 Hello and welcome. Thanks so much for joining us today. You have tuned in to another episode of The Non-Profit Show. I'm Jarrett Ransom and today we have Mouhi Kwaja with us. Mouhi serves as a trainer for Fundraising Academy, but there's so much more to this gentleman and you'll learn more here soon. But he's here to share with us about social media and the new secret donor, Prospecting Strategy. So he's gonna drill down into this conversation with us today. But before we dive deep, we wanna remind you who we are. Julia's taking a day off. So I hope you're enjoying that. Julia Patrick is the CEO of the American Non-Profit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom, her sidekick, non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. And we are honored to continue these conversations. Thank you so very much to our amazing presenting sponsors. Those include Bloomerang, American Non-Profit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Bee Generous, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit thought leader, as well as the non-profit nerd. And if you haven't checked these companies out, we encourage you to do so, not yet, but as soon as we're done with today's episode to check them out, because they're here to help you elevate your mission. And if you missed any of our episodes by now, you know where to find us, Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. And for those podcast listeners like Mouhi and I are, you can listen to the non-profit show wherever you stream your podcast. So no excuse, you can share it far and wide. And again, thrilled to have you back here, my friend, Mouhi Kwaja with a lot of letters behind his name. He is the trainer, a trainer at Fundraising Academy and also tells you you're gonna learn more about him. The co-founder of the American Muslim Community Foundation. Welcome back. Thank you so much, and Jarrett. Really happy to be here and just learning with you and sharing with you and everything, so happy to be back. Absolutely, and there's a lot going on this year. We talked about it being end of year season, we are in Q4, believe it or not, Q1's gonna be here. And so as we talk about communication strategy, social media strategy, let's start off and talk to us about why nonprofit communication and social media is even a thing and why it's important. Yeah, so social media is such a new age concept for many of our organizations. And as nonprofits came into the internet world and realized the potential for online donations, then soon it was around online communication. And, you know, face-to-face is always going to be king, but think of how the pandemic changed that. Think of how going forward, it set the tone. Our donor's gonna wanna meet face-to-face going forward. Our donor's going to want to touch base with organizations in the same way. So we really have to think of how can we leverage the tools that we have to continue our prospecting, to continue our engagement. And a lot of us as major gift officers, as prospect managers, as individuals with portfolios, we have metrics that our teams want us to hit, but how can we redefine what an engagement is? Yeah, we can make a phone call, but who wants to answer those these days? Yeah, we can respond to an email or do email outreach and that's probably the least invasive, but oftentimes it just ends up being not even opened or deleted and same thing with direct mail. So social media provides such a unique opportunity for engagement, for virality, for the opportunity to build a relationship and also find more about our donors. Because if you're like me, you know, my social style is I pretty much put 90% of my life on social media. That 10% is really just what I don't wanna share with my dad. Sorry dad. Yeah. So, you know, think about the different tools like my generation, we started Facebook 15 years ago now and then slowly moved to Instagram and now to TikTok and these other formats, but where are your demographics pointing, you know? And what is it about the mission that you wanna share? This is all about storytelling and there's such a unique opportunity. And with social media, it's about consistency, it's about messaging, it's about building a connection to your followers. And you know, we can get into the how of increasing your followers and asking your donors to follow you and like you and subscribe to you. And all of those things are super important to deepen the relationship with them. So I'll pause there. Yeah, no, that's really good and important. And there's so many channels, you know, as we've talked about social media channels and I feel like not only are they evolving, there's always new ones kind of popping up, you know? One of the age old challenges that I've heard of in my career over the last 20 plus years is the aging donor demographic, right? And so I think of social media, Muhi, and I think of it as a way to engage, you know, a diverse audience, an age diverse audience, a geographic diverse audience. And to me, it just sounds like a win-win opportunity. But my question, again, all unscripted is there's so much noise in our world today. Social media is a very noisy place. How do we even capture the attention of our audience, right? Yeah, I think that, you know, they tell you our attention span these days is like less than a goldfish, right? And we're bombarded with tens of thousands of images every single day. And oftentimes it takes seven attempts for something to resonate with us. So think about that in your messaging. What's that hook in the first five seconds of a video? You know, our attention span is still limited. These days we get frustrated when an ad comes on and it lasts for 10 seconds, right? Oh, yeah. And we look forward to being able to skip on the ad right away. So even commercial marketing is still limited in the sense that it needs to have that hook, right? And think of the Super Bowl ads. Those are the ones that we actually look forward to because they're funny, because they're catchy, because they're interesting and engaging. And we should, you know, if your organization had a 30-second spot and had Super Bowl ad potential, what would that message be? And that's how you should be communicating with your donor. Oh, I love that. I love that. If we had, yeah, that 30-second potential. So let's, I love that so much. And let's talk about, you know, the potential donors coming to the nonprofit. How do we help them get there? I love the Super Bowl analogy. And, you know, that's fantastic because we always think of an elevator pitch, you know? We always think of, okay, you have just a fine amount of time to capture this person's attention and their interest. So how do we help potential donors come to our nonprofit? And I'm assuming this is related to using social media channels. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, as a trainer for Plunderaging Academy, I have to plug our book. Yes. And, you know, this cause-selling the Sanford Way, unfortunately my filter doesn't let you see it that well, but cause-selling the Sanford Way. I know I was looking. I know I have it too. So. It is such a fantastic book. And there's a whole chapter on prospecting and how to find qualified donors. And if you don't have this book, definitely worth the investment to really easily read along. It's such a, you know, it's not as much of a technical book as it is like a hot book. And there's so many little gems in here. And a lot of it in terms of finding and connecting with your donors is doing your homework. It's trying to pinpoint and get your organization to show up in FDO searches on Google. It's about creating a consistent blog. It's about even at the end of your emails linking your social media, of course, but in your one-on-one outreach linking your social media and literally creating messaging around following and supporting your organization. So that's one way in which you can help potential donors come to you. But you also have to do your homework because if it's about prospecting and trying to see who's following you and maybe even look at your portfolio, a lot of CRMs, customer relationship management tools will have social media integration. You can run your donor portfolio through this integration and it will then based on their email address or whatever information that you have access to say, oh, this social media profile is associated with this email. So then you can find their social media account. You can put it in their donor profile and this is where prospecting comes into play because if you then see that Muji Hwaja has been to Guatemala and Mexico, you know he loves to travel. If you see that he's been posting about philanthropy and other nonprofit causes, you know, he's inclined to be civically engaged. You saw that he just voted earlier this week and all of these different things that you can find out about your donors before having a conversation with them. And when you're in that one-on-one meeting, it's not to say, oh, I saw that you posted. No, it's a little tidbit for you to develop a perspective on how this donor thinks on how this donor would want information presented to them on how you should go about developing a relationship with this potential donor. And you get to ask those discovery questions when you get that one-on-one meeting. And that's what prospecting is all about. It's about qualifying them as a donor and as somebody who's connected to your organization. Qualifying them, absolutely. And I love that you're bringing up all of these data points, right? And I hear from people often, they're like, oh, I just stalked this person. And I was like, no, no, that's called prospect researching. It's big difference, you know? But in our language, the vernacular is prospect researching. And you can find a lot of this, as you mentioned, Muhy, through the social media outlets. Talk to us more about these outlets, the social media outlets, because there's a lot of them and how we can expand our reach within the market. So if you're at a small organization like American Muslim Community Foundation, our staff is overstretched. We have part-time staff. We have full-time staff. We have the very limited time to do a lot of things. So we try to do a few things well. And oftentimes marketing advice is stick to one social media channel and make that your holy grail, right? Yeah. And if you can and have the capacity to slowly introduce another outlet. So of course, I would say the top four are likely LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And if you can focus on one of those well or utilize a platform like Hootsuite that allows you to schedule and manage and post virtually and all that once in one place, then you have a solid way to attract and expand your followers. And if your admin or staff member has time to schedule posts out, it makes their life a lot easier. It creates consistency and all of those things and the best time to post and figuring out just like with email marketing, they say Tuesday mornings or certain dates and times, all of those things are so critical in social media as well. And you can market test AB, okay, let's try post at 10 a.m. versus 1 p.m., which one gets more engagement. And each social media platform is gonna be different as well. So things like Hootsuite gives you analytics and it also has something called smart scheduling. So it tells you when the best time to post on that said platform is. So there's so many benefits and Hootsuite is a free service. If you link more than three social media accounts, then I think it's a paid platform, but it allows you to magically do a lot of this stuff. And if you have the time to develop the content, create the content, then you can schedule it and it makes your life so much easier. Yeah, I agree. The schedulers are fantastic. I feel I would be remiss, Moohi, if I didn't ask, how do you recommend we tap into ambassadors, other individuals that are engaged with our nonprofit to also serve as an ambassador online? Because when we think of outlets and expanding our reach, I think that's a fantastic audience for us to tap into. Yeah, definitely. I just saw a video sponsored add another way for social media to work. It was Rami Malik, the actor, and he was sharing a short video about why he supports international rescue committee. So, you know, of course, with celebrities and large national organizations, they maybe have the reach and capacity to build those larger connections. But even with an ambassador that who knows, might be a social media influencer or somebody who's a board member and has a following of lawyers because they're a respected lawyer in town or somebody who just wants to help your organization. They don't even need to have a following, but can create content and become an ambassador for you so that it's easier for you to develop that content and tell your story. I think, you know, having worked at the American Red Cross, we oftentimes had a few big name celebrities. And again, it's easier for those larger organizations to find those ambassadors. But I would encourage small organizations as well to see how they can find a local ambassador that can help them be the face of their social media. And why not make that an intern who's right out of college, who's a Whippet snapper with all of these social media tools and understands these metrics and can learn more about your organization. Like, there's so many creative ways that you can share your story and have somebody help you with that. Absolutely. I love, you know, tapping into the interns, volunteers, things like that. But how can we understand our social media metrics? Can we nerd out about this for a little bit? Because not only are platforms changing, are the KPIs, like the key performance indicators, the metrics, are those changing? And what do you recommend we track? Yeah, so this is beautiful. And if each of your nonprofit social media pages is set up like a business page or even in Hootsuite, they will give you analytics up the wazoo. They will tell you demographics. They will tell you what location your followers are in. They will tell you... Like the time of day, right? Like the peak time of day, yeah. They will tell you the age bracket. They will tell you pretty much when and how your followers engage with you. So that information is critical. And what you do with it is cater your messaging to the largest audience. Oh, they're females ages 40 to 50. What's gonna resonate with that audience? You know, that's gonna be different than say a male who is 20 years old. And maybe even finding that ambassador who meets your largest demographic, so it's more engaging and more connected. So those are all things that the metrics can help you think through. And then, obviously, the easy metrics are how many shares, how many likes, how many new followers are you getting, and all of those to track over time. And I would say for KTIs, especially when it comes to social media, is, you know, we wanna grow our user base or our followers by x-centage year over year. And then what you do for fundraising is you say, we want x amount of new donors to come from social media. And even double down on that, you can be putting unique URLs in your social media posts and then track the hits to your website from those unique links. So all of these things are super integrated. And if you have a marketing team, or if you are just a one-person marketing team and development team and you're struggling to do everything, learn about Google SEO, about Google AdWords, about creating customized links. And your website often has these metrics built in, Google Analytics. So look at how Google Analytics can connect with your social media, which can then connect to your website, which then can connect to your donation form so that you can really track the progress of each post. And when you use that link, did it generate clicks and likes and all of that? So there's so much that you can do with online marketing, with Google AdWords, like every nonprofit should be taking advantage of it. And all of that can be pointing to your social media as well. So there's so many things about social media, engaging your prospects, doing a little bit of research before you have that meeting about who your donors are and seeing how you can best engage them and tell your story to them. That is so fantastic. And I think of like, all the things that's going on integrating this, having a way to track it. I love the URL link. Like that's seemingly an easy solution, but you can track that, especially when it comes to end of your campaigns. Maybe you're participating in Giving Tuesday, right? Like that can be a separate link there. And I just think that's really important. Is there a way, Muhi, because you hit the nail on the head, there are so many organizations that there's a one person, that kind of does all of these roles. Do you recommend outsourcing any of this? And if so, what might that look like? Yeah, I'm getting exhausted thinking about those one person development teams and how much they have to do. I used to be that person. I was burnt out after so many years of being that person. So I would say, try to recruit board members who are experts in these areas. Try to find volunteers who know what they're doing. If there is a local marketing firm in town, see if they can pro bono help your nonprofit. And if you do have a budget, then yes, try to work with organization or company that will help you with your Google analytics, right? Google SEO and AdWords, they give you as a nonprofit $10,000 a month for a budget. If you don't know how to use Google ads, you can do like online certifications. But if you have a budget to pay somebody a few hundred bucks a month to manage it for you, you'll see instant boost in your SEO, in your hits on your website, in your links to social media and all of that. So it's a matter of getting your nonprofit to show up on Google's page on the first search at the top and to do that naturally and through ads. And that's what Google SEO and ads can help you do. So I would highly encourage you trying to find a marketing expert to join your board, again, to maybe find an intern that understands it better than you do. And even if you do have an understanding of it, but don't have the capacity or time to, then outsourcing it to somebody that does. So yeah, those are a few ways in which you can try to use that metric to then benefit your fundraising, especially in a critical time like year end that we're heading into. Solid advice. And I would say too, when it comes to understanding the social media metrics, this is best practice to measure the same metrics over and over, right? So like monthly, quarterly, annually, and that's how you track and analyze success, what's working well, maybe what's not working. And just like getting a consistent rhythm and cadence with these metrics is really important. So understanding that I think is key. Yeah, like, seeing how Q4 of 2022 performed in how many likes you got versus Q4 of 2021, how many new followers, how many donations from online did you get? Social media posts and all of those things are so critical. And if you can put a magnifying glass on those things, you can better understand how to increase it over time and what a realistic KPI is because I've been at and seen so many nonprofit organizations that just say, oh, well, we raised $600,000 this year. Why don't we raise a million dollars next year? Yeah, that's great. But what data do you have to support that that's possible? So not to say that it can't be done, but if you look at year over year growth, that's a much better indicator of what to expect the next year. So yeah. And then we have to look at, yeah, and then we have to look at what happened that year that might have increased the opportunity for that, decreased the opportunity for that. There's a lot of moving pieces, I think, that we need to put into play because obviously, March of 2020, there was a big life event that happened for all of us and just to map that on the metrics, I think, is worthwhile. Muhy, you're always so fun for me to chat with. I really enjoy our conversations. Again, Muhy Quajar. Yeah, thank you. Joins us. He's trainer for Fundraising Academy and also co-founder at the American Muslim Community Foundation. So check them out as well here with National University Fundraising Academy. Follow us on our social media. Yes, what a nice plug. Yeah, and then let's also visit the online learning portal and that is online.fundraising-academy.org. So many good things and resources here on this portal. Definitely worth taking a look at. And I'm gonna give another shout out and a plug for that book because Pearl did send me a copy of the book, Muhy, and I love it. It's, you know, it's right here. So easy to read. Yeah, it's fantastic. And so, you know, I encourage all of you watching and listening to take a look here at the online learning portal, but also in general, what Fundraising Academy is providing. Again, Julia Patrick missed out today, but I hope she's having a fantastic day. I'm Jarrett Ransom, her fun sidekick and really just honored to be here with you, Muhy, for today's conversation. Also extremely grateful to have the ongoing support from our amazing presenting sponsors. And they're really here for one purpose, and that purpose is your mission. So thank you to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, where Muhy joins us from today. Yes, thank you. Be generous. You're part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader, as well as nonprofit nerd. These companies keep us going and growing day in and day out. And I have to share, Muhy, we are fully booked for this year. So we are currently fully booked with all of our guest speakers, our nonprofit thought leader episodes, and just so grateful to have these ongoing, high-level intellectual conversations. So thanks for joining me today. Oh, it was a pleasure and looking forward to the next one. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, you and I need to catch up offline, but really that just depends on social media. I know we connect today quite a bit. LinkedIn, by far, is my number one, but yeah, it's been a really good conversation and thanks for sharing your expertise with us. And for all of you that joined us, thank you for joining us for today's drill down with Muhy. Join us tomorrow. It's Friday, it's Veterans Day. We will be here. So yeah, thank you to all of our veterans that have served. We will be here if you miss it. That's okay, you know where to find us. But please do stay well, so you can do well, and we'll see you back here tomorrow. Thanks.