Nonprofit Expert Episode 12 – Building Brand Authority and Connections Online

DonorPerfectHost00:03

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect.

Dana SnyderGuest00:09

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect. I am your guest host, Dana Snyder, for this incredible Read More

DonorPerfectHost00:03

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect.

Dana SnyderGuest00:09

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect. I am your guest host, Dana Snyder, for this incredible episode with Brynne Krispin. She is the president and CEO of Cause Focus. I am the founder and CEO of Positive Equation, so it sounds like we’re going to have a really good conversation. I am so excited to be here with you today. I am a speaker, I am a fellow podcast host of my podcast, Missions to Movements, and the creator of the monthly giving mastermind program. Brynn is here with us today to talk all about social media marketing and she has an incredible background that we’re going to dive into working with nonprofits, thought leaders and policymakers in DC for the last decade. Her team focuses on using empathy-based marketing to turn passive audiences into loyal advocates, and I don’t know who doesn’t want that. Bryn, I’m so excited to connect with you in this conversation today.

Brynne KrispinGuest01:08

Thank you so much, dana. It’s really really great to talk with you.

Dana SnyderGuest01:11

Same. So I want to kick off talking about your background because it’s remarkable and, of course, I was doing some LinkedIn stalking and I did not miss your background the year at IJM. I’m a huge fan of International Justice Mission. Can you share with us really what’s your favorite part of digital marketing and what got you into social media from your experiences?

Brynne KrispinGuest01:34

That’s a great question. Yeah, so I went to school for journalism. Actually, I wanted to be a print journalist. I was actually pretty anti-technology, believe it or not. A print journalist I was actually pretty anti-technology, believe it or not. I loved asking hard questions and digging in deeper to get to the root of a story. So I was pretty old school when it came to media. I loved and still do just turning real pages and buying the actual book.

Dana SnyderGuest01:59

I hate waiting on screens.

Brynne KrispinGuest02:00

But toward the end of college I became fascinated by the conversation piece of telling these stories on social media, because now you know, there wasn’t just a fast, new, dynamic way to share these stories, but it could be done in such a way that invited live conversation and feedback around them.

Watching events like the Arab Spring protests unfold from conversations that started on Twitter, just the power these platforms had to ignite and empower people toward action was just fascinating to me and I couldn’t get enough of it. And of course, we’ve seen this level of power can also create waves of negative actions and have serious consequences, which is why I don’t think I would still be working in social media today if it weren’t for helping incredible people and incredible causes make a positive impact on the world. So, to answer your question, it’s really the connections and the conversations that happen daily on these platforms that I’ve seen inspire real change from grassroots to global, and there’s really no other medium like that that can do that with stories. So that’s my favorite part, that’s what gets me up in the morning and keeps me sane, working in social media all day long.

Dana SnyderGuest03:12

Yes, I love it. I know I can definitely relate. I will never forget the one personal Facebook fundraiser that was raising upwards of like 7 million plus when it took off.

Brynne KrispinGuest03:22

And I was like oh my gosh.

Dana SnyderGuest03:24

that is the power of these platforms, is the ripple effect that it can have for movements of good. And you mentioned these channels and I think we can be overwhelmed in thinking and I get asked the question all the time do I need to be on everything? I think our people are everywhere. So where do you think people should really focus and figure out where to spend their time, where to invest resources?

Brynne KrispinGuest03:52

Absolutely. I get that question all the time and I’m going to have to give you the marketer answer on this one and say it depends. So I would say start with your goals and do your audience research. You can ask questions like do you need to engage high earning young professionals? If so, I would say, go to LinkedIn and develop thought provoking, insightful content that educates them on what you do. But if you want to encourage more stay at home moms to be politically active this election season, go to Instagram. Focus on developing unique content that will thrive on that platform specifically. So no, you don’t need to be everywhere all at once. It’s actually better to just choose one or two platforms, develop content specifically for that platform, and you’re going to see a much higher results by doing that.

Dana SnyderGuest04:40

Yes, 1000%. Echo everything that you’re saying. It’s interesting with the moms to one platform. It’s technically not a social media platform, but Pinterest, I think, can be an untapped one to dependent upon the demographic that you’re trying to reach. Agree with you in focusing on one or two is because they all should have a platform. Specific content strategy, because we consume them differently and different content works better on different channels. What do you think is working best and where right now?

Brynne KrispinGuest05:15

Yeah. So for a nonprofit, I like to help them think through content through two different lenses. One would be thought leadership content and then the other one would be storytelling. So if you’re an organization that’s really heavy with research advocacy, you’re really trying to connect with strategic partners and be an expert and a leader in a space I would focus on LinkedIn and X. So we’re still seeing some success on X. It’s a bit of a hot mess right now for a lot of organizations but, again, if you’re in that thought leadership space, it is a really powerful tool still.

So content that shows people how you do something or why it worked, that helps them understand why they should care about it and really tell it from an expert’s point of view. So that’s what’s really going to thrive on LinkedIn and X. And then for storytelling, that is, your human experiences. So that would be Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, shorts. We’re seeing a lot of success there right now as well. So think about those reels, those short clips, lots of faces and content that just drops you right into an experience. Nothing fancy, just keep it raw and relatable. Pull back the curtain to help people see what you do and why it’s important. And this is where partnering with a collaborator can be extremely helpful too, because you can do this through the eyes of someone else that your audience already resonates with and trusts. But those are the kind of the two different lenses I try to help people think through before just deciding where they should be posting lenses.

Dana SnyderGuest06:44

I try to help people think through before just deciding where they should be posting. Awesome, and I absolutely love LinkedIn as a thought leadership platform. If listeners are thinking or questioning because sometimes we have our own imposter syndrome or are a little bit nervous about being vulnerable what do you share with team members and clients that you work with on where to start, in kind of sharing your own stories and experiences on LinkedIn in particular?

Brynne KrispinGuest07:09

Absolutely. I know that is intimidating and it’s hard for me too, even as a marketer, who I do this day in and day out for other clients. But when it comes to my own content I freeze. But I would say, just try to picture when you have that really important meeting with a major donor and you’re sitting down one-on-one for coffee and just treat it like a conversation. What do you want them to know about you? What are some just connection points you can identify with them to build that warmer connection? And then what do you want them to take away from that conversation? Even if it’s just 15 minutes long, what are you hoping they walk away with? What kind of expertise or information do you want to communicate is the most important?

So I would say focus on that, take yourself out of it and just focus on your work, your expertise and I think you’ll start to get the hang of it. You’ll start to get a little more comfortable and then, as soon as you start seeing some of the conversations and the comments that start coming in just from inspiring other people to do the same or educating them on what you do, it is really powerful in that way to really mobilize and motivate people to be a part of your organization.

Dana SnyderGuest08:14

Yes, so good. Is there a sample prompt or something that you would advise people start with?

Brynne KrispinGuest08:27

Oh, that’s a great question.

We’ve seen a lot of success with starting with personal pronouns in your hooks.

So if it’s a personal experience saying something like I had a conversation the other day with a friend and she brought up a topic around X and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it and then you just kind of walk through what those thought processes were on your end but then also kind of communicate how to move forward with that information so you get other people thinking about it and asking questions about it too. But it frames it in a way that is very personal to you and kind of pulls back the curtain on what goes on behind your brain and going on in your head. And I think, especially if you’re an executive leader, there’s walls and barriers that you built up. We’re kind of coming out of this very buttoned up professional world post COVID and now we’re seeing that we want to actually get to know our leaders more and we want to be able to trust them, and the best way to do that is just start building the rapport and the trust, and LinkedIn content can be one of the best ways to do that.

Dana SnyderGuest09:30

Definitely, definitely so good. Something that you mentioned was talking about Reels, tiktoks and YouTube Shorts, so they’re all short form video content. How would you say they differ, or do you think you can use the same video across all three?

Brynne KrispinGuest09:45

So the success we’ve seen truly with especially with working with smaller and mid-sized nonprofits is just taking a video that they’ve already had created maybe it’s two or three minutes long and just slicing it up into those short prompts and then posting it on TikTok, youtube and Instagram. So we haven’t seen a ton of success yet with just optimizing every single video per platform, but again, we’re trying to help nonprofits optimize the content that they currently have.

Dana SnyderGuest10:14

That’s where we’ve seen the most success there, yes, taking something macro and slicing it up into micro pieces, so important and to that point, what do you think is the anatomy of a good piece of content? What is somebody going to stick around and actually pay attention to and engage with?

Brynne KrispinGuest10:31

Yeah, the number one thing that we see across the board, no matter what platform or what the content is, is if it creates an emotional connection. So if you think about as we’re scrolling on social media, it’s almost like we’re all in crowded rooms, sometimes hopping between multiple rooms at a time. So we’re all looking for what is actually going to add value to my life. Okay, so we want to connect with friends and family, we want to be entertained, we want to learn something new, we’re all busy, we’re bombarded with ads, information we don’t always know is credible or relevant to us. So if you’re a nonprofit who’s trying to break through the noise and all the distraction, the best way to do that is to add value and create an emotional connection.

And to do this really well, I call it making direct eye contact with your audience. So you want to use a lot of, again, those personal pronouns in your hooks. So start with phrases like in my opinion, or I had a conversation with a friend the other day. If you’re doing it on your brand account, just use those pronouns like he, her, they and your hooks, just to drop your audience directly into a personal story. And we’ve seen engagement double or even triple when doing this and then, with your photos and videos, make eye contact, literally.

So sit in front of the camera, talk to your audience just like you’re in the living room with them. Pull back the curtain Again. There’s no need for fancy tools or equipment. Just keep it real and honest and this will open the door for supporters to know you on a deeper level and trust you, which leads to increased giving and a higher lifetime value over time and there’s a study by Motista back in 2018 that shows emotionally connected customers have a 306% higher lifetime value. So this does take more time and more thought and planning to build, but you’ll see those people stick around a lot longer, so it’s definitely worth it.

Dana SnyderGuest12:29

Oh, I believe it and I think something that I catch myself doing all the time and I’ve spoken about this before is we so often say hey guys, or like speaking in a plural sense, but content on social is consumed as individuals. Had to catch myself sometimes approaching it as a plural thing, sometimes the same as emails. But how is it being received? Somebody is sitting down on their couch and watching it one-to-one. So, again, I love the fact of you speaking about direct eye contact, like it is somebody right in front of you. I think is so powerful when we’re using social and, let’s say, our content on point and we want to try and convert a and I actually want to approach this from two different lenses. One, we want to try and move somebody from social media to our websites or to capture an email address, phone number, et cetera A I’ll start there Like what’s your thoughts on doing that, on how to move somebody from a platform to get more information about them, to build a deeper relationship?

Brynne KrispinGuest13:38

Yeah, again. I mean. This goes back to building that emotional connection first. So, according to research conducted in 2019 by psychologists Eshin Jolly and Diana Tamir, our brains are wired in such a way that we want to feel safe, connected and understood by someone before we say yes to them. So, whether you’re looking for a partner, a friend, a donor, or just want more people to go to your website or your email list, it’s critical to establish those emotional connections before chasing after them and asking them to do something for you. So establishing that emotional connection, gaining their trust, are fundamental here, and then, just, you know, thinking about it as adding value to their life, not the other way around.

Your content, especially on social, should always be developed through the lens of the common question we all have right. When someone’s trying to convince us to do something, we say like, okay, but why should I care? Why should I take my valuable time and energy to do this? So if you can show them how, for example, being on your email list or going to your landing page will add value to their life, you’re in. But you won’t be able to achieve this if you haven’t established that connection and trust with your community first. So that’s where social is, it thrives. I mean, that’s what it’s built for establishing that, that really healthy community.

Dana SnyderGuest15:00

That’s so good. That’s such a good perspective as to how is this adding value for them. And then I think, on the flip side, there’s this notion right of always taking people from social and moving them to an email list. But what about building the connections on the platform If they stay there? How would you recommend helping to facilitate that? I know Messenger is something that’s been really booming recently.

Brynne KrispinGuest15:26

Yeah, one thing we’ve started recommending with our clients is spending as much time engaging as you do posting. So it’s not enough anymore just to schedule out your post, set it and forget it and walk away. You have to be on the platform, engaging in conversations, leaving comments, replying to comments on your own post, sending direct messages, really igniting that conversation piece, and again, that’s what gets your content in front of more people as well, because the algorithms want to see that you’re staying on there for as long as possible. They don’t want people to leave. So as long as you are doing that, they’re also going to be pushing your posts out. When you do post, they’ll post it out to that Discover tab or just put it in people’s newsfeeds more and more, and those conversations you’re having will also show up and it shows that you care more about helping people and being generous and just providing value again, versus just treating it like a bulletin board where you put up your posts and then you walk away and hope someone calls you.

Dana SnyderGuest16:30

Yes, social is meant to be that two-way conversation, for sure. How do you find or I guess maybe if there’s a couple of examples to share about using social media to raise funds?

Brynne KrispinGuest16:41

Yeah. So again, the primary purpose of organic social during a fundraising campaign is to prime and remind. So ideally, you’ve already spent months ahead of your campaign nurturing your audience, educating them on the issue, building those connections so that now, when you need them to show up and take action donating, signing the petition, whatever it may be they’re actually going to do it because they know you, they trust you, you’re a friend. So this is also where we’ve seen a healthy relationship between social and email come into play, and we’ve seen more success in the last two years, especially with using organic social as a primary tool to build your email list and saving the hard ask the donate now for email and then just keeping social more about that conversation piece, the priming and the reminding. And a great example of this recently was a research institute here in DC became the go-to resource for daily updates and maps tracking the war on Ukraine, and they grew organically to half a million followers on X or Twitter, and so they came to us to figure out okay, what do we do with all these people? They just flocked over to their account and so they wanted to turn them into donors.

So I worked with two of my favorite consultants, caroline Griffin and Caitlin Vaughn, which I’m sure you know, and we just helped them pull back the curtain and feature the experts behind the incredible work that they were doing. This was kind of a new concept for them. They’re very research focused. They’re all behind their desks working away, but we put them in front of the camera and they were willing to experiment with us and do it. We showed their names, their faces, the camera and they were willing to experiment with us and do it.

We showed their names, their faces, stories of the good, the bad, the struggles, and just asked for help, asked for more funding so they could keep doing this incredible work. So we told those stories on social but then integrate an email as kind of the number one converter for asking for donations. Once people were aware of these stories and the need and the results speak for themselves they raised 120K online in two months, welcomed around 50 new monthly donors and this was all organic. So we didn’t do any ads. So it proves, with the right strategy, with the warming, the reminding, telling those really personal stories, it can still be a huge revenue source for your organization when email and social are working together in tandem. Really well, absolutely, those really personal stories. It can still be a huge revenue source for your organization when email and social are working together in tandem really well.

Dana SnyderGuest19:08

Absolutely. What were you using to ask people for their emails? How did you get some of those followers over to their email list?

Brynne KrispinGuest19:17

So we were just teasing the content through the stories of the shorter videos and then, if they wanted more to learn more about that story, to sign up on their email list. They have a couple of different email lists that were very specific to the war in Ukraine, to receiving updates. They were also tracking a lot going on in the Middle East and so we were able to kind of integrate those updates on social just to tease them and then encourage people to go and get the whole story by signing up for their email list.

Dana SnyderGuest19:45

Cool. So was that a? I like asking, like the behind the feed questions, something I do on my show all the time on my podcast. Did you send people to then a specific landing page that had just like a simple form, versus like sending them to their homepage with like the traditional newsletter? Was this something that was curated for this experience?

Brynne KrispinGuest20:06

For the donations or for the email signup. For the emails, for the emails. No, it was just what was on their landing page already.

Dana SnyderGuest20:14

Oh, wow, okay, Interesting, okay. So the homepage. And then that was all organic, all organic Yep, all organic Yep. Very cool, okay, amazing. So we are both LinkedIn fans and I know you posted about this recently on there and I just want to go back real quick because I think this is so important for people to really focus on this tool. What is the opportunity there for building thought leadership, no matter what level of expertise you might be at your organization?

Brynne KrispinGuest20:46

It’s huge right now. I mean, you and I both know trust is currency for nonprofits and, unfortunately, nonprofits saw the largest trust decline of any American institution in 2023, according to the latest Edelman research. And we also know fundraising is down. So trust and fundraising are down. So we’re all asking what can nonprofits do to rebuild trust and reach new supporters? And the answer to that is transparency and credibility. And who are the better people to do that than the ones leading your mission? So it’s so important to start thinking through how can we activate the networks of our executive team who already have built trust and rapport with some of the most influential people in your community and your company accounts can’t necessarily do this in that special way, so they can’t go speak in an event or message with the CEO of a fortune 500 company. They can’t meet with a policymaker. People really just want to connect with people right.

So building your thought leadership on LinkedIn. It just opens the door to be in rooms where you may never have been invited to be in, and it also gives people in your network the messaging and framework they need to talk about you in rooms that you aren’t in at all. An example of this is a client came to us about you in rooms that you aren’t in at all. An example of this is a client came to us about eight months ago. They’re in the healthcare advocacy space and rely heavily on corporate partnerships to fund their program, and they had tried some ads on their company LinkedIn page but weren’t seeing great results. Cold outreach wasn’t working all that well either, so they were ready to try something different.

So we took the approach of activating their chief development officer’s personal LinkedIn account, started posting three to four times per week speaking directly to the pain points and solutions of their ideal corporate partner. We even were engaging on his behalf, so leaving comments on his ideal corporate partner partners post when they were posting, and then we also built out something called target mapping, which is essentially lead gen. So it’s a little bit of professional stalking that we do on their behalf to really figure out, okay, who are these people and what do they need? What do they want? What are they engaging with, so that our content was specifically aligned with where their head was at. So over the last six months we’ve gotten over 100,000 impressions on his content. We’ve increased profile views by 508% among decision makers in his top target industries and a major LAPS partner just texted him last week and said I love what you’re doing on LinkedIn. I can tell the organization is taking a turn for the better. Let’s chat.

So again it’s all about building that trust first, and then building the relationship and then focusing on conversion, getting them on a call asking them for a meeting, whatever it may be, but we had to get him in the right room.

Dana SnyderGuest23:45

Yeah, people are watching. They might not say anything right away or they might not engage, but a hundred thousand impressions People are definitely watching. I was at a conference recently and I just said, hi, like I’m Dana Snyder and I’m very active, I love LinkedIn, and they’re like are you the Dana Snyder on LinkedIn?

Brynne KrispinGuest24:08

And I just laughed and I was like oh gosh.

Dana SnyderGuest24:10

I was like, if it’s the right, dana Snyder, and she’s like, no, no, no, I love your stuff and so it’s so true, but I don’t think that person has ever said anything to me. But they are watching.

Brynne KrispinGuest24:43

No-transcript, we were just talking all about it, so might as well hop over there. So, brynn Crispin on LinkedIn, or you could go to our website, causefocuscom, and that’s focus with a K.

Dana SnyderGuest24:57

Amazing, awesome. Thank you, brynn, so much for being here. Everyone, thank you so much for listening to Nonprofit Expert presented by Donor Perfect.

Brynne KrispinGuest25:07

Thank you so much.

DonorPerfectHost25:08

Thank you for listening to Nonprofit Expert presented by Donor Perfect. For more information and a special offer, visit DonorPerfect.com/podcast