Transcription

00:00:05
            

Well, hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. I'm your host, Matt Lombardi, and today I am joined by David Schwab, president and chief strategist at three Dot Media, a digital agency that works with nonprofits. David, how you doing today? I'm doing well, Matt.        

00:00:22
            

Thank you for having me. Yeah, man, pumped to have you. Pumped to have everyone else watching along for the ride. Just quick, quick word. Got to pay the advertisers.        

00:00:30
            

Super grateful for the sponsorship of we give for this episode of the podcast. If you're looking for a world class donor experience, go check out we give.com dot. Now, David, give us a little bit of background of, man, how you got into nonprofit land. I know you've got experience in the tech side now, your agency life. We met through a mutual connection, Andrew Olson over at Dickerson Baker.        

00:00:51
            

Great guy. So just give us a little bit of the story of kind of how you got into space. So I, like many of you all listening, and many people who have found themselves in the fundraising world, fell into fundraising on accident. I was graduating college, had $200 in my bank account, and I had no job offers, and got a call from a company that I had interned with. They had a job, and they happened to be a fundraising agency.        

00:01:17
            

So I fell into fundraising on accident and absolutely loved it. I got to work with. So the first two years of my career were working with homeless, faith based homeless shelters across the country. My whole job was telling people how they could feed and shelter someone for a buck 50. And to see that kind of scale, that kind of impact and hear those stories from across the country, I was like, how can you not love this?        

00:01:40
            

Yeah, absolutely. So that's how I got my career started. I also recognized direct mail probably wasn't the future of fundraising. So I took a, took a bit of a career pivot, went to the for profit commercial world, did social digital influencer, all of that style marketing with the intent that I was like, hey, I want to go learn what the big, big players in the space are doing. Bring it back to the sector.        

00:02:06
            

Right? The social impact sector. So about five years ago, I came back to the social impact sector. Joined, actually worked with our friend Andrew Olson at an agency, like two or three agencies ago for both of us now, but we worked together doing. I was leading digital fundraising.        

00:02:25
            

He was leading the agency for social impact organizations, specifically ministries and organizations like that. Then I took, like you said, a brief stint in the tech side. So as a digital strategist, it was part of my role was, hey, how do we have better structure behind what we're trying to do, right? So we're spending all this money to send a bunch of people to a broken infrastructure. What if we spent all that money to rebuild the infrastructure?        

00:02:52
            

And I got really, really excited about that and spent some time actually in the nonprofit tech space specifically to say, hey, this is better, this is available. The whole industry needs to be asking for more. And I'm going to go spend all my time talking about it. But I really missed consulting and being on the ground with funders and fundraising leaders. So I'm actually back now in the space and I'm starting a fundraising agency, like you said, throughout marketing.        

00:03:20
            

Awesome, man. Very cool. Very cool. So, okay, I love your background because it spans corporate impact and then also kind of agency life tech. Literally the full gamut of, kind of like the stack of what you'd ideally want, right.        

00:03:33
            

With a partner. So with what you've seen in digital, obviously, let's kind of segment out direct mail and say, hey, let's not talk about that today. Most of the audience and the marketing teams that they're creating nonprofit, they're in the development team advancement, whatever they're calling it. Right? Could you share a strategy?        

00:03:50
            

Maybe it's just a principle that you've kind of taken to heart that's unique to you? Like, no, no, I really think this is the crux of how we, digital fundraising could be a specific campaign. Like, no, no, this strategy, they need to work could just share some little nugget from your experience that you think would be really helpful for the audience out there. Yeah, well, I mean, as simple as it sounds, just there are so many organizations and leaders I work with who are still afraid to lean into digital because it doesn't work. But it doesn't work because we haven't done anything with it.        

00:04:20
            

We haven't updated our tech stack for 15 years, and we're wondering why our CRM isn't giving us automated insights. Because it was built to run a direct mail campaign 20 years ago. So really it's just do it. But if for those organizations, duh, I'm doing it. Schwab my go to strategy, and I promise it's not a cop out.        

00:04:43
            

This is the best thing for you, is to run an integrated marketing program across as many channels as you can. Yep, absolutely. Tell the, tell the same story you're telling in direct mail, with your organic social, with your paid social, with your display ads, with your search ads, with your connected tv. If you can afford it like when you do that, your entire program lists, you'll acquire more donors, you'll retain more donors, you'll raise more money just by telling a cohesive story across channels and being invested in more than one place. So it's called omnichannel marketing.        

00:05:15
            

Surround sound fundraising. It goes by many different names, but really, it is a fundamental strategy that every fundraiser needs to be doing. Yeah, no, it's great. That's something that we're passionate about as well, which is just like, hey, we call a broad based donor programs. Right?        

00:05:32
            

Like it needs to be hitting every channel you possibly can. Well, hey there. Holy donuts. Listeners, ever feel like your nonprofit's donor experience is like a jelly filled donut with no jelly? Well, don't fret.        

00:05:44
            

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00:06:02
            

And with we give, you get an incredible donor. Portal, events, pledges, surveys, segmentation, on and on. We could go on the features and those checkouts, though, smoother than my attempt to make homemade doughnuts, which, let's just say, didn't quite rise to the occasion. See what I did there? With Wegib's innovative engagement tools, your donors won't just feel the love of, they'll be coming back for second, because nothing says thanks for your dough better than a world class experience.        

00:06:31
            

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00:06:40
            

Okay, I'm going to nerd out with you a little bit. Talk about some of the organizations listening. Right? So some people out there, they're non profits doing $500,000 a year, and they're like, okay, we're barely sure by, some of them out there are doing 500 million a year and they're like, dashbob, we get it. We're doing that.        

00:06:58
            

But like, what do you do when you know it's held one story across the board? Talk to us a little bit through, like, I know even like some of the ministries we work with, and you do have 10, 15, 20 different programs right under their umbrella. Can you help think, help us think through segmentation a little bit more. And like, how do you, how do you get those ministries telling a cohesive story or maybe separate stories and not stepping on each other's toes? For donors.        

00:07:25
            

There'S no right answer to this. And it is something a lot of organizations struggle with because like you said, they so many different ways. They change lives. Yeah. And each life change deserves to be a story told.        

00:07:39
            

But you can't tell all the stories well. So I think it really comes down to testing. Find out what story, what ministry, what service line resonates really well with the mass market. You've got to acquire donors and they don't have to know everything you do. If you are a global ministry and you fund children's relief and you do medical relief and you send missionaries and you deliver bibles and you have clean water projects, those are all great things.        

00:08:11
            

Donors don't need to know all of those things and understand all of those things. Before choosing to invest in your organization, lead with one and figure out what acquires the best audience. And chances are two or three of your services are going to be your best acquisition lines and there's going to be different segments in the market that are going to want to invest in different things that you do. And then you use, once you already have that invested relationship, use your own channels to educate. Hey, did donor, you leaned into our missionary sponsorship.        

00:08:42
            

Did you also know that we do x, Y and Z? Would you consider supporting those as a monthly donor? Right. That's a great way to turn a one time donor into a recurring giver when you can show the breadth of their impact once they're already in. But if you try to educate a donor on everything you do in every communication, you're just going to confuse people.        

00:09:01
            

Yeah, absolutely. Man, that's such good advice. And it's, I mean, you know, good kind of corporate language. Like your other programs are such beautiful cross sell opportunities and I would say their retention strategies. Right.        

00:09:12
            

I mean, like, it's literally, hey, how do we do retention? Well, don't try to give them everything. Use those extra programs as, hey, maybe they've shown propensity towards this one program that you've kind of just kind of thrown the cherry bomb in a little bit to see if they'd be interested. Okay. Now we know we can segment them out.        

00:09:28
            

So I love that, man. That's great advice. Let's go macro. Since we kind of zoomed in. Micro on the macro level for nonprofit, for ministries, what's a trend that's got you pretty excited about what's coming next and what's one that's got you a little bit concerned?        

00:09:44
            

Well, I'd say AI, but I think everyone is saying AI right now. So I'm not going to go that route because I'm sure you've had many good conversions about AI already. But I'm going to take a step broader. It's nonprofit technology.        

00:10:00
            

Ten years ago, even five years ago, when I came back to the sector, your choices were two or three, eh, products or go get something from the corporate world. Now there is an entire industry of custom built, freaking awesome nonprofit technology designed specifically for what you're trying to do. You don't have to go get a commercial platform. That's pardon my language, but dumbed down for us. Yeah, you can go get something equally as good, if not better, built specifically for fundraisers and what you're doing on the front lines of fundraising.        

00:10:39
            

And that's not just CRM, that's CRM. Marketing automation, fundraising platform, websites, CMS, every sticky thing you need to solve as a fundraiser, there is technology built for you. And that's what makes me real excited. And there's competition. 510 years ago, there was no competition.        

00:10:55
            

So you were, you paid for Salesforce or you paid for Blackbot. That was the choice.        

00:11:03
            

Now there's competition. Right. And competition ends benefiting the market.        

00:11:11
            

Yeah, absolutely. It's huge. And we even see this with some clients where they're, it's kind of a shift in this custom legacy software they built in house. Right. And so one I can pick up specifically complete custom built on Oracle takes a full dev team to continue to make updates.        

00:11:29
            

I mean, they're spending millions of dollars a year on custom built software. The problem is that was their best option. 1718 years ago. Yep. But now we've had to come in and say, hey, you're spending all this money.        

00:11:44
            

You can get a better product than what you have custom built in house for fractions of the cost. And that's almost a difficult switch. Like mentally, that's a hard switch to make. Wait, so you're saying we've been wasting money? It's like, no, no, you weren't wasting money.        

00:11:58
            

The market is just caught up in terms of competition and quality of technology. So, yeah, man, see that all the time. Absolutely love that. Is the tech side something that has you concerned as well, or is there something else that has you concerned? What has me concerned is donor retention rates.        

00:12:13
            

It's not, it's not necessarily a strategy or a tactic or a thing. It is donor retention rates and the fact that they keep going down.        

00:12:23
            

It's a hard time to be a fundraiser, period. Right. The market's tough, the inflation's up. We all see the headlines, we all share the headlines. We all know what's going on.        

00:12:37
            

We all feel it. We all see it in our results. If we're lucky, we're flat year over year. Yeah, that's what. That's what concerns me.        

00:12:46
            

Not in a. Concerns me. We can't do anything about it, but concerns me that we aren't doing anything about it. Yeah. Yeah.        

00:12:53
            

That's great, man. So let's camp out on retention for just a minute because I was with a client last week and we walked through their retention strategy, and it was essentially the same thing that they've been. I mean, it was good. It was like best practices from ten to 15 years ago. Right.        

00:13:11
            

It's, hey, we're going to send out, you know, we have this. You know, I think it was like a quarterly, like, thank you letter. Like handwritten notes. Right. I think it was twice a year, handwritten notes, and then two quarterly thank you letters that were, like, printed and, like, signed off on.        

00:13:23
            

Right. And then the occasional call. Use a call center to make the occasional call thank you voicemail drop. Not even really that. It was like, literally call center calls.        

00:13:31
            

And that was the extent of it. And that's like, that's how we do retention, which is better than what most organizations are doing, but it still seems like it's 15 years in the past. Anything that you'd recommend that you're seeing that works or that might be, hey, some things to try or test out that is not that kind of old school model video use. Like, we all have better cameras in our pocket than the best production studio had 15 years ago. Yeah.        

00:14:00
            

Grab your phone, do a literally like this forward facing video from your CEO or your exec director. Record two minutes of talking about a story or thanking donors, or tell something that just happened in one of your programs and send it via email, send it via text message. Put it on your website, put it onto, like, it ultimately comes down to delivering content that builds relationships in the way people want to engage with content. And the people, the way people want to engage with content is video, period. I'm sorry.        

00:14:32
            

That's great, man. That's great. Okay, let's move a little bit into as we have a few more minutes left here. Yeah. Always like to ask, what resources do you recommend for folks out there in nonprofit land?        

00:14:44
            

Could be your own if you had some stuff that you're working on or just generally with that. Blogs, conferences, books, articles, journals, anything like that. Yeah, I mean, man, we could probably spend a whole podcast talking about this. There's so many resources, but my favorite right now podcast marketing against the grain by the HubSpot Zapier cmos. If you haven't listened to it, listen to it.        

00:15:06
            

They're talking about all everything with AI. Any good idea I have has probably come from that podcast over the last couple months, so that one's a great one. I highly recommend it. We all know him, but nextafter always has great resources for digital testing optimization strategies. We talked, we've talked about a couple things.        

00:15:26
            

Our mutual friend Andrew Olson, he's always putting out great content, specifically about leadership. Right now is his focus. And that one, his podcast and his newsletter have been really helpful for me. And then if you want to connect with me, follow me. On LinkedIn, I'm always talking about new things, about digital fundraising, things that are, I'm surfacing.        

00:15:47
            

Like, hey, I talked with my I've had four or five different organizations ask me about this this week. Let's brain dump mind share. I'm always trying to add at least some perspective to what's happening in the industry. Sometimes people like them, sometimes people don't, but it's there. Awesome, man, awesome.        

00:16:05
            

If people want to connect with you, is LinkedIn the best place to connect with you? LinkedIn. And then if you want to have a conversation, I'm always happy to chat. You can reach me via email. David three agency I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes, absolutely.        

00:16:20
            

But LinkedIn, email, those are the two places and most of my time these days. Awesome. David Schwab, president chief strategist at three marketing thank you so much for the time, man. Super helpful as always. You're just a wizard with this kind of stuff and really appreciate your time.        

00:16:34
            

Yeah, thank you. It was great to be here.        

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