 Welcome back to the non-profit show. We are so glad to have you here, and I'm really excited for our guest today. We have Nick Lynch, CEO at Kaleidoscope. Nick is here to share with us about what it's like to use influence marketing and how that impacts and works with non-profit donors. Nick, I'm really excited to have you, and I'm also really interested to learn more from you on today's conversation. Thank you to Julia Patrick that allows us this platform. She's the CEO at the American Non-profit Academy. Remember, she's attending a local United Way breakfast this morning. As we all know around the nation, United Way serves a big piece into our community. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group, and always honored to be here day in, day out to have these high level conversations. We also want to give a huge shout out of gratitude to our friends that allow us this opportunity, the conversations, the continued conversations that we've had since March of 2020. 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So if you download the app, you will get that notification telling you that you can now listen, watch, to today's conversation. So Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Again, our viewers and listeners, today we have Nick Lynch, he is CEO at Kaleidoscope. Welcome. Thank you likewise. I appreciate you having me and it's good to be with a fellow nerd. Like I nerd out about all this stuff too. So I'm super excited to have the conversation today. Good. Yeah. Well, we're in good company then. And so let's get just super nerdy. But before we do, I would love for you to share with us, Nick, a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Kaleidoscope and how you serve the sector. Yeah, absolutely. So from a professional standpoint, we founded Kaleidoscope about three years ago at the beginning of the pandemic. My professional background has really been based here in Los Angeles, focused primarily on building solutions for brands and advertisers to better target their audiences on digital and social media. I mean, I'm an early MySpace employee to kind of date me a little bit. So I've been in this area for quite a long time and have been in social media for pretty much since the beginning, since Tom was in everybody's top eight, which maybe only a certain amount of people will probably understand that. Clearly I do. Yes. I know, we both do. But from a personal standpoint, I'm a cancer survivor. I'm a make-a-wish kid. You know, I've been a part of their family ever since they sent me to Disneyland when I was three. I'm very, very involved in the LA chapter here. And when COVID hit and the pandemic started to shut things down and in-person events started to go away, the first thing I thought about was how are nonprofits going to generate revenue? I think we all know that a majority of nonprofits generate some most or all of their revenue in in-person events. And so knowing my professional background in marketing and technology and my kind of recent stint for the last seven years or so in influencer marketing and understanding sort of the evolving space, I kind of thought, okay, I can match brands who I know are spending billions of dollars in cause marketing and social impact, sort of CSR or this ESG thing has started to become popular. If I can connect those brands with nonprofits where there's vision and value alignment and then also add influencers who are also interested or passionate about a particular cause to amplify all of it and then measure that partnership that there could be something there. And that was kind of the genesis of Kaleidoscope and doing all those things together building some solutions and technology to facilitate all that. And then if you fast forward three years we've kind of jokingly become the Deloitte of social good. We sort of sit, I know we sit on the intersection of anywhere where there's marketing media or measurement opportunities around impact in corporate brands and nonprofits and influencers. So that's the quick spiel on us and what we do in Goliath. Well, I am fascinated and you know this, I have a 12 year old son many of the viewers and listeners get to hear me mention him every so often. And he is of that age demographic that when he grows up he wants to be an influencer, right? Like that is a career path and that's really kind of where we're going in this space. So let's start off, Nick, share with us how influencers can connect, do connect, best connect to philanthropy. What does that look like? Sure. The first place I always like to start off of is kind of defining what an influencer is. I mean, I think there's a lot of, still a lot of questions about who an influencer is, what is an influencer, where do they work? Ultimately an influencer is anybody who has an audience on social media that could be Facebook, excuse me, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, but LinkedIn is also a platform that works. So it could, I could be an influencer even though I have a hundred followers on Instagram, let's say, but those followers are maybe friends, family or people who know that I talk about sci-fi movies and other nerdy stuff that I like to talk about. And so if I make a recommendation that I just saw the newest avatar and don't see it because it wasn't great, those hundred people may look at it and go, okay, well, then I'll probably pause on that. So everybody has some level of influence and it just varies on size. So I think it's super important to set context there. But it's a maturing market, like you said, there's a growing number of a certain demographic of 12, 14, 16, 18 year olds that want to be influencers when they grow up or want to be creators when they grow up. It's a hundred, a billion dollar a year business. And so influencers really have a platform now and not only do they want to create content and share their opinions about whatever they're passionate about, but impact is becoming a massive area for influencers to use their platform and their audience to communicate to. And so there's never been a better time to really identify who those potential partners could be and those could be people on your board that could be people that are tangentially connected to you are already on your email list or it could just be people that are out there that you may have not met yet but that are talking about particular issues that you're aligned with or your values or visions or alignment that you connect to. So it's sort of a blank canvas and it's very, very blue ocean, which can be challenging, but ultimately there's massive access. And there's again, like I said, there's never been a better time to really figure out how you can partner and who you can partner with there. So you mentioned, and I really kind of hung on to the 100 on Instagram, like is there a certain level of influence? Like what makes a good influencer? Now that we know what exactly it is, are there certain parameters, qualifications, requirements that makes a good or maybe even a better one? Sure, no, that's an excellent question. And so influencer marketing, because it's now mature and because there is so much opportunity there, it is really a legitimately scalable marketing channel. And so any marketing channel that you have, I typically suggest to look at three different buckets of goals or outcomes that you're hoping to achieve. So usually you use marketing for awareness and trying to drive awareness about an initiative or a program or even your overall nonprofit or your corporation or your organization. You're either creating, trying to create engagement. So maybe there is an information or a survey or some type of pamphlet or flyer or downloadable piece of information that you want people to download or engage with or maybe there's a post that you've created that you really want people to engage with. So maybe engagement's the goal. And then the third bucket is action. Maybe you want somebody to sign a petition, donate or join an event or sign up for something, right? And so those are the three buckets that we always focus on. And so there are some influencers that are fantastic at generating action but they don't have necessarily the reach that you would want for an awareness. Some influencers are amazing at getting their audience or followers to engage but they maybe not really will donate, right? So it doesn't answer your question directly but what we look at is those three buckets of goals or objectives and then look at the various parameters or the capabilities of an influencer like their followers, their engagement rate, their ability to really engage their audience to then sort of align influencers with those objectives and then work with them to achieve those. There's so much to consider, you know, really when it looks, when we look at this and I remember, you know, just a handful of years ago where like this was really starting to take shape. So I'm curious, you know, the second key talking point that we really want to learn from you here and nerd out, right? Like it's super nerdy. Managing the nonprofit story with an influencer. What does that look like? Because I can only imagine there's some fear from some people saying, we can't let them, you know, run with a blank canvas. We really need to, you know, narrate this for them, set some guardrails. So what are you seeing for best practice? Yeah, 100%. So let me address the fear thing because I think it's valid and I understand it. Influencer marking has been seven, eight, nine, 10 years right now, right? So it's definitely not in an infancy stage yet. It's for sure growing and it's going to continue to be explosive, but it's by no means new. And I think that even five years ago, there the risk or the potential downside to work with an influencer was for sure there. There was no real great cadence or best practice or templates or any type of thing that would really help you create those guardrails. And it was still very much experimental, but now this is a legitimate business. People are putting money into it, livelihoods are at stake. So the risk of an influencer doing something to negatively impact your brand is pretty low. It exists. And I think it would exist for a celebrity partnership as well, but it's pretty low. So just generally setting the table there, I think it's important to understand. But for sure. We have a process that we've built out, you know, in terms of creating a very detailed, you know, campaign brief or creative brief that really outlines specific messaging that they would like to incorporate, specific dos and don'ts around. It could be as simple as like, this is how you pronounce our name or make sure you don't say these words or do not say anything political in nature, whatever it is, but you know, create a very specific detailed list of dos and don'ts and even providing some references on the types of visuals that you want or the types of video that you may be looking at. And so it's a pretty simple basic step, but it's super important because not only will it allow you to achieve the outcomes that you want in terms of creator for the influencer, but even doing an outreach to an influencer, if you can clearly articulate to them and say, we really like you for these reasons, we think you'll be impactful because of those reasons. And this is specifically how we want to work with you, the likelihood of you getting them to respond to work with you, to negotiate price, to do stuff for free or to donate. Like all of those things are much higher if you can really clearly follow that process and articulate specifically those items. Do you see where the influencer creates, you know, the narrative around whatever it might be and then that needs to go back to the organization for approval or is it, you know, here's the guardrails, we trust you. What are you seeing? Yeah, so the majority of the process of the workflow is here's the sort of framework we'd love for you to work in. The contents created, there is some negotiated amount of revisions that are acceptable. The contents created is sent back to the organization or the nonprofit, they provide their feedback. If it needs to be revised, they send it back to the influencer. If not, then it's approved and you just work on scheduling at that point. However, I am starting to see some increases in more integrated partnerships where an influencer will get a little bit more flexibility in the leeway and almost provide a bit more strategy on how they think they can provide value because they know their audience so well and they're obviously their content. So there's definitely becoming a little bit more comfortability around influencer marketing generally, looking for better partnerships and long-term relationships with influencers because organizations are seeing the value there, but there are still guardrails, there is still a process for approval and ultimately, most of the time, we've never seen a situation where an influencer just posts something without getting approved. Right, and I would imagine that you don't wanna, you know, I don't know, like put a wet blanket on the influencer's tone and voice. Like they have their own authentic tone and voice and if you nonprofit say, here's exactly what you want you to post, like their followers will realize that is not an authentic post. So I could see that happening. Yeah, oh yeah, 100%. The least performing campaigns are the ones that have that level of restrictions. I think it's okay and there is success in providing some talking points and some things that you want to make sure that they include in messaging. But in terms of saying like, here's the script, stick to it and we don't want anything else, don't do influencer marketing because that's not going to be productive for you. So you piqued my interest and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't even think of this, but you mentioned celebrity, right? Like nonprofits have used celebrities for a long time to dare I say influence their own brand. And so now what I'm hearing is, and again, again, like from you, what you just said, celebrities are still being used and influencers. So can you share with us maybe like how they differ or why choose one over the other? Again, don't mean to back you in a corner, but it just dawned on me, right? Like of course, of course we've been using celebrities for the same type of purpose. Yeah, I mean, I think it's now sort of all, you could ask 10 or 100 people who a celebrity is now and I think you would get a hundred different answers because the world is so intermixed now, right? I mean, you have YouTube celebrities who were influencers at one point, right? So I will give you my take on it, but ultimately like a celebrity is somebody who has millions of followers that is known to do multiple things, not just to be on a particular social media platform. So I think what makes an influencer become a celebrity is they now are on TV and they're in movies and they have products and all of these things and they sort of become sort of much more than just a social media channel. So I'm sure again, you would get tons of different answers with you asking different people on that, but that's sort of my feel on it and celebrities typically have millions of followers on that. But I think generally speaking, influencers as sort of an ecosystem have really leveled the playing field so that you as an organization, you don't need a celebrity endorsement anymore. I mean, there are millions and millions of amazing creators that have influence, that have followers on social media that you could probably piece together in a much more economical and accessible way than trying to land a George Clooney or an Amal Clooney or anybody that has like this celebrity status, right? A Kim Kardashian, right? All of those people, there are so many other people that you could work with that would probably drive more sustained and long-term impact that would be a little bit more authentic to your organization. So I think it's just sort of democratized influence and celebrity as a whole and really allowed nonprofits to leverage this to generate. And I feel like influencers might automatically niche their audience faster, right? Like easier, faster, more in tune as opposed to celebrities that really cast their net far and wide. I would say for me, a celebrity is maybe more of a household name, right? More of a known household name, whereas influencers, my 12 year old knows names I don't know, you know? And it's very different. But let's branch into the impact, right? So okay, I'm sure there's tons of people listening to this conversation, Nick and they're like, how the heck do you measure the ROI, right? So measuring the influence or impact. And like you said, this has been around. It's now a mature channel, a mature path. So what are these measurements of impact? Sure, absolutely. And that's really where our kind of bread and butter is and where we started is we knew that if we can provide really detailed, transparent reporting for corporate partners as well as nonprofits, a lot of good could come from it and we could all scale it. Cause essentially, you know, you don't know what you don't know. It's sort of one of the common, you know, cliches that you hear a lot, but you also can't optimize what you don't measure, right? So the way that we've sort of looked at it is we call it the double ROI. So return on investment and return on impact because those are two very important areas that not only help secure and scale corporate partnerships, but also optimize internal nonprofit sort of strategy philosophy and process too. So when we look at the sort of return on investment side, we really look at some of the more standard common marketing key performance indicators or KPIs, right? So reach, awareness, engagement, clicks, click through rate, those sorts of things. Really to understand, you know, if I'm an organization that is, excuse me, a corporate partner that is partnered with a nonprofit organization, I want to know, did this partnership actually drive like brand lift? Did more people understand who we are, are now more people associating the good that we do with our nonprofit partner with our brand, right? And so understanding that a lot and measuring those components, but then also we look at the return on impact. So did that partnership and all those clicks and impressions and reach, did that start to drive impact back to the nonprofit? Did the nonprofit see increase in website visitors? Did it see an increase in social media followers? Did it see an increase in donation? Did it see an increase in petition signatures? Whatever the main metrics are for those partnerships. And so those are sort of the high level things that we look at. You don't need to have a data scientist on staff. You don't need to have somebody who is like an Excel nerd like I am. You really just need to make sure that you are kind of looking at all of the various components to align all those things. And what we found is that when we measure tactics to outcomes, that allows us a really great blueprint for what works and what doesn't, which partnerships are valuable and which ones are. And there's a lot of aha moments because there's a lot of times where nonprofits maybe have spent a lot of time, a lot of internal resources to support what they thought was a marquee partnership. But when they actually looked at the impact metrics of okay, well we've spent all of these man hours and all this time to support this partnership that it really maybe doesn't necessarily move the needle in the longterm and maybe it's just like it's a small short-term flip or vice versa. They see that there's these smaller partnerships that have drawn immense impact that they had no idea about. So maybe they need to drive more attention and awareness on it. So the more that we can measure the return on investment and the return on impact, the better we can identify corporate partners and scale those partnerships to more integrated opportunities but also optimize internal process to really make sure our marketing spend, our marketing resources and our partnership and development resources are used as effective as possible. One of the things I see as a huge advantage of this is since I started in my career 20 something years ago, it was always mentioned we are losing constituents meaning they're dying, right? They're aging, they're dying. How do we engage with a younger audience? And this to me is like clearly engaging in younger audience, right? Like younger and younger, you know, as we move forward with the advancements of technology. So I have a couple of rapid fire questions I wanna ask you, Nick, because I know I'm looking at the time and I don't want it to end, but it always goes by so quickly. What does something like this cost, right? For an organization that might be considering an influencer partnership, is there a range of investment or budget we need to consider? No, and I'll tell you why. So there's four, the quick answer to that is there's four ways you can fund this. You can, if you've done your homework and you've done your creative brief and you can articulate the value that an influencer would bring to a campaign, you can ask them for a donated post. They get those all the time, but the more you can articulate why they would be impactful for you, the more likelihood you can get a donated post. So that's free. The second thing is you can barter with them. Maybe you're an organization has a walk or another event that has t-shirts or hats or merch or whatever, or maybe you have a corporate partner that has merch that can donate in kind. You can barter a post. You can send them those merchandise or that apparel for a free post essentially, right? So that's free number two. Number three, maybe you again, have a corporate partner who's doing a roundup program and it would be already doing some marketing around it. So maybe they can subsidize some part or all of a co-marketing opportunity with an influencer that sort of is announcing this roundup opportunity at their retail location that is supporting your nonprofit. So that could be free or almost free. And then the fourth thing is you're a nonprofit. Pull the nonprofit card. Hey, I know your rate is 1,000 bucks usually, but how about you do it for 500? How about you do it for 250? So I think that like nonprofits are their own influencers. Nonprofits, it's never been a better time. It may not feel like it sometimes, but it's never been a better time to be a nonprofit. So swing that rate, that around and work on that to lower rates and to get the best you possibly can. Cause everybody wants to really do good. There's a humongous focus on generationally, especially to do good. So I think that hopefully it doesn't answer your question directly, but I think those are the four ways that I think you can find ways to fund or leverage influencer marketing in free or somewhat free ways. Yeah, no, I appreciate that, right? Like it's free, free one, free one A, free one B. Yeah, there's a couple of different options and definitely trying to negotiate. Okay, so maybe for people watching and listening that are saying, I have quite a following. I myself would like to be an influencer. How does one even engage in this? Yeah, I mean, you kind of just do. It's kind of a weird thing. So if you have a following and you want to become an influencer, like actually make it a business. The first thing you kind of need to do is figure out what is your unique sort of expertise or platform and to find that really clearly. How much does that cost to partner with me? And then sort of write that down on a piece of paper, on a document. And that's a good place to start. And think about who you would be an ideal partner for. Maybe you are a health passionate about health. And so you have a lot of opinions about health. So maybe there are some brands that you already love that you could reach out and say, hey, I'm already talking about you. I love what you do. And this is what I can do for you. And this is why I think I could be valuable for you and this is how much it costs, right? Yeah, so really just put it out there, right? So Nick, this has all been fascinating for me. And I know we could continue our conversation. Share with us a little bit about what Kaleidoscope has going on, where we might be seeing you next. Like if we want more, because again, this is very truncated, you know? What's going on and how do we find more information about you and the company and just the influencer space in general? For sure. There's so many fun and crazy wacky things with influencers and crypto and NFTs and education. I mean, there's so many things that we think we can make accessible for nonprofits being in the space for a long time. So reach out, kaleidoscope.io. We talk about it all the time on our LinkedIn and social media channels. Please check those out and follow us there in a couple of months, actually in a couple of weeks next month, I'll be at the Virtuous Response Nonprofit Summit talking with, I mean, a panel that is like all-star plus me. I don't know how I got on it, but I'm super excited about that. We're seeing the same thing. Don't worry. Yeah, right, no. Plus Nick Lynch. I don't know how I got next to him, but. They're awesome. So I'll be there on May 9th. We'll be on a panel there. We're about to launch an influencer marketing for nonprofits e-learning course to really break down step by step as a nonprofit organization. Like where do you start? What does that creative brief look like? How do I find influencers? How do I reach out to them? How do I measure it? So we've broken down that process in our e-learning and we'll do supreme launch in a couple of weeks. And we're here and I answer everything. So if you have questions about where nonprofit marketing is headed, what's influencer marketing? How do I work on it? You just mentioned crypto and NFTs. They sound crazy and fun. I have no idea what that means. So we're just here for it. And we just wanna make the spaces as great and as best as we can knowing what we know and what we've done. Okay, Nick. So what platforms are you on? So we have your web address here, right? For your company, but what other platforms can we find you? Yeah, we're on all major social media platforms. I'll tell you that we love LinkedIn the most. So you can check us out on LinkedIn. We're most active there. We feel like from a corporate and a partner and a nonprofit perspective, that's no better place to interact there. So check us out on LinkedIn at cloudscope.io. And like I said, reach out, tag me, ask me questions, we're here to support. Well, thank you. Again, fascinating conversation is it continues to grow and evolve. We'd love to have you back on to grow and evolve our own education and knowledge on this. We started the conversations March, 2020, really just kind of thinking it's gonna be a couple of weeks and little did we know, right? Like here we are coming up on 800 episodes into our fourth year. So very honored to have amazing leaders and guests and experts like yourself joining us. So Nick Lynch, CEO at Kaleidoscope. Thank you so very much for joining us. And again, the web address is kaleidoscope.io and that spell like collide, C-O-L-L-I-D-E, scope.io. So definitely check Nick and the company out. Julia Patrick, thanks for creating this platform. She's the American Nonprofit Academy CEO. I'm Jarrett Ransom, her fun sidekick and a nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. And again, I truly love nerding out with so many people when I'm not here on the show, I miss it. So it's a lot of fun. And again, shout out of gratitude to our amazing presenting sponsors that allow us to bring in and attract our own. I'm going to say it, Nick, influencers in the nonprofit space. So thank you to Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising Academy at National University, nonprofit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. These companies have been with us most since the very, very beginning. And they're also here to help you in the sector, do more good in around and throughout your community. So as we end every episode, including this one with you, Nick, we want to remind all of our viewers, our listeners, as well as your guests to stay well so you can continue to do well. Thank you so much.