 Good morning everyone I'm just gonna make sure everything is on okay fantastic. Are you all excited for the second day of word camp Europe? Awesome. All right. So as Ann said, I'm gonna talk to you about using WordPress for good and for me That means working with nonprofit clients now. I didn't just wake up one day and decide hey I'm gonna work with nonprofit clients. What a brilliant idea. So a little bit of a backstory I Come from Montreal and the wonderful whoo Montreal All right Hey guys Fun fact about the province of Quebec where Montreal is located is that we have a Vibrant mining industry. So about seven point six billion dollars of our gross domestic product every year comes from the mining industry There's no surprise. It should come that a mining industry company came to me one day I was like, you know what we need some help with our WordPress website. Okay, cool Let's see what we can do The whole time we were talking about how we can help them and what we can do. I just had this irksome feeling This client just doesn't feel right and Why doesn't it feel right because I really don't want to contribute to this industry? I really don't want my name my company's name to be anywhere associated with mining or anything That's that environmentally Unsafe so then I started thinking further Okay, what what does that mean? What is right to them? And what I realized was the clients that did feel right where the clients that were doing something good The clients that were doing something helpful and they weren't doing it for the sake of a profit Not for profit Non-profit. Okay, the light bulb went off. I'm like, oh, okay. This makes sense. My clients are the nonprofits in the world The second thought I had was All right, so I guess if I work with nonprofits, I'm gonna be happy and fulfilled But I'm probably gonna be broke for the rest of my life Because that's the the the general idea we have about nonprofits, right nonprofit no profit no money no budget broke Surprisingly, they didn't stop me. I'm a business person, but the profit thing didn't stop me and I thought okay cool So the reason why I really love these clients is not only because they're doing something good But because I want to do something good, too I want to have some meaning from the work that I'm doing. I want to actually leave a positive Impact in this world when I'm done and my time is over The thing that did give me pause though was this whole specializing thing Do we have anyone in the audience who's like a specializing that sounds scary No, buddy. All right, we'll go through this a little faster than cool So it was scary because it felt like saying yes to a really really small group of people while saying no to a much much larger one Right that kind of feels risky from a business standpoint So let's get into a little exercise just to get you over that Let's say you just became a parent of a beautiful little baby Maybe two and you think that your baby is just the best baby out there because it's yours. You made it and You're so proud of it and you want to share with the world just how awesome your baby is you hire someone to take some photos Are you gonna hire a landscape photographer? No Are you gonna hire a food photographer? Definitely not you're gonna hire the best dang baby photographer that your money can buy And that's exactly how your clients feel about their business organization, right? It's their baby They're so proud and they know it's special because they made it so from this perspective You can definitely see how specializing pays off It pays off because you can actually charge what you're worth. I'm not talking about like gouging nonprofits for money That's not what we're talking about here. Just what you're worth so that it's fair to you. It's fair to them, right? It's a win-win You can do better quality work because you're gonna be less stressed out you're getting paid what you're worth When you do high quality work your happy clients are more likely to a stick with you and be give your referrals And those referrals are worth their weight and gold And when they give you those referrals The referrals might be nonprofits. They might be something else. That's fine. There's no specialization police No one's gonna come and say, oh, I'm sorry. You can't take that project. It's a not not a nonprofit But you work with nonprofits If you are having a slow quarter or slow God forbid year you just take that project and you go with it Sounds good, right? High five So here's the thing that applies to all specialization. What about nonprofits? Here's a fun fact about my personal experience in the first year of Announcing that we are now specializing in working with nonprofits. We go three point five times more Than the previous year Times not percent times now. There was a little bit of luck involved. There's always a little bit of luck involved Yes, we were under charging as well. So there's that But it was also a lot of hard work and a lot of this So the hard work came from having to break into a new niche right a new niche is always difficult to break into But there's things that you can do to make it a little easier because obviously you're gonna pretty much start off Almost from zero, right? You're gonna have to rebuild your portfolio to target a new audience, etc So things you can do partner up with someone who's already specializing Like maybe an agency that uses a different technology than you are So for example Let's say it's a Ruby on rails right agency. That's working with nonprofits. You do WordPress awesome Another lovely thing about doing this is that when they're too busy or maybe a project doesn't fit them too well They're gonna send you referrals good for business You can do some pro bono work if you want to I would kind of really advise you not to do that Unless you have resources to do it. See if you have folks on your staff that are under bill Hourly okay, put them on a pro bono project You can also go for like a smaller pro bono project not a full-on website, but maybe a one-day hackathon Maybe a small sprint That'll work And finally you're gonna have to find out where these folks are hanging out, right? They're watering holes and build relationships with people because relationships is how business actually works So what do I mean by watering holes? Well a lot of nonprofits belong to associations. So for example Museums museums usually belong to a regional or national association those associations are going to have events Conferences and you can show up and start listening to what the problems are in that particular niche of nonprofits And start figuring out how you can help them you can start meeting people and etc. And actually become very valuable to them a Few organizations worth mentioning here. Oh, which one are you? All right, so not profit technology network is my favorite Well, that just got really loud. No, okay They're my favorite because they own not only do they have an online community You can join free of charge and there's lots and lots of forums. There's one for WordPress. There's one for women in tech You can find people like minded people people you want to learn from and start building a network They also have events. They're based in the States So if you're in North America, it suits you a lot better There's also a yearly conference you can go to and it's kind of like a word camp like this There's just a whole lot of people there that know about technology for nonprofits that are nonprofits They also have a certification program So you can actually plop a nice little certification badge on your website say hey, I know what I'm talking about I'm not just saying I specialize in a nonprofit technology. The rest of these are mostly for nonprofits But you want to get into their mindset as much as you can so you can go there and find out okay So what are the technology issues in the nonprofit sector? What what are they doing with technology? Where can I be helpful? So definitely worth checking out and all of these things are linked So in the end there's going to be a link to the slides and then you can go and click on all these things from the slides Okay, so this is the question on everyone's minds, right? How do nonprofit budgets work? Well You're probably thinking that when you ask nonprofits about their budget, you're gonna hear something like this. Well, we're a nonprofit So we don't really have a budget, right? Okay, what if you substitute nonprofit for Small business that all of a sudden makes a lot more sense, right? Now I'm not saying that all nonprofits are small businesses But there's definitely a nice large number of nonprofits just like in business and for-profit business that identify as small organizations of small businesses so Okay, what does that mean that means that there's actually lots of large nonprofits like Amnesty International or Oxfam or if you plan if you're Following the news in the States Planned Parenthood ACLU doctors without borders Think about all the folks of these people employing and all the salaries that they have to pay Do you think that when they come to an agency for a website? They say hey, but you know what? We're a nonprofit We don't really have a budget Of course not These folks are dealing with like million sometimes billion dollar budgets So the thing that you need to remember right away is nonprofit doesn't mean No money. It means a business. It's still a business and yes Just like in for-profit business nonprofit business can be all sizes small and large So don't get discouraged if you get that well, we're not profit We don't really have a budget it could be that they're just a small nonprofit It could be that they have other priorities and that's fair enough a few special things about nonprofit budgets So on the annual basis, they will decide what budget they will a lot to the next year So they will excuse me. They will look at how fundraising went the year before and Then they will decide okay, so what can we a lot where for the next year? There's also a great degree of transparency because donors want to know where their money is going so oftentimes nonprofits will actually have annual reports on their website where you can see okay, so this is how much they raised and this is Where all went and oh communications budget? That's websites Sometimes it's not on their website, but you can usually find it fairly easily And the thing is if there's a small budget that you do have to work with you can always prioritize scope and Start planning with them for the future phase 2 phase 3 etc And as soon as you start planning with them for the future so that they can plan on their end They're fundraising efforts to make it happen You become their partner and that's a pretty good place to find yourself Of course, we also call them organizations right now businesses, so there's a few considerations to keep in mind a Few familiar questions you should be asking like hey, who's going to be maintaining this website? Are they tech savvy? Do they know how to use WordPress now? You know how much training you're going to have to build in What's the number one action the folks should take on your website? With nonprofits usually one of four well, it's all four, but you have to prioritize donate Give us your email so we can send you stuff in your email mailbox Follow us on social media so we can show up in your feed and tell you about what we're doing and what we need to you to Do to help us and hey, we have a program join us You have to prioritize because if you have all four of those things screaming at people from every page That's not going to work So from the design standpoint very similar to any other website And who makes the final decision if you're used to working with smaller organizations smaller Businesses you're probably usually talking with the decision maker to begin with But once you're going a little bit bigger than that you're probably talking to a communications manager or a marketing manager And at that point they have a boss That boss might have another boss And oh boy, they might have a board of directors too and that board of directors and how much they're going to be involved is extremely important because if you have 20 people 20 member board of directors and they need to be involved in revisions and approvals You need to know that right away because there's going to be a lot more effort from you a lot more time a lot more Vetting and and all these things that you have to do so at the same time Maybe you don't want to work with someone who has 20 members of the board of directors. That's fair. That's fine. Ask the question Then there's a few unique questions to ask What's the turnover like for people that are going to be working on the website? So a lot of nonprofits that work with educational institutions will have student assistants They're there for a semester and then they're gone Other nonprofits get a little bit of a break if they hire student interns during the summer at least in Canada That means that every summer you have to train a new cohort of folks good to know right away What is the breakdown of your funding sources and what's the most important now? You're probably going to see that from their financial reports anyway, but it's good thing to start the conversation so you can see okay They do a lot of fundraising drives. Are we going to have to build that into the website? Yes, no, maybe How how complex is their donation system? Good to know another thing is how often are they applying for? technology grants Because those technology grant applications ask for a nice section about the technology that you're going to be using and Guess who's better than you to write that section nobody so you can actually start helping them to get the money So they can pay you. Excuse me so they can pay you Which is pretty awesome from both sides. It's a win-win And finally what third-party integrations are we going to be doing for this website? So nonprofits love to have many little tiny pieces of technology that they all have to piece into one website And that's a really big big question. You need to know what kind of level of effort you are Needing for this part. I'm gonna have a quick little drink. I'm sorry. All right, so fun part nonprofit technology So of course there's an opportunity for non devs and for the duration of the talk I'm gonna go non devs devs. This is what you can do Because in WordPress we have this fancy thing called themes, right? So if you're working with theme customization, that's what you do You can still do that and and make a difference for smaller nonprofits help them really get Up and running on on the web Please keep the admin simple when you do this You don't want their maybe first experience with WordPress to be a terrible one and then they go away to Drupal or something like that You also just want to make it easy for people to use the products that you're creating, right? Yeah, I'm talking about page builders Please Please don't use page builders Um, thank you. Oh, wow. I actually did a talk last year about how much I hate page builders So this is a topic very near and dear to my heart But what can you do without page builders? Well, most small nonprofits They're not gonna have the resources to work with their layout and all these options that the page builder gives Give them a nice single column cost content Well that they can plug things into as they need to short codes. You're good to go You really don't need page builders If you're a dev you can make custom fields that are specific to the content that these folks are gonna be putting on their website You can make flexible content areas What can you do for that to do that? I'd ask custom fields pro is probably my favorite as it turns out It's pretty heavy on the low time. So we'll we're gonna see what happens there Pods is another option and of course Gutenberg is coming out soon Maybe so we'll see what happens with that. I'm hoping that'll simplify the whole process a lot more And like I mentioned integration is the name of the game. So The first thing is of course MailChimp, right? Newsletters the most Effective marketing tool out there nonprofits use them as well MailChimp is usually the one that they use Pretty simple right copy paste your code Customize it CSS on your site. You're good to go If you're not quite comfortable with that there are plugins for that For example Oh, what just happened? I didn't do it. It wasn't me. Oh, okay All right, was it just the screens in front or? Okay, whatever Traffic analysis and visitor data, of course We want to track people who are coming to our website how they're using it how we can optimize it rinse and repeat So Google Analytics pretty pretty simple integration there as well copy paste if that's not so much of your speed I Wouldn't recommend using a plugin that's specific to Google Analytics because you can get so much more Out of something a little bit more versatile. So let's say I want to see Opaq I'm gonna probably install it anyway. Go ahead and plug your property ID into a field. That's there social media Nonprofits also use social media. What do you know? So about 92% of nonprofits who responded to a specific survey Use Facebook 72% use Twitter. There is plenty of them on Instagram LinkedIn as well The easiest thing to do use those simple share URLs that are available from the different network Plug in your permalink. You're good to go, right? Twitter you have a message you have a permalink LinkedIn your permalink you need an email button. All right href mail to done You want to print the thing a little bit of vanilla JavaScript and you're good to go as well If that's not so much of your speed their social media share button Plugins usually they're a little heavy for what they're providing so if you can manage to do this stuff I would I would highly recommend that you do Alrighty fun stuff payments donations. This is what nonprofits really need you to do on their website Simple stuff you can do PayPal first of all PayPal offers discounts on their defeat that they do per per transaction to register nonprofits So that's already a lovely thing. You can also create a simple donation button right in the PayPal account for your nonprofit They give you copy paste code you put it on your website you style it Get to go when people click on the button they get taken to a page like this We're at the top you have the name of your nonprofit and they say okay How much do you want to donate this much awesome? Do you want to make it a recurring donation recurring donations are kind of the coolest thing? Because as we know from business when you can ask for a small amount Regularly you're probably gonna end up getting a bigger amount than if you ask for a large amount right away Cool you can also use stripe stripe as a thing They have a really really handy repo of PHP tutorials on how to set up your donations with stripe There's a link And If that's not so much of your speed there is a plugin for that to the plug is actually pretty cool It's very very simple to use and it gives you some great options Fundraising plugins. This is the real fun Now My favorite is give Give is kind of like the everything you ever wanted in a fundraising plugin made by lovely folks They give you the free plug-in the base is free PayPal integration is free if you want some fancy extra features, you're gonna have to pay for it. That's fine They also package it into different bundles. So it makes it a little bit more affordable Cool things. They have a recurring donations mail chimp integration Google analytics So you can actually track the donations individually striped gateway Zapier Zapier will talk about in a moment as well The special feature here is this built-in reporting module you they have so it's basically like having Google analytics But for your nonprofit donations, you can get an actual bird's-eye view of whether or not your fundraising is working What you have to adjust rinse and repeat Another option is charitable and yet for these ones for for fundraising I would not recommend that you go ahead and build it from scratch These are already existing. They're well maintained. Why do that when this is a lot more financially It makes sense a lot more sense so charitable Similar idea you have your free base that comes with PayPal you can add things For additional fee. There's a cool extension called the ambassadors extension And it allows for peer-to-peer campaigning, which is the hottest thing and fundraising right now And what it allows you to do is for example, I want to I'm gonna get married and I say, you know what instead of gifts. Can you just all donate to my charity of choice? Awesome, I'm gonna go to that charities website I'm gonna create a page specifically for me and my campaign and folks are gonna come come there and make their donations So it means that the nonprofit actually doesn't have to go out and get all of those donors Individually they just got me to come and make the campaign really cool feature Actually as it turns out this feature is also available through give They just put out a tutorial yesterday That uses give the free plugin called era free and You can make this work on their platform, which is pretty awesome There's also fundraising with WPMU dev If you have their membership, it makes sense to to get this because it comes free with the membership But if you're just gonna get it for the fundraising, there's there's really no point You get a whole like library of plugins themes backup tutorials If you don't need all that stuff then you're better off with some other options And of course there's WooCommerce No, okay WooCommerce we all know we love right it's free comes with PayPal is built by automatic The additional extensions that make this work so there is recurring payments subscriptions MailChimp you can name your price All of these things you can get to make it work. So what does this look like comparatively speaking? You can do some things for free you can definitely get get going with give and charitable for free But if you're gonna get there like recommended package That's what we're talking about if you can see the WPMU dev is like whoa That's a bit much, but unlimited site licenses So it depends on what your philosophy is about your clients owning every little piece of the website versus you are providing various bits and pieces and you're maintaining the The memberships I usually go with hey, can you please own everything and if something happens to me? We're okay Donor management Since we're taking donations, we're gonna have to build relationships with our donors That means that we're gonna have to use a CRM or our contact relationship or client relationship management system If you haven't used one who's used a CRM? Oh Guys you got to use CRM's just use it for your own business to see what it's like It's amazing you get to basically put your leads in a different Location from your mailbox and interact with them there so they don't get lost here for donors It means that you can do all of your donor communication in a separate area And it all allows you to do a whole slew of other things things like Salesforce Hubspots Oho CRM. Those are the most used ones salsa is marketed specifically to nonprofits So that's the one you might be working with most often Here's an opportunity for all of you WordPress plug-in people This is like the best one I could find the best CRM For WordPress all the other ones that claim to be CRM's they really give you a very limited limited set of functions This one gives you the ability to set tasks per per donor per customer But really if you want to help this industry Take a look at what's available out there Take a look at the actual CRM's and what they offer and see if you can replicate it For the nonprofit community specifically in WordPress a few technical considerations when you're working with CRM Because how are you integrating this with your website? Well generally you're gonna capture some stuff from a form, right? It's gonna be like a MailChimp thing. Hey, what's your name? What's your interest submit on submit that information goes into your CRM and It's creating or updating a record that already exists Sometimes it can be on the donation form as well. Those are kind of the two standard things Technical considerations our best case scenario. It's gonna be a copy paste Otherwise, maybe an iFrame. Okay, not too bad. This is simple stuff, right? If that's not an option you can search for WordPress plugin that's already a connector again Those of you working in plugin development. There's so much stuff to be done in this area of nonprofit tech Worst case or sorry not worst case scenario next if there isn't a WordPress plugin Go through Zapier. So Zapier is kind of like an if this then that have we used if this then that Okay, so there's a trigger and then there's a reaction the trigger comes from your website something is submitted the reaction is We create a record in the CRM. We're update that record Pretty cool tool and if you remember give has integration was a pair. So Worst case scenario You might have to work with some API's and I'm not talking about rest API with WordPress I'm talking about the API of the CRM that you're working with they will have their own Which means you're gonna have to probably dig through documentation You should be comfortable digging through documentation anyways cool as I mentioned nonprofits like to have lots of little pieces of technology out there and a lot of nonprofits that work with data particularly those that work with Policy for example will have projects that they've done that have a lot of data that they might have put into an access database so Yeah, I definitely behooves you to at least know how to work with an access database or have someone on the team Who knows how to work with it? You can bring it into WordPress if you want to if that's okay with them or keep it separate But that is definitely a tech consideration to keep in mind And of course I can't not say anything about accessibility. There's two talks. I believe after this in this track Unaccessibility so if you don't know much or if you want to learn more stick around it's gonna be definitely worth your time There's an extra little level with nonprofits that comes to accessibility And that's as soon as you're getting government funding You can be required to adhere to a minimum level accessibility for all the products that you create with that funding Which means that if you don't you could have your funding cut or you could have to find Pay fine. Those are not things you want to deal with as a nonprofit or any organization So it definitely behooves you to know at least a basic accessibility level type information Okay, so Let's say that all of us looking a little bit much. You're like, uh, I don't know if I really want to Specialize and work you with nonprofits, but I still want to use my WordPress skills for something good There's a really cool movement inside of the WordPress community called do action It started in South Africa and it's a charity hackathon. So one day hackathon you can run To help local nonprofits. I think it's a third year. They're doing it in South Africa This year. We're taking it to Montreal. I'm actually organizing one there for October 14th this year and If any of your conox turning in Things are happening We're just opened Registration or applications for nonprofits. So if you know a nonprofit in the Montreal area that needs a website Send them to the do action that org website do action. No spaces. We're also on Twitter Instagram Facebook all those places But really the point here is Regardless of how you go from here I do encourage you to figure out what it really means for you to use WordPress for good for me It was working with nonprofits. Maybe for you it would be Working with female run organizations or maybe it's about working with companies that make environmentally Conscious products. It could be whatever it is but as long as you understand that those magical powers you have at the fingertips to build platforms to Elevate people to give people voices and let them actually do Have a have a bigger impact that comes with a responsibility And I hope that after this talk you feel a little more empowered to go ahead and use your powers for good Thank you Thank you so much. I said that we do have a little bit of time for questions if there's questions from the floor The microphones are down to either side. I I have a little question. Yes. Yeah, it's kind of a question And so you said there are four main things that a nonprofit will try. Yes. I think I may have identified a fifth Great way to ruin my talk It's Yes, please. Yes, and so and so quite a few nonprofits these days are Crime motivate their membership and their supporters to join them in campaigns not just a not just to raise money But petitions is something that was starting to see coming through a few more times That's kind of the programs that they're running in my mind So it's the programs that they run the things that they email you about like hey Do this thing because it's it relates related to our cause go go sign a petition. Yeah, yeah And and sometimes I mean we're seeing some patterns as well come through as well So we've worked with a nonprofit in the UK and that but they're international And they have got a pattern for how they can encourage people to design patterns. So I think So it's just like to add to the really good integrations and the technology you're talking about as well It's worth looking around if you if you won't it doesn't just apply to nonprofits actually most specializations If you're if you're engaging with a particular niche in industry, they'll have technologies that you use Oh, yeah, but often they'll also have design patterns. That's they'll reuse as well Yeah, well work and I didn't really mention a lot of design in this talk Kind of specifically because I feel like good design is good design, right? Yeah If there's patterns, right, yeah, there's Being user centric, right making sure that the the clients goals are met through your design and Kind of applies across board. Yeah, you're so right Yes, sir question from yes. Hi. Hi. I'm Dino from Croatia. Hi. I'm Sasha from Montreal. Hi That's pretty far away. Well my question First question would be I presume you're working with the nonprofits here in the European Union In the EU in the States in Canada. Okay, great. Yes. So what's the step your standpoint in regard to? GDPR Regulation next year because your whole business is Centred around Collecting emails that go into databases and everything and you use the information and that information has to be secured, right? So next year that would be a big deal So I'm just your standpoint and what's the case with that? Well, I feel like when you're you're most the time you're using the third-party system So it's really up to them to make sure that everything is secure and properly on their end And you can do research make sure that that's the case Is that? Yeah, I never thought that way. Okay. Do you want to? Well, no, that is the thing that's come up for us as well As if as developers you can this stuff we can access guidance and best practice and There are people like Heather who's spoken already at the conference and there are resources that are available to us such that we can We can highlight to our clients the best practice and the approach to take and now sometimes You know the clients are fully on top of this and they understand the constraints sometimes they may be unaware of it That's our job, right? Yeah, and also like some international charities. We can have wildly different Expectations in different areas If you've got a multiple countries that you're dealing with and one of those is Germany that will be quite different to some of the others Germany in Mexico, I found had quite different one of them wanted everything mothers maiden name and everything else Germans not so keen on that What do you know? Sorry, but it yeah, I think we can do best practice Yeah, I think that's practice and we can help them I guess those networks those technology networks are really good places to bring that expertise into Into the community. Yeah, okay. I agree great. Thank you Okay, another question for the four. Yes, I am Laura from price You said you we should avoid build a page builder. Sorry, you said we should avoid page builder Yes, I also against so We can use SCF pro But these types of organization wants many templates of pages many flexibilities and How can we give these flexibilities? Without blowing the budget So I think you're talking about having lots of different layout options without having to create Templates for each one of them. Is that what we're doing? Yeah, I mean it's a night. Yeah, yeah So he's building like how can we get lots of different things really cheaply, right? Well, first you can really work on that from the content The information architecture standpoint to make sure that everything kind of fits really neatly into where it should go on the website one two You can offer them. I think I mentioned yeah flexible content. So things like short codes and Flexible content that for example comes with advanced custom fields that you can actually plug into the body of your yes But yeah, so that gives them flexibility essentially Yes, but we must make So many From development so many times so money Mm-hmm. Yeah, but if it's just chunks, it's not a whole template. That's completely unique Then the front-end development is really limited So you're offering flexibility, but you're also Controlling that flexibility in a way that lets the client really focus on content and not worry about layout That's that's how we do it anyway Did I answer your question? Thanks. Thank you. Yeah Okay, I think I suspect there'd be more to follow up Am I wonder if we can maybe sort of get a little tribes thing around nonprofits going that would be There's space in the day if not if not today at this work camp or another work camp in the future because the nonprofits either Third sector kind of a huge community of nonprofit. It is very largely actually does have a quick show of hands Who here has got most their business or like an appraisal part of their business is engaging with nonprofits? All right. That's good. Okay. Look around. Keep your hands in the air. Okay. Look around see who else has got their hands up in the air These are your people Find them find them in houseman find them at the party tonight. I should find in the punch I haven't have a nonprofit dance. That's the thing to do. Okay. Thank you very much indeed Sasha Thank you. Thank you to all of you and your questions as well We'll be