Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: The importance of marketing and how it doesn’t have to be rocket science or brain surgery for your non-profit, stay tuned, listen up, and hear everything Stu Swineford has to say about this. Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode, I’ve got Stu Swineford, a digital marketer, fellow podcast host, author, marketing coach, and mountain fellow.

Stu has seen it all, serving purpose-focused leaders for over 30 years of marketing. He helps take marketing off your plate and elevate it to the next level so that it transforms strangers into stakeholders. Stu, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. How’s your day going so far?

Stu Swineford: So far so good. It’s really great to be here today, David. I appreciate you having me on as a guest.

David Pisarek: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for joining. I heard that you have a little story about coming home and there being a coyote in the living room. What’s that about?

Stu Swineford: Well, my wife used to do wildlife and domestic animal rescue stuff, and we would have a variety of critters on our property from time to time. And one day I came home from work and there was a coyote in our living room that she was rescuing. This was a cute little coyote pup named Jenny. She was orphaned or something. She was found abandoned.

We raised her up from a pretty young age to where she could be released back into the wild. She was like a really misbehaving dog for the most part until we got a second coyote pup that had been out in the wild a little bit longer. He was about the same age as Jenny. We called him Franklin because he came in just filthy, and I believe his mother had been hit by a car or something like that.

He was rescued by some kind people. He was a lot crazier than Jenny just because he’d been out in the wild for a lot longer. We eventually were able to take both of them down to a little town called Del Norte, which is in the southwestern part of the state. We drove them all the way down to Del Norte, where they continued to be rehabbed into adolescence and were then released into the wild.

But yeah, it was always fun. You never knew what you were going to get when you walked through the door in terms of critters in the house.

David Pisarek: It must have been fun for any friends or family that you had come over. It was just like random animals sitting there.

Stu Swineford: Yeah, it was fun. At one point, Rach was the premier cottontail rabbit rehabber in the state, probably in the country. She was just amazing at it. We had a good, really good location for that.

And that cottontails, when they’re babies, they can actually be literally scared to death. And so our house was quiet and we had ways to keep them isolated from any other pets that we might have. And she just did a great job of getting bunnies back out in the wild.

There was a goat in our living room one time. We had all sorts of different critters, everything from kittens, so domestic animals, to rabbits, both domestic and wild rabbits, as well as squirrels, etc. So yeah, it was always an adventure.

David Pisarek: Amazing. So one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you is commitment and how committing to something can actually help people change habits, change their life, and change what they do at work. Can you talk about that for a bit?

Stu Swineford: Yeah, for sure.

Commitment, in my mind (or the way that I view commitment) is something that is beyond what you absolutely know that you can do, but not to the point of the place where you absolutely know that you can’t do it.

I use the example of throwing a football. It doesn’t take any commitment for me to say that I’m going to throw a football 15 meters or 15 yards. I know I can do that, so that’s easy. That just lives in this realm of duality.

I also know that I can’t throw a football, say, 100 yards. I just am not ever going to be capable of that. There may be some people out there that can do that. So somewhere in between that, and I would say I would probably march the 15-yard line out a little bit because I know I can do that. But someone in between that point of probability and possibility is where I feel commitment lies.

And one of the things that I’ve discovered… In fact, the podcast that I created called “Relish This” (which is a non-profit marketing podcast) came from this place where I was on Dean Jackson’s podcast called “More Cheese, Less Whiskers”, which is another great marketing podcast (He’s an amazing fellow), and during the course of our conversation, he said, “Well, you serve non-profits”. I said, “Yes”, and he said, “Well, why don’t you just take the same format as this show, the More Cheese, Less Whiskers show, and just transform that to do the same thing for non-profits?” And I thought, “Well, no one really wants to listen to me for an hour necessarily”.

And he really challenged me to come commit to doing that. He first said, “Well, no one has to listen to you for an hour. You’re going to be interviewing people, and you can bring a lot of value to the table”.

And so he challenged me to commit to recording at least one episode a week and publishing that for a whole year. And so I took a leap of faith and I said, “Yes, I’m going to commit to doing this”. I’d never created a podcast before, so I had to start from scratch. I didn’t know if it was possible. But a year later, I think I had recorded over 60 episodes. Just by telling yourself that you’re going to do it good or bad in terms of how great you are when you start, obviously, when you start something, you typically aren’t fantastic at it.

So I think the first few episodes were a little rockier than maybe some of the episodes later in the series. But at this point, I’ve recorded over 100 episodes of that show for non-profit leaders and marketers who are seeking to improve the way that they show up in the world.

David Pisarek: Yeah. Whenever you’re starting something new, there’s a little bit of easiness, a little bit of discomfort, and maybe some butterflies in your stomach. But I think some other words that might resonate instead of commitment is maybe perseverance or grit and actually spending the time and doing it.

You can sit and read 30, or 40 articles on how to actually start a podcast. I think a lot of non-profits and charities and community organizations, they tend to sit and meet about doing things and not actually do the things that they’re sitting and meeting about. It’s important for people to take a moment and go, “Okay, how can we actually start this? What is that first step that we can do?”.

Yeah, non-profit, ABC, whoever’s listening to this, if you want to start a podcast, for example, pick up your cell phone, hit record and just record it, make it happen. Whether you use it or not, it’s a different story, but you’ve got to start with at least the first recording and go, “Okay, I goofy this up. No problem”, you can edit it just like this. I can goofy up a word right now and we’ll just cut it out.

Totally fine. Nobody cares. But have some value that you bring to the conversation. You want to strategize a little bit and have some thought and idea put into what you’re going to do before you actually do it. So you have some guiding principles, but you’ve actually got to take that first step.

Stu Swineford: Yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned that. I just started trying to create a video. I’ve committed to creating at least three videos a week for the next two months. Those are going to be probably short for them to start, but a couple of things. The first is this desire for perfection and really getting comfortable with the idea that there really is no such thing as perfection.

All of us who are desirous of delivering value and being great have a tendency to overthink things, as you mentioned, as well as to get really nervous about the fact that it’s not perfect or even great. For some of the videos that I’ve been recording lately, I really got frustrated with them because I’m just not comfortable with them yet. I just got started doing that, and I’m more of a behind-the-camera guy instead of in front-of-the-camera guy.

So it’s going to just take some time for me to get better at that. And two things about that: the first is you don’t have to be great when you start because no one really expects you to be. The second thing is you really don’t have an audience when you start either.

So no one’s going to see those first few at-bats that you’re taking, that you’re undertaking there. Just hit the record. I would suggest that actually putting it out there in the public realm is a good thing. As I said, there’s not going to be anyone looking when you start, so don’t worry about it.

Then this idea of perfection, this desire for perfection, that’s great. However, the perfect is, as they say, “the enemy of done”.

So certainly just making sure that you’re getting stuff out there and taking action. And that’s a big part of my podcast, “Relish This”. It’s a question I ask at the end of every show to all my guests is: if you had our audience take one action at the end of listening to our episode, what would that be? So I recommend just getting out and getting something done.

David Pisarek: Yeah, the idea that you can achieve perfection is a little bit absurd to me, and it’s tough. I work in the digital realm of design and development with our agency at Wow Digital, and we want to deliver the best possible product for our clients. We want to make them absolutely perfect, and our clients love the work that we do. Things that we notice because as designers, you want everything absolutely pixel-perfect. The clients don’t necessarily notice that.

So if you take that mentality and go, “Okay, I noticed this little…” You could hear me breathing when I’m talking. A lot of people don’t want to hear that. What can you do? Well, there are some algorithms you can run on it and things like that to try to pull it out a little bit. But here’s the idea and the notion of “good enough”. So what does good enough look like to you? And you need to be comfortable with that.

Stu Swineford: Yes, especially in the digital world, this stuff isn’t printed. It’s not carved in stone. You can always go back and if you have a different idea, you can always go back and re-edit.

You can reuse that content and actually leverage mistakes or leverage the change in the marketplace in the space as an opportunity to do something new. I would certainly suggest in the digital realm to be comfortable with good enough for sure.

David Pisarek: Yeah. Digital space, it’s all malleable. You can update it anytime. You’re not printing 50,000 physical annual reports and sending them out. You want to make sure the financials and stuff are perfect.

Obviously, there are things that need to be spot on, but you can always change them. You can always update it. You can tweak it. You can do all that type of stuff.

And like you just said, learn from your mistakes or your missteps. Maybe that first episode of your podcast or your blog or your TikTok account or whatever it is, maybe they’re not that great. That’s okay. Work on it, practice it. You’ll get more comfortable. You’ll do better over time, and that’s totally fine.

Take a break for a day and do it the next day. If you’re getting too frustrated or upset, it’ll all be okay. It’s totally fine. Having said that, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, you need to think about strategy. What is that? From your point, Stu, why should strategy come first?

Stu Swineford: Strategy first is a hallmark of how we handle things here at Relish Studio. We really want to make sure that we have a great understanding of where you’re trying to go before we actually prescribe how to get there. That’s what strategy is all about, is unearthing the ideas around where you want to take your organization before you start that journey.

If you just hopped in the car and started driving without understanding where you wanted to go, it would take you a lot longer to get there and it’d be a lot less efficient.

Taking the time to diagnose problems, understand what direction you’re trying to achieve, and understand the outcomes you’re really seeking before you start implementing tends to take up a lot less time in the long run.

We understand that using a sailing metaphor, if you’re trying to get from A down here to point B up here, there’s going to be some tacking. You’re going to change direction a little bit in order to move up to the place that you’re trying to go. What we want to do and what strategy helps do is it minimizes those wild swings of direction.

We want to keep in a northerly direction as opposed to going way far to the east or to the west. And that’s really what strategy helps do. When we do strategy, we typically start with that and map out about three months to a year of activities and tactics that are going to help drive toward that end goal.

And then we measure and adjust accordingly, certainly providing opportunities for innovation along the way. But the idea is that we have a plan and the activities that we’re helping our clients embark upon are aligned with the desired outcomes for that plan.

David Pisarek: As you said that, what came to mind was how many times have I gone in the car with my wife and the kids we’re hungry, we start driving, “Where do you want to go? What type of food do you want to have?” We didn’t think about it before. We just got in the car and started driving.

Knowing where you want to go will help you guide the path of what you need to do, what you need to develop, create, connect with, integrate, and apply for grants, whatever it happens to be. You need to have that focus and that vision down the road of, “All right, this is what we want”. This is the ideal situation or the ideal outcome so that you can really put together the plan.

Stu Swineford: Yeah, for sure.

David Pisarek: I think part of that plan is metrics and KPIs. How can you show the ROI, whether it’s hiring Relish or Wow to come and work with you or some other agency or freelancer? Or even if you’ve got staff in your organization, what’s the ROI of their time spent that was put in on whatever the project happens to be? What are some of the typical KPIs and metrics that you recommend?

Stu Swineford: Yeah, that’s a great question. This idea of KPIs and leading versus lagging KPIs is a challenging one to wrap one’s arms around. I remember when I was first introduced to me several years ago, it took me a while to really fully understand.

Sometimes I still have to take a step back and be like, “Okay, is that something that I can affect, which would essentially be a leading KPI, or is that an outcome which would be essentially a lagging KPI?” For example, revenue tends to be the first thing that people jump to.

We need a certain amount of money to keep our organization running, and so we need to raise that amount of money or create other revenue streams, merchandise sales, grants, etc, that will help us get to that goal. But just measuring that goal is what it’s called a lagging KPI because you can’t actually affect that particular input. It’s an output as opposed to an input.

And so what we really try to focus on is where can we get to what we would call leading KPIs that drive toward that revenue goal? So for example, if you have a revenue goal and one of your inputs for that revenue goal is corporate sponsorships, great!

We need to get eight corporate sponsorships of $50,000 each to reach our goal of 400 grand. I did that math in any event. So you could say, “Okay, I need to have eight people sign on as at least $50,000 corporate sponsors”. Well, that isn’t something that you can actually change.

But you can affect that input to get to that output. So start backing down from that. And typically we look at how many proposals do you need to create to land that corporate sponsor. Okay, let’s say your conversion rate is 50%, so that means you need 16 proposals to land eight corporate sponsors.

Well, you can back up even further and you can say, “How many conversations do I need to have to get to a proposal phase?” And that may be 32 conversations to get to 16 proposals to get to eight partnerships. You can back up even further. “How many networking events do I need to go to? How many introductions do I need to have to get to those conversations that then lead to this?”

And so once you back that back-up and you get to some of these places where you can start to pull levels like networking events, if you know that you need to go to 10 networking events that then lead to these 32 conversations, now you can start to say, “Okay, what are the 10 networking events that I need to go to?”

When you get good at that predictability, that’s where you can start to pull those levers and you can say, “Okay, if 10 events get me eight corporate sponsors… If I go to 20 events, I should get 16 corporate sponsors”. And so that becomes a KPI that you can measure and adjust and make sure that you’re affecting everything downstream from that.

So for non-profits, there are a number of KPIs that one probably can be tracking. How many grants do you need to research to submit a grant proposal to get a win? And so you start to be able to say, “Okay, we need to research five grants a quarter, and then three of those we’re going to apply for, which is going to result in one grant win”. So in that capacity, the research piece may be a KPI to measure. In terms of volunteers, how many volunteers do you need to get? You could look at traffic stats and so you could start to say, “How much traffic do we need to drive to the site in order to get volunteers?” But you can probably back that out even more because traffic comes in a variety of different ways.

There’s organic traffic, there’s paid search, there’s social, there’s from your email list, etc. So you can start to apply metrics that you’re tracking, iterating upon to try and achieve some change, a positive change, hopefully, and that then leads to that end goal.

I would say that there are so many different KPIs that one can measure that it’s a little hard to say which ones are most important. You would have to assess that based on which channel you’re talking about within your own organization.

But certainly activities on social would be something that I’d be tracking if I were an organization looking to grow. Networking events, introductions, and those types of things would be places that I would look at. How many review or referral requests are you sending out on a regular basis to try to get people to share their experience with your organization so that other people that trust those people come into your organization?

David Pisarek: I love that, Stu. Talk about leading and lagging indicators and KPIs and those types of metrics. It’s really important to understand if you want this outcome.

If you need 50 donors that are going to donate over $500 to your organization this year, how many conversations do you need to have? How many emails do you need to have? How many introductions do you need to have? And backing that out and going, “Okay, well, if we need 50, we need to have 200 conversations. Okay, so what does the team look like for that? What’s the training involved that you need to bring those people up to speed? How much time is this actually going to take?”

If you are hoping to get 50 donors over 500 dollars by the end of the year, and it’s November, it might be too late for you. You need to be thinking about these types of things as early as possible so that you can get all those pieces in place and you can arrange the support and the team and the staff and maybe potentially budget or finances involved with it to help you accomplish whatever your end goal is. I love that you mentioned that.

Stu Swineford: There’s one thing I would mention there in terms of the “it may be too late” piece.

We tend to have this idea that, for this challenge with goal setting where we look at the whole goal… So if I say I want 50 new donors by the end of the month, there are a couple of things.

The first is to make sure that you’re setting yourself up for some success.

You can have stretch goals for sure. However, let’s create smart goals. Let’s create goals that are measurable, which you have 50. Is that attainable, however? Is it realistic? We need to make sure that we are creating opportunities for ourselves to tee ourselves up for some success.

We have a challenge with, particularly people who are very aspirational, have a challenge of setting really big goals without fully understanding whether that’s something that’s achievable. When setting up your goals, I recommend trying to come up with something that you can then hit. It could be a little bit of a stretch. Then the second piece is to not get discouraged if you’re not going to hit that goal. We tend to have a problem with the idea that if I can’t get all of it done, then I’m just going to do none of it.

And so if I say I want 50 donors by the end of the year, let’s say that that is an achievable goal, but maybe I’m not tracking toward that as effectively as I would like, I have a tendency or people have a tendency to just abandon the entire effort as opposed to really celebrating how far you’ve come.

And so that’s something I definitely want to make sure that everybody looks at, is “If I get to 45, that’s not a failure”. You didn’t go quite as far as you wanted to, but 45 out of 50 is amazing. 40 out of 50 is amazing. And so really getting to that point where you allow yourself to be happy with the progress that you’re making. The other thing that we tend to do is, in the celebration piece, once we get close to 50, we tend to push the goalposts out. That’s something that’s very common in the entrepreneurial space.

Leadership tends to do this all the time. They get all excited about, “Oh, wow, we’re going to knock this out of the park, so let’s move the park boundaries out”. Then they never celebrate. All of a sudden you look back and you’re like, “Yeah, we got to 70, but our goal was 80”.

It’s like, “Well, wait, our original goal was 50”. Just make sure that you’re celebrating from time to time. One way to do that is to go ahead and start celebrating 95% of the way there.

Just go ahead and have a celebration and then you can move the posts. But allowing yourself and your team to experience the joy that’s associated with achieving goals is really important.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. We do this in our businesses all the time. We achieve something, we launch a project early, we hit financial goals or whatnot. It’s important to celebrate those milestones, whatever it is that you’re doing. If you’re looking to get 300 followers on your Instagram account… Every mile at 100, celebrate at 200, celebrate at 250, celebrate at 300, celebrate and beyond. Make that part of your daily activities.

So as you’re looking, as you’re tracking your weekly activities, as you’re tracking the metrics, go, “You know what? Last year, we only had 20 donors over 500. We’re already at 35. This is incredible”.

Be proud of the work you’re doing. And honestly, a little pro tip, work that into your messaging, and your marketing as you’re talking with them. Look at the growth that we’re having this year. We’ve got 35 donors over $500. We’d love for you to join this elite club of donors that care about our organization. Come and help us and let’s celebrate more and create whatever the impact is, that your organization is doing. I think I love that idea and that notion. Absolutely.

One of the things that I just want to take a moment and pause and talk about is SMART goals.

Smart is an acronym. It’s specific, meaning set real attainable numbers with real deadlines on it. M is measurable, so make sure that your goal is trackable in some way, shape or form. It could be maybe, “You know what?” Like you just said, “I’m going to spend the next two months and I’m going to produce three videos a week”. That could be it. It could be spending an hour a week reviewing your website analytics and tracking page views or visits or bounce rates or whatever it is that you want.

The A is attainable. Working towards a goal that’s challenging but not too far out there, like what you were talking about earlier, Stu. R is for realistic, be honest with yourself, know what you’re actually capable of doing, whether it’s just you or your team or maybe you have a vendor or supplier that you’re working with, make sure that it’s actually realistic. And T is for time-bound. You want to make sure that you’re giving yourself a deadline for that. So just like you at the podcast, all right, two months. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to do three a week for two months.

Great. Maybe there’s a week in there you do four. Maybe there’s a week in there you only can do two. Totally fine. But you’re going to focus on this and do it right through for those two months. So that’s what smart goals are. It’s not smart like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to do this and this is a great idea”. No, it’s actually “There are some very specific things around what is a smart goal”.

Stu Swineford: Yeah. And I would suggest once you have committed to a goal, make sure you just stay with that for the amount of time that you’ve put into it.

Like you said, David, if you one week you only get two done, don’t beat yourself up about that. Just get back on the train and get three done the following week. And if you want to be ambitious and try and play some catch-up, then that’s great. But be excited about the fact that you did two because two months ago you didn’t do any. So two is better than none. That’s what I would suggest.

And don’t get discouraged and let the end goal dissuade you from keeping going.

David Pisarek: I was watching a video, a couple of weeks ago, it’s probably a really old one, Gary Vee. People like him, people hate him. It doesn’t really matter. But what he said I thought was really inspirational is that he goes out into the world and he has this abundance mindset.

Go out, help everybody, do whatever you can, and give the advice that you can. He said I think 99% or 95% of people won’t actually take the advice and act on it. So he doesn’t care. He’ll tell people what his secrets are, but he knows they’re not going to do anything. So just that mere fact of even if you wanted to do three a week and you can only do one because you got too busy or whatever, that’s still a step in the right direction and keep pushing yourself forward on that. So I think that’s super awesome.

Stu Swineford: Yeah, it’s just going to get easier the more you practice. It’s like anything.

Very few people actually are amazing at something the first time they try it.

And if they are amazing at something the first time they try it, they usually get better as they do it more. So just be comfortable with the fact that you’re putting content out there that you’re creating value, that you’re sharing information, and some percentage of the people will love it and take action on it. Some percentage of people will love it and eventually, they may take action on it or they’ll share it, and some % won’t like it or won’t take action and that’s okay.

David Pisarek: Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes better. Let’s just change what we think about that for a second. Just stop and pause for a second and just absorb that practice makes it better. I’m going to leave that one there, but let’s talk about content.

You were mentioning podcasts and you’re going to be producing videos and stuff like that. Why do you feel that content is so important for phases of a stakeholder lifecycle?

Stu Swineford: Yeah. So we should probably talk about the stakeholder lifecycle first. So typically the way that we look at it, we’re part of a network called “Duct Tape Marketing”. And so this comes from that framework.

Essentially there are seven steps that most people take when they engage with your organization.

The first step is that they get to know you, then they get to like you, then trust you. Those three typically fall under the purview of marketing. So all the stuff that you’re putting out there is helping people get to know, like, and trust you.

Then they move into this idea of being able to try your services. And so whether that’s a free assessment that you provide or some tip sheet or checklist or something of that nature, that you ask them for some value, their email address or what have you, and then you provide some value. That allows for this transactional relationship to start to build. Try could even be a lower value or lower cost item, a sticker versus a branded car or something that you sell. I don’t know. But in any event, getting people to be able to try and then buy, and in the non-profit space, buy is typically a volunteer might volunteer.

That might be the buy phase piece of that. A donor, the donation would be the buy phase activity. So allowing them to do those things that typically fall under sales. And then once you have somebody in that transactional relationship, they’re a donor, they’re a volunteer, they’re giving you their time, their money, etc. Then we move into the final two phases, which are repeat, so getting people to take a second action and then recur and repeat and refer… Sorry, repeat and recur would be the same thing.

So in the referral phase, it’s basically getting people to tell their friends about you, share their experience on social media, and write a review, those types of things would fall into that referral phase of the engagement.

So in terms of content, content helps fuel a lot of these phases. So when you create material, whether that’s video, podcast, blog, graphics, etc, whatever you’re creating in terms of content is helping you tell that story. Content helps with the no phase because it helps fuel search engine optimization.

The search engines are going out and they’re looking for matches on people doing a search. And so if you’re a non-profit that helps… I don’t know, helps refugees in your area find housing, there are people out there searching for ways to help an organization like that.

How can I help refugees in my area? If you have a blog post that’s just talking about that stuff and has some key terms in it that reference housing and refugees in your area, the likelihood that your site is going to be found for that is higher. When you put that out there on social media, people may stumble across that and all of a sudden be pretty excited that they received the information that they were looking for. So they’re getting to know you. You’re now on their radar.

Then with content, again, when you create that content, it enables people to start to read or watch or listen to material that you’ve produced. They start to say, “Yeah, I like what these guys are saying. I like what this organization is doing”. You’re fulfilling that like phase piece. Moving into the trust phase, the content, if it’s authoritative and does provide value, maybe I show up looking nice on video, for example, that then enables people to say, “You know what? I think I got to know this guy. I like him. I really trust what’s being said here”. They’re moving through that stakeholder phase.

Once you get into the sales piece, we have found content not only helps reinforce those no-light trust but then helps in the try-and-buy phases as well. If you have a sales team, for example, and they’re talking to a potential donor who’s maybe on the fence, but they’re listening and the donor is saying, “These are the questions that I have. How do I know that my money is going to go to the recipient? How do I know that this is something that is going to help them?” You can go back to the content that you’ve already created.

Your sales team can actually follow up with people saying, “Hey, we were having a conversation about this”. “We wrote a blog post about this”. Or, “Here’s our white sheet”, or “Our annual report from the last three years that help reinforce the concerns or address the challenges that you are experiencing or the questions that you had”. It then becomes something that can reinforce the sale piece. Then in terms of the repeat and refer phases, that content can also be used to reach back out to people.

If you have a blog post and you have someone who’s been a donor or been a volunteer and that blog is what you would consider to be valuable, you can email that to people, which will remind them of you.

They’ll be like, “Oh, I want to donate to these guys again”, or “I want to volunteer my time with this organization again”. Or they can share that content with their friends, which would then fall into that refer phase. That’s why creating that content, and being consistent about it can help fuel each of those phases.

Then in fact, in terms of SEO work and social work and all of those things, the content helps you stay on top of those algorithms, typically. What we know about the algorithms, especially for Google, is that consistency can be very key if there are two organizations that are in the same space and one of them is producing content on a regular basis and the other one maybe isn’t. But otherwise, their websites are equivalent. We believe that Google and the other search engines actually raise the one up who has been producing content more consistently as well as more recently.

David Pisarek: Yeah. Few great points that you mentioned there. I made a couple of notes as you were chatting. Know, like and trust factors.

Anybody that listens to this podcast has heard me talk about this a number of times. It takes 6 to 7 interactions with somebody before they’ll know, like and trust you.

It’s really important to get out there, whether it’s email marketing campaigns or posts on social or showing up because you’re doing your analytics reviews and being strategic about the content you’re producing to show up, for example, like you were talking about for refugees in my area, you don’t want to produce an article that talks about helping refugees in my area. You want to produce an article that talks about helping refugees in Phoenix, Arizona.

You want to produce and you take advantage of what’s called local SEO, put in some of those keywords and things that somebody might actually be looking for because that’ll help elevate you. We know that Google, as part of their algorithm, wants to show people content that is close in proximity to where they are because they tag and watch where you’re coming from for better or worse, and also based on the keywords.

That’s the first thing, is: yes, you want to produce content. You want to do it in multiple ways. If you produce a blog article, let’s say it’s eight paragraphs, maybe 600 words, 500 words. Take that, cut it up and use that and produce five or six social posts out of that. Turn that into small little tidbits of information that you could push out and get out there.

You don’t have to produce fresh, brand-new content over and over and over. You can just repurpose what you’ve already produced.

Go back to something you did a year ago and get two or three Instagram posts or Facebook posts out of that. Post it on LinkedIn, wherever the people are that you want to connect with. You need to do, again, the strategy on the back end, identify the avatars and personas that you want to connect with, find out what drives them, what motivates them, where they hang out, where they spend their time, and then publish content in those arenas. I think that’s certainly an important piece to keep in mind.

Stu Swineford: Yeah, content can be not only chopped up but it can be combined.

So for example, I wrote a book called Mission Uncomfortable. It’s a non-profit marketing book. It can be found at missionuncomfortablebook.com, and that book actually arose from a series of blog posts that I wrote five or six years ago.

We started to do some analytics, we were looking at our traffic, and we noticed that these four or five blog posts were getting traffic even quite a few years after they were published. And it was like, “Well, that’s weird. Well, what if we combine those into something bigger?” It started out as a, “Let’s just combine them into one thing that we can use as a giveaway”. But of course, I wanted to expand on that, so I expanded it into a, what’s a short book, but a fun book nonetheless, I think, or a helpful book for non-profits.

But essentially, when you create a piece of material, you can look at it two ways. The first way is what David just described, chopping it up into smaller pieces that you can then leverage on, say, social media in a series of posts about this one piece of content.

So let’s just say a blog post. The other thing that you can do is start to look at similar blog posts that you could lump together into a bigger piece of content. So it can go both ways, both up and down that continuum.

The other thing you can do is take… If you have a bunch of blog posts that are all about… I have a bunch about coaching, for example. We’re going to combine those into what’s called a “hub page”. Right now, search engines really love hub pages because they are a central repository for a lot of topical information. So if you can start to just create content on a regular basis, then go back and look at that content and see where there are content themes, you can bulk that content into these hub pages or into more value exchange ebooks or things like that. So that’s another reason why content and being consistent in content is so important.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. I think that’s really key. Google is the number one search engine out there, followed by another Alphabet. Alphabet owns Google, they also own YouTube. Youtube is the number two search engine out there. I’m presuming you want to take advantage of that, which is why you’re looking at doing video and video content.

I hope, Stu, that you’re thinking of publishing videos out in the YouTube realm as well to take advantage of SEO because, for every video you put up there, you can put a description, you can put links back to your site and all that great stuff. Why, in your opinion, is video so important for non-profits to start venturing into?

Stu Swineford: Yeah, video is a really powerful opportunity. You hit on one of the main reasons which is that the second largest or most popular search engine out there is a video platform. People also, over the years, have started to engage and appreciate video more.

As internet speeds have increased, it’s opened up a lot of opportunities where 15, or 20 years ago, video was not as important because we just didn’t have as universal of high-speed internet everywhere.

However, now, things have changed. Our attention spans have dropped a lot. People don’t seem to be reading as much as they used to. And depending upon what your audience is or who your audience is, your personas, like you mentioned, David, video can be a really powerful tool to get your message in front of them and get them to engage with your services.

The other thing that’s nice about video is it can be transcribed, it can be turned into a blog post, and it can be turned into audio. So when you start with video, it potentially gives you the opportunity to repurpose even more effectively and more efficiently more easily. We actually have a process over here at Relish where we do content marketing for clients, where we’re actually writing blog posts for them, repurposing videos for them, doing some of that editing, etc.

One of the parts of that process is a lot of our clients don’t feel like they have the time to write an outline, for example, of a blog post that they’d like for us to produce. They’re the material experts, so they’re the content experts in their field. We have them craft a video, so take 6 to 7 minutes or less, however long it takes, and just record a video.

If that recording is of a high enough quality, we can use it on YouTube, we could use it on their site in video form, but then we can also take that direction from that video and potentially use it as audio, potentially use it as a blog post. The idea is that they’re giving us content direction in a video, and it’s really easy or routine, I guess, to turn that into other types of material.

David Pisarek: It’s so easy to hit record if you’re comfortable with your topic to just sit and talk and talk. The conversation we’re having, Stu, I feel like we can probably talk for another three hours about this. This is what we do over and over and over. We could talk about this and drop all kinds of gold nuggets and info bombs on everybody here. But doing the recording of the video, was super great. Transcribing it is even better.

For our podcast, we have a full transcription of every episode. One of the main reasons is there’s accessibility on that side of it. But the other side is for SEO. We actually put that transcription as live text on our site.

There’s so much rich content in this thing and it helps drive traffic.

We have our momentum value program over here at Wow Digital. Our strategy part of that is about producing content. One, two or four articles for our clients a month. We know that the more frequently you publish content, to your point earlier, the higher you’ll end up ranking in SERP, so in the search engine result pages. Google likes sites that are updated frequently that have new, constant, fresh information being pumped into it, or older content that’s been slightly updated and saved in there.

It’s just the truth. It is what it is. If you can take some content, and if you could take some time, just record it, you can transcribe it, and that could be the article, for example, or you can use the video and leverage other platforms. You can take that video, cut it into a 15-second snippet or 30-second snippet, and publish that as well. There are so many amazing things that you can actually do with it like Stu’s talking about.

Stu Swineford: Yeah, you can take a long, short video and chop it into… I believe on YouTube, if you can get them to less than a minute, then you can be in what they call… They call them shorts, right? So if you have even a 3 to 5-minute video, try to find two or three less-than-minute-long segments of that that have a good hook and that have the ability to get a point across in that period of time, if they’re under a minute that, you can publish them again on YouTube and get even more reach.

Right now, TikTok has fueled this current trend for shorter videos, and most of the other social channels, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc, have taken that model and are starting to try and push people to create those quick minute-long little snippets.

And it’s funny, as I’m producing video, it’s actually a minute is plenty of time to get a point across. I would say that as you’re planning that, make sure that you are focusing on a single point for those smaller videos unless it’s something that you can rapidly fire, “Here are three ways to blah, blah, blah”. Certainly, rapid-fire-multi-point video could be really effective. Just make sure that you’re thinking about that length and sticking under a minute if you want to get into that short category.

David Pisarek: People just want to flip through video, video, video, video, video instead of sitting and watching. So you need to also captivate and capture their attention in the first two seconds… I would say maybe even less than that, which is an unfortunate reality.

We all want the attention of our organizations, and you got to really capture that right at the beginning.

Stu Swineford: You have to throw that hook right off the bat.

David Pisarek: Exactly. Stu, amazing and fantastic insights. I hope that the people listening to this episode have been able to pull some really great insight and take the advice that we’re saying of actually taking that first step forward in doing something instead of just sitting and meeting.

Again, you also have to strategize to start some, I guess, going against what I’m saying here. You got to meet a little bit, get some strategy, and then actually go and pursue and persevere and make it happen for the organization. If you could challenge anybody listening to this episode to do just one thing, what would that be?

Stu Swineford: I would say just get started with something.

If there’s something you’ve been thinking about doing, just create a goal, create your commitment and get started.

David Pisarek: Okay, there you go. Right from the mouth of Stu, get started. Awesome. Write it on a Post-it note and stick it on the bottom of your monitor. And just every day you’ll look at this, get started, get started. It’s going to motivate you. I have a couple of Post-its sitting on my screen right now that I’m looking at, and it really does help because it keeps it in the front of your mind.

Pro-tip, if you’re going to put a Post-it note on your monitor, put a little piece of tape on the top of it because hitting it, it’s going to keep falling off. Just a little piece of tape on there. Stu, if anybody wants to get in touch with you or Relish Studio, what do they need to do?

Stu Swineford: Sure. You could find me at relishstudio.com. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/sswineford. You can check out my book at missionuncomfortablebook.com.

And if you like podcasts, which I assume you do because you’re listening to this one, check out “Relish This” wherever you go to listen to podcasts.

David Pisarek: Fantastic. And I was on Stu’s podcast, so listen to that one. You have to. We are going to have a show notes page on our site. So if you want any of the links that Stu talked about or any of the other insights, if we covered them maybe a little too fast and you want to chat about them with somebody at your organization, I encourage you to head over to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode. Until next time, keep on being successful!

Stu Swineford: Thanks, David!