Well, hi, everybody.
Thank you so much for checking in with me and letting me know
that you can see and hear me.
We are gonna cross our collective fingers that the
screen share doesn't unexpectedly quit again,
because I'd like to go ahead and get started.
If you're not familiar with me, my name's Abby.
I am on the Neon One team,
and I've been in the nonprofit tech industry for,
a little over twelve years now,
which is kind of shocking to say out loud.
I really am passionate about understanding
what people want from the nonprofits they support and
what you can do about it.
And today, I'm going to be drawing both on my background with nonprofits,
but also on my background as a marketer.
So I have a lot to talk to you about today.
Just as a couple, like, quick housekeeping things,
I do see that we have some. Neon one users with us.
That's amazing. I'm so glad you're here.
Anything that you learn today can be applied in a lot of your
of your Neon One tools.
However, if you are not with Neon One,
everything that you're gonna learn here today is applicable
to you too, and small things.
I love that you're talking with me in the chat,
and I'm gonna ask you to keep doing that.
I will ask you, however,
if you have questions that you'd like me to go over at the
end, please do drop those in the q and a section.
I say that because I'm going to ask you to talk with me today,
and the chat can move pretty quickly.
And I wanna make sure I don't miss anything, important.
The other thing is, yes, we are recording this webinar,
and you are going to get an email from me tomorrow with a
link to the recording.
That page will also include the slides and the resource I made for you.
So keep your eye out.
That usually goes out, I think, around ten central, eleven eastern.
I'm not positive I'm gonna get that out there,
but it will be tomorrow morning.
Okay. I said I was gonna ask you to talk to me. I meant it.
How do you feel when you hear the phrase multichannel marketing?
Are you kind of exhausted just thinking about it?
Do you feel like you shouldn't really be here?
You should be teaching me about it.
Jesse, I'm on the tired side. I feel that entirely.
It is it's a lot, and especially option a.
Especially if you don't have a background in marketing,
it can feel very overwhelming.
On the nap side, are we all just gonna take a nap?
I think that we can.
First, we'll go over multichannel marketing,
then we will all leave and take naps.
It does feel overwhelming.
Well, I am going to hopefully share some things with you that will
make it feel a little less overwhelming and a lot more manageable.
I do have, this checklist that I put together.
I'm gonna drop a link to this checklist in the chat.
This is something that,
will kind of guide you through the process that I use when I
am thinking through how I'm going to create a piece of
content and then share it on lots of channels.
And I actually like something,
a question that was just dropped in the chat.
How is multichannel marketing defined these days with
evolving tech?
Very simply, multichannel marketing just means that you are
communicating with your audience on lots of different channels,
and a channel is really any avenue that you use to connect with someone.
So social media is a channel.
You would even say that, like,
Facebook is a different channel than Instagram,
is a different channel than TikTok,
is a different channel than threads.
Other channels that are less common,
if we're talking with development folks in particular.
And, actually, let me know. Are you in marketing?
Are you in development? Do you do a little bit of both?
A flyer is certainly a channel.. A print is is a channel.
Direct mail is a channel.. Email is a channel.
Social like, search and display as a channel on the comp side development.
Both.
Okay.
I'm glad to see that there are people who are doing both
because I really think that if you want to be very effective
both in I mean, especially development,
that you're gonna wanna be working very closely with marketing.
Marketing should support development,
and development should feed back into marketing.
Greg, I have four job descriptions.
Greg, that's so many job descriptions.
I I hope that this will, be especially useful for you.
Okay.
So the big thing that I kind of get asked is, like,
does this actually matter?
Like, do I need to really think through how I'm gonna talk to
my audience on lots of different channels?
And the answer is yes.
This does really matter,
and it matters because repetition is the key to
getting people to hear you and remember what you have to say.
That can be hard to remember sometimes,
and it can also be hard to hear sometimes.
So I want you to hear me.
If you stress yourself out trying to say something brand
new on every channel every time you get on your computer,
I want you to hear when I say that people are probably not
seeing or hearing or remembering everything you have to say.
And that can be kind of a blow to the old ego because you put
a lot of time and effort into what you're saying on all of
these different channels.
But I hope it's also kind of a relief to you because if you
are like Greg and you do have four job descriptions
or if you are balancing communications and marketing
and development and everything else,
you can use and reuse the content that I'm gonna walk you
through building today without fear of being annoying because
people are probably not going to remember or see everything
that you send out.
So I hope that is a relief to you and not a blow.
And the reason that this is important is because whether
you are trying to acquire donors or recruit members
or find volunteers or simply connect with the people in your
community, you are competing for people's attention.
And the e arena that you're competing in is really crowded.
How many emails do you think the average person receives in
the in a day?
So I have here that we see around ten thousand ads every day.
We see far more posts, too many emails correct.
Three hundred oh, that that is a a big one hundred and sixty.
I think the last time I checked,
the average is between a hundred and twenty and a
hundred and thirty emails.
I suspect that those of us on this call
probably get way more emails than a hundred and twenty to a
hundred and thirty.
I would suspect, that we're probably a lot closer to what Miranda said,
which is a hundred and sixty eight,
and I would even go up from there.
We see thousands of ads.
We get hundreds of social media posts, hundreds of emails,
stacks of emails.
The world is really noisy.
And I feel like I was gonna say a hundred and fifty or a
hundred to a hundred and fifty.
They all go in my junk.
That's another thing that you're competing against.
But what this means is that you need to be present and
consistent on multiple channels.
People need to be seeing your messaging in multiple different
places, but that doesn't mean you have
to create brand new unique content for each of those
channels every time you use them.
What you can do instead is you'll use what you know
about your community.
You're going to use that to plan content that they're going to love,
and then you're gonna do some research to and inform how
you're gonna use it in lots of different places on multiple
different distribution channels.
So that's what we're talking about, social media, email,
direct mail, ads.
And you're gonna plan it in a way that will catch their
attention and inspire them to get involved in what you're doing.
So today, we're gonna go over a pretty a high level, but hopefully,
very tactical method and system that you can use to do that.
Alright.
First thing, this is a question. I'm sure a lot of you have.
Where are your people?
The first thing you need to do is choose what channels you're gonna be on.
And as importantly as choosing what channels you're going to be on,
you're gonna decide what channels you are not going to be on.
I say that because and tell me if this is true for you.
I encounter a lot of folks in the nonprofit space who feel
like they should be active on each and every single channel
available to them.
They feel like they need to be on TikTok and Blue Sky and,
Mastodon and threads and. Instagram and Facebook,
and they need to be doing ads and emails, and and it's a lot.
So instead of starting with everything,
we're gonna choose a few channels that you know you need to be on.
And then as you start mastering those channels,
you can decide if you want to expand,
the scope of what you're doing a little bit.
So let me know in the chat,
where does your community hang out right now?
Email is probably a given.
Email tends to be the number one most preferred
communication channel.
But what's what social platforms are they on?
I know I use Instagram,
but I don't really get on Facebook anymore.
I tend to be on Instagram,
and I will occasionally poke around on threads or blue sky.
I like that Yessica called out that that people are on
LinkedIn.
I think LinkedIn is something that I kind of forget about.
I when I'm a millennial, and. LinkedIn has gotten, like,
much bigger than it was when. I entered the workforce,
so I'm always kind of surprised if that's such a channel.
Went Facebook sober, me too.
Facebook, not not my sneeze anymore,
but it is for a lot of people.
Like, Tony just called out that they have three hundred and eighty
five thousand members on Facebook.
That's amazing.
Where else are you? Are you on. YouTube? Are you on threads?
Where are people most likely to interact with you?
I'm also interested like, do you use display ads?
So are you, like, running ads through, like,
Google Ad Grants or anything like that?
Are you using text messaging to reach your community?
Where are people spending their time?
Where are they connecting with you?
I love that Suzanne called out that LinkedIn is the only place
I can get, staff or board members to engage.
Love that. Kim uses everything.. Amazing. This is awesome.
If you are on this call and you are not sure where your
audience is hanging out,
you can do a little research to figure it out.
And this may be interesting for those of you who are active on
on all of these channels.
So look at your post performance and other analytics
to get a feel not only for where people are hanging out,
but when they're hanging out and when they're most likely to
interact with you.
So those insights can give you,
some really fascinating insight.
So you may notice that you get really great reach and
engagement on. Facebook and LinkedIn.
You're gonna wanna stay active on those channels.
You may notice that you get better engagement with
Instagram stories than you do when you're posting to your grid.
That's really helpful insight that you can keep in mind as
you're planning your posts.
You may notice that,
other organizations like yours are active on some channels that you're not.
And if you decide that you wanna expand your audience,
eventually, you may choose to expand into those platforms.
I know Blue Sky, for example,. I've just started using it.
An organization that I follow has just started using it,
but it's a conservation organization.
There are a lot a lot of other conservation organizations on
that channel, so it may be something that they evaluated first.
If you are looking at non social channels,
I saw a lot of you are using email.
You can look at things like your email reporting.
You can also look at things like your website analytics and
other tools to understand where your audiences are spending their time.
And then this is my personal favorite.
If you really want firsthand insights or if you're
evaluating, like, should we actually be on TikTok or not,
you can try sending a survey to different groups of people.
Now you may not wanna send a survey to everyone on your
email list asking them if you should be active on YouTube and
if they would follow you there.
But if you have a small group of really dedicated,
volunteers or something, or even just, like, a trusted,
what's the word for it?
Not it's not not your board members on it.
Like, an advisory board, those may be good options for you.
Okay.
When you're researching where and when your community wants
to hear from you,
this is also an opportunity for you to figure out what they
actually find compelling.
And the reason I talk about this is because sometimes we
sit down, and I'm I'm talking to you as a marketer here.
Sometimes you sit down and you're like,
I haven't written a blog article in a little while.
What on earth should. I write about?
Having a solid understanding of what your community
likes, what they find inspiring,
what moves them to act is going to be as important as
understanding when and how they're actually going to to
interact with it.
You will be able to uncover a lot of this by looking at
things like the social media insights we talked about,
the email and website reporting I alluded to.
But you're gonna look at it through a little bit of a different lens.
So when you look at your social media insights, for example,
you may be able you should be able to see which of your posts
actually performed the best.
You'll be able to see which emails got the best open rates
and which links people were most likely to click on.
You'll be able to see which of your web pages are getting the most traffic.
And all of this is really valuable intel because it can
give you some clues about what people are into that
you can use to inform future content.
So if you notice, for example,
that most of your email engagement is with messaging
related to an upcoming program,
you can spotlight that program on other channels.
If you notice that all of the clicks or the most clicked link
in your newsletter is a success story,
you'll know that your audience is really compelled by those
people centered stories, and you can share more of them.
But this this works in other kinds of reporting too.
There are a lot of development folks on the call.
What can you learn if you notice that an appeal that
shared a story about one of your staff members
outperformed an email appeal that focused more on some
equipment upgrades that you needed.
Or if you're running ads,
what can you learn if you realize that an ad that
spotlights pet adoptions outperforms an ad
that spotlights your spay and neuter program?
If you're well, yeah, I see some of you on on Instagram.
What and if you notice that you have, like,
a an unscripted behind the scenes reel and that
outperforms a more highly produced, like,
sit down interview reel.
All of these are just examples,
but they do help you understand,
especially as you're measuring these things over time.
It does help you understand what your community actually
wants to hear from you,
and that can make it easier for you to plan content that you
know they're gonna love.
So once you understand where your audience is gonna interact
with you and what kind of content will spark that
interaction, you're ready to sit down and actually, like,
plan the content that you're gonna create.
And as a general rule,
this is gonna fall into one of three categories
or more likely it's going to fall into more than one of
these three categories.
You're gonna give people content that educates them
about something important,
usually about your work or something related to your
mission, something that inspires people.
We love we love an inspirational story or
statistic or takeaway and something that entertains.
Entertainment is especially important,
if you are not necessarily asking people to do something,
like donate or sign up, but just to engage with you.
Entertaining is gonna be huge.
Now that's all very nebulous.. So here's an example.
Say you work for an organization that focuses on conservation.
Conservation is my favorite mission,
so you're gonna hear me talk a lot about it.
You noticed that some recent posts of yours,
that encourage people to sign a petition about,
development plan for,
that was gonna develop part of a state park.
Really got a lot of a lot of traction.
This is top of mind for me because it happened here in
Florida.
You know that a lot of your audience members signed the
petition to protect that state park from being developed,
and you know that the development proposal was
eventually denied.
That's a huge win.
So you may choose to take that information and write a blog
article that recaps the situation,
talks about how your organization helped protect that park,
celebrates how your community really rallied together to
protect that park.
And then maybe at the end, you ask people to continue, like,
protecting local state parks by keeping in touch with your organization.
This checks a lot of these boxes. It's inspirational.
It's exciting.
You could use it as an educational opportunity,
and you know it's on a topic that your community finds compelling.
So that's that's just an example,
but I hope it is is practical for you.
Now while you're planning the content you're gonna write,
you're also gonna wanna think about what different assets
you're going to use to support that piece of content.
So when I say asset,
I just mean it's a file or a resource or something that you
can use multiple times to get people interested in
what you're saying in your content.
Photos are kind of a given.
If you work for an organization where you can't necessarily
take photos of your clients, if you work in health, like,
health can be kind of fraught.
If you work, with populations that need to be protected and not have their
identity shared online, you may need to focus on, like,
staff photos or even some artfully or nicely chosen stock photography.
But photos are gonna be important.
Graphics and infographics, also great.
People love an infographic,
especially if you want to to get into that entertain and
educate section.
Videos are increasingly important.
They don't necessarily need to be very long and very nicely produced.
Some long form videos are great.
You can clip it up into smaller pieces,
but a lot of shorter videos are really popular online.
I think, like, sixty to ninety seconds is kind of a sweet spot.
Quotes and testimonials are really great.
Those are awesome to turn into graphics that you can use on
your site and on different, other different channels.
So out of curiosity, if you would add anything to this
list, I would love to hear about it.
I had a person a while ago share with me that they make,
Spotify playlists related to some of their different programs.
That was really cool.
What would you add to this list to to
support a big piece of content that you're putting together?
Now once you've got your content,
you've got some supporting resources,
and now it's time to get this on your website.
And I'm gonna talk about why this
is important in a minute,
but I wanna emphasize here that the content that's gonna go on
your website is longer form content.
These are blogs. These are success stories.
These are educational articles.
You are gonna wanna put this on your website,
and I'm gonna go into why in a minute.
But more than just that,
you're gonna wanna make this very easy to find, read,
and act upon.
And you'll notice here I have this screenshot of,
a website on a phone.
It needs to be very easy to navigate on your phone in
addition to just on a desktop.
That's because most people are reading their emails and
checking their social media platforms from their phones,
and that is where most of you have indicated that your
audiences are spending their time.
So write your content,. Put it on your site.
Make sure it's easy to find, read, and act upon.
And I'm telling you this because oh, actually,
I gave you an example first.
I pulled this example because it gives you an idea of how you
can kind of organize some of this.
If I want to learn about nature programming or educational
content, I know where to go.
If I'm looking for conservation information,
I know where to go.
If I want to donate or become a member, I can easily do that.
Now I've put this up here just as an example because if you're
if you're pointing people to your website,
they may choose to navigate around the rest of your website
for a little while after they land there.
You're probably going to post directly to a specific page
when you share your content,
through an email or or on social media.
But it should be discoverable no matter where someone lands.
Now why am I emphasizing the importance of putting all of
this content on your website instead of doing something like
writing a longer Facebook post or keeping your content limited
to a single email?
There are two reasons.
The first reason is that as a general rule,
your website is where people are going to go when they want to get involved.
If you share a really beautiful,
impact story or, call to action to sign a
petition or if you're spotlighting a program that's
that's super interesting,
People are gonna go to your website to make a donation,
sign up for your event,
volunteer, or become a member.
They're gonna they're gonna need to be on your website.
So your big important pieces of content should live on your website.
So that way, you can share your content out to all of your different
channels, get people to one centralized location,
and then ask them to take action there.
The other reason that you're gonna wanna have all of this
content on your website instead of putting all of it in an
email or all of it in a social post is because keeping your
content on your website is gonna make it a lot easier for
you to share in multiple places.
If you've got a long impact update that's only available in
email, for example,
you're gonna have a hard time using it as the basis for a display ad.
So if you build on your site,
it's a lot easier to share it in multiple places.
Say you did work for that, conservation organization.
You wrote that blog article about
why people should protect their parks and how people helped
protect their parks.
You can post it on your site,
and then you can use it as a basis, for an email update.
You can include it in your newsletter.
You can use it as a basis for an appeal. Hey.
Our state parks are being threatened.
Donate here to, I don't know, keep them safe.
You can share pictures and a synopsis on different social media platforms.
You can adapt it to LinkedIn.
You can film a short video and then use it in lots of
different places.
So this is why I'm emphasizing in all of these different channels.
So you've got multiple channels.
The most important channel is your website,
and it will feed all of the other ones.
Okay. I've got some examples.
So here's an example from the. Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
They wrote a great success story. It's quite long.
It's very in-depth.
It includes lots of links that people can use to learn more
about their work and then eventually go donate.
And then they took an excerpt from it,
posted the link to Facebook,
and then pointed everyone back toward their website.
They also shared this on Instagram,
and I wanna say there was a third one that I didn't get a screenshot of.
This is another great example.
The Wildcat Sanctuary took in some lion cubs that they
adopted from Ukraine at the beginning of the war.
They wrote an article about it.
They filmed a short little video,
and then they shared it multiple times on multiple platforms.
So, this is on their website.
Of course, this is where they want people to go,
but they had a little video here.
They made they shared some information,
and in the comments,
they pointed people back to the the article.
And then I included this screenshot here because they
did something I really loved.
Videos are kind of hard to get.
They can be a lot of work to create.
But what they did is they took a still from this video that I
showed back here and just used it as a standalone static image.
So that way they had two supporting assets,
both a video and a static image, instead of just one.
So I thought that was a really great way or a really great
example of using video in multiple ways.
Okay. We've got five minutes left.
That's a basic overview of how you create one piece of content
and adapt it for multiple platforms.
But I wanna use the last few minutes of our time together to
go over some basic best practices for some of these
different channels.
I won't have time to go over all marketing channels,
so I'm just gonna hit the the high notes.
The big important reason that. I'm gonna share these best
practices with you is because people have different
expectations associated with different channels.
So the people who are interacting with you on
Facebook are gonna expect a different experience than the
people who are interacting with you when they're flicking
through their Instagram stories.
People reading an email are gonna expect something
different than people who are reading a direct mail appeal or a brochure.
So here are just some basics.
And then to answer the questions, yes,
this these slides are gonna be available.
So I'm gonna fly through these,
and you can look at them later if you wanna go for them more slowly.
So let's talk about appeals first.
A lot of you are both in marketing and in, development, and
your marketing materials should feed your development actions.
So,
best practices for email appeals and direct mail appeals
are pretty similar.
Both should catch people's attention.
You're gonna do that with a subject line, with an email,
with a great eye catching envelope with direct mail.
Both should be easy to skim through.
Both should establish pretty quickly what you want people to
do after they read it, what's going to happen,
when they get involved, and how they can actually do that.
And then it should be very easy for them to act.
If you are asking someone to take action in an email,
link them to your website or your more importantly,
the form where they can act, donate, volunteer, become a member.
If you are sending a direct mail appeal,
you should include a remit slip or a QR code or URL that they
can use to land on your site, find the proper form,
and get involved.
Newsletters and impact updates are a little different.
You're not necessarily asking someone to take a direct action.
You may be asking them to do something, though.
If you wrote a really nice blog or impact story on your
blog or on your website,
you can include a snippet of it in your newsletter,
invite people to click over to your website to learn more,
and then they can interact with you from there.
If you're sending an impact update,
you may not choose to ask them to do anything at all.
It just may be a, hey.
Look at this wonderful thing that has happened because of
the support of this community.
Thank you so much for your involvement.
Or you can invite them to take a next step, like,
share it with a friend or click over to a website to learn
more about the story that you're sharing with them.
Now we could talk forever just about social media best
practices, but I do wanna emphasize one thing here.
We're gonna shoot for an eighty twenty split,
and that means eighty percent of your posts
ish should inform, entertain, or inspire,
and then twenty percent you can ask them to take an action.
This is for a lot of reasons,
not least among them because any more social media platforms
don't want you to link users away from the platform.
They want users to get on. Facebook or LinkedIn or
wherever and stay there.
So what you can do to get around that is make most of
your posts just self contained.
You don't need them to take an action or move away from the platform.
But when you are asking someone to give, volunteer,
or read more, you can point them to your website.
How many of you are using videos?
Videos are generally very popular on most platforms.
It's also a really highly consumed form of media.
So if you have very long videos,
I would say those are most appropriate for your website or
your YouTube channel,
and then you can clip those long videos into shorter videos
for use on your social media channels.
So that way you're getting a lot of,
little smaller videos out of one single long piece of work.
Now it is one thirty, and I'm gonna take some questions.
That was a lot of information in a very short period of time.
So let me know what questions you have.
I'm gonna drop this worksheet link into the chat again,
and then I'm gonna look over here.
Hi, Abby.
Will these slides be shared with us,
or are they available to download?
They are going to be made available to download.
You'll get an email from me tomorrow morning with a link to
a page that will house the recording of this of this
webinar, the slides and this resource, actually.
So if you don't wanna download it today, you don't have to.
I have here a question from Greg.
I've had Google Analytics Four enabled in Neon for months.
I don't see much activity in GA. Four compared to online donations.
Greg, I don't have a ton of insight
into the integration between oh, Brenda,
the QR code took you document on board funding thing.
I must not have switched out that, that URL.
So, instead, go to this URL here.
I that is just an old QR code.
I will fix that before. I put these up tomorrow.
Greg, I don't have a ton of insight into the the guide update process,
but I will let the team know that there are some,
additional details that we can add to that article that kind
of flush out the way Google Analytics four and Neon can work together.
So I'll I'll do that after this call.
Let me scroll back up, make sure everything okay.
When we do ask people to take action on social media,
taking them to a link off the platform,
Do you recommend using a link tree or a similar tool rather
than adding a link to the post?
That is a little bit of a tricky question,
and I think it will largely depend on the platform you're
actually using.
So
I tend to think that people are more likely on,
platforms like
Facebook, for example, to click on a URL.
If they can see, the URL will take them to your site.
If you are using,
actually, a Facebook or a LinkedIn,
it may just change the the URL anyway.
So if you, for example, paste a long URL into a LinkedIn post,
you'll see that it shortens the post and turns it into a
LinkedIn URL.
Where something like Linktree is useful is if you're posting
on something like,. I mean, really,
Instagram is the one that kind of comes immediately to mind
where you can't include clickable. URLs in captions or comments,
then you would want to have a Linktree,
and you would wanna have a link in your Instagram bio.
So that way I have one set up.. I don't think I use Linktree.
I don't remember what I use.
I think I may just use lincoln dot bio. I don't know.
But if you have a Linktree in your Instagram profile,
you can say in your captions,
if you'd like to learn more about, I don't know,
this story, if you wanna read more about this program,
check out the link in our bio for more information.
And that's where I think Linktree is most useful.
Okay.
Alright.
I think that is a really great, place to stop.
I think we've got them all.
Greg, I also wanted to point out this just occurred to me.
Greg, if you're looking for a webinar or,
educational materials like that,
you can go to I'm gonna drop a link in here.
Academy dot neon one dot com.
We have live trainings and, like,
open office hours where you can drop in and ask questions about
how to do some of these things, of our team.
So if you have specific questions about, for example,
GA Four and Neon, Neon One,
check that out and see if there's an upcoming session
that you can join.
Alright.
Thank you so much everyone for being here with me.
I know that taking half an hour out of your day in the middle
of the week can be a big ask,
and I really appreciate you being here.
Keep an eye out on your inboxes tomorrow morning.
You're gonna get an email from me, and,
I hope I see you at next month's tech circle.
I'll talk to y'all soon.