 Great. Welcome everyone. You've made it to Thursday 5.15 at SoCAP. So welcome. Good job. My name is Amy Hartzler. A lot of gratitude to be on the stage with these folks. I will mention, you might see five names up there and four bodies up here. We were supposed to have five and a half. Nikki Sylvesterie is very pregnant and woke up this morning and could not breathe. So it's not able to join us. We are wishing her well. And we'll share some of her insights today in her absence. But yeah, we'll just take you, give you a quick spin of who we are on the stage and we'll start with the next slide. Alpha. Oh, hi. Hello everyone. Did you want to join me to introduce myself? Sure. I just wanted to add to Nikki's news that she can still breathe but was having difficulty due to the air. It's minor correction, right? Thank you. My name is Alpha Damalash. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Rising Tide Capital. We're a non-profit organization that is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey. We've been around for about 14 years and we work with entrepreneurs in inner city communities to help them start and grow their own businesses. And we're in the process of expanding our work nationally with partners. So delighted to be here with you and looking forward to communicating effectively. So good evening. My name is Rodney Foxworth. I'm here sort of in two capacities, I guess. I am the incoming Executive Director of Bali, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. And I'm also the founder of an organization called Invested Impact. And I'm actually realizing that... So Alpha's on my board and she's also a fellow. We have a local economy fellowship that focuses on individuals that are pioneering local economy solutions. And I'm also realizing that we have a connection as well because of my work with the Calvert Foundation and the hours to own initiative in Baltimore that we'll speak to you a little bit about in a bit. Great. Well, hi, everyone. I'm actually gonna... This is an alphabetical order and we are not sitting in alpha order, so I apologize, but I am Amy Hartzler. Just to keep you guys awake. Part of what we're gonna share today are some insights that emerged in my work contributing a chapter to a book you might have heard about while you've been here this week by Jed Emerson, the Impact Assets Handbook for Investors. That was an early attempt to try to produce some best practices, share some messaging that we know works, some things to maybe avoid in what is a really emergent industry. I mean, one thing that I would say on the communication side, if you're working in impact investing, if anyone tells you they're an expert in this, I would go in the other direction. No one has it quite figured out in part because it's an emergent space and in part because it's a really complex subject, as I'm sure most of you know, to communicate about. So we'll share more about that today as well. Great. Well, hi, everyone. Andrew Perucci. I head up Calvert Foundation's marketing and user experience work. A lot of that ends up being communicating to general audiences. So people who are not really steeped in impact investing in the way we are and don't speak the lingo and are just kind of getting their feet wet and trying to understand where they can engage. For folks who aren't familiar with Calvert Foundation, we are a nonprofit investment firm. We have a portfolio of mission-driven organizations about 100 right now, both in the U.S. and 70 countries. The portfolio is around 350 million. And what makes Calvert Foundation a bit unique is that we work with both accredited larger investors and also non-accredited investors. So we have a product called the Community Investment Note. It's very widely available, very accessible. And so part of our history and mission has always been about democratizing impact investing, so reaching those people who might not even consider themselves investors with this message that you can align your money, however small it might be, with the things that you care about. So we, yeah, we have kind of the 80-20 effect where most of our capital actually comes from the larger corporate investors or institutional investors, but most of the number of our investors are individuals. So over our 20-plus year history, we've worked with probably 18,000 individuals to help them kind of align their money with their values. So looking forward to sharing some of our insights with some of the engagement campaigns that we've done. And yeah, just to briefly add to Nikki, who is totally safe and breathing well now, because she's home. Yeah, Nikki, I'll share a few of the contributions that Nikki has made to this field, but just wanted to kind of honor her work in this space and certainly brilliant bright light in her right, and we'll go ahead and move on into communicating about impact. So we have a very big topic to try to touch on, you know, touch on many specific aspects of today. One of the things that made me excited to pull together, you know, these folks to be in conversation with today is that, you know, we really do bring some experience across a number of channels. We have folks who have been in broadcasts, podcasts, obviously print, as well as just thought leadership more generally. So we'll touch on a number of things, in part because Nikki is not able to join us in particular. We're going to leave some really nice open time for Q&A. So please consider the questions, the burning questions you have about communications in this space, and we will try to take all of them as possible. Next slide. I wanted to start with a little bit of context, and we can go to the next slide again. It's a noisy world, I'm sure you all know well. We've really wired ourselves at this point as humans to ignore and delete as much as possible in this kind of broad scheme of what we see every day. There's a study that was done, FMRI brain scans, that show in particular that when we are exposed to messages about giving away money to do good charitable giving, dopamine is released, all these happy parts of our brain lights up. When we're shown messages about deferred returns or investing, all those happy parts of our brain shut down, and literally the reptilian base of our brain is what's activated. So at this point, we've literally wired ourselves as audiences, as consumers of messages about money to not take in that information, to in fact actively ignore it while activating the parts of our brain that do not know how to make sense of this idea of doing good with investment capital. So I share that because if you're like me, you've struggled to find those messages that resonate with people and it's not just you, it's that as audiences, as actual media consumers, we have trained ourselves to receive messages this way. So hard to make a connection, hard to then sustain the dialogue, not to discourage you, we're also going to share some things that work, but I just feel like it's important to obviously understand the science, the actual science of what we're dealing with. Next slide. Yeah, I can go ahead to the next one. I think it's also really important from a context perspective to just have a sense of the ratio of what philanthropic dollars look like as compared to invested wealth. And if we actually go to the next slide, we can see the sources for that data. The yellow, it might be a little bit hard to read, but in 2014, as this is cited, 358 billion in charity in 2015, we see that investable assets are 33 trillion. So understanding the role and the relationship between philanthropic capital and invested capital, both in terms of how we receive content and communications, but also just in terms of the change that we're all trying to make in this world. Everyone's in this room because we believe that capital can actually create the world we want and just really recognizing the scale of how the scale and the role of philanthropic capital to kind of seed some ideas, grow those ideas to the point where they're investable, and then really do our best to constantly educate audiences so that they understand the volume of investable capital that exists will allow us to begin that hopefully increasingly quickening process of shifting capital out of destructive practices into ones that actually create the world we want. Understanding this ratio especially is our role in trying to communicate about invested wealth and creating trust with audiences by educating them in the context and understanding their role and creating pressure on the people who are supporting in some cases the direction of invested wealth is also important in the work we do. So I just wanted to offer some guiding reflections and these are kind of in the book as well. Communications, at least again in my experience, I don't know if Andrew would share that too, especially in your role, but oftentimes communications is kind of the last thing people think about. People are like, oh, we've designed this perfect thing and here's the strategy and now go tell amazing stories about it. And as a communicator, it's really important, especially around money for the reasons I've mentioned, that we have really good answers for these very predictable questions that come up. Why is the money going there? Who's deciding? What's going to happen with my money when it goes there? All of those questions have to have satisfying answers for people to actually make it then go through the often also difficult steps of moving their money into good things. So just understanding that communications really needs to be considered at the same time that you're thinking about the change you seek and your goals is really important. Also impact investing as a term as much as I use it and I suspect a lot of people do in this room. What I find again is that investors are just increasingly critical. They're like, well, what kind of impact does that create? Is that the impact I want? Which may not be the impact you want. This lack of standardization, the fact that we're all kind of operating from different sets of metrics and not using the same language to even talk about those things either, again makes it just very difficult to make a connection in a way that is satisfying and persuasive in getting people to move their money from here to there. So we just offer those as reflections in addition to just noting in particular as I don't know about other folks but the last couple of days I've kind of had this headache and the smoke affects me. These problems in our world are urgent and very tangible right now and nearby and so I personally feel a great deal of urgency to activate what I've learned and also share it if I can along with the brilliance of these folks to help support our shared goal of moving money in a better direction. A few questions that I think are helpful to keep in mind. Some folks in this room are marketing a very specific product that produces a certain set of questions and needs. I hear a lot of folks have come to me and they're like, we want to lead a movement. We want to get all the people investing all the money and all the good things. Those two things are different. They require different resourcing to some extent. There's a commitment to long-term conversations with folks and certainly different resources in some cases. Really understanding, kind of in particular around impact and the positive impact you seek, what is that theory of change that's going to accomplish your goal is really key in addition to, of course, understanding who that audience is that's most important to move. Again, a number of folks will come up and they'll say, oh, I need a viral video and I'm like, do you? I don't know. Do you need to reach 10 million people or 300 of the right people? Those are key questions as a communicator that we need to have good answers to as well. So the next slide. I want to introduce a slightly different way than of thinking about those audiences we're trying to activate and then we're going to hear about some examples of some of these folks. But one of the things that I found really interesting, and again the book chapter goes into much deeper detail around each of these, what I call psychographics, big marketing term, what are some of the themes that unite across your audiences in terms of their roles. So I think it's very common for people to say, well, I need my messaging matrix. It says, talk to financial advisors this way and I need to talk to my retail investors this way and my anchor institutions this way and sometimes that's true. And I think it's also helpful to really look at what unites these folks across their different roles. So I offer, again what I call these psychographics, one being the pragmatic altruist. I suspect a number of us in this room are the pragmatic altruist which is generally that kind of individual who just wants to do well and do good. They often come into impact investing through philanthropy, may or may not want to be super involved in the actual kind of weeds of their investments, but they're really just trying to mitigate the harm that their capital can do. And then moving into, I think an interesting, again we'll hear some example systems weavers. People who look at collective assets in different places and think about how do we weave these together to have greater collective impact than we could ever have as any one entity or any one institution. And then there's that radical seeker. Again, there's lots of them here. It's wonderful to be in that company as well. These people who are pretty advanced financial activists, they're pretty fluent in finance for the most part. They're really looking for how do I activate every single dollar in service of the world to create. We're hoping to create more of those all the time. And then there's the majority, I would argue, of people who are just indifferent. They may or may not have wealth. They may or may not have a lot of time, but they generally don't have a lot of interest in thinking about their investment. So if we go to the next slide, we'll just kind of hold these ideas in our head and maybe some guiding questions and I'll just kind of offer it to Andrew to share some examples of what we mean by the pragmatic altruists. Sure. So from time to time, I try to pick up the phone and call some of our investors and just sort of talk through what are your motivations for investing $50 on our platform? How did you find out about us? What attracted you to us? What caused you to kind of go through the process of putting in your bank account information and going through all these steps? Because it does get to some of those emotional and functional needs that people have that go beyond sort of the persona level or the demographic level. So that's what we try to understand. So one of the people that I talked with recently is a 26-year-old woman from Illinois who over the past, I'd say three years, has built up a balance of about $300 with us in increments between $20 and $50. So she'll buy a note for $20 and then a $50 note and so on. And so in talking through that with her, she has both kind of the practical needs and also, I would describe it as more kind of the emotional needs that our product kind of fulfills for her. So she's very organized and methodical in how she manages her finances and her investments on a monthly basis. She logs into all of her bank accounts, all of her investment accounts, grabs her balances, puts them into a Google spreadsheet, and so I thought that was really interesting because even though she only has about $300 with us, she really wants to know exactly kind of how much interest has accrued on her investments and so on. But at the same time, we were talking through more of her, well, why did you invest motivations? And she was telling me about how her family perceives kind of her charitable giving and her investing, and they don't necessarily agree with the fact that she's doing impact investments or investments that have this explicit social outcome. And so she sort of sees investing with us as making a statement to her family that, look, I can earn returns and this is a viable, legit investment product, but at the same time it supports a number of the issues that I care about. So it's empowering women, it's getting financed to small entrepreneurs that need loans and things like that. So I think for her it's kind of balancing those two modes of engagement as she works with us. And then the other example is a really interesting guy who lives in Texas, he's about 60, and I would describe him as libertarian. I don't know if in fact he is a libertarian, but just some of the ways that he was describing his investment methodology kind of caused me to think that, okay, this guy holds those views. So his thing was that he had done pretty well for himself in the business world and his own investments and now felt more of a need to give back, but to do so in a way that wasn't just giving away all of his money, he really wanted to see his investments as empowering people, helping people help themselves become more self-sufficient. So for him it really wasn't, oh, I see needy people and I want to support them with an investment, it's okay, I'm investing in you and you have to make yourself better. So those are just two examples of how people kind of approach our product and think about our product. We have some systems weavers, which I think Bonnie may be offering up some examples of. Yeah, so I should say before I get into the systems weaver sort of examples that I have, just thinking about the importance of communication at every step of the way and the work that I've done in the social sector particularly. And to Amy's point, oftentimes we just really think about communications as like the very last thing and don't put enough investment into it and to really think about many of the things that I know, many of us certainly on stage but I know many of you in the audience we're really grappling with really large challenges and opportunities, right? And so even thinking about the communication strategies that we've employed through a variety of different things that I've done in my career, whether it was with Be Me we're really trying to create a much more holistic picture of African-American men in the communities where like Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, we're quite frankly, African-American men are seen as not as assets but as challenges that need to be solved, right? That's a big challenge across the country. Thinking about the question in Baltimore when we founded the Impact Hub, are we really looking at social entrepreneurship as a real viable opportunity for challenging some of the systemic issues that exist in the city? And then thinking about now my role at Bali to consider how do we get people to really think about local solutions, local economic solutions and reimagining what the economy can look like, right? These are all really massive opportunities and challenges and quite frankly, communication has to be centered. We have to think about storytelling. We also have to be really sophisticated about how we take that approach and I really have always thought about how much change can happen if we really center communication being really strategic and really being sophisticated in our approach. So that said, much of my work has really been around ecosystems, right? And so when I think about systems, I myself am one, but I'm going to speak a little bit about some of my colleagues and partners that I've been able to work with, particularly in my work in Baltimore City, but I think of, for example, a colleague of mine who is the Chief Business Officer for a large nonprofit organization that actually creates their own social enterprises. And the organization has really been grounded in human services and workforce development for many years and over the last 10 years have really made the connection between entrepreneurship and investment in advancing the opportunities for low income, low wealth individuals, and particularly in East Baltimore, which is a very historically disinvested community, one of the more heavy hit places in Baltimore City. And so this individual has come into it from our approach of how do we actually communicate and think about the ways that workforce development, human services, investing, and philanthropy can actually come together to advance the interests of particularly African Americans in East Baltimore and looking at it from our approach of, I care about the individuals in this geography, but at the same time, how do I communicate to multiple audiences to make sure that we're advancing the interests of these folks? And so really having an approach that is about weaving in many different stakeholders so that you're not really focused on just one stakeholder, but you're looking at it as a fabric that you need to weave together to have a coherent strategy. And so that's something that I think many of us are constantly evolving toward. We can't just look at it as we're solving a situation of poverty alleviation or we're creating jobs, we're doing job training, but we also have to think about the investment capital that is needed and how do we communicate to people that haven't necessarily looked at the fullness of the breadth of the opportunities there to think more strategically and collaboratively. And so that's one example and I think about the work of Impact Hub when we were founding that as well. We're really trying to make the case that Impact Hub and this community of social entrepreneurs was an opportunity for individuals across the city to have access to a platform for creating change in the city. And so many of our initial stakeholders were philanthropy, entrepreneurs themselves, and also more traditional debt providers. And so they all shared this vision of what Impact Hub could look like. But we also had to communicate in ways that were drastically different. These are people that were in, representing, we had investment from an anchor institution, a large university in the city, and their interests were really about how do we have an active space along this particular corridor in Baltimore City that our students would be interested in having access to. That was one thing. Our philanthropic partners are really interested in creating entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly for millennial entrepreneurs, but not exclusively. And then many of them also were interested in the opportunities that could be afforded for job creation from the Impact Hub. And then we also had this really large community of entrepreneurs, particularly entrepreneurs that did not have access to a lot of the incubation spaces and co-working spaces in the city, and really we're looking at a community-grounded solution. And so we had this multi-tiered approach in terms of engaging with multiple stakeholders. Great. Yeah. So working where I do, and also an urban environment, very much similar to the mix of audiences that you have to cater to when you're a nonprofit. One thing that I will say that we did very early on at Rising Tide Capital when we decided, even just naming the organization, there was a lot of organizing around how it is that we can ensure that brand could communicate to the multitude of stakeholders that we're trying to bring to the table. And so there is the saying, Rising Tide lifts all boats that comes from a certain side of the political arena, perhaps, but we kind of use that to pull people in to have a conversation and maybe be a storytelling organization right from the get-go to say, sure, logically, Rising Tide can lift all boats. The question is, do we have boats? And so where we were located, we didn't have too many boats, or at least we had a lot of people who were trying to build boats, but they were wearing life jackets and swimming against the tide. And so we're like, what would it look like if we actually come together to build boats? So that was kind of a core decision around how a branding decision could enable you to tell really powerful stories that people don't forget, and that could help bridge divides across a multitude of different audiences. Then when we looked at the work of building entrepreneurs in the communities where we were working to do this work, we realized that the storytelling about the work itself and about the people and the entrepreneurs was just as important as actually resourcing them with the business management education, the coaching services, and the long term interventions that we'd envisioned and that we would need to tell these stories over the long term and in a sustained way. That meant it most definitely made sense for us to be a non-profit. Secondarily, we opted, even before we built out a fundraising and development team which is core to the non-profit survival, we actually built out a communications team. And so to this day, the communications team at Rising Tide is stronger than all the other teams and it acts as a hub for a variety of different communication needs. So, you know, out of a team of 30 that are focused on mostly on the program side, you have four people whose everyday jobs full-time is dedicated to manning the variety of different audiences and platforms that need to be communicated through. The beauty of doing that has been multi-fold. It enabled us to tell really compelling stories about our entrepreneurs, not just to other external audiences, but really to our entrepreneur community and to the places where they live and they work. It enabled us to shift how the communities where we work are actually perceived as opposed to being places where there is disinvestment and drugs and violence. It became a place where people are starting all kinds of things. So people would say, I don't know what's going on with that neighborhood, but I'm seeing these people telling stories about our entrepreneurs in their local papers. We even, one wonderful example is we were very successful with one of our entrepreneurs to such a point that people thought that she was running for office or people in the community thought she was preparing to run for office. She'd never considered running for office before. Her business also involved working with elder care services and so they were, most people were absolutely convinced that she was going after the elder vote because that's who votes in our communities. And lo and behold now she's a state assembly woman in New Jersey because she decided to run for office when she built up a great following and she's a wonderful and hyper communicator because we also instill that in our entrepreneurs how to communicate as they're building their companies. But we are funded by a variety of different kinds of funders. I mean if you looked at the mix of audiences just in our funder pool there's tremendous diversity for the reasons why they invest in our mission. And so communicating to them is not a one size fits all exercise by any measure. So I think one of the things that has been really helpful when you're looking at this impact space where you have such a diversity of reasons for why people show up being able to try and thread across what the values are that move them to come there and then have phenomenal communications experts say hey that is a radical seeker and you're like great I would never have called it a radical seeker but yes and we have radical seekers who are on one extreme of the political spectrum to another and they never like they don't necessarily hang out with each other. Someday we hope they will get to hang out with each other in really deep and meaningful ways but they're mutually investing in a mission space because they care about this mission for a variety of different reasons and they're trying to reimagine how they could use their capital to actually have the same impact because everybody agrees that people should build boats as fast as possible and we should put people in them so we could all rise together. So there is a tremendous power in having and resourcing a communications infrastructure and maybe that is the kind of thing where when you look at it from a business model perspective you say oh this is so expensive it's too much we can't carry it but it's really it's not I think the benefit that I've found in building out a comms infrastructure is that you can pivot as quickly as the times are shifting all around you and so when you're often engaging with just outside consultants or around a very specific and narrow topic by the time that piece comes back to you the world has already changed and it's kind of frustrating and you've already and then you're like going through changes and you pay for all of the changes along the way and in the end you just like you know give up but when you have an in-house team you could and you would still need to resource them because they're like a tremendous hunger for like immense 24-7 communications but you can be really nuanced in the ways in which you can use social media you can be thoughtful and create thought leadership pieces but all of that takes a lot of like massaging and culling different kinds of knowledge from different parts of your universe that it is very helpful to have that kind of backbone infrastructure in your entities to try and push your communication strategies and you know greater visibility means greater credibility means greater fundability hopefully for all of our work including funders like Peter Peter Buffett and Jennifer Buffett are part of like an example of radical seekers where certainly I could say that their investment in our mission has been incredibly holistic and something that they've partnered with us on is not only resourcing the work but being able to have conversations about the work and their why and being willing to really engage in a way where you know we've had podcasts where we talk about why this work is really important along with Peter and Peter is coming to an event actually on November 2nd in New Jersey if you're around and welcome to come join us where he's going to tell his story of his relationship with money with piano and cello accompaniment because this is how creative you have to get when it comes to having conversations about money and making sure everybody's wired and awake and trying to reach people in different ways Yeah. Just some tactical recommendations and kind of holding some of these things in mind as well and some just what I'm calling easy-ish wins at least and then we'll leave time for Q&A The next slide we'll see is a chart which goes into much more detail in the book chapter and the impact assets handbook for investors but just to give you a sense as Alpha was saying what I've seen over and over again is the most successful communications are ones that are grounded in shared values by ones that talk about these are the best product features this is how great our financial structure is there are things that call on our desire for courage or imagination or agency and so this is not prescriptive this is not cover every single beautiful flavor of humanity but just to give you a sense of how there are key themes and values that have been tested to be resonant with these different types of audiences one thing you'll probably see is that radical seekers surprise tend to want all of it I want equity I want vision I want self-sufficiency and that's what they don't settle for much less which is what makes them radicals but we'll move on to the next slide and share an infographic yeah so this is an example of a win that we've had at Calvert Foundation we're communicating very succinctly and clearly hopefully about how the investment product works from the perspective of an individual so what we're really trying to communicate here are three concepts the first one is that it is a pooled fund so you're putting your money in with thousands of other investors the second concept is that it's supporting a diversity of different types of organizations and projects from agriculture to housing to education to small business lending and so on and the third one is that you get your money back so it's not that you make a donation one time and you walk away from it it is this ongoing relationship that you have where you stay tethered to the returns that are being generated by these organizations so we've gotten a lot of use out of this and it's something that we've put together and probably an hour and have used in a lot of different places one thing that's important just to underscore there is just people obviously learn in different ways so clearly having visual content to support the many many words that a lot of us love is just really important next slide let's just go ahead and do the next slide actually one experiment that we did that was really interesting this is for the hours to own campaign it's a place based impact investing campaign with Calvert the campaign that I helped name and brand and launch we wanted to do a very specific target to millennials and so there's a lot that we know about millennials I'm sure you guys probably know this too but one of the things that we found through extensive testing with Upworthy now this is a couple years ago they were hitting about 800,000 unique folks a month lots of email subjects lots of landing pages with like new economy Wall Street to Main Street different terms around investing crickets no clicks Upworthy said leverage what we call the curiosity gap which is one of the ways that they get people to engage with content this can be a little bit tricky I think the important thing too and it's kind of counter to a lot of advice that I even give which is be really straightforward and be really clear this tactic the goal was to just get emails for our list so we could go to the top of the funnel engage people who would not normally engage with us so that we could begin a long-term conversation where we were kind of going back and forth between what I call head and heart-based content so it's a long ongoing dialogue providing people with that kind of rational case for investing along with the heart-based storytelling but this is just how do we get them in the door we know that they don't want to think about this stuff so how do we just start the conversation so we ended up with this literally like a nonsense title it's in the video that we did it was a 90-second piece we cast two comedians and scripted this 90-minute piece that basically suggests like why can't we expect investing to create real value that I can see and also create real financial returns that I can benefit from so the subject headline that out-tested everything else was two guys I can't read this exactly two guys in our room start arguing it's 90 seconds, it's passive aggressive and funny that was it but what was so fascinating was that after people clicked through to that it out-performed every other comparable so it shows you that people even if they're not interested if you tell them this is what it's about they're not interested but once they get in it higher shares, higher signups than any other relevant promotional content so for this campaign I think it's a valid question to have a thousand names on a list or 2,500 names in a week is that success all I can tell you is those are 2,500 names we didn't have before we ran this campaign that's 2,500 conversations you can start in a week and that was important for us to continue to gather more data to understand how do we have a satisfying relationship with people and answer the questions that come up for them next slide I'll offer this up in Niki's absence, Niki Sylvesterie helped manage and brand this campaign on behalf of another radical seeker, Sally Calhoun who's also part of the Bali community in the local economy investor circle the no-regrets initiative so this is one of those beautiful cases where you get 2 words that say a whole lot no-regrets Sally has a fully integrated regenerative asset strategy that is deployed across a charitable foundation the Glow Prouder Foundation investment, vertical, Sienega Capital and also she's a rancher where she actually practices holistic land management and pilots a lot of things that she ultimately invests in and grants to specifically around soil health that's Sally's primary focus is soil health and regenerative agriculture so the website kind of leads people through a series of questions that's one thing I would offer as a tactic it's inquiry-based messaging in this field in particular is very successful what do I do now what does this mean just asking questions that allow the audiences to start answering those questions and engaging with your content very successful in this case you know what I would consider the easy win is giving them just a clear call to action what do I do now commit to having no regrets what does no-regrets mean to you might be different than what it means to me but be in that inquiry about defining what it means at the end of your life to say I am really proud of what every dollar that I contributed to this economy did so not an easy win exactly it's a tall task but really compelling framing and messaging next slide the easy win just to be bold and clear just yeah so really interesting I wanted to first say again to re-emphasize everything that's been said but you know communication really is or it can be and should be an opportunity and one of the things that alpha pointed out was thinking about the context and the places that right in time works in and I think I'm thinking about this conversation that was in the other day where someone said you can't describe a place full of poverty there's not opportunity and addiction all these sort of things because if you want me to invest in that place I want to see opportunity and I think it's really important to think about that in the context of the work that we all do and what you're working on I'll give you an example just really quickly to think about for example in the city of Detroit which is 83% African-American when I was with the Knight Foundation and Be Me which at the time stood for black male engagement we did a media audit of media coming out of the city around innovators and entrepreneurs and when you did that media audit it was almost exclusively for young white individuals and so what kind of context does that provide when you're thinking you're trying to make the case that we need to invest in African-American and other minority entrepreneurs when from a communication standpoint by and large we're actually not framing the fact that African-American women are actually the the largest or the fastest growing entrepreneur population in the country we use language like non-traditional entrepreneurs will refer to women and minorities and in fact women and minority entrepreneurs are the fastest growing and they have consistently been entrepreneurial so just the framing of how we actually communicate what opportunities are for investment and I also do this myself in terms of trying to set the problem statement but also turning that on its head and inviting people in to invest as well so as a segue with Amy's referring to the need for black and philanthropy was a piece that I wrote last year and actually became quite viral and it goes to what Amy's point was earlier this is a very specific topic philanthropy not everyone is in that was particularly it was a piece about institutional philanthropy and the lack of investment being made into communities and nonprofit institutions that were founded and led by people of color individuals that were disproportionately impacted by social injustices and so I wrote this piece really to a specific audience it wasn't for main like entirety of America it was for individuals that are engaged in the day to day in philanthropy and so while I had you know I wrote a piece that had a bold and clear title it was also directed to specific audiences and constituencies and so what we were able to do is we segmented out our communications channel once I wrote the piece to make sure we were getting into the right hands and at that point it became surprisingly viral I think we had cleared over 10,000 individuals it was placed in media that was very specific to philanthropic and impact investment publications but because our strategy was always about reaching those core audiences we weren't looking to get this into the hands of all Americans or even everyone who's working in social impact space we're actually being very clear that we wanted this to be a piece that would get in the hands of influence and spark conversation from individuals and institutions that were particularly trying to address and so it was successful beyond our imagination we were able to really have it uses the opportunity to spark dialogue in Baltimore City with the local philanthropic and impact investment community about what it would look like to actually get much more investment into organizations that were founded by people of color in the city and were able to do a follow-up campaign in person to do a lot of work with the individuals that were targeting and so we had a lot of dialogue we were able to then support and figure out a way to shape some of the philanthropic practices that institutions were working with and also outside of the city we were able to begin influencing and having dialogue with philanthropic communities that were really wrestling with challenges of how are they not investing in communities of color that have tremendous leadership and just to go back to my earlier point one of the first questions that came from a lot of my colleagues after this piece came out was, Rodney, are there enough African-American and social entrepreneurs of color in places like Baltimore City? Again, going back to say when we started with BME that we had hundreds upon hundreds of African-American men that were doing work in places like Baltimore City and it was a disservice because we had created this framework that African-American men and people of color could not be social entrepreneurs where in fact problems are needed to be solved and it was really interesting to see how this piece, the first reaction for many folks was are you sure that there are enough individuals in these communities that have taken on leadership and so it opened up the door for a conversation that we really wanted to have with philanthropists and institutional investors. I would, I guess add to that just based even on the comments in this article and I think one of the reasons why it also caught hold not in addition to this brilliant strategy that was executed really well people wanted to have this conversation. It gave people the opportunity to say like I know one of the comments was this has dominated my organization today and I think it just speaks to that idea of relevance. People are want to have the conversation if you're able to produce the content that allows them to have it and to celebrate. The next slide please is rising tide. Yeah, so... Aspirational imagination. Imagination, warm, not so much heavy-duty activating head but also playing to Rodney's point about how we brand this mission space and how we talk about the work and how we need to kind of appropriate terms and modify like entrepreneurship and like black entrepreneurship or low-income entrepreneurship. It's like, well, it's entrepreneurship and so it's just, yeah, who does it and from where do they come. In this case it's actually interesting because this speaks to them different. This is our we're hosting an event the one that I just mentioned and we're having it on the waterfront of Jersey City which is a highly developed area where the rising tide you could see. There's been a huge boom in development and as a result a lot of the people who work there they're some of the most educated workforce in the globe essentially. I think we have like a 30% post-secondary education rate there. It's huge but most of those people certainly shuttle right back out to Manhattan to see what's going on. I think it's really interesting to see how many people once they're done with work or if they're living there in those residential units like they don't come out. One of our entrepreneurs created this phenomenal marketplace literally proving a point to one of the developers actually that you could have she called it a midnight market and about this event in the hopes of being able to tap on the shoulders of them different who would certainly not come out if we told them hey you know we're hosting this event for this particular purpose. It's like no opportunities universal you get to come and have a warm fuzzy time it's going to feel like midnight market and Marrakesh without you needing to buy your ticket to Morocco, great food curated, great music you know philanthropists come on now so we're using every trick in the game to get them different to begin to engage because they're the ones that have the resources and the options to be able to make decisions about how they might want to invest in their local entrepreneurs. And I know we talk a lot in the impact space around proximity that we need proximity I know in the social space we talk about it with Brian Stevenson who champions this. If you're not near if you don't know if you don't rub people that are running the companies or entities that you might want to invest in that it becomes a really hard barrier to overcome. So being given opportunities where you can actually hang out and be human and you know celebrate and eat good food and get to know people in a different platform is part of what this is about and you know bridging divides once again while having fun. So important. So next slide is just a placeholder to turn it over to you guys and we will do our best to offer some thoughts. People have questions. Any questions if folks are still awake? Where does the impact measurement come in? Do you want to repeat it? Yeah. Where does the impact measurement piece come in and communicating the qualitative and the quantitative side by side or what's the best way to do that and the role of I guess annual reports and impact reports and if they're still useful? I'm happy to speak to that. So in a couple of weeks we'll be publishing our annual impact report which is a really critical piece for us to communicate with our investors. It's something that I look for every year it's something they ask us about and it's something that some of them really want to dig into so they want to understand the methodology behind well how do you arrive at the units like walk me through how you got that you know walk me through sort of how my investment is connected to these big kind of obtuse numbers and so we try to do a clear job of explaining our methodology for collecting all the impact outcomes from all of our borrowers and how we blend all those outcomes together how we kind of synthesize it and make sense of the data but to answer your question our investors really look for both so they want to see that there is that methodology behind how we measure impact and they want to understand that it is a really rigorous process but at the same time they just expect to see a nice human interest story of an entrepreneur in Kenya who got a $100 microloan and is benefitting from that microloan. So it's really kind of including both of those things because our investors are so diverse and kind of where they're coming from and you know what interest they have and kind of their understanding of impact measurement and things like that that we give it give them both of those things I would add and it's definitely critical to mix both the stories and the impact side for us you can check on risingtidecapital.org to see our annual reports we get a lot of compliments on them we include our dashboard which lets activities that happen as well as the actual outcomes and just like repeating at different places certain things that need to be highlighted but also having kind of the fuller picture of how you measure and why like your theory of change incorporating then like we saw really critical we found even like not necessarily going we used to do like fuller profiles of entrepreneurs and we decided that actually what people need is like a great picture and a couple of snippets about that but like repeat them so they get a sense of an entrepreneur that they could relate to maybe like that guy who is working on you know the roof is their guy and that's the reason that they're gonna come and invest and connect versus you know a woman in a bakery the Google Glass is doing XYZ so it's having a mix of faces, a mix of businesses and sectors and the data just populating alongside and all of it coming together where it tells the full arc of the story you want to tell I would just briefly add to that that you know in email campaigns I mean we all get lots of email obviously but just always thinking about I know like in one campaign that Andrew and I collaborated on it's called Age Strong some partnership with AARP Foundation Capital Impact Partners and Calvert Foundation you know it's included in the book as well we just show the subject email lines that like toggle back and forth between this quantitative and qualitative content so you're hitting the head you know these kind of rational questions that our heads have and then this heart based content and you just have to go back and forth and repeat many times yeah Any other questions? Looks like one back there Thank you, good evening excellent excellent exchange My question is for Alfa about your decision originally to have such a strong communication team apparently early on in the life of your organization which is a non-profit so how did you make that decision justified to yourself to your board to your donors and how did it pay off in terms of increased resources for the organization I think in part maybe this is how I'm oriented even though I never studied communications or marketing I definitely the rational side of my brain says it's absolutely essential so I don't even think I justified it I was just it's kind of like the CFO you know you're like yes this has to happen I was fortunate that I got somebody who built a team because you know I thought I resourced it by just having this person I was like great you know you got comms taken care of and before I know it you know they're like paid internships that became part-time positions that became full-time positions and it is a hungry beast I will definitely say there's like infinite needs for hyper communication at every different level and there's so many different skills needed so you know you have like your strategic communications folk which is really essential and then you have your copywriters, your creatives the people who get PR etc so having a core team enables you to learn and to adjust with them without feeling the strain of paying a lot of consultants to do different things which would be hard to justify to my board if I said I had a PR consultant to justify but we've gotten a lot of visibility without actually having that kind of support because we've just invested in having like every single entrepreneur we've worked with over 1900 soon to be over 2000 entrepreneurs we have a picture of every single one that's part of the benefit that they get from us it's a profile shot but it also means we have a robust kind of media assets to be able to talk about them and do the placements as necessary so it's interesting so a friend of mine been jealous who used to be the president of the NAACP and was able to really add a lot of reinvent the organization during this time there he advised a friend of mine that typically social change organizations are really focused on their programmatic functions then fundraising then communication and his point to me was actually it's the reverse so the way that I think about it is none of us really thought we needed an iPhone until Apple told us that we needed an iPhone and the communication the opportunity with communication is that we often time think about particularly the social changes about fundraising and not market development not actually creating conditions in which we can expand resources and marketing and communication allows you the opportunity to do just that when we focus explicitly on fundraising we actually limit ourselves on our ability to bring in people to change minds to create conditions in which we can expand investment and so that's sort of you know one of our challenges as we're all of us who work in social impact and social change is really we have to get outside of just the fundraising bucket we have to think about how do we bring more attention and how do we increase awareness and market demand right for addressing these these challenges and creating opportunities there and so that's why for me communication is such an essential investment because it allows you to do the fundraising it allows you to have a conversation about impact measurement before people even understand that there needs to be impact need right like there are a whole sort of issues that we're facing that people don't even aren't aware of and so one of the challenges that I find that we put ourselves in particularly from a fundraising perspective is if we only focus on what people's interests are without creating an expanding awareness and expanding interest so that people can understand that there's a connection for example if someone who's not interested in reentry and say Baltimore City but the reality is Baltimore City is a place where without addressing criminal justice issues you're not going to be an improved city so how do we expand awareness and market that is an opportunity for people to invest in I would also add there's a huge dimension here if you look at the vast majority like 99.9% of non-profit websites you're going to see who the audience for those websites is which is the donor community so fundraising leads which means that your core constituency is being talked about as opposed to talked to and engaged with and that I think is one piece of the communications challenge that we haven't figured out how to address and what are strategies to be able to actually have that multi-threaded way to be able to talk to the various audiences because you know when you pay for that consultant your board is going to say great you know hopefully they're going to deliver value and they're saying yeah we're going to raise money and so all of your messaging is to this audience and I'm not even sure that actually works in getting you a donor so but it depends from mission to mission before you change your websites check with your communications consultant so we can take one last questions and then release releases for the evening if anyone has one oh great thanks for the mic assist thanks very much for the insights building on these last answers that you provided how would you go about the campaign for the situation is this the organization is nonprofit it provides symphonic music 10% of the resources let's say are used to provide the social services in this case free school program for the kids in the entire region but we want to fundraise without necessarily causing all the money that comes attached just to find that particular resource but because we need all orchestra to provide the programs so what do you think would be a way to approach the fundraiser without constraining or restricting the funding I would be happy to answer that so in our case we're a single mission focus organization so this makes it a little bit easier and we also started 14 years ago right when this conversation around these kinds of line item restrictions were being really pushed in the philanthropic community to really question like what is this actually delivering or not delivering more importantly so what we've done and it works for a vast majority of our funding relationships which means that more engagement and conversation and trust building is to get total budget support so this is what we're going to take to deliver on the impact we're promising you and here is total transparency you can tweak and measure all the things that you want to measure but at the end of the day there is no way that I could deliver on this impact or let alone tell you about it if I don't have the resources in there so total budget support and you could care about entrepreneurs who are formerly incarcerated or entrepreneurs who are women come from a variety of different interest areas but at the end of the day it all has to be streamlined into one total budget that supports an actual impact agenda well thanks to the brilliance of all of you thanks to all of you and go enjoy evenings