Transcription

00:00:04
            

Well, hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. My name is Matt Lombardi, and I'm your host today, joined by Sam Wheatley. Sam, how you doing today? I'm great.        

00:00:14
            

Thanks for having me, Matt. Yeah, absolutely. Great to have you. You're joining us from New York City, where you work with avail ministries as the director of digital services. Tell us a little bit more about what that means.        

00:00:26
            

What does day to day look like for you? What's the ministry all about? Just give us a little bit of context for your role. Great tee up question. So availnYC works with basically decision making around the issues of abortion and unexpected pregnancy.        

00:00:45
            

We sort of take a third way approach. We're not classically aligned to either of the sides of the spectrum, but we instead, we take a very pro person approach that's really based in research and 26 years of experience of helping women and men facing the situation. So we really focus on helping them make decisions in a pressured situation that their future selves will be happy with. And so when we find out that we help people, provide them the tools, give them the listening ear, lead with empathy, people are able to slow down and make more confident decisions. And so we've been doing that in a traditional brick and mortar type of situation for 26 years.        

00:01:32
            

But two years ago, I came on to help project manage the build of our online platform called Better Clarity. And better clarity was designed specifically for Gen Zs who are online all the time, who are comfortable with talking about their most intimate issues with, you know, in spaces that older generations are not. And we were also creating a self guided platform that had no sort of counselor on the back end. So it's all geared towards the audience and then being able to sort and go through the material at their own pace to reach better decisions. So that's what I've been doing the last two years with avail, and so started out project managing the site and then came on a year and a half ago as the director of digital services.        

00:02:30
            

So covering marketing, content, tech support for all of our digital platforms. That's awesome. Well, I want to put a pin in the better clarity conversation because I think there's a definitely something to come back to when it comes to a topic that we're seeing a lot with clients and just with people that we talk to in the space, which is how do we take our traditional brick and mortar service programs offerings and now update those in kind of a digital transformation way to make those platforms available, those programs available asynchronous, kind of as you go for the people we're trying to serve. So I want to come back to that, but first, want to dive into a little bit of your background. How did you start working with nonprofits?        

00:03:11
            

How did you get into the digital space, specifically, give us a little bit of the Sam Wheatley background. Yeah, so I grew up in the southeast, graduated college, came on staff for the christian ministry, moved to New York City in 1989, and was working in an inner city neighborhood called Washington Heights. Here in Upper Manhattan, we were sort of working with existing parachurch ministries, house churches, spanish speaking neighborhood. And so we created a community development ministry from that, where we were working mostly with younger teens, basketball, after school tutoring, ESL, the whole sort of kitten caboodle. Started feeling a call to ministry as a pastor, went to seminary in the mid nineties, graduated, and really from about 1998 until 2016, I was in pastoral ministry at a church in Atlanta and 16 years in Salt Lake City as a planter slash replanter of a congregation there.        

00:04:22
            

And then in 2016, I came to New York again to work on an exec team as with Redeemer Presbyterian, as Tim Keller was stepping down as the senior pastor. And we were kind of taking this one large mega church and figuring out a way to sort of right size it for the next phase of its ministry. That's amazing. So cool. Well, we have a lot of similarities there between pastoral ministry, going to a nonprofit, even Tim Keller connection there, that I'm sure we could explore more.        

00:04:54
            

But I'm gonna keep this moving for the sake of the audience. In time, we can have an offline about that stuff. So. Okay, so you work with veil digital transformation. I said, let's put a pin in that.        

00:05:05
            

Come back to it. One of the questions I like to ask guests is, hey, what's a strategy that has been really impactful for your ministry that you think would be helpful for others? Is that something where we kind of camp out on the way that you all kind of took? What avail's done for 20 plus years for Mordor and come online digital? What's that process been like for you all, and how's that actually started to serve your constituents?        

00:05:27
            

Yeah, that's a great question, Matt. I think so. Back it up. So they had been doing this for 26 years, began to see changes in the marketplace, began to see clients more amenable to online services just in their normal operation. Then Covid hit and began to see, oh, it's not just possible.        

00:05:50
            

This is actually pretty preferable for many of our clients to interact around complex issues with a little bit of remove from being face to face. So, actually, during COVID we went online immediately without a hitch. And even today, when we're still back up and running in person, 90% of our clientele see have one on one appointments digitally. So that's sort of stage one, is just doing what you're doing sort of online. But we wanted to take it a step further.        

00:06:29
            

And right before COVID we commissioned some research. And I think this is one of the key principles, is basing change and actual research. And so we hired a third party, top of the line market research company to help us to understand the people we weren't seeing. We knew our own clients, but we didn't know what it was that kept people from coming in our doors. We didn't understand the user journey of those clients around the space of unexpected pregnancy and abortion loss.        

00:07:05
            

And so this company did an incredible job of a deep dive into understanding that experience and then mapping it out for us in a very detailed journey map that helped us to understand sort of the start to finish what happens? Where are the key benchmarks? What are the pain points? Where are there opportunities for intervention? And where is there sort of a closed door?        

00:07:34
            

It's basing it on research that the key thing is making sure that your research drives your change. And so without that research study that we had done, we would have made a lot of missteps. But because we had the research that really grounded our understanding that there was a reason we weren't seeing certain people in person. And so it shifted us to not just being digital because digital is cool, but being digital because that was actually the place where our audience was. Yeah.        

00:08:06
            

And so we needed an outpost in that place where our audience was. Yeah. Sam, I can imagine a nonprofit leader right now saying, oh, that sounds awesome, but it sounds crazy expensive. Right? It was crazy expensive.        

00:08:21
            

Okay, thank you for confirming or denying that. So at least we confirm that, maybe then speak to. Okay. The importance of ROI on that. Yeah, it was crazy expensive.        

00:08:32
            

And our CEO was really a thought leader in this. She went out and raised the money for it. And, you know, I don't know exact figures, but it was six figures to do the research. But it was really invaluable for then guiding every step of the way. And so it guided our research.        

00:08:54
            

The research then guided the way we rethought how we would provide services. It then opened up opportunities when we started thinking about a digital strategy, how we would execute on that, how we approached our marketing, how we approached our user journey, what content we created. I mean, everything came out of that research. And so if you're asking for the best marketing strategy, it's nothing really cool or innovative. It's really just listening.        

00:09:27
            

If you can listen well to your audience and get out of your own headspace of what you think they need and hear what they actually say they need, you'll be amazed at the areas of alignment and the places that maybe you thought there was no entry point, that there are actually wide open doors for entry points. And I will tell you, like talking about ROI. So we spent a lot of money for that. We built this website, and then, you know, what we've seen is we have quadrupled the number of people we've served in less than a year. It's huge.        

00:10:06
            

That's huge. Yeah. What are some of the mechanisms outside of? So you hire great firm, come in, do all this market research, help you build that kind of, that user journey, those user maps, are there any feedback loops that you all put in place or any mechanisms to continue that process? What does that look like for you all as a team to kind of build those, that listening happening?        

00:10:27
            

Yeah, no, absolutely. So one is data. This is the other thing. It's like, mark, you know, solid marketing outcomes come from listening and research solid marketing outcomes come through listening to data. And so creating data analytics that are actually helping you understand the traditional marketing funnel.        

00:10:48
            

You know, why are people attracted, okay, why are they, why are they engaging or not engaging? What's keeping them from converting is our call to action. Clear a b, testing market, testing those kind of things. So we're asking about food back loops. One of the things we keep doing is refreshing the data.        

00:11:12
            

Our data. Our research is now four years old. So we're talking to the Same research company about, well, okay, that research was primarily around a New York City based audience. Now we're national. How does that change?        

00:11:26
            

The landscape around our issue has changed dramatically in the last four years. How do those new fears affect our clients? How do we understand the adaptations that have happened in the user journey because of the political landscape? And then also international, we have a huge international growth, even though we're not marketing internationally. Yeah, we see a huge potential internationally for these issues.        

00:11:53
            

Yeah. That's amazing. So one of the things I've seen ministries do before, and I'm just deep diving on this because I love this topic, is they build this cool tool, right? They go digital with something and then they, it's as if they think, hey, if they build it or if we build it, they'll come and they'll show up and it's the classic problem, right? Every tech startup does this, but a lot of ministries do this too.        

00:12:14
            

They just think, well, of course, if we build this great thing naturally, people just come. But you all have actually had success where it's, you know, I think the word viral is overused, but it's growing in areas that you're not even intending growth to happen. What's any, any insight into how that's happened, why that's happened? Was there, I mean, sometimes it's as simple as like, oh, we got really lucky and it got picked up for a pr piece on, you know, Forbes or on CNN. Right?        

00:12:41
            

Have there been any linchpin moments that have helped this thing kind of go pseudo viral or kind of get outside your own gates of what you expected, or has it just been consistent effort? No, I mean, our organic traffic is pretty low for better clarity. Our organic traffic for avail is very high because it's an older website, it's got a lot of credibility. There's a clientele for it. But better clarity is starting from zero, you know, last May.        

00:13:10
            

So it's been a classic startup and it really has relied heavily on marketing and advertising. And so that's partly the research, gave us clarity around our Personas, so we know very deeply what our Personas are looking for.        

00:13:30
            

I won't say you talked about AI. One of the creative ways I think a lot of people aren't using AI yet that we've been able to use is we've actually turned our Personas into GPTs, and then we interact with our GPTs to refine our marketing messages. That's fascinating. So let me just see if, just to make sure I'm understanding correctly. So you essentially built prompt agents within that are chatbots back and forth.        

00:13:59
            

And so when your marketing team goes to that, are you just asking it, hey, what type of creative would appeal to you? Or like, what kind of, what are you feeding data into that in terms of questions to get the response they look for? So with GPTs, you can now create your own GPT bots. And so we have taken our research, loaded it into the GPT knowledge base. We've also done some other analysis, like personality tests and things like that.        

00:14:32
            

So we know, like our persistent Penelope, you know, is this kind of person, she has these, you know, we know everything about her, and so we interact with that bot. Hey, how would you react to this ad content, clarify this call to action in a way that you would respond to? It's like an in house focus group. That's amazing. That is such a cool use case for AI.        

00:14:59
            

Like, just completely outside the box of just, oh, rewrite this copy for me in a generic way, but instead say, hey, make it Persona specific. That's great. Yeah. I think this is the misuse of AI is people are using it to substitute for work instead of using it as an aid to creative work. And so for us, we see it as a, we can quickly iterate this ads not working, or this ad is working, or this ad is working with the wrong audience.        

00:15:24
            

So how do we retool it? Yeah, Sam, when you look at the macro space of nonprofit ministries right now that are doing fundraising, marketing, this kind of stuff, the kind of larger ones that have real budget put behind that, what's a trend that you see that's really exciting for you, and then what's one that's got you a little bit nervous? Yeah. What's interesting to us right now is on the social side is we were struggling with the influencer based social environment. How do we make space for our brand when we really are trying to avoid tying a person to our brand?        

00:16:04
            

We want to make it personal and approachable, but we don't want to have a face Jane X as our influencer face because we want it to appeal to a broader audience. So actually, we're very excited about sort of the rise of faceless influencers or faceless content. And we're beginning to adopt that strategy for a lot of our social, because, as you know, social is moving more and more and more towards video. And basically, this gives us the ability to do sort of faceless interfluencer without tied to one individual or one particular niche group. Yeah.        

00:16:45
            

And does that look like for you all, working with an agency is going out and finding these folks for you, or are you just. No, we've actually found. We found our best folks already work for us because of the, you know, again, it's genuineness. Right? Like, that's the behind influencer is like, hey, here's another real person talking to me, a real person about this real thing they're facing.        

00:17:08
            

And so we have found folks who are already working for us that are in that age demographic that have sort of our philosophy of approach to the issues. Being able to. Just to talk as they would talk to their friends is the most powerful thing we have. And then being able to, one of our concerns was their privacy and nothing, you know, putting their images out there. So sort of the faceless marketing or the faceless influencer gives us the ability to sort of give their vibe without necessarily just, you know, disclosing their identity.        

00:17:48
            

That's so cool. That's a really, really great use case. Are you all, I'm guessing because we're talking Gen Z here is a lot of TikTok. Yeah, we use, we use every platform. I mean, Instagram is still big for us.        

00:18:02
            

Our Google Ad campaigns are very strong. I think also, here's one of the shifts we saw, again, with AI that's happening is you're moving from keyword search to AI empowered search, which is going to be AI gives you an answer. It doesn't give you a list of pages. And so this is one of those other things that you're asking about trends. I think one of the trends that's going to be very important is credentialed sourcing so that your marketing isn't just, I'm cool, I'm hip.        

00:18:36
            

I've said, you know, I'm just saying these things. But your content is actually deeply rooted into spaces, credentialing agencies, creators that are considered highly credentialed by AI. And so that means affiliating more with credentialed sources like universities, research centers, making sure any information you're putting out there is really rooted in science and credible sources. That's so helpful. So helpful.        

00:19:13
            

Sam, on the, on the other side, any trends in, in this space right now that are concerning for you? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the trends that I don't like is, and it's just hard for everybody, is the proliferation of platforms. Is that, I mean, and oftentimes based on spurious concerns, you know, like TikTok is tick tock and get banned in the US. What does that mean? What happened to Twitter?        

00:19:44
            

You know, what is that now? You know, threads. Do I do threads? Do I? Yeah.        

00:19:51
            

It's like new platforms. There are all these platforms that just keep splintering your audience. And so it becomes harder and harder to gain traction on a platform because it could be gone in six months. Yeah. And so I don't know what the solution is.        

00:20:10
            

We've been, you know, it used to be just pick one platform, you know, and that's your platform. Right. We found we have to sort of have a foot in every platform possible. Yeah. It seems like more and more that generations are selecting, like self selecting into their platform.        

00:20:35
            

Right. So, you know, you think boomers self selecting into meta, Facebook. Right. Millennials oftentimes kind of pushing towards Instagram, Gen Z towards TikTok. And so it becomes a question of okay, well, what's, what's the use case for each platform?        

00:20:49
            

Right. And you're probably not going to be looking for donors on TikTok. Right. Whereas you may be like, LinkedIn may be a great platform for that, or Facebook may be a great platform. Exactly.        

00:20:59
            

I mean, so this is just part of your Persona. Research is like, okay, which platforms are my Personas on? I mean, we're starting this project as well with our development team to sort of do the Same project with cultivating future donors because we don't want to be just having donors in one generation that's sort of on the way towards retirement. We need younger generations of donors for sustainability over the long haul, and so we have to start reaching those donors in the places again, research, locating yourself where your clients are beginning to build awareness and trust so that then you can actually have a conversation about partnerships and things like that down the road. Absolutely.        

00:21:48
            

Okay. So I mentioned before we started recording, I follow you a lot on LinkedIn. Read a lot of your stuff. It's always great. I'd recommend anyone watching go give Sam a follow.        

00:21:55
            

Really, really great content that he puts out there. So I know you're always reading, always learning. Any podcast, books, resources that you just love to recommend to others in the nonprofit development and marketing space. Yeah, I mean, there's, again, sort of, we began our conversation offline about sort of how I'm using AI a lot, but it's really not about AI. It's really about these more fundamental issues.        

00:22:22
            

And so the things I would recommend really center around communication. The better of a communicator you are, the better you're going to be able to market, the better you're going to be able to understand your client base. And so one of the places I would recommend is there's a communication writer named Nancy Duarte. And Nancy has a great book that's a great starting point on some of these topics called resonate, where she talks about how to think about classic approaches to communication, like the greek rhetoric, you know, ethos, logos, pathos, and applying it to very contemporary settings. Or how to think about storyboarding as a methodology for communicating your message, which then translates directly into website design and all kinds of stuff.        

00:23:18
            

So I can't recommend Nancy Doherty highly enough. She's been very helpful for me in, in this journey. The other more approachable probably, that maybe a lot of your audience has heard of is Donald Miller's story brand project. And that has been incredibly helpful for understanding the hero journey as, again, a classic model of storytelling applied to marketing and user journey kind of issues. And so story brand is great, and any sort of hero journey stuff you want to read is well worth your time.        

00:23:57
            

Yeah, absolutely. The original Joseph Campbell on that. So good as well if you want to go back to the original source. Yeah, we're huge fans. A little thick.        

00:24:06
            

I won't recommend Joseph Campbell. It's a little thick if you're, if you're a nerd like me. It's a little heavy sometimes, but it is fun. It's a, there's, it's dense, but there's such good stuff in there. Sam, folks want to connect with you if they want to, you know, if questions about what you guys are doing to avail.        

00:24:23
            

Questions about. Okay, we're working through this. We might want to talk with you about, hey, could you give us some advice on this? What's the best way to reach out and contact you? So two places.        

00:24:31
            

One is my LinkedIn page. Just Sam Wheatley. And then also I write on Substack under the, the nonprofit leader. The nonprofit leader. On substack.        

00:24:44
            

On substack. Okay, great. We'll absolutely direct people there in the show notes. Sam, it's been so much fun, man. Really, really enjoyed it and would love to have you on again soon.        

00:24:52
            

Yeah, look forward to it. Appreciate it.        

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