00:00:05
Well, hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. I'm your host Matt Lombardi, joined today by my friend Brady Josephson, VP of marketing and growth at Charity Water. Brady, good to see you again, man. I saw you a few weeks ago in Nashville.
00:00:19
How you doing? How are things in Nashville today? They're great. Yeah. Sun's shining.
00:00:24
You got some good weather, and yeah, it's great to see you again. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for taking the time to be on the show. Obviously, Charity Water an organization a lot of people are going to be familiar with, one that a ton of us in the nonprofit world just have a ton of admiration for and respect. So excited to hear a little bit more about your experience there.
00:00:40
But also you've got a pretty interesting background. Have been with some organizations that a lot of folks are going to know as well. So why don't you kind of give us the background on you, how you got into nonprofit space originally and this crazy world of donor engagement and donor activation. I'm getting old, Matt. It's a longer story every time.
00:00:59
Every year goes by, I'll try to keep it. You know, I kind of had this spark moment the first year that I was in college at North Park University, north side of Chicago, where kind of had this moment at the back of the chapel where we were. Doing a candlelight visual service, kind of to reflect on the devastation and destruction from the tsunami in Southeast Asia and had this moment of seeing NGOs and people respond, just being like, that's what I'm going to do. And it was just this spark point moment. But you can piece things together.
00:01:35
Looking back how everything led your like, we have these eureka moments. There's a psychologist named Steven Johnson. He coined the term slow. Like, we have that moment where we're, ah, that's it. And we think that that's the thing.
00:01:48
But it's really a culmination of marinating in all these different inputs and ideas over a longer period of time. It's the same thing. Kind of my journey in nonprofit space was looking back. I grew up in such a missionally focused family. My grandfather was a pastor and a church planter, and my dad has served at Bible colleges and churches and ministries.
00:02:08
And my mom was a news anchor, but she would volunteer with the Canadian Leprosy Mission and go on trips and kind of help shoot content and stories and those 1800 commercials we used to see back in the day. And so she'd come back and tell stories about Ethiopia or India or Nepal or Bangladesh. And that was just kind of like where I grew up. And so kind of in hindsight, you're like, oh, I've had these kind of values exhibited to me, and I've seen them. And then it wasn't until I really went to Chicago and started experiencing these different issues of social justice and race and inequality that started unlocking something in myself while I took a business course and was like, what is this?
00:02:45
This is awesome. Creativity and strategy and numbers. So all these things really came together at this moment, for that moment. And I was an elementary education major going into that day, and I was a business major focused on nonprofit management a week after. And so that's kind of been the starting point, and then it's been circuitous route through international development startup, medium size, really stagnated in career and thinking nonprofit wasn't the best way for me to develop as a professional, which we can come back to.
00:03:15
So stayed in the space, consulting, technology, software, ended up at a tremendous organization called Next after, where I got to do a lot of marketing and research and learn a lot about digital marketing and fundraising, and then fortunate enough to have the opportunity to come work for charity water. So there you go. Hopefully that'll very cool. Very cool. Just hearing your story, I know a little bit pieces of it so funny.
00:03:39
We can look back and be like, well, of course you're going to work nonprofits, right? It's a complete no brainer. There is definitely something orchestrating that all along, but we all kind of take our own path to get there. So something you mentioned that I do want to come back to this idea that, hey, maybe nonprofit not the best way to build a career, right? I think there's a lot of folks out there who, as I talk to them, they kind of stumble their way into this world, right?
00:04:03
Very few people when they're like, five years old are like, you know what I want to do when I grow up? Nonprofit development work, that's what I want to do. And so I think most of us kind of find ourselves in this space through whether it's a calling or whether it's a god kind of moment. If you're a person of faith, we kind of find ourselves in that way. And so when you were at that point of saying, okay, I don't know if I can make a career here, was there a turning point?
00:04:28
Was there something that because I think when people are in that moment, they're kind of saying, like, oh, what I do. And maybe people out there listening are even feeling like, burnout with their spot in the nonprofit world. They're like, I don't know, this is really what I want to do long term. What was it that got you through that and kind of allowed you to no, no, this is actually a great way to build a career. Yeah.
00:04:48
So, again, I don't think my experience is everyone's experience and everyone's different. But for me, I was at the point where I was a national marketing director for a medium sized nonprofit in Canada, and it was a good title. And as an organization that I love to this day. I really appreciate their work and huge alignment. But for me, I was 27, maybe 28, and there was this moment where we had a really tough year.
00:05:12
We had to cut back on some staff and pivot away from a growth trajectory to like, we're going out of business kind of trajectory. And so just like, all hands on deck. And we had this really successful year and kind of saved the kind of and just had all the plans that I had to kind of grow digital or do more innovative, cool things. Obviously had to get shelved, and we just did whatever it took. And I remember going into my review and just got hammered in my annual review because I didn't do all these things that I said I wanted to do.
00:05:42
And that was another of these spark points, was like, well, I didn't do any of those things because that's not what we needed. And it was just like, look, this is not just that organization or that situation. But I'd been around long enough to know the thing that stagnates a lot of people in their 20s in particular, isn't the money necessarily. And I tell everyone, don't chase a title chase experience, but you don't have the opportunity to do the things that you want to do, to grow and develop as a person. And if any industry should be able to embrace the freedom and risk, it's not like we're crushing it and solving all the world's problems as it is.
00:06:18
We're not keeping talent. We're not getting talent. Like, if anyone should embrace that and really let people who have that inclination lean in and really develop, it should be us in our space. And it's often the total opposite, right? We have these rules.
00:06:31
We have these best practices. This is how we operate here. It's very controlled and it's very deflating for a lot of more entrepreneurial, innovative people where you either have to bust through and stick it out or a lot of people end up leaving and it's not great. So that was my experience. I just felt like I got to where I thought I wanted to be, and I looked forward like 30 years and was like, I can't do this for the next 30 years.
00:06:57
So for me, it was, let's go get some different experience and see how I can grow and develop. Yeah, no, thanks so much for sharing your story. I think while your story isn't everyone's story necessarily, I think there's a lot of people who are going to resonate with that same experience. Maybe they're in that space right now who they're entrepreneurial. They want to see change, they want to see growth, and they just feel stagnant or stuck or with the shackles on.
00:07:20
Right? So thanks for sharing that. Really appreciate it. So kind of a hard pivot. Want to talk from more of your story background into some things that we like to talk about a lot on the show, which are tactics, strategies, right.
00:07:33
So maybe share a little bit with the audience. You've worked obviously with Next After now with Charity Water for a little over two years. Also had your own agency before that. So you've had a lot of exposure to working on campaigns and strategies for, I would say probably almost hundreds of organizations at this point. And so maybe dozens, maybe we'll say.
00:07:54
Dozens, between dozens and hundreds. How's that? Dozens and hundreds. Yeah. Could you share maybe some of your experience, a campaign, a strategy that you've really loved?
00:08:03
It's really impacted donor engagement with some of the clients that you've gotten a chance to work with. Yeah, there's a bunch. Obviously when you have the luxury and opportunity to be around so many organizations and people, you kind of have a bunch. But it's not really a campaign. But one of the things that we learned all the time at Next After and then we learned it here at Charity Water is just the more human looking sounding feeling a piece of content is, the more engagement it gets.
00:08:30
And that often shows up in plain text emails or things like that. But something that Charity Water is really known for and is tremendous at is kind of brand design story. And that's because we've invested in those skills and that avenue for years, going back to the founder and who later became his wife, who oversaw creative in the early days of just having that commitment and knowledge and expertise and just saying, no, this is important, we're going to invest in this. But where we've struggled a bit is kind of as that stands out less and less is a lot of people have adopted similar tactics, not because of us necessarily, but sometimes because of us. Because I know they tell us that they're copying is to send these kind of totally undesigned no design emails in the responses that we get or the engagement we get or when we post more content on social that's maybe behind the scenes and a little less filtered, especially today, what that looks like.
00:09:27
And so I think we'll talk more about brand later on because it's something that we talk about a lot and that we're really focused on but we really have to embrace the definition of what brand is. And if we think brand equals design, that's a component of brand. But brand is more about the experience people have and sometimes having no design is a better experience. So I think that's one thing. It's not really a campaign, it's just kind of a universal and stitching together all these campaigns.
00:09:55
And part of the reason why we tell stories is that it resonates at a human level in a way that campaign briefs and numbers and facts can't. So it's all tied into how do humans interact and how do we tie in our marketing and branding and messaging into that. And that's one of them. Yeah. So that's kind of like an overarching tactic.
00:10:17
And then we've had a couple really cool campaigns. One that I really liked this last year for World Water Day was just around time. When you think about the water crisis and how it impacts people's health, how it impacts people's economic opportunities, how it impacts women and girls and equality in society, at the root of a lot of these things is time. All those things, it robs people of time. They have to walk 30, 60, 90 minutes to get water that sometimes isn't even safe to drink.
00:10:47
And so that means time away from family, time away from jobs, time away from school, and it's women who do this. And so we really centered the campaign on time and really trying to make that connection. And so we had out of home ads in subway stations and things like that, trying to connect commutes and your time to the time and commutes that people have to take in rural parts of our world that don't have access to water. And we had never really called out time so specifically, and even the campaign goal, being around saving people minutes in their lives and what that means. And it was a really big unlock for us of really being like, oh yeah, you know what?
00:11:23
All these other avenues are really connected to time, and time is something that everyone can connect to. And I thought we did a really good job of connecting that and then visually displaying it in different mediums and different channels. And it was a really successful campaign for us overall, but it was also just a bit of an AHA for us internally of we knew those things, but once we really drew it out in the campaign, we were like, wow, it really is about time. So many of these issues that we deal with. Yeah.
00:11:51
So would love to dive in a little bit more to your process there because I think there's probably if I put myself in the shoes of a marketing director nonprofit, and the ones that we talk to a lot who are generally just saying, I'm just so strapped for time. That a lot of not to pun on you as time campaign, but a lot of what you just talked about, it sounds like there was a great deal or at least a lot of intentionality around creative conceptualization of the campaign, right? Not just, oh well, what ebook can we give out? And how do we then tactfully drive this donation upsell page or this? I'm sure that stuff was all there, but it seems like there's a ton of work done on yet again, the storytelling, the front end to say, no, really, what's the core message that we want to communicate?
00:12:37
How do we want to communicate that? And then even the thoughtfulness of saying, now what channels can we get creative with to actually thoughtfully connect the story with the actual end audience, who's also going to find themselves in a parallel story with that. Right, but that takes so much intentionality around creativity, like the creative process. How much time do you all spend when you're thinking through a campaign or a project on the front end, just dialoguing, just creating those kind of creative spaces to dream and to say, where can we go with this? Can you talk just speak into a little bit of that process?
00:13:13
How much time you all spend on that kind of stuff and maybe even why that's important for you all? Yeah. I'd say we still probably don't spend as much time as we should. Just probably, like every organization out there, we feel time strapped as well of like, hey, we got to crank out the work. We got to get onto the next thing.
00:13:31
I'm incredibly fortunate to be in the position that I'm in to work with Charity Water as an organization, but also have the team, the creative team, led by Tyler Reaver right now, who's been here for ten years, and Cubby Graham, who's been here for ten years. We have some incredibly creative, incredibly thoughtful, incredibly intentional people who have established that culture and the way of working long before I ever got here. Right. So the commitment to creativity and storytelling is not me. That's really driven by Scott and the founder and then people like them.
00:14:04
But it is something like the more you do it, the easier it gets. Right. So just always having this kind of running dialogue every time we do a campaign, there's normally this creative process of what's the theme or what's the narrative? And oftentimes we'll come up with an idea that doesn't fit there, but it'll go to kind of the graveyard, and then next year we'll be, ah, what about that idea last time? What if we pull it?
00:14:27
Then, you know, you can save a little bit of time that, um and then it is then it becomes pretty collaborative. Like, normally, Tyler and the creative team or our brand team will kind of come up with some themes and ideas. We'll kind of workshop it a bit, we'll hone it, and then we'll go out to the different stakeholders, whether it's the major donor team or our brand partnerships team, to try to get some input. And then we have to improve in this. But we're trying to think more like 18 months in advance, like, what are the campaigns and themes?
00:14:54
Because one of the biggest opportunities is to get our partners involved, brand partners in particular. They need so much runway if they're going to do donated in Kind media or in store advertising or in store opportunities. So we're getting better at that. So now we kind of have this annual review of what that calendar is. We'll review it every quarter.
00:15:16
So it's not like, oh, World Water Day is coming up, what are we going to do? Which we still are in that camp a little bit, but it's more like, hey, the theme for this year is this, and we know World Water Day should fit in like this, and we're a little bit ahead of the game. And then you can spend more time thinking about the channels and the partners because you're not like, what's the concept? So that's a big unlock for us, is we don't have all the details figured out 18 months in advance, but knowing how these bigger moments tie into the bigger narrative much, much sooner allows everyone to then have their own time to kind of marinate on and figure out what it means. So that's how we're kind of improving.
00:15:53
But if you ask us internally, we'd all say we're still way too reactive and behind the gun. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for going there, man.
00:16:01
I appreciate you diving a little bit more to that process and how you all work internally. I think that'll be really fascinating for a lot of folks to hear. Well, hey there, holy donuts listeners ever. Feel like your nonprofit's donor experience is. Like a jellyfilled donut with no jelly?
00:16:15
Well, don't fret. We found the jelly to your donut dilemma. Enter wegive the software tool. It's like the cream filling to your eclair, or should I say the glaze to your donut. With Wegive, you're not just taking a donation, you're rolling out a red carpet for every person who gives to your organization.
00:16:34
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 donuts, which let's just say didn't quite rise to the occasion. See what I did there? With we give's innovative engagement tools.
00:16:54
Your donors won't just feel the love, they'll be coming back for a second. Because nothing says thanks for your dough better than a world class experience. So if you want to sprinkle some extra special magic on your donor relationships, check out WeGive.
00:17:14
So pivoting a little bit. Let's talk more macro, right? We just went kind of micro level. Let's talk macro about what you're seeing in the nonprofit space specifically. I'd love to hear is there a trend or a thought or even just a sentiment that's hits you, that has you really excited about the future for nonprofits and then on the backside of that two parter right.
00:17:35
What's? Maybe a trend or something that you're seeing out there, that you kind of got your finger up to the wind, and you're saying, not so sure where that's going to go. Not a little concerned about that. So just kind of sharing on the good side and maybe a little bit of the bad, too. Yeah, I don't know how much of it's a trend, but there's a couple of things that I think are really interesting right now, I think one is using Voice.
00:17:57
So there's Voice of Customer which is really around research and understanding donors. And whether it's like surveys or panel interviews or zero party data or first party data, I think there's more and more sentiment around how do we do market research in our space? Which is great. It's something that I don't do as much as I'd like or we don't do as much of. But that's hugely important, obviously, to know where to go.
00:18:22
And once we kind of get beyond some pretty basic like, oh, you need a website and be on digital and have a good offer like the basics. And a lot of orgs to be fair, are still kind of dealing with the basics, but to get some of those next unlocks you really need a level of research and that comes from Voice of Customer. But I think the other interesting kind of trend is like, well, what are the voice of the communities that we serve? Or what does that look like? Because for a long time a lot of orgs are kind of we are going to tell these people's stories in this way and it's kind of an us them dynamic, especially when you work in international communities and it's something that we struggle with.
00:18:59
I think we've done a great job in our history of really trying to do ethical storytelling that paints the communities and people we serve in a positive light. But even we're trying to figure out, well, it's still often Tyler, our head of Brand, in front of the camera in Malawi. What would it be like if there was a community member in Malawi or just our voiceovers are trying to be more or less our voice and maybe Voice of Community and trying to be more representative communities. And so we're piloting a local storytelling program. We have two people on contract, one in Sierra Leone and one in Nepal who are supposed to help tell more authentic stories in the communities that they live and work.
00:19:40
And we think that's a real model for us. But maybe other orgs moving forward is to say why do we feel like we need to go there essentially when there are already talented, smart people who speak the language and know the culture and it's also cost effective. So whether it's that kind of moment or how are we representing communities of color for nonprofits that are supporting communities of color, I think it's a really interesting conversation and it just is trying to move away from the US them or we do this here and they do this there, it's a really interesting conversation. So those are like a couple of things that I think are kind of like interesting keeping. Yeah, well, I think yeah, more and more there's always that tension right, between the marketing team and the programs team, right where it's okay, well, marketing told the story this way, but is that actually what programs is seeing or vice versa?
00:20:37
Sometimes marketing sells something to donors that then programs is saying well we can't fulfill that, that's not actually how we operate, there's no way that can happen. Right. And it goes back to, okay, well it's got to accurately reflect the stories of the people who are actually on the ground and doing the work and that's getting more and more representation from the people who are being served. But then also I would argue upstream of that are in a major way actually serving the donors. Right.
00:21:04
Because the donors are getting something in return, which is they get the feeling of significance and of impact and making a true connection, as opposed to maybe one that's a little more artificial with, like, well, let us clean. Up this story or something like that, I think actually gives them more of an authentic experience of significance than just, oh, well, here's a sanitized version. Because that's what we think you can handle, right? Giving them an actual opportunity and serving them well by allowing them to really get no, this is actually what's happening here and you're going to hear it. First person voice I think is such a service to the donor as well as a service to the communities that we're hoping to impact.
00:21:39
So love that you guys are doing that. Yeah, and it depends too, right? It depends on where the donor is at and what you're trying to do. It's not like every piece of content should be raw and unfiltered and straight from reports or straight from beneficiaries, but not every piece of content should be overly produced and overly branded and that kind of side of things either. So I think every organization has to find their way and where it fits.
00:22:01
And I think the biggest thing more than anything is diversity. If you're too singular channel, if you're too singular narrative, if you're too singular anything, it's problematic. So whether it's diversity in the stories you tell, diversity in the channels you use, just we need to be thinking about more diverse ways to communicate across the board. And it can be stressful thinking like oh my gosh, there's more channels and more things I need to do. But luckily we've got tools and ways to do that in easier ways today than we did a decade ago.
00:22:34
Much much easier than old school video where know tape to tape editing now AI just edits everything and we complain that we still don't have enough. Oh, OK. So Brady, that's some exciting things, right? What are some maybe trends that have you a little bit concerned? Yeah, I think there's still kind of a real I mean this is going to sound bad but like a real best practicey.
00:22:59
Direct responsey adherence from a bygone era of sorts. And I'll caveat that of saying so much of what we know today about the psychology of donors and why people give and how to do. Fundraising comes from a real direct response heavy, often direct mail heavy way. And so there's so much value to take from what has been learned and what has already been done, because the base level of humans hasn't just changed. People want to be competent, good people doing good things.
00:23:29
They want autonomy to live out their own values in their own lives. And they want relatedness or connectedness to themselves and people who share similar values, those are root things that we've always been tapping into. But we've learned so much of our fundraising from a direct mail heavy world where costs are really large. So figuring out real precise segments, for example, or how to play the volume game, and we've just adopted so many of those best practices. It into a digital world and they don't translate the same way.
00:24:00
So overly focused on donor journeys and overly focused on segments is something that gives me wary. It makes me have pause. Not that there's not value. It's diminishing returns. Consultants or vendors will sell you data or a dream of 68 individualized personalized donor journeys based on exactly who they are and what they do.
00:24:22
A, the inputs that we have on those 68 people are not strong enough quality to justify that level of personalization. And B, you can't manage those, you could build them once. But maintaining those types of journeys and experiences is impossible. So a big unlock was it was at a conference, and I think it was Greenpeace UK went through their onboarding journey and they would talk through how they had eight specific funnels based off how people came in on their interests. And that's a large organization with a lot of sophistication.
00:24:56
And they walked away being like, we had to tone that down into two because we couldn't do enough optimization and testing within all eight, there's not enough volume. So yeah, you could create 16, but there's only ten people going through one of them. There's no value in that as an.org. So this idea that data or personalization or journeys, they're important, but it's way overblown and it's impossible for nonprofits to manage and it's hugely diminished returns, in my view. So I think that's still a little worrisome, where people hear, oh, we got to have donor journeys and just leap at it, and that's what we should do.
00:25:29
And I'm not so sure that that's actually the best usage of everyone's time. I love that. And it's a little bit of a contrarian take, maybe. And again, no. But here's why I love that, man.
00:25:43
Even with our organization Share, we talk about that all the time. There are organizations that are going to be out there and everything's data driven, data driven, data driven. And we're making all these decisions and then we've kind of always had that hunch. That's not really where our specialty is. One, because me as a founder, I'm just not an.
00:26:00
Analytics nerd, right? I'm just not I am so gut feel visceral, emotional, passionate, that it's like, that's just never going to be my skill set. But one of the things we've seen, too, is even once we get into client work and we're looking at data, we're looking at data sets of sometimes under 100 people for a specific test. And I'm sitting there going, how could you possibly make a decision with this small of a data set? No, you can't.
00:26:24
How could you possibly say, well, we're data driven when that's not even a verifiable data set? And any sort of decisions you make on that seem a little bit more like you're just validating what you want to do in the first place sometimes than you are actually going where the data sends you. And so Jeff Bezos has a great quote, and it's kind of one that we internally love and live by, which is like, if the customer tells you a different story than the data, believe the customer. And I love that because it's just sometimes those anecdotes and those things that we think of as like soft skill things or, oh, well, that's kind of like squishy. We don't know.
00:27:00
Not that we need to live and die in every anecdote we get from a donor, right? But if we're consistently hearing a message from our donors when we talk to them, we gather some of that first party data, right, of like, let's just actually hear from them. If that conflicts with some of what of our analytics testing is doing, I tend to say believe the donors and believe what they're saying. And so I love that. The power of story, I think, is going to trump more than, hey, the power of crazy.
00:27:25
Advanced segmentation all day. So love to see the spicy cake right there. Yeah. And again, it comes back to what are you segmenting on? Because just because someone gave in a particular payment type on a particular day and a particular amount, we don't know jack about that person and what they care about.
00:27:39
So if you knew, if you were able to parse out through survey data or first party data or third party data, like what they cared about or what the personality type was, then it's a different conversation around personalization. But the inputs is what needs to evolve and continuing to improve what happens based off those inputs. That's the piece that it's not as important and relevant. Yeah. So with this, this conversation dovetails nicely into resources, tools, right?
00:28:08
Things that, yes, data analytics has its place maybe overblown a little bit, but what are some resources that you would kind of recommend to nonprofit marketing, donor development teams that you love? Whether that's a blog, whether that's a podcast, whether that's an article, what are some things that you like to just kind of find yourself consistently giving out? Yeah, got a few. One just on that last subject. Donor Voice is required reading.
00:28:33
If you talk about donor psychology and segmentation, donor Voice is tremendous. Learned so much from them over the years, I'd be remiss to not mention next after they'd probably if they heard this and I didn't mention them, they'd text me and yell at me. But it remains just such a great data driven resource hub of some of the best digital work around. I spent a lot of time learning more from growth marketing on the for profit side. And so one of my favorite, it's a substack, it's called Lenny's Newsletter.
00:29:06
He's an ex airbnb guy. He's got a podcast as well with interviews with product managers and product leaders. And I just think there's so much overlap for digital work overall and know me and Charity Water, so I've learned a lot from them, which I think is great. And then there's a friend of mine named Tobes Kelly who has another substat called Some Personal News, and he used to be at UNICEF, and he's a for profit marketer now, but it's a really meaty blog that gets into some pretty gritty, advanced details. And a lot of the content in our space is pretty high level, pretty fluffy.
00:29:45
Yeah. So what I like about his resources, it's pretty detailed and in the weeds. I love it right up our alley. So man, Brady, thank you so much for just opening the book, right, and just going there on all different kinds of subjects. If folks want to connect with you, whether that's social media personally, what's the best way to get in contact with you, to follow along with all you guys are doing?
00:30:06
Charity Water, this is your free time to plug. If you're working on a book, feel free to plug it here. Anything you're working on or any way people can connect with you. I think, honestly, check out Charitywater.org and I'd love for people to support, but even if you just want to follow along and sign up for stuff and see what we're doing and not all of it's working, I'll give you the heads up, but you can at least see more of what we're doing. And then LinkedIn, I haven't been posting a lot on Social, but I still read a lot and connect a lot on LinkedIn, so you can find me there.
00:30:35
And then I'm basically off platform on X. Good for you. I'm looking for something. Is it threads? Is it TikTok?
00:30:44
I don't have it, to be honest. I'm not missing it that much. So you're like charitywater.org and LinkedIn? Or safe one? Awesome.
00:30:51
Brady Josephson, thank you so much, my friend. Really appreciate your time. Thanks, Matt.
