Host: Welcome, everyone, to the Go Beyond Fundraising podcast. Today, I’m sitting down with Laura Hinrichsen and Trent Ricker, and we’re discussing the role of digital in the modern nonprofit — some of the challenges or opportunities in the landscape specific to digital and how nonprofits can act on those opportunities and combat any headwinds or challenges that may be coming their way.
Trent, I’ll turn it over to you.
Trent Ricker: Thanks, Leah. It’s always good to be with you. Welcome, Laura. This is going to be fun. Laura and I have been working together for about a year and a half. When we travel, you constantly challenge my curiosity. I will admit to the audience that I’m the old-school, digital guy who started his career in the digital landscape, and then it has passed me by. But I know enough to be dangerous while Laura is on the spot.
I love collaborating and learning from Laura, who leads an exceptional team here at Allegiance Group + Pursuant.
Today, there is this emerging digital landscape for the nonprofit market. Again, I think back to my entry into applying what I knew about digital in the for-profit space. Then, I was a leader at Convio, so I was immersed in the digital landscape of email and the web.
So much has changed over the years. So, we want to talk more about this emerging landscape. I first want to ask you: What are some contemporary components of a digital landscape for the nonprofit organization to consider?
Laura Hinrichsen: “Digital landscape” can be a very overwhelming term, especially if you’re an older nonprofit that has been around for a long time and may have an older donor base. But what’s common to all nonprofits is that the digital landscape includes what you’re doing online.
How are you communicating via email? How are you communicating on your website? What’s the donation experience like on your website? What does your organic social presence look like? What paid communication do you have ongoing? Data is a big part of that — especially the paid aspect.
Google has been messing with us for the last four or five years, talking about getting rid of third-party cookies, which would have impacted our ability to track. That’s no longer a thing, but privacy is probably the most significant remnant of that — privacy-related concerns and questions.
It’s a very intimidating topic for many nonprofits — getting a handle on the privacy aspect and what we can and cannot do with our owned data. What does first-party data even mean, for example? Much of the chaos and confusion around that area specifically occurs when most nonprofits hear the term “the general landscape” and start to cringe a little.
Trent Ricker: That’s a good place to start. Think about a macro concept most people are familiar with: owned, earned, and paid media. Most nonprofits own some data related to those they’re already aware of — those who have permitted them to communicate with them either via mail or email or those who are following them on social media channels.
Again, today, our conversation is going to lean into the digital landscape. Most nonprofits have owned media. In many cases, depending upon their size, sophistication, and budget, those nonprofit organizations have somebody to manage it. It’s table stakes today.
Most nonprofits need a presence for search positioning, social media, and email, whether for gift acknowledgment, newsletter, stewardship, or appeals. This is ingrained in every nonprofit’s community engagement. So, let’s start there. What does that look like?
Also, leaning into your point — that emerging challenge — if you own the media, you’re asking for permission and being permitted to continue a conversation.
Laura Hinrichsen: Many nonprofits make one mistake, for lack of a better word: thinking their owned channels are enough to achieve everything they want. Posting on your Facebook page or sending out your monthly or quarterly newsletter can be great for building awareness and keeping your organization top of mind. But they alone won’t get you where you need to be to reach newer, younger donors, which most of our nonprofit clients want to do.
For example, we see organizations plan to do a handful of social posts for a big tentpole fundraising period where they have a match. I’m not saying that will never work, but think about the mindset someone is in when they follow your page. Most will follow your organization’s social channels because they’ve received your services.
If you follow a health-related charity, you or someone you know might have been affected by the disease the organization is trying to serve. You might have a connection to it. You don’t necessarily follow someone’s Facebook page because you want them to ask you for money. You follow that organization’s page because, if you’re a past donor, you want to see where your money has gone and what the organization is doing as a trusted resource to help advocate for that mission.
We encourage clients to pursue things from both sides. You can Include a reference to a specific tentpole fundraising effort on organic social media, but to get the guaranteed scale, impact, and reach you need for a tentpole fundraising effort to be successful, you’ve got to work in that paid element. Many nonprofit organizations have a defined radius where they can or cannot target, so you can be impactful for much less money than you think. Hopefully, that’s refreshing for a lot of the listeners to hear.
With paid, you can guarantee that people will see it. Yes, the algorithm will always have a big say, but you have a lot more influence on the algorithm when you have a budget and can put in specific targeting. You can control a lot more than you can unpaid.
Trent Ricker: Excellent answer, and I want to come back to that because you were talking about the existing channels and their expansion. I’ll also touch on earned for a moment because I want our listeners to think about where they have natural partnerships, whether in the media or with corporate partners willing to amplify your message through their owned media.
Paid is also very important. We’re going to spend some time on that today because, to your point, there’s a misconception that you can’t afford to do amplification or advertising. And we have to think about how different it is in the digital landscape.
But before we come back to that, you hit on something I want to explore further. When we think about development and fundraising, there’s this natural tension amongst many nonprofits: Who, when, and where do I get to amplify a message through our owned channels? For example, the development team might say, “Wow, it’s Giving Day. We need to get our message out, and we need to prime the pump.”
But you bring up an excellent point: The person following you on social media didn’t follow you to be sold to all the time, and, therefore, marketing is trying to be a good steward of the brand and the amplification of a message. Our regular listeners know my perspective about having a bucket of nonprofit organizations with a natural customer funnel — museums with customers, hospitals with patients, universities with students, etc. — and then mission-based organizations that don’t have a transactional element.
The marketing and fundraising teams in those market segments have varying levels of cooperation. Laura, I’m interested in your perspective, but the digital channels seem rife for fighting. Many of our organizations will internally say, “No, that’s mine. The website’s development; that section is marketing.” Talk about how you have confronted and diffused some of that tension related to marketing versus fundraising or development.
Laura Hinrichsen: Sure, and you’re not wrong. I think that battle exists across organizations of every category and size. When we’ve been successful in helping organizations overcome that, it’s primarily with data.
For example, we have many organizations where cooperation exists. We’re working with some clients in the conservation space who have invested more than ever in upper-funnel media. We can see that when we properly invest in the upper funnel, results for all those lower-funnel tactics — i.e., development and fundraising — amplify even more.
It’s nearly impossible to have someone’s first exposure to your organization be a donation ask and have that be successful. They have to get to know where they are. We’ve been able to get clients to overcome that when we show data-driven examples of what I consider the marketing side of the house contributing to that upper-funnel investment. They don’t have to fight over the website or the social channels.
It’s helping them realize that collaboration dramatically increases the success of both goals. Say it’s a food bank, for example. They all want to feed more hungry neighbors, so we show them how they can do that by increasing fundraising results.
It’s also important to be mindful of how paid can increase organic results, which seems backward. However, we saw similar results with the sample client I mentioned—an almost 90% increase in organic leads year-over-year by investing in upper-funnel media. We saw that lift on both the organic and paid sides.
So, it’s helping the very limited dollars of the marketing and development teams work even harder. If they’re open to seeing the data and hearing that story, we’ve found that to be very powerful in increasing collaboration.
Trent Ricker: There’s so much in there, Laura. That’s fascinating. This is why I love talking to you; you get my mind going in so many different directions. As ambassadors to the nonprofit space, we strongly encourage all organizations to have their marketing and fundraising teams collaborate more cohesively.
I’ve seen it over the years, too, where there’s been varying levels of attention to cooperation. I want to go down further because you touched on the funnel and traditional development. So, let’s go old school; let’s go pre-digital ages.
Traditional development might rent a list to acquire names. To achieve a return on investment (ROI), the first touch would be to ask for a gift because that’s how the ROI model would otherwise work. That still exists. In the direct response world, we do a lot of acquisition through traditional methods for many of our partners — with good results.
But I would also argue that those are diminishing results because the pools we’re fishing — co-ops or list rentals — are decreasing. The mail will still get some good returns, but the new frontier for engaging next-generation supporters and more diversified supporters of all ilk will come from the digital landscape.
So, let me reset a few things. I want to go deeper into the funnel concept. I’m a big believer in the old-school Seth Godin. Permission-based marketing and timely, relevant, and personalized communication get strong results, and that builds a bond between the for-profit company and the customer, in his case. In our case, it might be the nonprofit organization and the constituent.
Let’s unpack the upper funnel further. In the digital landscape, we have all these other aspects in which we might engage these channels, but we aren’t going to ask for a gift right away. Talk us through what we might communicate and how to get someone to give us permission to continue a conversation with them.
Laura Hinrichsen: There’s much we can do to reach folks in the upper funnel and work toward receiving that permission. Take our client in the healthcare space. They were starting to promote an annual walk. We identified digital out-of-home, which feels a bit more like traditional media.
In core areas around their campuses, digital out-of-home could be billboards on the side of the road, screens in a restaurant, gym, or health club, or when you’re checking out at the grocery store or gas station. The idea was to plant that seed of awareness to get folks to know the event was happening and coming. There were opportunities to convert folks right away, but that wasn’t necessarily the expectation.
The technology is incredible in that devices can be tracked. We know if someone has been exposed to a message on a screen somewhere, so we can then serve digital ads on that device. That’s where we can go further and ask them to register for the walk or donate.
That’s one example, but there are many data examples as well. We’re about to launch a program for one of our faith-based clients that targets folks based on their presence at certain venues or events, such as churches of a particular faith or a relevant event or concert someone has attended.
We can target people based on their online and offline actions. Again, it’s all about finding people online who have engaged in behaviors similar to those of the people we already know support our organization, regardless of whether they’re donors. Another example is that we can target folks online based on the specific type of content they consume, and we can drill that down to keywords.
More importantly, technology lets us ensure the sentiment of that content is positive and supports the mission and work of our client organization. We can do so much more than ever to find the right types of people.
Trent Ricker: I love that. Hopefully, our listeners are understanding why a cohesive upper-funnel strategy is so important.
You triggered something in me. I’ve been a golfer all my life. Philanthropically, I typically support poverty-fighting and faith-based organizations that help those at risk. First Tee is an example of an organization that intersects golf and those who meet at-risk needs.
It’s not hard to find data about me — Axiom has a lot of information about my shopping habits and their relevancy. Some people might think that’s creepy, but if what’s in my inbox, social media feed, or mailbox is relevant to things I care about, I’ll pay attention to it.
So, back to your point, suppose I’m at Topgolf with my daughter, and the screen at the far end is promoting an upcoming golf tournament. You’re not going to just text me and ask for a gift to First Tee. That won’t cut it. You have to introduce me to who you are, what you do, and why you’re important.
However, due to the relevancy of the target audience at Topgolf, they would be more likely to be interested in learning more. I would go ahead and opt-in by giving you my phone number or email address to learn more about the golf tournament that’s coming up to support a specific cause.
Could you talk more about geotargeting and the refined opportunities out there? Please share that with our audience because it’s definitely on the emerging digital landscape.
Laura Hinrichsen: You can do a lot to take advantage of a dynamic, localized version. I’ve done that in the past, working in the B2C space for a major national hardware chain.
We could target folks based on which of our franchise locations they were closest to because the product mix and available products were different for every store location. This was during lawn care season in the spring, so we could also trigger based on the weather forecast and how the weather had been the last three days. That’s not necessarily relevant to nonprofits right now, but it shows how you can use dynamic decisioning to develop a very customized experience.
We’re talking to many clients about how to have a robust retargeting program. Most clients will retarget someone who’s come to their website with an ad. There’s nothing wrong with that — it can be very effective.
However, many of our clients in the faith-based space offer different content, such as books or guides that people can download. We set up rich and robust retargeting programs based on whether someone is in this market. It sounds complicated, but it’s not.
If someone has already consumed a piece of content on your website, you don’t want to send them an ad to consume another. Instead, you would send them ads to consume something else you think they’d like because of what they’ve already consumed. This is a way to help move people through the funnel and gain some loyalty toward your organization because you’re constantly giving them information that helps them, such as on their faith journey.
We also have several clients in the healthcare space that provide services to those affected by a particular disease. These organizations offer content and resources. It’s a great way to get on a local level and have a customized experience with that person. The more you show that your organization relates to their needs, the more they’ll say, “Wow.” You’re planting that seed and building a good association — and, hopefully, an affinity — so that you’re successful when you make the donation ask.
Trent Ricker: That brings up a good parallel with front-end premium acquisitions for some of our old-school fundraisers that might be listening today. You might send mailing labels to a particular demographic with a propensity to respond with a gift. The challenge I’ve always had with that is that it’s transactional fundraising — they may not have an affinity with that particular cause.
Say, back in the day, my mom was short on mailing labels, and she just happened to receive some from Save the Baby Snakes. She doesn’t care about baby snakes but wants to write them a check because she now has $10 worth of mailing labels. It’s fine, but she has no affinity for that organization.
Laura Hinrichsen: There’s no loyalty.
Trent Ricker: Right, it’s transactional. And frankly, many case studies show that front-end premiums can yield a positive ROI. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll build a positive lifetime affinity.
Let’s return to your example. Many of our partners have digital content that we’ve converted to what I would consider a front-end digital premium. For instance, if someone is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, you might offer a digital recipe book in exchange for their email address. That’s a valuable premium relevant to your audience.
As a fundraiser, you’re letting me continue a conversation because you’re giving me some personally identifiable information (PII) that I can then use to move you up the funnel. I’ve given you something of value, and in exchange, you’re giving me something of value — your name, address, email, mobile number — that permits us to have a relevant conversation that can ultimately lead to an ask.
Let’s talk more about that because the upper funnel is essential to marketing and development.
Laura Hinrichsen: It is, and that’s where the upper and mid-funnel work together. You want someone to know your organization exists and what it does. We have another client in the healthcare space where some similarly named organizations are in the universe of that disease type, which leads to confusion.
We recently launched an upper-funnel programmatic campaign that’s been incredibly successful at driving donors exclusively to a page to learn more about a specific organization. On that page, we indirectly point out exactly how our client differs from the other organization. We’re saying things indirectly on the website — their owned media — that we can’t say publicly because we don’t want to be seen as trying to bring down another organization.
It has been really successful and led to record traffic on their website. That’s helpful because we can then retarget those audiences and bring them further down the funnel. As we spend on the upper funnel, we see organic and paid traffic increase. We also see people sign up for the newsletter while they’re there. Some of them actually make a donation.
We’re building an audience that we can retarget with other efforts. No matter the client or their size, we continuously see that to be successful — especially because, in general, there’s never only one organization that serves a particular mission. Everyone’s asking for money, so you need to be out there and help plant the seed of how and why your organization is different.
We saw that with many of our food bank categories at the end of 2022 and into 2023 as part of their year-end giving efforts. We got several of them to invest in some upper-funnel programmatic display for the first time, which led to record results across the board in essentially every single instance.
We were out there planting the seed in a very competitive space — gaining that awareness and laying the foundation for an even harder-hitting ask down the road. Advertising can be great for making a direct ask, but it’s also an opportunity to nurture folks — like email. Frankly, I think that’s something few organizations or agencies understand.
Trent Ricker: I’d like to spend a little time on some of these specific tactics. You used the phrase “programmatic display.” Share with us today: What are some of those elements? What is programmatic display? What are some other areas by which we can either amplify the message or acquire a new name that might lead to cultivation and conversion?
Laura Hinrichsen: Think of programmatic display as buying people and behavior, not a site. Trent aged himself at the beginning of the conversation, so I’ll age myself now. I’ve been doing this long enough that I remember when it was cool to have a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage. You thought you’d made it.
Trent Ricker: I used to buy ads on an AOL channel. Now I’m really aging myself because there was a work-from-home AOL channel where we bought ads. So, there you go. That was my digital agency a very long time ago.
Laura Hinrichsen: Very early, when digital advertising became a thing, you would make assumptions. Let’s say you were a national consumer soda brand. You knew your target was women of a certain age with a particular lifestyle and interest who might go to People.com, Us Weekly, or Entertainment Weekly. You would go to each site and buy a bunch of impressions. You wouldn’t necessarily know anything about the people you were serving those ad impressions to; you just knew you were reaching people on those sites.
The site probably had some data to show it had people like your target, so you’d buy things on a publisher- or website-driven basis. That dynamic has completely shifted in the last several years. Now, digital marketing — especially in advertising — is an audience- and data-first approach.
In the programmatic space, we don’t have to buy site-by-site. We can step back and say, “Okay, who exactly do we want to target, and what do we want them to do?” Then, the technology goes out and finds the impressions and the ad inventory across the entire internet. That includes games, apps, anything you can do on your device, streaming content, and video games. It finds those impressions and brings you the ones that will reach someone who fits your client profile.
We can find people who are consuming content and searching for specific keywords. Programmatic display takes an audience-first, data-driven approach and finds ad inventory. Instead of buying sites and hoping those people are there, you buy ad inventory based on the people it reaches.
Trent Ricker: It’s a quantum leap. Not long ago, direct response TV acquisition for nonprofits meant buying remnant space on some random channels or across a package of channels. It might be a short-form, long-form, or direct-response television (DRTV). No disrespect to DRTV because it performs quite well. For those who use connected TV exceptionally well, there are ways to refine the specific target audience.
It also takes a big budget, which we’ll come back to later. This is the part of the podcast where I might say, “Hey, if you’re out there listening, and you’re ready to turn us off because this sounds too sophisticated, complicated, and expensive, please don’t tune out because Laura’s going to talk about that soon.”
These more sophisticated tactics are more accessible than ever. Ten years ago, data from our partners like Axiom was much more expensive for much less data. Today, it’s a fraction of the price for many times the data.
Again, as consumers, we feel creeped out if we get irrelevant, untargeted messages. Nobody likes that, and it’s a bad black eye for the brand. I can’t emphasize this enough: we aren’t doing our jobs well if we aren’t delivering timely and relevant messages to our target constituents. These messages should be embraced and welcomed.
It’s a better way from that perspective. Laura, do you have any further thoughts on that? I want to learn more about some of these other positioned tactics, but programmatic display has been very effective in our experience.
Laura Hinrichsen: Absolutely. Programmatic isn’t just display; programmatic can be native advertising. It can be video. It can be interactive, rich media. You can even do gamified ads or interactive video. Programmatic can be anything, so putting it in a bucket is hard.
You brought up that intimidation that might exist — that people may want to tune out because they think programmatic is too complicated or expensive. It actually isn’t. Many organizations, such as food banks, have a well-defined geographic area they can target.
To take a step back, a significant advantage nonprofit organizations have now that I wish I’d had in my first couple of decades working with B2B and B2C clients is the data we have on who our customers are. For instance, whether they’re donors. We have so much data on who our constituents are that can easily be targeted and loaded into an advertising platform.
All the programmatic data I mentioned on paid social can be loaded into those platforms so you can target those folks directly. You can also target lookalikes of those within a specific area. So, your organization can be very impactful with less money than you think.
Sadly, many agencies will say it doesn’t make sense unless you spend a couple hundred grand. That’s not true, and if someone’s telling you that, they’re lying. The beauty of an integrated and full-funnel plan is that you can do it successfully, no matter the size of your organization.
Also, it’s not an all-or-nothing approach — it can scale as the program’s success does. We don’t have a cookie-cutter plan for any client or organization. However, some low-hanging fruit tactics are a good place to start to help an organization grow its comfort level and prove that digital advertising or marketing works.
Trent Ricker: Let’s walk through that a little. Over the years, we’ve invested heavily in analytics and insights. Our product, GivingDNA, brings in constituent data. I use the word “constituent” broadly because when you talk about a broad audience, a constituent might be a donor, volunteer, event participant, previous customer, or museum patron.
When we have data, it’s cheaper and easier than ever to use it and gain insights into particular cohorts. Who’s most likely to give us a gift by lookalike modeling? Who’s most likely to give us a single gift but potentially lapse more transactionally? What do our loyal donors and supporters look like? What does our intersection of volunteers and donors look like? This helps inform your campaigns and testing.
Let’s talk about that. Where do you gather that data? Our GivingDNA platform, which you don’t have to be an Allegiance Group + Pursuant client to use, is one way. Laura, walk me through a new partnership, such as how you might go through discovery and testing with them.
Laura Hinrichsen: Sure. As part of discovery, we’ll try to understand all the fields of information you might have in your database. If you’re a GivingDNA client, we can download audiences or profiles from GivingDNA and load them directly into the ad platforms.
You can still target people directly on paid social or create a lookalike audience. It’s not as robust as it was perhaps two years ago, but it’s still there for certain subject content areas. You can target some affinities or fans of specific categories. But going back to programmatic, there’s a tremendous amount of data out there.
For example, with some data partners, we can target folks by a particular political affiliation on social or programmatic. Some data partners can help us understand what types of merchandise categories people purchase in. We can look at their affinity for a particular cause or organization. We can look at the types of organizations they’ve donated to — or those the data says they’re likely to donate to.
We can use more privacy-compliant data — points of interest data — than ever. It’s quite remarkable.
Trent Ricker: This digital frontier is incredible and expanding in all ways. If data allows us to refine demographically, interest-based, and geographically relevant messaging, it will be more approachable and impactful than ever.
As a consumer, I think about all the places I’m touching data, and sometimes, it can be overwhelming, but I love how you’re simplifying it. Let’s mold this down to the place within that digital community where we can have relevant conversations.
Laura Hinrichsen: Exactly. And that’s something we talk about during discovery. We’ll find out where you’ve been and what data you have access to, and that will help us understand the best place to grow and scale. We’ll also uncover the best opportunity to supplement or build upon what you already have.
Trent Ricker: I want to come back to marketing and fundraising. We work with digital in both for our client partners that are truly measured by a return on investment to raise a dollar. It’s essential, and as an agency, we pride ourselves on being an important part of their fundraising partnership.
But more broadly, marketing is critical. An organization needs to amplify its message. It has some missional support to engage with the community. It wants to connect with their community and build community. If you’re a customer-driven nonprofit, sometimes you’re in the business of customer acquisition — getting people to come to your museum, the opera, the zoo, or become a hospital patient or enroll in your university. There’s another element to it that I want to talk about.
We work with folks on the marketing side, where it’s more about amplifying their brand, but we measure ourselves on conversion. Talk to me about some of the things that measure success all the way up the funnel because I want our audience to understand this as well.
The marketing dollars deployed for your organization can and should be different from the development dollars that are deployed. The same goes for the ROI of investing in fundraising programs versus mission-based amplification of your brand- or community-building.
But Laura, back to you. Talk to me about some of the key metrics in the digital landscape.
Laura Hinrichsen: We try to hold every piece of a digital communications plan accountable for success. However, the method we use will be very different depending on where it falls on the funnel. For many of our clients investing in a full-funnel strategy, something in the upper funnel will be judged not just on impressions. Impressions are meaningless — they essentially mean your ad got served, not seen. They don’t mean that anyone saw your ad.
Trent Ricker: Having worked in traditional advertising for many years before specializing in nonprofits, I had plenty of clients with brand amplification budgets who just needed impressions.
But I love that you’re going there. We believe in accountability. So yes, you might care about brand impressions for marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the content was consumed. It may have been seen. It’s like taking a postcard from the mailbox to the trash can. Yes, it was delivered to a home, but that’s all we know.
Laura Hinrichsen: Exactly.
Trent Ricker: But it is a metric.
Laura Hinrichsen: Correct. It’s a metric, but it’s not super meaningful. For something that’s upper funnel, we look at whether we’re getting increased website traffic. For some clients, we don’t just look at traffic to the particular landing pages that the ads click directly to. Is that campaign also resulting in folks visiting other sites on the page? Are those new website visitors? We want to get new people to start filling that funnel.
Are they quality visitors? Are they consuming multiple pages? Are they simply getting there and leaving? Are we getting new quality users to the site?
Video is a tactic that can be very successful in other areas of the funnel, but it often contributes most to upper-funnel engagement. A video viewer isn’t always going to go to your site, but having someone get an impression of your organization through a video is very valuable. So, one KPI for upper-funnel video is the completed view rate — what percentage of people exposed to your video saw the whole thing? We’ll also look at the cost of completed views. How cost-efficient is it to get a completed view?
Mid-funnel is where we often get people to engage more, or we start to ask for more information. For instance, we would ask someone to download a piece of content or sign a pledge or petition. At the bottom of the funnel, it’s about the revenue and donation.
Trent Ricker: Conversion of dollars.
Laura Hinrichsen: Exactly.
Trent Ricker: You bring up another interesting point. There’s a role for us to collect more data based on how the constituent or user interacts with us.
In my mind, there are three buckets of data. There’s the data you own — how a constituent is related to you. When did they give you money? How much do they volunteer? Do they attend your university? Whatever it might be. You can’t buy that from Axiom; you own that.
Second is what we can learn about the individual through demographic or third-party data that’s readily available. This supplements our database with ways to further learn relevance. I believe you’re a champion of this. Say I’m producing content for a hospital. I have a general video and some vignette videos that relate to oncology, cardiology, etc. We can track what people are consuming to then deliver more relevant communication.
In that case, we’re not trying to work around HIPAA — those people are telling us what they’re interested in by clicking on a behavior. We do that all the time. Talk a little about how we refine and enhance data profiling as it relates to our digital strategies.
Laura Hinrichsen: Generally, this is easy to do if your organization can place tracking pixels on your website. That’s a bit different than the third-party cookie you might be thinking about. They’re similar but a little different.
You can create audiences. For instance, I might want someone who consumed this piece of content but not that one. Or I may want someone who has filled out a form to receive some content but never donated. You can treat their experiences differently.
Most people’s first exposure to retargeting is looking at a pair of shoes, for instance. You don’t buy them now, but then you see an ad a few minutes later for that exact pair of shoes. That’s retargeting.
There’s a reason retargeting is hands-down one of the most effective ad tactics across nonprofits and B2C and B2B businesses. You’re serving something back to someone based on something you know they’re interested in. That mentality of relevance allows retargeting to be successful, just as it enables contextual and keyword targeting to be successful.
Trent Ricker: That’s right. Sometimes, people look at that and think it’s creepy. I’m shoe shopping at DSW Warehouse, and then I’m on Instagram later and get an ad for that particular brand of shoe or DSW. That’s relevancy. Of course, in some cases, it may not be relevant to you personally because you may have been shopping for a gift.
As it relates to enhancing our data profiling, relevancy enables us to have more timely, relevant, personalized, and permission-based communication. That’s important, too.
Laura, we could go on for hours, and I’m sure we can have more conversations on this, but I want to pivot a little here as we end our time and land this episode. Talk a little about some of the challenges. We touched on some emerging privacy concerns from the individual and in the government’s efforts to protect consumers. But let’s talk about emerging privacy concerns and concerns nonprofits might have in general as they consider a digital engagement strategy.
Laura Hinrichsen: Sure. One concern might be the conflict between marketing and development we talked about earlier. That’s still common across many organizations.
Another challenge may be if they tried this already, and it didn’t work. They tried Facebook, and it didn’t work. They might have a negative perception about how something may perform based on something they’ve done in the past. There might be a challenge there.
Trent Ricker: That makes a lot of sense. I think privacy is an emerging concern. It gives me heartburn because I want to protect the constituents and consumers while keeping communications relevant. Sometimes, I think the government and its efforts to protect might overreach. Also, it would be unfortunate if we couldn’t do relevant and timely communication because it would restrict what we could do to benefit nonprofits.
Another important topic you hit on earlier is that we must address the challenge of a true omnichannel strategy in the nonprofit space. This creates the necessity for marketing and fundraising to sit at the table together.
At the end of the day, we all have to produce revenue. Marketing should be in place to amplify and deliver on a message and mission and to create prospecting for next-generation supporters.
Laura, can you think of any other challenges? Many nonprofits could be listening to this and saying their biggest challenge is budget. “How in the world am I going to be able to engage in this?” What advice would you give a nonprofit of any size that was thinking about strategically expanding its digital footprint?
Laura Hinrichsen: You can be successful with nearly any budget. It’s all about how and where you focus. For instance, focus on your lowest-hanging fruit. Focus on those most likely to convert. Focus on a particular region or audience segment.
Paid search could be a common point of entry for many of our clients who are exploring digital advertising. Maybe you don’t think you have enough to make an impact through paid search, or there’s a lot of search volume out there. You can start by trying to own branded search items or general terms related to the category your organization is in. That can be very successful. Then, as that success grows, you can expand prospecting.
There are some misconceptions about the cost of entry, but any organization can make an impact through paid search.
Trent Ricker: Let’s go back to owned, earned, and paid strategy. I can’t emphasize this enough for our audience. When I talk to some of our nonprofit partners about digital strategy, in some cases, they say they have an entire department that handles that. The question is, what are they handling? If you’re talking to your existing tribe, that’s critically important. But what we’re talking about today is expanding your tribe to survive.
Some of the challenges that our partners come to us with are engaging next-generation supporters, engaging younger supporters, and meeting people where they are. And Laura, back to your point, the digital landscape gives us an opportunity to engage and expand from owned to earned through corporate partners or wherever an aligned tribe might exist. If you have a corporate partner that cares a lot about cancer, we can talk to their employee base — that’s earned media in a partnership.
But we’re talking about that paid component. People say, “Oh, I can’t afford to do paid.” We haven’t used the “A” word today — advertising — because we don’t love that word. But what we’re trying to do is expand our tribe to find more people who are aligned with our mission and who have the capacity to support our mission in a relevant way.
You’ve talked about ways to enter it inexpensively, perhaps through Google grants or refined search. That’s where I’d like for you to end us today. Talk about the test-and-invest mentality of paid media in the digital landscape. If somebody were to start with programmatic ads, what strategy would you develop? Then, how would you begin to test and invest to build your tribe?
Laura Hinrichsen: That’s a great question. We’d start with the lowest-hanging fruit. What do we know about the people who already do what we want to ask people to do in our ad campaign? In many instances, that’s going to be a donation.
So, what do we know about the folks who are already donating? We would then go where we can reach more people most cost-efficiently. The beauty of most digital platforms is that you can test many different things inexpensively and change course mid-flight.
Many ad platforms like Meta, Google, Microsoft, or Bing have inherent variety baked into every type of ad execution. They know the same headline that motivates me to donate isn’t going to motivate Trent to donate. Even with a singular ad, such as on Meta, you could have five headlines and five copy variations. It’s probably twice that much on the search platforms. Some kind of inherent testing is always part of digital.
At Allegiance Group + Pursuant, when the advertising team gets involved, there’s often direct mail, email, or some other type of engagement already in place. So, we can see and know that this type of personal story or this type of ask, feel, or language worked very well on this type of appeal. We can then replicate that success in advertising.
On social media, it’s not uncommon to see that if a particular post gets a lot of traction organically, we can tweak that post or story a little and make it relevant for a fundraising ask on a paid effort.
There are many ways to efficiently test what’s out there without blowing much of your budget. In general, we recommend not doing a lot of wild testing in November and December because it’s too important not to work. But yes, there’s a lot of inherent testing.
It’s also crucial for clients and agencies to remember that your digital communications plan may look differently at the start of a campaign or fiscal year than it does at the end. Part of testing is also determining if you have multiple platforms designed to do the same thing. If one of them is more cost-efficient than the other one, then shift the budget.
So, many more things can contribute to this bigger idea of testing than folks might necessarily think.
Trent Ricker: That’s excellent — a lot of great content to give our audience things to think about. The digital landscape is too important not to develop your emerging strategy. It’s moving quickly.
I always like to end our podcasts with a bit of encouragement. Take inventory of what you’re doing and how you can improve it. And if we can help in any way, reach out. We love this stuff.
Laura and I are of the same ilk in that if we ideate for half a day with you about where you are and your existing content and footprint, we’re likely to create many more opportunities to prioritize. Again, we’re all about “test and invest” here at AGP.
Whether you have or need an agency partner, we encourage you to explore your strategy. It goes beyond your owned media and constituency. The acquisition landscape is changing, and we know it’s going to continue to change and evolve. The digital landscape is where your future constituents are right now, and you need to reach them in a relevant way.
Laura Hinrichsen: Absolutely.
Trent Ricker: Laura, thanks so much for joining us today. I’m sure we’ll have more of these and make it a regular conversation. There’s so much more I want to dive into, such as the specific tactics that are blowing our minds as consumers and how we might be able to apply them to our nonprofit organizations and their constituents. But thanks for joining us today.
Laura Hinrichsen: Thank you for having me.
