141 – Escape Campaign Chaos Before It Breaks Your Team with Alexis Bennett

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Feeling like every campaign at your non-profit is last-minute, rushed, and exhausting? Alexis Bennett shares how small teams can escape scramble mode, build rerunnable campaigns, and finally turn strategy into sustainable growth. So stay tuned and let’s transform the way that you plan and execute your digital campaigns.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about moving from scramble mode to strategic, rerunnable, reusable campaigns with Alexis Bennett. Before we continue, I just want to mention that our podcast does need your help. If you find this episode or any of the others insightful, interesting, or at least helpful, please like, subscribe, share, and comment. It really does help our podcast immensely.

Alexis Bennett is a messaging strategist and founder of Sprig Co., helping non-profits and healthcare teams turn complex ideas into clear, high-impact campaigns that drive action and outperform their size. Thank you so much for joining, Alexis. How are you doing today?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Thanks for having me. I’m doing great.

David Pisarek: Awesome. So let’s just jump right in, and here we go. So a lot of non-profits feel like they’re in reactive instead of proactive mode, right? What does scramble mode actually look like in terms of a digital marketing context, you know, across emails, website updates, campaigns, etc.?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think, first of all, it’s easy for organizations to get teams into scramble mode because they’re doing the work, right? They’re taking care of clients, they’re taking calls, and they’re trying to do outreach to donors. They wear a lot of hats, right? And so a lot of the scramble for the campaign comes from just being busy, and it sneaks up on you.

I think we’ve all experienced it, even in our personal lives. You know, we have professional things going on, and then it’s like, ‘Oh shoot, you know, summer break coming. What are we going to do for the kids, kind of thing?’ So it happens to all of us, right? But scramble mode feels like, ‘Oh shoot, you know, we only have a few weeks until this campaign starts and we’ve done nothing.’ And for development directors or communication folks, marketing folks, they may be one person, or you may have a couple, like one of each of those people. But more often with these small KMDs, you have one person who’s doing like all of the admin stuff, right? And I say admin not as in a bookkeeping way, but in the— I’m not directly interfacing maybe with donors or clients, right?

Or not with donors or clients, but with the ‘Oh shoot, we need to pull something together really quickly. It looks like let’s go through all of the stuff that we have and see if we have anything that works.’ Because reaching out to get impact stories takes time, right? You may be reaching out to your team that’s in the field. It takes time to make contact with some of those folks. And in some populations, they’re really tough to get a hold of, right?

So it looks like, ‘okay, what do we have that we haven’t used in a couple of years that no one will notice if we use it again?’ It looks like blasting out emails when you have time, rather than on a specific cadence. It looks like, ‘oh, we need to start posting to social media even though we’ve been ghosting people for the last, like, 3 months.’ You know, so it really comes with, like, sort of scattershot tactics without a real overarching strategy for how we’re going to approach a campaign.

And when non-profits, and especially now, you know, in the last year, budget cuts have been a major constraint, we really need those campaigns to run well.

We really need to connect with folks. We really need to bring people in to let them know about our organization, or fundraise, or whatever that is. And so scramble mode costs a lot, you know, in the grand scheme, because you’re not as effective as you possibly could be.

David Pisarek: I think one of the main themes throughout everything you just said is actually having a plan and a strategy in place.

Anybody that’s listening to this episode on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to, check us out on YouTube or Spotify, the video version of this, because, on the wall behind me, this is not a virtual background. This is, this is a real, legitimate background behind me. I have fancy lights turned on, but I have a content planning board on the wall, and this could be used for events. This could be used for your content, your emails, your social, your videos, everything and all of it. And we have a really great process that we go through where we sit down with our clients at the start of the year for an hour and we plan out the entire year of content, not actually write the content and create it, but just, these are all the topics.

Every organization, I’d say, probably 90, over 90%, is tied to some kind of thing. Maybe it’s Alzheimer’s, maybe it’s children, maybe it’s this, that, whatever. And through the year, there are different things that you can tie your organization to. Like there’s brain health awareness, there’s back to school, there’s summer programs, there’s this, that, whatever it happens to be.

And you can take your content and then like the top half of my board, if anybody wants a copy of this board, let me know. I designed it in a way that you can print it and just put it in, in an IKEA frame and just like use it. But the top half is split into 12 boxes, one for every month. So you can take your content ideas, throw them in for the month, and then the bottom half is the current month.

When are you actually going to do the stuff? When are you going to send it out? When are you going to write it? All that kind of stuff. And having the plan makes it really easy to execute, and you don’t really have to think too much. When are we doing this? When are we doing that?

Not to say that you can’t change what you’re doing or when you’re doing it. But it’s a really great start.

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, I agree. I think of those as sort of like anchors to your year, right? Because you know certain things aren’t going to change. The event will probably not change dates dramatically, especially if you have a place rented. Alzheimer’s Awareness Month is not going to change. But you can do a lot of that pre-planning. And I love that you, you know, for the visual folks, as sticky notes work really well. And then if you’re dealing with a team, you need to delegate.

I’ve often taken what you’ve done with sticky notes and moved it over to a project management tool or a spreadsheet, even, so that you can keep track of it across teams and not have to wonder what the heck is coming next. It’s already planned for you. You just need to go look at your sheet.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I mean, you can move it to Trello, to Airtable, to ClickUp, to even just a Word document on a network drive, like whatever it is that works for you. But planning, whiteboarding, and doing that stuff in the physical space is very different in the outcome.

So when we think about this scramble mode, folks that haven’t done the planning, and I think a lot of people don’t give enough time and foresight to recognize that planning is an important thing. But for those folks who are operating in scramble mode, even if you do this, there is still scramble mode that happens because you have got, like, the 37 hats you’re wearing. How does it impact things like donor retention, website conversions, ROI on campaigns and events and stuff?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, you know, in terms of thinking about that scramble, and I think this comes up a lot because you’re wearing multiple hats, and so there’s this tendency to do a lot during a certain period of time and then be crickets in between. And we know what that feels like as consumers, but somehow we sort of disconnect that from the work that we’re doing, often, you know.

And so the big thing is that you’re going to people, maybe for the first time, to communicate something. First, you need to warm them up. Right? In Scramble mode, you don’t have any time for a warm-up. But then, you’re asking them to engage in some way, but you haven’t done any of that warm-up. You haven’t maintained that relationship. And so it really feels inauthentic. It feels like you’re only there for the transaction. It feels like we’re not that important.

It feels like you just asked me, but you haven’t told me anything about what you’ve done already with what I’ve given you, right? Because you haven’t spent that time telling them how their funds have had an impact. You haven’t told them about the awesome programs that you’re running. You haven’t told them about the people you’re like, you know, you get it, right? But if you’re not constantly, like, closing the loop for them, and when you come back to reenter a new loop, it’s like, why would I give to you, right? You’re only here when you need something, and I don’t even know if you’re doing anything with the money I’ve already given you.

And so you see retention start to fall off, or you see that amount go down, right? Because they’re like, ‘Ah, yeah, I still care, but you know, I’m not as engaged.’

Alternatively, if you’re being very consistent and intentional with your communications all year long, you’re going to see that relationship grow, hopefully.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And that’s part of it, right? Like, how many of us have had a friend who only calls you when they need something, or they need help, or they need money, or they need help move or whatever, whatever, right? Like there’s only so much you can give.

You need to be talking about the impact. You need to be talking about the benefit. Not everything is always an ask, right? You need to emotionally connect with somebody to make them understand the impact that they’re having.

Part of that is the messaging, right? It’s not a ‘Hey, you know, donate $50.’ It’s a ‘Help buy school supplies’ or ‘Help feed the homeless,’ right? And tie that to something tangible, as opposed to this ethereal, random pot of money that is just magically going to help people.

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah. And I mean, there’s a reason, you know, those Give Day campaign pages that you’re participating in, your city or statewide Give Day, like there’s a reason why they have all of those like open fields for you to put, ‘Hey, your $5 will do this,’ right? Borrow that when you’re running your own campaign.

But there’s a reason that that’s built in. It wasn’t just like, ‘Hey, I want a box here with a pretty picture.’ There’s intention. Someone made a decision about that. And so if you’re not, if you don’t have anything to put there, then you may ask yourself why, you know, why you’re not doing that in other campaigns and other communications. So yeah, I love that.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And so, you know, one of the things that I think helps people, especially when you do things year over year, like there’s Giving Tuesday that happens year over year, right? Take what you did last year and plan it out in some kind of master document. They can just copy, paste, and modify a little bit as you need, and then rerun. And you’re talking about rerunnable campaigns. So what does that actually mean and how does that— how do you differentiate just repeating what you did the previous year?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, when I say repeatable campaigns, I don’t mean send the same message, right? I mean, create a structure that you can take some of the mental load off of yourself when you’re planning your next campaign, right? You know that Giving Tuesday is going to come every year, and hopefully, you know, you can do this once. It may adjust over time as your audience changes, but you need to be spending some time identifying who your audience is if you don’t know them well, right? Whether that’s new people or just getting to know the folks already in your network, you need to figure out which channels work most effectively.

I’m big on the idea that if you’re a small team, you don’t need to show up everywhere. You need to show up where it works.

And so a lot of that planning needs to go into, do I show up on Instagram or do I show up on Facebook? Do I show up in email, or in printed material that arrives in someone’s mailbox, right? A lot of that planning needs to happen. So then, when you’re creating your campaign structure, it’s a matter of: all right, I know who my audience is, where they show up, and what they care about. I know how they think. Are they the type of person who needs a story, or do they need to see the metric, right? And start building some of that logic into your campaign, then think about your channels. Where do I need to show up?

And then frequency, I think, is one of those things we often overlook. I already talked about warming up your audience, but different people have different attention spans. I’m a mom. My husband is in the military, so I have a lot of time to spend alone while juggling two small humans. And so my attention might require you to send me something like 3 or 4 times before I— not because I don’t care, because I do, you know, but around giving time in November, I have like a stack of mailers sitting on my counter, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I need to send those.’ But it takes me a minute, right? Because I am just pulled in so many different directions. Whereas maybe a senior is your primary audience. They have a lot more, you know, time and attention to put into your campaign.

So, thinking about your touchpoints, you can build that into your campaign. Looking at your sticky notes, there in the background, you know, that lower half where you’re putting, when am I actually going to send these things, moving that over into a project management tool or taking a picture even of what you’ve got here. And so if that works for you, put it back on the board.

And then the effort every year is really just: what are we fundraising for? What is our campaign about? Are we doing something different this year? And who do we want to talk about, right? Do we have some really cool stories from the year that we can pull in? And a lot of that, when do I send it out? 4 to 6 weeks before.

I need to make sure I send an email. Stuff is already- you’ve already thought about that- built into your plan. And then you’re just pulling content in. Anyone can sit down and write, you know, to put some content together in a couple of hours, especially if they have some really good stories. And you don’t have to be like workshopping and getting all these people in the room to think through who we need to reach again. Right? And that’s what I mean by repeatable.

Create structures that will make your job easier so that all you have to do is pull in new content.

David Pisarek: And I think you’ve made a lot of interesting points there. And one of the things that I want to emphasize is that you need to know your audience. You need to know who you’re talking to. Demographics, geographics, and psychographics. People often don’t know what psychographics are, or, if they do, they’ve never actually used them to figure out who their audience is. I ask everybody who is listening to this to wait till the episode’s done, but go and listen to episode 16 because I have an episode where I talk about psychographics, the importance of it, what it is, and how to use it in your organization.

And it’s really important to— where do they hang out, right? How can you connect with them? What stories resonate with them? And you need to go back and look at your data and analytics. What emails got the most opens? Which social posts got the most likes, comments, interactions, shares, all that kind of stuff? Which campaigns—at some point, you need to put out an ask. Not every email should have an ask. Let me just be very clear about that. But when you do put out an ask, which of those emails generated the most donations?

Then you can use that data to create similar messaging, similar posts, similar campaigns over and over and over, maybe change the topic a little bit, but the way you talk about it, the messaging, the stories that you’ve included, maybe you’ve got video, maybe it’s just photos, maybe there’s nothing at all, right? You need to really clearly understand what’s working and what’s not working, and build that into the structure.

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re speaking my love language. I’m just like, yeah, I, I mean, and going back to scramble mode, it’s really difficult to do that. If you’re tight on time, right? Or you don’t have much bandwidth.

And so that’s why getting out of that scramble, being intentional and thinking ahead is so important because all of this stuff that we talk about, these best practices, these things that you can do to optimize your campaign require you to think ahead, right? And people feel it, you know, they will feel the lack of strategy because it feels like ting, ting, ting, ting, ting of stuff without a clear through line. So even beyond that, like, go and ask for the Bible, right? You know, people can feel it.

David Pisarek: Just to put a visual in people’s minds, right? The scramble mode is kind of like a pinball machine, right? Where you’re bouncing back and forth and hitting lots of stuff versus one of those like crazy marble run videos that you might have seen where like it goes through things and like it, right? It’s a very different way of getting the ball from point A to B.

You need the plan, you need the strategy, you need it sorted out.

And although people are really stressed and busy, there are times of year, let’s just be totally honest with ourselves, when there really isn’t much to do, right? Block off 1 or 2 days in your calendar. Maybe it’s with your team, maybe it’s by yourself, maybe it’s with your favourite AI platform, whatever it happens to be, and sit down and actually put some time and effort into building this out because it’s going to save you pain, time, headache, and effort campaign after campaign, year after year.

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, and you mentioned planning at the beginning of the year. I like to plan before January starts because there’s always that quiet period, you know. You hustle really hard towards the holiday season, and then there’s sort of this like mall, right? Nobody is reaching out; everybody is in and out of the office, on vacation. Your donors are like about, right? People are doing the same thing with their work, like using that time, right? You plan the whole year in that time. But you’re right.

I mean, there are lows every, every, even throughout the year. It doesn’t necessarily have to be only this time. And it just takes discipline to sit down and do that, right? Instead of like, ‘Oh, what’s next on my to-do list?’ Because there will always be things.

David Pisarek: Yeah. So my pro tip for everybody is like, open up your calendar. Think about the past 12 months. When has it been a little bit quieter? Maybe it’s around the end of school and like the beginning of summer. Maybe it’s around the holidays, although a lot of organizations actually close for like a week and a half or 2 weeks. Like, don’t use your holiday time. Take that time to recoup and regenerate.

Find some of those times, block off the entire day, like right after this episode, just go block 1 or 2 days and just be done with it. And don’t move those days come hell or high water. It doesn’t matter. Do not move those days. Actually, spend the time.

Okay. So Let’s jump back a little bit here. Websites. In your opinion, Alexis, what role should a website play in rerunnable campaigns, and how should non-profits structure their site to support strategy instead of, you know, this crazy last-minute chaos that happens?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: I mean, your site can be a great storytelling tool. I mean, you can, you can talk to a web designer if you want to get to the specific, like, sitemap that takes you on a journey, you know, when people land on your site.

But for me, what I love about websites is just using them as a storytelling tool, you know, and you think about keeping people’s attention all year and keeping that communication alive, you know, making sure that your website is updated with the latest, whether that’s an event that they can get in touch with you and celebrate or be a part of, whether that’s volunteer opportunities, whether that’s story. I’m coming from a former magazine editorial team and transitioned over, and so I’m always a big, like, push-the-content person just because I feel like you can take those stories and put them on your site.

It’s a great way for people to get locked into your site and do some reading, and then you can pull that content over later. Just because it’s been published on your site doesn’t mean that everybody has read it. So I like to pull the content that’s gotten a lot of traction and reuse some of it for my campaign as well.

A story that’s really resonated, maybe you did a lot of to pull some data into an article that you’re really proud of and you want to bring that forward. The other thing, too, is that I mentioned Give Days, right? And they specifically have you, you know, build out on their landing page so that you can do the same thing for your campaign too. And so, having a home for your campaign where all of that information lives, I feel like this is best practice, but you know, not everybody does this, right? So build out a page that’s your campaign.

You know, make sure you’re following the same hierarchical structure, so it’s very skimmable and readable. And then, you know, use pop-ups or use your emails to drive people over to that page so that you can use it as another vehicle. But that’s a way to, like, build your entire campaign story on one page on your own site. I like to mention those Give Days because I feel like they— there’s a lot of things that you can just borrow even if you don’t participate, like the PR around the event, the hype around the event, the landing pages, being very prescriptive.

There’s a lot that you can, you can borrow from those even if you don’t participate.

David Pisarek: You want to one-up that. I think that’s all awesome. Try to work in some A/B testing into those pages as well. I can tell everybody right off the bat, there’s been a lot of research around CTAs, call to action, so buttons that direct people. People don’t want to think, they don’t want to read, they don’t want to write. So you’ve got to—keep your content really short: bullet points, very skimmable. But people don’t want to think about what the thing is that you want them to do, right?

So CTAs, callout buttons that are very clear, very important. The top part of the page through each section, because they might not be ready to donate here or subscribe or share or anything, but maybe further down in the content, once they’ve gotten some context and they’re emotionally engaged, that’s the, that’s the right time. The point that I’m trying to get at is to make sure that you’ve got buttons on the page that direct people on what to do. And in research, you would think green means go, red means stop, right? Green would outperform. No, red is vastly superior at driving people to click the button.

So, red tones for the call-to-action buttons- you want to go with those. So just putting that out there.

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, I mean, that’s good advice, especially, you know, if that’s not on your brand, it can be tempting to, like, let’s make this pretty, right? And let’s use a nice blue that matches the dark blue of our logo. I use heat maps a lot, too. I don’t know if you are a heat map guy, but along with A/B testing of, you know, whatever your site content is, your emails, all of that, you can use your heat map and a lot of I mean, even if you’re hosting on, like a Wix or a Squarespace, there are built-in tools on the backend.

You don’t have to go pay for another subscription to a heat map service. You can use a lot of that and just watch people’s journey through your site, watch people’s journey through your landing page. You’ll learn a lot about where they’re stopping, where they’re on, or where they’re bouncing, and you can start to make adjustments based on individual journeys or an aggregate of looking at those journeys and just optimizing your site. So that’s great advice.

David Pisarek: Yeah, there are two tools that I would recommend by far, leaps and bounds above the next one, which is called Hotjar. You can set up a free account. It’ll track, I think, 5,000 page interactions with the free one, but only for like one or two pages. The other one is Microsoft Clarity. I don’t like it as much. I don’t, I don’t think it’s as good in terms of giving you the data, but that one’s also free, and you can track the entire site instead of just one or two pages. So there are some tools out there-

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, I love Hotjar.

David Pisarek: To help people. Yeah. All right. So great. We’ve talked about specific tactics. We’ve talked about planning. For leaders who might be feeling overwhelmed or too overwhelmed to slow down, block some time, and do this kind of planning, what do you see as the first small step that they can take without adding any more stress to themselves?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: I think you could probably do— I’m just thinking about that component of knowing your audience. You likely have people on the ground, you know, doing the work and meeting with folks in the community. Listen, right? You can- you can get a lot of information just from, like, putting feelers out for your other folks, whether that’s the board members or through your volunteers.

Like, find out where they came from and what they’re hearing in the community. And while that’s not the most data-driven approach, right? At least you’re getting some information because you’re already having conversations with them, right? And so if you’re overwhelmed and you’re like, I can’t do one more thing, I can’t sit here and sift through the data, or I don’t know how, or I can’t hire someone, whatever that looks like, the one thing that you can do immediately that’s low effort is start to ask more questions about your audience to the people who are interfacing with them the most.

David Pisarek: Yeah, you need to really connect with them and have those conversations. It’s very, very important. Absolutely. Totally agree. In terms of messaging, right? What messaging mistakes would you say keep small non-profits from outperforming their size online?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, I met with someone the other day. He was just feeling frustrated about campaigns, and I think they– The challenge was that they were comparing themselves to like big guys, right? Like Big Brothers Big Sisters, YMCA, you know, big national organizations where they not only have, maybe, a larger team there locally, but they have this whole, like, brand backing. And so I think one of the— I say this because it’s really easy to feel like, well, if this organization is doing everything, then I have to do everything too.

So, messaging specifically, and we talked about, like, you don’t have to show up on every channel if that’s not what’s effective for you. But the same can be true in your messaging if you want to do so much that you end up oversaturating your message. Does that make sense? So instead of focusing on like one program and one need, and I’m just talking about like a fundraising standpoint for being pretty focused on one thing, you try to like make sure that everyone knows everything about your entire organization, right? We do this, and we do this, and we do this, and we’ve done this, and we’ve supported this.

And it’s like, holy cow, if I’m interacting with your message, I’m just like, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be focused on. You know, you mentioned the buttons and I think this is something that can happen too, is like give them a bite-sized thing and then ask, give them a bite, give them a bite, right? And you’re doing that, maybe on your page, and then giving them a button.

But you can do the same thing in your message rather than give them everything. Like, get really focused on what is the one thing that they need to know about and then iterate on that, right? Like, if I am focused on, you know, like a back-to-school backpack program or a campaign, and I’m an organization that also, like, does healthcare screenings, also does, you know, has counselling services, also has a food bank, don’t— you don’t need to, like, give them all of that. Just focus on the backpack program.

What it is, what you need, what it does. Give me some impact metrics. Tell me some stories about some kids that you supported. Tell me about some schools that have, you know, like, given you good feedback on their interactions with you and the kids that have been supported by you.

And so I think that’s the big one, is that, you know, instead of focusing on like one thing, you know, you want to share everything because you’re in it, you know the work, so it doesn’t feel complex. So talky that it doesn’t feel too complex. And you want to share all of the good stuff that you’re doing, but that is just— it’s too much for people to consume. So that’s the thing that I see most often: we’ve tried to do everything at one time.

David Pisarek: I would call that watering down the message, right? Like, we do all these things. No, talk about that one thing. Your next email that goes out, talk about the next thing. The next email, talk about that thing. I love the idea of being specific with it and making people understand the importance of this thing, not these things. Right. And leveraging the story, I think, is really cool. If you’re talking about the Backpack Program, right, I’m just throwing this out there, right? But talking about the Backpack Program,

Alexis Marcae Bennett: We’ll roll with it. Yeah, right.

David Pisarek: Can you get any stats or data about, like, at the end of the school year, how that helped the kids through the entire school year? I think we can all understand children who might not have the financial means in the family to get the supplies that they need, and the importance of getting them good school supplies so they can have a really strong school year and get off on the right foot.

But what did that do throughout the entirety of the school year? Can you, obviously with the permission of the family and the parents or the guardian or whoever, follow that student through the school year? Talk about, you know, how this, this, this helped with all these other pieces and really brought it full circle to that campaign. And then that gives you some leverage the next time that campaign comes around. Right. And it gives you the data, and it gives you the insight, and it gives you really great stories, and it gives you more wholesome and complete information to pull on those heartstrings of your potential donors.

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, and I don’t, you know, I- you talked in my intro- I, you know, I work with non-profits, and I work with healthcare groups, and I think there are some interesting things you could do, even just following around a student and talking about- just go a layer deeper, right? It’s not just like, here’s this confidence, I’m assuming, because he- it’s a they, right? Like an ungendered student who receives the backpack. But if you’re following along with a student, dig a little bit deeper, then they had a backpack that they felt confident in because now, for the first time, they had, like, a Spider-Man backpack, and they’ve always wanted a Spider-Man backpack.

Think about like what, what now do they have access to that they didn’t before because of this backpack? Now they can participate in the food program. They have a place to take food home if they don’t, you know, if they’re participating in a food program. Now they can take books home, whereas before they weren’t able to do that, take books home from the library. Like they know that they have something like a safe place to go back and forth. The reason I mentioned that is that so many organizations do this work around social determinants of health, right?

And like addressing upstream, you know, prevention and improving health and wellness. And I think that, you know, it’s like an untapped, like, through line often. You know, we see it with food. We see it with maybe transportation, like some of the obvious things. If I can’t get to, you know, my appointment, that’s a problem.

But I wish that more organizations worked this into their messaging like this- this broader impact on community, health and culture through this one backpack, right? Because I think that you would appeal to a lot more people. If you’re not just going after the people who would do it anyway, you’re going after the people who are like, “I see a problem.” I don’t know how to fix it. Non-profits offer a great way for people to resolve social challenges. And so I wish that more organizations would go just a little bit deeper in their messaging and bring some of that through to the folks who maybe are a little bit more skeptical.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Fantastic insight, Alexis. And love the conversation we had about moving from scramble-crazy back-and-forth mode to something more sustainable, more strategic, and more aligned in terms of campaign strategies. I hope everybody listening has been able to get some amazing advice and pointers from you today. I know I’ve got a few that I’m gonna go back and talk to my clients about. What I like to do is to ask my guests to issue a challenge to everybody. So, Alexis, within the next, let’s say, 24 hours of listening to this episode, what do you want people to do?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: I mean, you already issued your own challenge to block some time off your calendar. Here’s what I want you to do with that time when you get there. I have a resource. We talked a lot about digging into getting to know your audience. I have a resource, a campaign planning workbook, that’s going to take you through all of that.

So go, download that workbook, put that in the link of the time that you, so you don’t lose track of it. You’re going to block out your time. And I want you to put that document in the meeting invite so you have something to come back to. But that’s the challenge is I want you to set yourself up for success, to be thoughtful and to plan not just your campaign, but potentially your entire year. And so that workbook will take you through all of that. It’s going to give you a spreadsheet to take all of your notes and put them in. Something that you can collaborate with others on.

I think that’s the biggest thing, and that’s the hardest thing: just having the discipline to sit down, block the time, and then use the time.

So I’m going to hop on your challenge, David, just to, you know, block out the time and be intentional. And then, you know, set it, set yourself up so that you can be successful and use that time rather than just like, ‘Okay, now I need to go back to listen to that episode to know what the heck I was going to do with this time.’ You know, put your notes in there, put some tools that’ll help you with that planning period. And then, and then make it happen.

David Pisarek: Love it. So we will have a link to the workbook on our show notes page, but if anyone just wants to get there and get it right away, how do they access it?

Alexis Marcae Bennett: Yeah, that’s my website. That’s the current pop-up right now. So go over there, and it’ll smack you in the face. I’d love for people to get that. Obviously they can follow me on social media or follow, connect with me on LinkedIn, and I can share that with them as well.

David Pisarek: Alexis, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. Everybody listening, like I just mentioned, come check out our show notes page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all of the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!