138 – Raise More with Smarter Marketing with George Percy

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you tired of doing more marketing but seeing fewer results? George Percy breaks down how non-profits can escape mechanical marketing, own their data, and reconnect with supporters in a more human way. Who doesn’t want that? So stay tuned. Your digital strategy is about to feel a whole lot lighter.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. As usual, I’m your host David. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about human-led data-driven digital marketing. Who would think that you need data? with George Percy.

But before we continue, I just wanted to mention that our podcast does need your help and support. So if you find this episode or any of the others insightful, interesting, or helpful, please like, share, subscribe, and comment. It really does help our podcast.

George is a digital strategist helping non-profits and cultural institutions grow through data-driven strategies, generating over £1 million in ethical digital revenue. Make sure to follow, subscribe, and share.

George, thank you so much for joining our show today.

George Percy: Thank you for having me, David. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

David Pisarek: Yeah, we were talking a little bit before the show about actually, you know, leveraging data, and I think a lot of non-profits feel like they’re, you know, doing marketing, but they’re not really seeing the results. But I’m curious, from your perspective, what are the most common signs that a charity might be stuck in kind of the regular mechanical marketing?

George Percy: I think a lot of the time when you work with non-profits or charities, you can see it in how they’re communicating. You can see it through what their emails are like. You can see through what their posts are. They’re either playing it incredibly safe. They’re using it more of like a, a loudspeaker rather than like treating it as a conversation and using a bit of emotional— exactly, yeah, a bit of emotional intelligence to kind of understand when you’re speaking to people.

I think that there’s a theory that’s going around, like it’s as soon as you’ve got a metric, for instance, like an open rate or something, and you’re using that to judge, as soon as you kind of specifically go for that, everything is optimized kind of towards that, and you forget that you’re dealing with people. There is a human part.

One of the big things of working in non-profits and charity sector, that is a huge advantage, is that we do have an emotional draw. There’s a reason why we do what we do. We’ve chosen this and it is something that we feel passionate about, and that is a huge strength.

When you’re seeing how things are, yeah, coming across, that’s when you can see that they’re feeling a bit fragile. They want to kind of play it safe. It’s kind of they’re trying to copy the big guys like, oh, Nike did this as their latest one the other day. Let’s kind of copy it when actually it’s probably not really appropriate at all. That’s one of the big things that you can kind of see. It’s just from how things are being spoken about.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And I think a little bit further to that is everybody’s trying to find the ‘viral thing’, like what is going to make them blow up online. And you never know what that’s going to be, right? Like the biggest companies, they don’t know necessarily what’s going to blow up. I think they have millions of dollars they’re pouring into marketing and they don’t— they still don’t even necessarily know.

George Percy: No one does know. It will be that everything is constantly changing. It’s all contextual. Luckily, with the big companies, they have enough ad budget to kind of forcibly push it in front of you rather than naturally going viral.

And yeah, pursuing kind of virality with organic social media posts is a common kind of thing because everyone kind of assumes it’s also free and like it’s kind of a way of kind of getting there. But it’s a lottery. That’s a lottery. And they don’t have a strategy in place to counteract that.

There’s no outreach, and they’re kind of stuck in that kind of method because the social media world is not built for non-profits. It’s built for e-commerce. It’s built for simple kind of transactions like of purchasing kind of product.

So we have to adapt these tools, adapt how they’re kind of used, and figure out ways of make it effective for us. And I think that’s one of the key points and why it takes like digital strategists and why it actually takes more than like copying what the big guys are doing and trying to go viral is, yeah, really important.

I don’t know if you remember, there was a show even before I was— what, called MacGyver, which is the detective, you know, had a paperclip to defuse a bomb, that kind of thing. But that’s what it feels like all of the time.

It’s taking those kinds of tools that are given that aren’t necessarily built for us and adapting it in a way that makes it effective as well.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. And to your point, humans are humans, interests change, right? Something happens—global financial crisis, or Bitcoin blows up, or AI, you know, is starting to overtake—people shift and adapt, and things change over time. And one of the things I think a lot of people should be doing to drive data—so I’m interested in your thoughts on this—is A/B testing over time, right? We did a lot of that internally at Wow Digital in terms of what is the best day of the week and the best time of day for us to send out our weekly email. Right?

George Percy: Yeah, definitely.

David Pisarek: It’s time that we review that again. Are we still sending it on the best day and time?

George Percy: Exactly. Exactly.

It’s that everything changes. The context always kind of shifts, like how your message is working, what kind of channels you’re using, and even what’s going out. There’s a big change from between 25 and 26, for instance, which is going from— in 25, it was kind of more acceptable to kind of have the, like, a lot of generative AI. However, people have come to accept that now and understand that it’s relatively low-effort. So perceived that as less value. Now we’re going back to a rougher kind of content as well.

But again, as you say, A/B testing, testing and learning constantly. If you’re not constantly having a certain amount of time testing and learning new things, you’re already way behind, and you’re not being very effective at all.

And if you aren’t doing this, it can actually be, I think, from what we’ve seen, hugely detrimental. If you’re doing the same stuff that you were doing 2 or 3 years ago, not only is it boring, but it could be something that is totally anti and switched and kind of damaging your reputation as well. So it’s, it’s in my opinion, it’s not an option.

A/B testing is not an option. It should be a default. And if you’re not, if you don’t even have the system or the mentality within the team or the leadership in that way to have that thing, you’re really kind of lagging behind.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And, you know, people should get in touch with you or me and have a conversation. How could we be doing A/B testing? Right.

So we’ll talk about that later on because you’ve got a really phenomenal offer that we’ll talk about at the end of the episode. So everybody, you know, keep listening. We’ve got some really great additional topics we’re going to be talking about.

So let’s talk about small non-profit teams, right? They’re very often on a limited budget, extremely limited time. People are probably doing 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 jobs, right? What are the first realistic steps that they should take towards moving and creating a human-led marketing approach?

George Percy: I think it’s going back to the data point that everybody has data in some kind of way. It’s whether you can see what’s happening in Google Analytics or whether your Mailchimp, your email system, in that kind of way. All of these are different data points, and it’s not being scared of data itself.

We’re all kind of grown up with this as data is this scary kind of big thing where it takes a magician to kind of do, when in actual fact, reframing it as a conversation.

So, an example would be, if you were going to a cocktail party and you were meeting someone, for instance, and you wanted to start a conversation, be like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen this great initiative about we’re building water wells in Africa, and we’ve been doing that for the last few months.’ Then you wait for a response and can kind of gauge whether they’re interested or not.

If you convert that into a newsletter you’ve sent out, saying what you’re doing, then the engagement would be opening it. You’ve gauged that it’s a part of the concept. You’ve got an interaction back. Now, moving on from that one, if you’re then, your next one is: you’ve opened it, you’re then saying, ‘Donate now’ to kind of do it. If you did that in person, you would really scare them away.

So it’s building that kind of trust and taking what these data points actually mean, whether it’s an open of an email, whether it’s a form filling out, whether it’s a small donation, whether it’s the view on something. And framing is having a conversation with that person.

So reframing how you think about data and not just kind of going for an optimizing one specific thing, I think, is really important as well. So that’s one thing. So it’s reframing data as a conversation.

I think with small teams, using your size or the smaller size as a strength. You will know who your main kind of donors are. You know who to kind of prioritize.

Don’t treat them as a robot; treat them as a person, treat them as a human.

Go back to the emotional kind of, you know, pick up the phone, say, “Hi, how are you doing? Thank you for this,” and things along those lines. You can, particularly in non-profits, I think, automate too much and to the point where you’re starting to— if you make someone feel like they’re the same as everyone else, yeah, that’s not a good thing. No one likes that. No one likes that at all.

The other one is that, I’m sorry, but mail merge is not enough. That’s the other one. Everyone can tell when it’s got no first name in that one, the mail merge in the newsletter. ‘Hello, Steven.’ And along those kinds of lines, you can show you have to be authentic about this.

So if you do have an intimate, if you have your smaller size and have an understanding of who your donors are or who you want to build relationships with, use your size as a strength. Pick up the phone, do something that is more in the emotional intelligence kind of way of doing things.

Definitely. I mean, those two things are a kind of a smaller, on the small scales, I think, have more capacity definitely for those kinds of teams.

David Pisarek: As you were talking about this, the thing, the acronym that came into my mind is CRM. I think a lot of organizations need to leverage, ideally, a CRM that ties email into it so they can get clarity around the data.

Like, when was the last time this person donated? When’s the last touchpoint we had? When’s the last email they opened? When’s the last time, to your point, that somebody actually called them and spoke to them? And a CRM doesn’t have to be terribly complicated. It could be as basic, depending on the size of your organization, as like a spreadsheet. I don’t personally advise that because I do like to do some automated pieces, a little bit against what you just said, like don’t automate everything.

But when you send out an email, if someone interacts with it, you need to add a tag to that person. And then, over time, if they haven’t opened an email after— let’s say you send a weekly one, right? If they haven’t opened one after 6 weeks, they get a different tag added to them, and it’s flagged as like a weekly review that you can look through, and you can— so I’m getting way into the weeds of like how to leverage data, but there are ways that you can do this in a smart way that are not terribly expensive.

There are expensive CRMs out there, but if you’re a small team, you can do this relatively inexpensively, like maybe a couple hundred, maybe $1,000 a year. To get a platform in place to track all these pieces.

George Percy: Yeah, you’re exactly right.

The CRM, I would say, should be the core of your data infrastructure, with as much data as possible feeding into it.

And yeah, you can get really inexpensive ones as well, but just having that and understanding, because the other thing with this is you’re doing your donors a favour, because nobody wants to be blasted with stuff that is irrelevant to them. So you’re curating the message, you’re talking, you’re meeting them where they are. So you’re also doing them a service as well.

It’s not only a benefit to yourself, but going back to your point, regarding the automation, I mean, with AI, it’s a huge thing, and it is a huge benefit, and the systems should be automated. You shouldn’t be manually putting in any of these spreadsheets, and you shouldn’t be trying to get, like, go on the days where we have to manually type it.

Well, I hope they are, but you type in all the email addresses, phone numbers, and similar details. AI should be dealing with that. That’s what it’s built for. The part where I do think it comes to a little bit of a stop is when you’re doing more of the high-value interactions with people to clean up their lives.

Of course, there’s always space, and there should be space, and there needs to be space for automation, particularly with AI. It is so powerful, and it can be so efficient with these systems, and it’s making it so much easier with CRMs now. You’d see even in the last few months, the things now connect to each other. Have you seen the new one, which is in Google Workspace called Workspace Flow or Workspace Studio?

David Pisarek: No, I haven’t.

George Percy: So this is a new one that I would advise everyone to have a look at if they’ve got a Google Workspace. It’s Google’s own thing where apps start talking to each other, such as when a spreadsheet updates, it can create a task or a calendar event, and it’s within the Google kind of integrated system.

And it’s kind of that— it’s like if anyone’s got kind of here and things along those lines of where you can do it. There’s a more advanced version, but you can start setting up things when you receive an email coming in that can trigger sending a task for someone else to do or a calendar event. These kinds of things that you can set up as the automated flow. So I’d really recommend having a look at some of the, even the basic functions within the Google Workspace, if that is part of your infrastructure as well.

David Pisarek: As non-profits and charities, just so you know, Google does have Google for non-profits, so you can get workspace for your organization for free. You can leverage tools like this.

I think, at the very bare minimum, if you don’t have a CRM, you should be tagging when you send an email, even if you send one every 6 months. I don’t think that’s often enough, but let’s say that’s what you’re doing.

As soon as someone opens the email, they click a link in it. You want to tag that person with the email topic, and if they clicked on it, because then, over time, you can send messages based on topic and interest rather than general information.

And I think that’s probably one of the easiest, like, low-hanging fruit that any organization could do is just tagging people when they open or interact with an email.

Pause for a quick moment. If you’re listening to this and thinking, ‘We know our non-profit could be doing more online, we’re just not sure where to start,’ that’s exactly what we help with at Wow Digital. We work with non-profits to improve their website’s digital strategy and donor experience so they can raise more and create more impact. And the first step is to book your free strategy call with us. Just visit wowdigital.com/consult to get started.

You’re going to walk away with clarity, practical next steps, and real ideas that you can use right away.

Okay, back to the episode.

George Percy: Yeah, exactly right. And it’s— that scales really well. It’s like, even I was— on one very major European festival I was working on, on their CRM database, in actual fact, and looking at how their newsletters were done. And we implemented that when they clicked on an email, the link, depending on the kind of music that link was, then assigned them a tag.

If they did it 2 or 3 times over the course of a year, then we know that because the other smart thing you can do with the email ones is you can put personalized content at the top. So the thing that appears at the top, which is the big space, could be specific to that person. So the ticket link to say a chamber concert because they’ve clicked like 4 or 6 times on the Chamber Concert route there, that then appears up the top and the conversion rates of that we saw it just those purchases.

So it’s, it’s, there is a real kind of effect on the lifetime value of getting this right. And the other one, I think there was a McKinsey study that was done. I think

76% of internet users expect personalized messaging now, to the point where they’re really put off if they feel as though they’re not being spoken to.

So I think both of us would stress, we can’t— it’s really essential, and it’s a really important point to have that kind of setup and going.

David Pisarek: Yeah, absolutely. Personalization, like imagine getting something personalized, like how would that make you feel? Like, you’re— one of your interests is, like, right at the top, more engaging. So I love the idea of customizing emails with messaging unique to that person.

And it doesn’t necessarily need to be unique for that person, but it’s unique for anybody who has that tag, right? So you’re not going in and customizing 800 emails or 3,000 emails. You’re creating pieces that logic can insert based on that person’s profile, right? And that’s the key to it, is creating content that makes it appear like it’s personalized, that you’ve written for that persona because they’re interested in XYZ.

George Percy: Exactly. Segmenting into the different kinds of tags and along those lines. I mean, even now we’re using language. It sounds kind of scary, but it’s not. It’s not scary if you think about it. It’s just that we know that this group of people likes talking in this way.

We know they kind of appreciate that. And I think it’s that kind of barrier in how we speak about it that puts people off. But it’s okay. That’s why both David and I are there to help you with this, to understand that it’s not as complicated as maybe you kind of perceive it to be.

David Pisarek: So let’s talk about something that is or sounds very complicated. First-party data architecture, right?

George Percy: Yeah.

David Pisarek: Like that, to somebody that’s not very technical, would sound, I imagine, extremely intimidating. What should folks in non-profits focus on when it comes to owning their own data?

George Percy: Yeah, not only intimidating, but also incredibly boring. Let’s be honest. It’s like, it’s sort of, I wouldn’t talk about data infrastructure all day. This is like, no, unfortunately, it is essential. It does follow on from the CRM conversation. It’s owning your own data in some form.

So there are lots of different ways this can be done. But I would say the most prevalent are email addresses, phone numbers, and names. So, popping those into the kind of CRM and owning that.

Because, little fun experiment, if, say, Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram, just suddenly left, how do you contact or how are you doing any outreach to donors and things along those lines? Because with all of these ones like followers and things along those kinds of lines, you’re actually— you don’t own that. You’re renting that audience. That’s not yours. You’re paying for the privilege to be able to advertise to them and things along those lines.

But it puts it in such a situation where you don’t control that relationship. And so it’s not easy trying to transfer people across. We know that. But having the first-party data infrastructure in such a way as having a CRM is vital for the longevity, because if you’re not doing that, you’re also putting it at risk kind of in future, because we’re not just battling with other charities, we’re not just battling with other ways to kind of donate.

We’re not just battling with other forms of entertainment. Everyone is bombarded with a mass of stuff, and that is what you’re competing with. So you have to be able to keep talking to people in some way. And that’s done by having the kind of first-party data infrastructure that helps secure yourself for the future.

David Pisarek: I don’t want to get political, but— and I hate, I hate doing that. I hate doing that. Governments can decide to shut things down. There was a US TikTok ban. I think it lasted 18 hours in 2025. A lot of people are up in arms. If you’re counting on that one social media platform for driving your organization forward, getting your mission out, getting donations, whatever that happens to be, you’re thinking about it in the wrong way.

There are some CRMs that can connect to social media so you can, like, pull that information and build out the profiles. The other thing that I would like to mention is that just because you have your email list in Mailchimp doesn’t mean that Mailchimp will not shut down and go bankrupt.

You want to make sure that you’ve got backups happening, exports of your data that you’re storing somewhere, obviously, very safe and very secure, so that, if something does happen, you still have the bulk of the data, and you might only be out maybe a few weeks.

Like, if you do a monthly export or something like that, I would really encourage everybody to go through that process and look at the risk of where their information is actually sitting to make sure they’ve got a proper process in place.

George Percy: Yeah, 100%.

I mean, that’s a really good point regarding the TikTok outage as well. It just goes to show that, as much as these are huge platforms, they are not necessarily always fully secure. It doesn’t, I mean, I don’t know, as of recording this, last night YouTube went down for, what was it, an hour, I think. And it was, they were calling it the big outage or the big things along those lines.

But it just goes to say, and you hear all the time, and there are things that do kind of go out and stop running and things. So it’s, you know, these things are not super secure. They may feel as though they’re there all the time, but yeah, doing your exports, getting those in some kind of form and having a good backup system as well.

The 3-part principle of backups, which is one is, where you have your normal one, you have a physical backup that is in the same office, and then you have a remote backup

And you have those 3 that, if, for instance, and this has happened unfortunately, there was a place where, unfortunately, it was taken down by a fire, and they lost the first two backups. Now, luckily, they had a server set up and could retrieve it. But if that wasn’t there, and there was something off-site, you’re in a bit of a mess. Having that and it’s super important as well.

David Pisarek: I’m happy to talk at length about data encryption, making sure your drives are backed up, and all of that. But we don’t have to go down that way. I’m sure, you know, George can talk to you about that as well if you want to reach out to either of us.

I got one more. I have copies in a safety deposit box at a bank, in the cloud, and on-site as well. So whatever your comfort zone is, but just know, that at some point, you might need it. So you also have to test your backups.

George Percy: Yeah.

David Pisarek: All right. EAST Framework. Let’s talk about that. So how could you walk us through, I guess, a simple ethical example of how a charity could maybe nudge a donor or volunteer using your EAST framework? So what is it, and how can they streamline that process?

George Percy: Sure. So this is all about behavioural science, and it stems from the understanding that we’re dealing with people. It goes back to the human part; people are not always logical. They have certain, let’s say, cognitive biases.

It comes from Daniel Kahneman, who has a book that talks about System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking. So System 1 thinking is more of the natural, old way of thinking that takes up quite a lot of cognitive capacity. Consistent 2 is a more logical kind of brain. Now, understanding that people kind of are a little lazy sometimes and usually kind of stick with System 1 for most of the kind of things.

Well, yeah, he has a very, very interesting quote, which is, ‘Thinking to humans is swimming to cats. They can do it, but they would rather prefer not to.’ It’s the kind of way we take cognitive shortcuts, which results in cognitive biases. And this is what behavioural science is all about.

This was done by the Behavioural Insights Team, which is part of the UK government. And it’s a framework that takes these things into consideration, a way to apply them to your marketing or other systems you have. So, it’s an acronym, as we love acronyms, but it’s, it goes for Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely. So it’s used to create powerful knowledge that encourages action, and it’s proven highly effective for improving conversion rates and related metrics. So you go through each one.

 So, Easy is like reducing the friction required to complete an action. So, eliminating unnecessary steps.

We hear this in UX design. We sort of like to take the click away, things along those lines. This is also an important part that defaults work very well. So if you have a donation form, for instance, setting a default donation amount has been shown to increase donation amounts as well, because you’re taking away that mental step. Of course, people can change it if they want to, but it’s seen as the easy way to do it. So that’s one of those kind of things that you can do.

Then we have Attractive. Make the benefit of taking the action clear, immediate, and appealing, basically.

So using evocative language and visuals and giving that kind of payoff kind of in the way. And that can be done with how you’re doing, like call to action, and things along those lines and also how it looks as well.

Then we’ve got Social, which is that we are social beings, so show others are taking that action.

So it’s kind of like social proof. So that other people have also done it as well. So you’re kind of being validated. That’s also an important part.

 And then, Timely is when you’re asking for stuff; it’s really important.

It all kind of, all kind of contains this when the individual is either most receptive or the most appropriate kind of place to speak about as well and to ask for things or to be in touch with them in a certain way. So if you’re thinking about those kinds of 4, when you’re looking at your communications or marketing or setting things up, you’re tapping into understanding that we’re dealing with people. And using these as terrain to help along making an action to kind of addressing that we are, yeah, as I say, dealing with people basically.

So that’s the kind of EAST framework from the Behavioural Insights Team, and how that can be applied, particularly for non-profits, I would say.

David Pisarek: Love the idea of that. And I would encourage everybody who is listening to take a Post-it note, write it down, and then stick that to the bottom of your monitor. And everything that you’re doing, run through that filter, right? And do your best to try to meet those.

You’re dealing with a government that probably spent millions of pounds trying to figure out this methodology and distill it down into, I don’t know, maybe 7 sentences. That George just did is incredible insight. So thank you so much for that.

One thing that I do want to mention: you were on easy; you were saying, like, having a pre-filled donation amount. If you have a CRM and you know how much that person had donated previously, you could, in theory, if they click a link, have a customized donation form that increases the amount by 10-12%, maybe 15%, as a default from their previous donation. And what we’ve seen is organizations that do that, they actually see 5 to 10% increase in donations.

Because let’s say somebody made a $30 donation, and the next time they get an email and they click on it to make a donation, it says $35. ‘Oh yeah, I think I donated about $35. Okay.’ And then they make another donation. They can still change it. It’s not fixed, like you have to, right? But it does lead to increased donations. So it’s— that’s another smart way that you can leverage systems to help drive the organization forward.

George Percy: Yeah, there’s a, that’s a great example. Like I’ve seen that as well across the different ones.

The other one that is a cognitive bias that isn’t actually included in this, um, is that if you’ve got someone to donate once, even a small amount, they’re more receptive to giving more at a later point. So monitoring that, even if it’s like a $1 donation or something kind of in those kinds, you know that they’ve completed that action, and that’s something that you can take forward as well.

So yeah, there are lots of things if you are able to look and pop that in the CRM and understand there are opportunities later down the line as well.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Okay, so that’s EAST. It’s a really great process to kind of flow your ideas, your thoughts, your content, your marketing, everything through so that everything’s like aligned and working properly. Hopefully, bringing more attention and getting more engagement is really the end of the day. What you’re looking for is engagement.

Just because somebody’s interacting doesn’t mean they’re going to donate, but it doesn’t mean they won’t at a later point in time, right? We know, as psychology says, you need to build up the know, like, and trust factor before anybody is going to want to meet, before anybody’s going to want to volunteer, especially donate money.

And it takes between 7 to 8 interactions with somebody before you’ve established the know, like, and trust. So keep following the process. It will take some time. It’s not like you implement this and then boom, all like you’re going to, you know, take off and explode and like do awesome stuff. Maybe you will. Chances are probably not. It will take some time to build up that trust.

George Percy: Yeah, that’s the big word, trust. And it’s building trust, and it takes time. It really does. But the long-term value of it is astronomical. Really important.

David Pisarek: In the non-profit world, as I mentioned before, people are wearing lots of hats. They’re likely doing, you know, other duties as assigned on the, on the job posting. So burnout is actually quite common. How can a smarter digital strategy and better systems actually reduce stress for teams instead of adding more pressure?

George Percy: Yeah, I think adding the systems and also this also comes back to understanding data as well. Work on what’s effective.

Where’s the waste? Like, there are a lot of times when it feels like a hamster wheel. Doing an audit of actually what’s working and what’s not is really important.

So just doing some kind of audit, as long as you’ve got the kind of data there to understand, but even if it’s like, you know, is this working? And being curious helps you be effective. And just because you get rid of something doesn’t mean you can’t bring it back later. There is something to be said for removing something, and then people notice and bring it back. It actually could be exactly in its own kind of way.

Be focused on what’s efficient, focused on what you’re seeing is kind of working as well. I think it’s hugely important because there may be certain times where you have board members or things on top asking for, you know, this big company’s done this massive kind of thing, why aren’t we doing it? I think that’s a common thing in this, like, there’s like an understanding that you’re playing a different game and how we can kind of communicate that actually we’ve got a different strategy that’s not really appropriate for what we’re kind of achieving.

Yes, it’s a great thing, and it’s not coming from a defensive point. We don’t have enough resources. That’s true, but they usually don’t understand why; they don’t have the appreciation. That’s the other one. But communicating in such a way, ‘Look, we’re working on kind of building the lifetime value here rather than a one-off thing. And that’s what our kind of core focus needs to be.’

And having parts of the data to back that up is usually quite a good thing, too. It’s not always hugely reliable and can kind of go down at different avenues.

My advice on that one is to audit and don’t be scared of cutting away what’s not being efficient and trying to mould it in a kind of way.

But it, that does take stepping back, which I know can be super hard. I think, cause sometimes you are in the weeds for as much as possible, and it’s just like, oh my. And that’s why I think I, and I’ve seen this, you offer consultations as well and things along those lines, just to speak to someone to talk about it, and then kind of, ‘Well, have you tried this?’

Just like a second pair of eyes, a second way of thinking, and someone who knows kind of how these systems work. That’s one thing. Be efficient. And also when you feel as though there is something that’s not going to be effective, that is being kind of enforced on you, figuring out why and communicating back in a way of why you don’t think that what you’re seeing is the most efficient or effective way of the resources right now. I think those two kinds of things are what I would suggest.

David Pisarek: One other thing, and we were talking about this a little bit before, is the strategy. What is the end goal? Does this shiny object, new thing, idea, whatever, how does that fit in? Just because somebody higher up in the organization is like, ‘We need to do this,’ okay, but do we need to do it now? Right? And they would probably say ‘Yes,’ but then you could go back and go, ‘ Okay, well, our quarterly strategic planning—’ hopefully you’ve done quarterly, not just annual. If you need help with quarterly planning, come here. I do this with our clients. But ‘What is the plan for this quarter? What is the plan for the year? How does this fit in? Is this something that we can accommodate? Do we need other resources? What should we stop doing to accommodate this?’ If there’s a big enough ask, that’s the greatest question.

Is, ‘What do you want me not to do so that I can focus on this, right?’ And that usually gets them to go, ‘Okay, you know what, yeah, we’ll wait a couple months on this,’ right? Or bring somebody in, or whatever, whatever it happens to be.

So George, amazing insights around human-led, data-driven digital maturity. I hope that the folks listening have been able to get some really great advice and pointers from you today. I like to kind of throw my guest a surprise at the end of the show. So if you were to give everybody listening a challenge, something you want them to do, maybe within the next 48 hours after listening to the episode, what would that challenge be?

George Percy: I think what— go have a look at your last newsletter and see— no, sorry, have a look at your last 5 newsletters and see what was the most common interaction. Where, after the open rate, see what it was, see what material was, what people were clicking on, what they were interested in, and have that in your mind as when you’re thinking kind of on the way forward as to how you can utilize that knowledge, because that’s data in its own way, how you can use that effectively moving forward.

Start thinking, test and learn. That’s my challenge.

David Pisarek: Amazing. I’m going to go and get my team to do that for ours as well. So thank you. That’s a good one. If anybody wants to get in touch with you. I know you set something special up for our podcast, so why don’t you tell us about it?

George Percy: Yeah, so I’ve set up a limited number of spaces for a free kind of consultation with myself. And so if you head to georgepercy.com/wowdigital, you will be able to book a free meeting with me, and I’ll have a look at your kind of stuff if you give me a little bit of info, and we can have a conversation and see if there is a kind of easy wins of implementing kind of human-led or data-driven things that I can see that will be most effective for you moving forwards.

David Pisarek: That’s a fantastic offer. I highly recommend that everybody head over there and book it before the spots are taken. There are only 5 spots available.

George, thank you so much for joining. It’s been great having you on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. Everybody listening, if you want any of the links, the resources, the things that George and I have been talking about on this show, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all of the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!