208. A Pep Talk for 2022: Trends + Advice for Every Nonprofit in the New Year - Katie Appold
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Overview
Meet Katie. As a former nonprofit ED, she's been in the trenches from fundraising to ops to marketing before becoming an industry leader. Today, she leads Do More Good, the parent organization of Nonprofit Hub and Cause Camp which collectively serve more than 50,000 nonprofits throughout North America. We're talking through the trends she's tracking as well as advice she has for nonprofits beyond the New Year. She's dropping some marketing wisdom and shares why you have to stop saying your nonprofit is, "the best kept secret." Tune in to hear why🎧
Today’s Guest
Katie Appold, Executive Director, Do More Good + Nonprofit Hub
“How many things are we doing that cause us stress, take hours, take bandwidth and takes sleep away from us? And ultimately, they yield very little. It’s an interesting filter to run your programs through. Ultimately, is it worth it?”
Episode Transcript
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Episode highlights
Katie’s story and journey to where she is today (2:18)
The current state of the nonprofit sector (5:30)
Katie’s advice as we move into a new year (9:00)
Scaling our organizations for deeper impact (11:45)
Clarifying our messages (17:00)
Growing our messages digitally, and standing out within all the noise in our world today (19:00)
Leveraging technology to work smarter not harder (19:30)
Find a CRM to better serve your donors
The power of community (21:00)
A powerful moment of philanthropy in Katie’s life (24:00)
Katie’s One Good Thing: Pursue the educational things you’ve wanted to pursue. (27:37)
Powerful quotes
“For so long, the sector has had this reputation of overworking.” -Katie
“You know, EDs, were synonymous with long hours and wearing many hats. I think sacrifice is pretty much synonymous with cause work sometimes.” -Katie
“I'm watching it, because I want to see if we step away, or if this is more an impetus to just have better boundaries, are we going to make the changes necessary in the sector so that we keep our people and we keep them engaged and working at 100%? Not 150%.” -Katie
“I don't worry about the sector in terms of attracting top talent. I don't think that'll ever be an issue for us. I do worry about us getting it figured out that it's not cool to work 14 hours a day.” -Katie
“is the juice worth the squeeze? And that is my question.” -Katie
“With every single program, meeting, and thing I'm going to stress about, is the juice worth the squeeze? Is what I'm going to get out of this worth what I'm going to put into it?” -Katie
“How many things are we doing that cause us stress, take hours, take bandwidth and takes sleep away from us? And ultimately, they yield very little. It's an interesting filter to run your programs through even running your your board development practices. Everything you're doing, ultimately, is it worth it?” -Katie
“It's not to stop doing really important work. It's to free up more time and resources for the really important work that you'll see impact.” -Katie
“Very small marketing, branding and fundraising changes yielded a pretty big impact. And you know, nowadays organizations know better. They all try at least to have a great website, but it just shows you how fundamental those core pieces are. Are you on social media? Does your website function and is it easy to get to and easy to use? Are you easily found on the internet?” -Katie
“If you're the best kept secret, you are not doing your job, because you are not reaching those who want to support your mission, and those who need your mission. It's shifting that perspective.” -Katie
“You can’t serve an appeal to everyone.” -Katie
“I think we are so into the train of thought of gathering as much traffic as much attention as many donors as possible that we lose focus on our core audience. So who are the people who are going to be most in tune with what we're doing, they're going to have the most patronage to our to our mission, because that that's our target audience.” -Katie
“But we're competing with the world. We're not competing just with other nonprofits, we're competing with Nike and Apple and iTunes and Netflix. So we need to find those people that are most likely to become passionate supporters of what we're doing, and we need to speak to them. And that needs to be our message.” -Katie
“I’m here to share what I know, we really believe in sharing frameworks and sharing what what's been successful, because we want more people to test it, and we want more people to replicate it.” -Becky
“We never know what you know, what the donors perspective is and why they're doing some of the things they're doing.” -Katie
“I recognized what an amazing act of generosity and what it meant to this individual. And the fact that he let me share in his his moment, his excitement, it was huge.” -Katie
“If you can take you know an entire 24 hours. And just really think through what what is your dream for 2022? And how will you reset to achieve that?” -Katie
Connect with Katie
Connect with do more good
Website / Cause Camp / Nonprofit Hub
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