 and welcome. It's another episode of The Nonprofit Show and I am so happy to have with us today Jennifer Vogler. She's joining us to talk to us about language that speaks to your donors. So stay with us. Again, Jennifer, Jennifer Vogler Creative and I'll share a little bit more about her and she'll share a little bit more about herself momentarily. But before we jump into this conversation about how to speak in language that's going to attract those donors, I want to reintroduce ourselves in case this is your first time joining us. Julia Patrick, hello to you my friend. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and had this wonderful idea to create The Nonprofit Show and we are marching towards our 800th episode and I am so honored, so very honored to serve alongside you Julia each and every day, day in and day out. I'm Jarrett Ransom your non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group and day in day out these companies have been with us from many since the very beginning. So for those of you listening, I want to give a shout out to our friends. Thank you so very much to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Nonprofit Thought Leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk. Please check out these companies as I remind you many of them have been with us from the very beginning and what I like to say although they have other missions but one of their main mission is your mission. So they really are here to lean into your cause and to help you do more good in around and throughout your community. So if you missed any of our episodes I mentioned nearly 800 now you can find us on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV as well as Vimeo and for those of you that are podcast listeners go ahead and queue us up there as well. You can sign up and subscribe you can give us some amazing reviews on there but definitely tune into all of these amazing places where you can stream this entertainment at any time at zero cost so make sure that you do that. So our guest again I am just so happy to have you Jennifer Vogler CEO of Jennifer Vogler Creative joining us from Colorado and I believe that I found you Jennifer on Instagram so for those of you that are on Instagram please do follow Jennifer amazing content that she puts out there I love it I laugh it's like just spot on I think you're you're speaking the words that we all need to hear so Jennifer welcome thank you for joining us. Hi everyone thank you so much for having me I'm really excited to be here and yeah thanks for reaching out you can find me on Instagram at Jennifer Vogler Creative. Yeah tell us a little bit about your company and how you serve the nonprofit community. Yeah so I help nonprofits expand their impact what it might look like is marketing help social media help grant writing event planning or on the strategy side something like creating sponsorship levels for your fundraising events helping with your year-end giving campaign things like that I've kind of done it all I've co-founded a nonprofit I've worked in marketing and events and done a lot of grant writing and development so really kind of customized my work depending on what the nonprofit needs I tend to work with a lot of organizations who are one person shops or not even a full-time staff member so to outsource some of those things that need to get done but there's no time for that person to do it. Perfect well such an important thing is to have people in your back pocket like you who can help us tell our stories you know build that bridge of communication which is so crucial and for me it's really one of those foundational pieces of success so it's really cool to have you on today to talk about that and I want to start with something that you've said on your website and in some of your work the business of nonprofit is business and I'd love for you to kind of frame up what frame up what we're going to talk about because this kind this tends to be a little sticky of an issue and I don't know why. Yeah I don't know why either but something that I've found is that I'm always the one who's pushing the business side of the event or the marketing or the strategy and reminding everyone that we're out here to change lives to have an impact and in order to do that we need money and so if our focus is to raise money to then expand our impacts then we're doing our business and sometimes I think we we think about free help and how can we serve the community with the lowest overhead and that can be dangerous because we need to spend money to be able to expand our impacts and serve more people. Yeah you know one of the things and I'm curious Jennifer if you have experienced this as well I hear from a lot of organizations that are you know what I would consider those smaller organizations that you mentioned maybe maybe one two three staff members and they really fuel their organization by passion and not by funding not by money and so it's like passion can only go so far and as we've all experienced compassion fatigue and burnout it's like passion is not the fuel that will keep your lights on 10 years down the road our road have you seen this as well and have you experienced that? Yeah definitely it will it will get you started it will get some passion at people on your board as your first board members but if you don't have a strategy for fundraising and the system's in place to communicate with your donors after they donate and to strategize larger partnerships you're going to burn out. Yeah yeah it's really an interesting conversation and I think that it's one as Jared you said you know it's just it's a hard one to have especially in the beginning and then there's like shame it seems like when you lose your passion are you just get exhausted you know that like what do you do? One of the things that you talk about Jennifer and I'm really interested interested to get more feedback is cause selling and how raising money works into that not just through fundraising but you said something really interesting and that was having a strategy about this. Yeah talk to us about that. Yeah so you talk you start with the passion right and you have some people who are involved who are really passionate and can get some friends to donate and maybe they know a company over here that has a little foundation but how do you really build the actual foundation for success so how do you get involved in community events? How do you strategize major gifts or corporate sponsorships or a once a year Gallo or some sort of fundraising events? What are these different pillars that you can use to raise money to support your mission? Another thing I talk about a lot is program costs and program fees a lot of nonprofits want to provide all their programs for free and that's great if you can do it but you don't have to provide every program for free for everyone you can have scholarships you can have different opportunities for people who can't afford your programs to participate and you can still charge for your programs because it's going back into your mission and it's helping those that can't afford your programs and I think a lot of times nonprofit leaders want to do everything for everyone for free but it's yours on you. It does and I remember seeing that post again back to your Instagram feed that talks about this because you're right and I've been with numerous organizations that I've heard from the board but we can't charge for this right and my thought and my question back to them is why and did you know that X Y and Z other nonprofits charge for their services and they're like I had no idea and it's like it is a big piece of many organizations you know revenue streams and revenue models so I love that you're waving that flag Jennifer I love that you're bringing you know attention and education to that because that is a big piece you know raising money to support our mission we exist to you know to really provide a solution to that community problem so why not charge right for organizations and people that might be able to pay for that right yeah it's it's an interesting aspect and some of the things that you're talking about are really foundational to marketing because you have to have some of these decisions made before you market or before you brand and so let's kind of jump into that with the notion that how do we speak about our cause and about our impact because that's kind of like to me that magic elixir that allows us to go back out into that fundraising community or mode what are you what are you seeing and how can we really look at this yeah I'm going to share with you my favorite nugget and I even have votes here so that I don't mess it up because I want to give credit to the person who developed this framework are you guys familiar with Donald Miller and the story brand framework he speaks a lot and I've kind of uh shifted it into this nonprofit space of positioning the donor the volunteer the supporter as the hero not your organization so a lot of times we hear organizations that make it about themself they say your donation allows us to or we brought out this many volunteers and you're making it about yourself instead of making it about the cause which is what people care about people don't care about your organization how many staff members you have and how many volunteers you brought out they care about the impact so instead your donation and then state the impact perver preserves the forest or rescue dogs or feeds the hungry so when you're speaking speak about the cause and the impact and not what you do make the donor the supporter the hero of the story I love the reframe and I feel like this is coming from more organizations more and more Jennifer probably over the last year I've seen it but I really feel like maybe many of us myself included you know got into this like pattern and then just kind of trapped into the well this is how we talk this is our language this is our voice but now hearing this reframe I just I love it and it does speak you know to the heroes of the community that are allowing this impact because of their support yeah I hear a lot of times at the end of the year or after your year and giving we raised $80,000 right just change it to you raise $80,000 because you're speaking to the people that donated and they're the ones that did it you just kind of facilitated and guided it Donald Miller would use guide as your as your role right you're the guide you're not the hero they're the hero make them feel like the hero yeah and then I think that speaks to like naturally just chemical natural chemicals in our body and dolphins right like then we feel good and we want to do more of that we want to do more you know supporting individuals preserving forest and I just think then that just you know repeats a cycle of just altruistic feel good a lot of times you you hear that boi use the boi because of you and I think is for somehow some reason and we have a guest later on this week who's going to be talking about nonprofit growth and I think a lot of times we get trapped in the nonprofit sector about growth growth growth and you know what it means and the numbers and how many employees we have and how many buildings and and we we don't frame the discussion so it's interesting that you would bring this up because we're somewhat trapped in this this thought about what do we promote right do we look more successful when we have more employees and what does your audience want to hear why are you there you know yeah yeah I remember hearing from one of our guest Julia over the three years and I can't recall who it is but they had said no one cares about your board like they don't want to hear who your board is and I was like that is shocking really you know and I really feel like similarly you said the same it's like no one cares how many staff members you have no one cares like what we really care about is how many people have received shelter how many animals have received a new home right like that is the impact and that is why you know we want to give to these organizations and why we we galvanize to provide that support yeah Jennifer why do you think that we in the nonprofit sector don't look at the impact as much as we should like how do we start kind of reframing to use your word to be thinking more about impact yeah um I wonder for a while we were talking about sharing our story right why did you get into nonprofit why did why did your organization feel tell your story and it just um I think it's a little piece of it and it's nice it's a nice to have but I don't think it's how you should strategize your marketing or your development really because it's not really about your organization it's about the people that you're serving or or your costs or your impacts really you know one of the things sorry to interrupt one of the things I've heard recently is like you know when when this problem is solved this is where we would be so really painting the picture for the donors and the constituents like we wouldn't be here if this problem wasn't here so help us eliminate this problem and that to me I thought was like the most shocking of shocking because that clearly would put people out of jobs right it would put organizations you know on the dissolution list it would it would just like really change the community and I thought but that is our mission our mission is to eradicate homelessness eradicate hunger imagine if we did that yeah it's an interesting thing talk to me a little bit Jennifer about the visual piece of community of communicating um our our impact and and falling into the rabbit hole of data and overwhelming people with with that or do you feel like that's that's where we need to be like kind of help us understand that yeah I think some people really like the data I really like the numbers so I I do think you want to have multiple means of sharing your impact some people want to see a video of the person or the animal or the whoever that you change their life right they want to hear the story from their mouth some people want to see a picture of it some people want to read a statistic some people want to know you know where their exact dollars went um so I think including all of that is really valuable one thing I saw that was really cute this year um and like a year ends kind of summary from a trail group is they did all their normal statistics and then they did we packed out however many feet of toilet paper and they did some silly and this many snack bars eaten by our staff and so you get this in the mail and you read about the amazing work that they did and the impact that they had but you also have like a little laugh right yeah you make it more real yeah yeah I think just approaching it from different angles because different people respond to um to different things yeah talk to us a little bit about moving through that with the use of uh a visual tool such as photography and video and even audio I know you're so active on insta and and you communicate a lot through your voice you know on instagram what are you seeing some of the things that we can as nonprofits you know use yeah I think video is huge right now whether it be a youtube instagram I think it depends on I mean tiktok to maybe depending on where that's going this week um but I think it's important to know your audience and who you're trying to target and then choosing there's so many different means of social media you can do podcasts right um so figuring out where your audience kind of lives in their social media life and then creating things that are valuable things that are educational things that have a little sense of humor my my instagram is kind of silly and if you don't like silly then you're not probably going to follow me you have to be yourself um I think nonprofits can really showcase their personality more um we tend to go into canva and make like a pretty post which is great but it doesn't reach a lot of people um and people want to connect with you they want to see the people behind the nonprofit they want to see what you're actually doing um so I do share a lot of tips on my instagram for how nonprofits can make reels and videos that show their impact or highlight their volunteers um things like that yeah I'm all up for the silly so you've got me hooked on that one yeah question though is you know we talk a lot about and I assure you due to there's so much noise there is a lot of content there's a lot of material there's a lot of opinions how are you guiding your clients to really cut through the noise and to achieve attention um you know from their donors and supporters like what what is that I don't know what is the magic algorithm for that do you know um there is a lot of noise because every social media expert that you follow is going to tell you tell you that you have to post once a day so think about how many people you follow and if you saw everyone's one post a day you'd be on scrolling on instagram all day so you're only going to see the best content um so really I try to take the pressure off of people first of all you don't have to post every day um find something that works for you and create a strategy you can't be going onto your phone every day and thinking what am I going to post and posting right then and there you'll you'll burn out there's no way um so having a strategy having the content pillars having some different buckets that you tend to create your content in having a few things just recorded ahead of time and ready to go can be really helpful but it starts with the strategy if you're just on there every day and kind of scrolling and copying what other people do and um jumping on trends and not really creating your own voice and your own personality really on your social media um then you are going to get lost because you're doing what everyone else is doing yeah I heard a fascinating comment um from someone I follow and I don't think they're in the non-profit arena but you know really seen as a thought leader in their space and they mentioned that they unfollowed everyone that did something similar to them because that was really their way of saying I am going to create my original content and I'm not going to fall into what you just mentioned Jennifer like you know recycling something else of somebody else's post or really like falling into the trap of the latest trend and I thought wow that is brazen you know like to unfollow these people so then it wasn't kind of maybe even in their subconscious of I'm going to create something similar because look how many engagements they received and I just thought wow that was bold and I loved it you know I was like that is that's that's pretty brave yeah I think if you have your personality or your strategy set you won't be inclined to kind of jump on trends I definitely follow different creators in different fields yeah people like what they do um and yeah I don't I don't follow people that are kind of doing a lot of a lot of the same um because you don't want that influence all the time you want to see creative things and be inspired like I want to follow people that inspire me to do something different than whatever the trending like dance thing is yeah it sounds to me like you're you're calling us to step back and almost create if you will a library of content or images or video and then figure out how we're going to deploy it um or are you advocating that we're a little bit more spontaneous how do we walk that that line yeah I used to be really into like batching and making you can do I can do it still with um carousel posts where I have a few topics and I'm just going to spend a couple hours um in canva and just make a bunch of content um as far as videos and things that are more like trendy or on topic I tend to do them more spontaneous so I like having things saved that if I'm having a bad day or I don't want to get in front of the can't don't want to put my face in front of the camera I have something I can push out um but also don't pressure myself that I have to push something out every day um I really enjoy creating series so I have a couple series that I do on my Instagram one is called coffee talk which is a longer video format where we dive deep into a nonprofit topic like this um I sit there in a chair with my coffee and um and we chat for 45 to 60 seconds it's not like a trending I'm not trying to like capture all these viewers it doesn't really have a great reach but it provides value for people that come to my Instagram and want to dive deep into a topic then I'll do some shorter form of real videos that maybe use trending audio or a more trending theme um to try to get out um and expand my reach and then I have a lot of carousel posts that are really information packed where someone can go through and you know really deep dive and read some things and scroll through my page and they have some content to read so I think having a varied approach is um is really important I love that I think it's really smart and I think it um it makes it what you just said makes it a lot more achievable yeah and I think this is where nonprofits I mean get get stuck it's like oh this is I can't do this I can't manage it I can't achieve it on top of everything else I have to do it's really been fun to have you on today to talk about this Jennifer as we as we warned you before man it goes by so fast it goes by so fast I can't believe it but thank you both so much this was so much fun oh yeah no it's been really fun you've been talking our love language here for sure and and that is you know how do we talk about ourselves how do we talk about our impact and our missions and get other people talking about us as well Jennifer Vogler CEO Jennifer Vogler creative Jennifer Vogler creative .com as we can find her as well as well as on many many social media platforms especially her Instagram account check her out because it's really a great way to get infused by a lot of creativity and support and maybe it will help you to kind of reframe what it is you're trying to do so Jennifer it's been a lot of fun and we are so thrilled that you would join us today from snowy Colorado if you join us early Jennifer told us that when she woke up this morning it was one degree out that's crazy that's why I have my tea here and I'm in my flannel so I'm nice and cozy good keep it that way because we need to keep you creative again I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit academy been joined today by my intrepid co-host Jared Ransom the nonprofit nerd again we are so so very fortunate to have these supporting people in our lives and on camera with us every day and they include our friends at Bloomerang American nonprofit academy your part-time controller nonprofit thought leader fundraising academy at national university staffing boutique the nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk these are the folks that are with us day in and day out as a matter of fact the managing partner Jared of your part-time controller is in our community for a few days this week she is and all of their social media right now is blowing up with their 30th anniversary our birthday so it's been a lot of fun to watch that yeah it's been amazing your part-time controller has been with us from the very get go and so it's really fun to see them moving forward hey everybody as we like to end every episode of the nonprofit show we want to remind ourselves our viewers our listeners Jennifer to stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here thank you so much Jennifer