 Thank you to all of you that have joined us today. The other day I said this and I'll say it again, but good morning, good afternoon and good evening, depending on whatever time it is in your day right now as you're choosing to tune in with us. We have back with us today in a nonprofit thought leader episode Anne McCauley Lopez and Anne's going to share with us all about how, why and should you really look at hiring a content writer for your nonprofit. So we're excited to dive into this conversation with Anne. Before we do that, we of course want to make sure that you know who we are if we haven't quite met yet. Julia Patrick joins me. Julia is the CEO of the American nonprofit Academy and thanks to her we are 430 maybe 50 plus episodes strong. So grateful that you've had this idea to bring the broadcast to the nation. So thank you so much Julia. And thank you for allowing me to play a part in this as well as I serve as your co-host. I'm Jarrett Ransom, you're nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group and Julia and I both are so extremely honored to have the continued support from our presenting sponsors. You can see these companies in front of you. We really are so appreciative and full of gratitude for their continued investment. And I always like to say, it's not just here for these episodes, but it's truly at large in our sector across the nation. So thank you to our sponsors. And if you have not looked into them, please do that, not now, but as soon as we wrap up today's episode. I'm glad you pointed that out. I'm really glad you pointed that out because Anne Macaulay Lopez, we've had you on before. You are one of our nonprofit thought leaders, senior content writer for agency content writer. Okay, Jarrett, tell me the name that you always think you always attached to Anne. Logging badass, absolutely, she has all of that. And Anne, full of transparency, I have hired the blogging badass. And so I have fully seen the wonderful work that Anne does. She has helped me and my company achieve some really high accomplishments through content writing and really honored to have the opportunity to not only work with you in the past, but also to have you share your valuable time and expertise with us. Thank you for having me again. I'm so excited to share more knowledge about the importance of contents and just spend some time there today. Thank you. Well, you know, this is really an important thing. It's almost like your ears must have been burning because I swear every day, it seems like for the past two weeks, somehow, some way our conversations for each show have come back to taking the actions and the words that you have used in many ways and putting them back up on your website, making sure that you're closing the loop on that. And so I think it's really important to talk about this with you, Anne, because it's not just a matter of repurposing. It seems to me like it goes to another level. And so if you can help me understand, just from the beginning, what is a content writer and how are they different from the other writers that we might be assembling on our team? Sure. So a content writer, we create written content that tells the story of your nonprofit or of your business. We want to highlight kind of PR worthy items. We added a new director of something, right? We want to announce that. We want to tell the story where whatever your nonprofit does, we did XYZ and we want to do it in a strategic way. There are different types of content writers and there are also freelance writers or script writers or in this space, grant writers. Could I write a grant? Yes, could I do it as well as Jared? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Could she coach me through? Probably. I know a lot of words and I could put some together but that is not my forte. It's definitely blogging for nonprofits and for businesses and creating content that really tells about what you do strategically. Now let me ask you this question now. In order to get to that point, are you taking in these other written words or these other documents to then curate almost to get that content or is this from scratch? Either way, that really speaks to the process and I think if you're thinking about hiring a writer, that's one of the questions to ask really is what's your process? And I might be a little ahead of the class for today but there are clients that have come to me that say we have a lot of words and we don't know where to put them or how to put them somewhere. So when I gather all those, I have conversations with folks, I'll review written materials and really on the nonprofit side, really on the business side too but on the nonprofit side specifically we'll say what are the campaigns that we want to highlight? Well, who are the people that we want to highlight? Do you have a family that you helped that we want to tell their story or is this really more about giving? Oh, Jared, I'm losing the word. When you put them in your will or your trust and you say I wanna give to this organization, what is that? Legacy giving? Legacy giving. Okay, if we wanna highlight that what do we wanna tell about that? So being strategic, what do we wanna highlight? What do we wanna tell? And then really talking to the key leaders about the organization and what they wanna highlight and putting together a plan. So as we sit in December that I know it's a huge fundraising time of year, what did we say? 13? 13% of the money that comes in and nonprofits happens this month, which is that's a lot, right? Especially, yes, yes. Julia said it fast, it's mind-blowing. So would we wanna start yesterday on December 1st with a campaign? Probably not. We probably wanted to talk about it in September and build it up and start telling those stories about where does that money go? I mean, we can talk about operating expenses and we can say here's who's in our office and we can also say here's who we've helped. The majority of our money goes towards this, goes towards our mission and our vision and the goals of who we're helping or this particular campaign. So that was a very long answer to your question but I kind of, I could take all of whatever you have and in talking to people. I recently completed a project and I had the opportunity to actually review the larger, I work with a lot of digital agencies and I had the opportunity to work with the agency and they actually gave me access to the interviews they did with their client and just hearing the voices and hearing their stories. I got a real flavor for the culture of the company and I think that goes for any organization. Could I just take a piece of paper and write about it? Sure, but really we wanna know the personalities behind the cause, right? And what are we doing and why are we doing it? Well, and I'm really glad that you said that, Ann because one of the questions I wanted to ask and I feel like nonprofits ask this often of our grant writers, right? Is can someone really write for us if they're not here every day, right? If they're not seeing the program in action but as you said, you just listen to these interviews and really we're able to help capture. So talk to us about that about how a content writer can be a huge value asset without possibly even stepping foot into the office. I think it takes hiring the right writer. There are people that I come across and I say, can you send me some samples and the truth comes out? Well, I'm just doing this on the side. My brother needed help with his organization my sister collects bicycles for kids in the neighborhood and whatever and the truth comes out. That's not the writer you probably want for all of your strategic pieces. You don't. We all start somewhere and that's a great place to start but when we talk about being in on site I guess that's the question of being on site and talking to people. We can do it over the phone. We can set up a 30 minute interview. Tell me about what you do. I usually keep the questions pretty open because as you're talking, I hear certain words and I hear commonalities as I'm talking to different people. We could also feel like, oh gosh, I don't know about talking. I'd rather answer questions. I'm a survey person. Great, let's answer some questions. I could pull words out of there. There's different ways and because I've been doing this for a while I really have a process and honestly when I start talking to folks, I don't know about you but I get a sense of how they like to communicate and what probably works best for them and I will kind of morph my process to what we think will work for them. If they wanna just brain dump in the middle of the night at three o'clock in the morning, Julia, you go do that and when I get up at seven, I will read your email. Oh my God. Oh, Anne, you know me too well. You know me too well. The secret is out. Okay. I'm sorry. Gosh, that's the worst. Okay, so Anne, as part of parcel to that you gotta get the feel and I love that you use the word culture. Okay, you gotta get that whole thing because if you're not writing with the spirit you're gonna miss a line that web experience or article submission, blog post, whatever to what's actually going on. So that's a heavy lift. Now you gotta backfill it with the SEO work and that is where I'm a little like foggy on. So how does this all work? Cause it seems to me from the previous times we've had you on, if you are not working on the SEO aspect you're missing huge opportunities. You're missing all that Google love. You're missing strategically getting in your target audience and getting to people that will love your organization but don't know you exist maybe or don't see you when they search for people who love dogs or how to help dogs in fill in your city or whatever it is, education, helping kids. If you're not using SEO which is search engine optimization it's basically the Google love. You are missing out. So if I went to an organization and they said, oh my whoever is helping us write or a grant writer has written an article or the admin wrote an article, what can you do with this? The answer is this, great. The admin absolutely understands the culture. They are there every day. The grant writer maybe is there in house, whoever it is they write an article. What I could do is I call it a judge and we can edit that and make it SEO friendly so that it's literally in the voice of the organization but then we give it that little boost to Google love and that may be a way to kind of bridge that gap where you wanna keep ownership of your organization. It's your nonprofit, it's your life's work probably. And we want your voice in there. Well, no, I'm not in the office every day. I can understand a brand voice and give you a brand voice but can I sit there and get in the nitty gritty of everything that you maybe wanna tell about the organization. The answer is probably not unless I did sit there. So let's take what's written and make it Google friendly and let me do a little edit and there are some tricks of headings and things like that that we can simply format into what your team is writing to help you get that boost and tell the story in your own voice. So then let me ask another question to that. Sorry, Jared, I think I jumped in. Are you talking about just, you're not just talking about blog posts. You're actually talking about content that might be only a paragraph long that's on your website or is it more on like that full article kind of piece? It could be either. I was thinking more in terms of blogging on the website. For example, for that company I got to watch their interviews. What we did for part of it was we said what people say about working with us and it was basically just kind of the feelings and the gist of it. There were some words that they used and I made those quotes and I used quotes in quotes because it wasn't really direct quotes but it was the spirit of what people were saying. And I said, oh, here's what people say about working at our firm. And they were like, oh my gosh, we love it. And I said, okay, because I listened. You have to have a writer who has a process who listens and he doesn't just go, oh, tell me what do you want me to write? She might not know. It's very overwhelming. You have a hundred things going on and you're like, I don't, we got this writer here. What is she doing? So if we can kind of hone it in and say, okay, December is coming. It's September. Let's start thinking about what do we want to focus on in December and start highlighting that? Well, and I love your very professional terminology of judging it up. Because your ears, as Julia already mentioned, should have been burning probably the last two weeks because we literally have continued to bring up so many of your nuggets of information. One of the things that you mentioned as it relates to SEO, I believe, is the backlinks that you also, as an experienced professional content writer, are able to include to, as you again, refer to the Google love. And so that is so, I think, really important when it comes to us as nonprofits in the community is utilizing all of these tricks and best practices so that we... Relationships. So we can. One of the things that today's episode caught my attention and it's very clear that you understand the nonprofit sector because you refer to our annual campaigns and the variety of campaigns that we have going on throughout the year. Giving Tuesday just happened and that, of course, was a big campaign, but we have December, we have everything going on. So I'm curious if you can talk to us, if we choose to work with a content writer, what does that look like by way of timing? Because you mentioned maybe we start telling the story in September, knowing that December is around the corner. I think, I remember one of the, I think it was the first time I was on with you, Julia said. So, Anne, we've got all these ideas and we have a plan, but we have things that happen throughout the year. So I think planning ahead is one thing and also allowing that space for those special events that happen or those donors that we see and we wanna thank that just kind of you've retracted, but we didn't have in our plan, right? We always wish for those so that we can thank them and thank a big organization that we partnered with because nonprofits are always looking for those big partnerships. So I think it is about planning ahead. If there's a time of year when it is slower and we can kind of start working from there, maybe it's January, maybe it's June, maybe it's March, I don't know what it is and maybe it depends on your nonprofit kind of seasons and what you do, you know, back east, they probably have collected the winter coats for people, right? And we're looking to feed them for Christmas or something. So in the slow season, it would be a good time to reach out and just start talking to those marketing people like content writers to say, how could you help our organization? Here's where we see, we've had our annual meeting and we know what the board expects and we know what we expect. What can we do with you in terms of marketing and getting the word out about our organization throughout the year? That way we can put a plan together so that maybe I do a Jojovin article or we write an original article and you kind of keep my number, you know, whatever and say, okay, we're gonna do one a month and then if we need you, can we call you? And the answer is yes. And I feel like if you're going to work with a writer they should say, they should be open to that, right? Like we don't have a hard and fast. I think the caveat would be, it might give me a little time. Like can I do an overnight at this rate? Probably not, maybe, I don't know. So it's really about doing some planning on that. Once you kind of have an idea of where you want your, I was gonna say your business, but your nonprofit to go for the next year or next cycle, maybe fundraising cycle, then yeah, let's talk because here's the thing and we talked about this before is the repurposing and the backlinks. You can use those articles in your newsletter as you get closer. So when we talk about that September to December window we can use some of that content that we created in our November article about giving or our December article about, you know, whatever it is whatever we decide. But yeah, I think there is a little bit of planning and I think there's ways that we can work together to, you know, for me if we said, okay, can you consult and just give us the best of the best about blogging? Give us a website overview, what do you suggest? And we package that up and you say, okay, when we're ready or when we get this particular grant for this particular project, we're gonna bring you in. That's a good way to start partnering is just grab some consultants, grab some time with people. And maybe you've got a volunteer who's a marketing professional and they go, oh, I get that because we do marketing in a different silo kind of thing. So this gives me an intro into the nuts and bolts of things. I mean, I think you've already sold me on the idea of why this needs to happen. But if you can share with us like process because for a lot of us, we can understand that we're gonna need this, but then how do we manage it and execute it? So if you can talk to us about some of those things, I think that would really help us to kind of frame this up a little bit. Sure. So when I start with a new organization or business, we start with just a quick call to say, is there any synergy? Do I like you? I mean, let's be serious. We wanna work with people we know, like and trust and I think like is pretty big deal. So we do a quick call and if we say, yes, let's move ahead, we'll do, I might do a proposal. I might do some clarifying, hey, send me some information on those programs you talked about. Give me an idea of the direction we wanna go. I will put some questions together for them, some strategic questions. I just added this piece into my process. The reason I did is because I think that organizations, especially kind of post pandemic-ish, I call it, are really aware of what their mission, vision and values are and what they want to be doing. And whether it's what they were doing before they're changing, they have a really good idea of it because we had some downtime, right? We had some time to think about what are we really, why are we really here? And I really wanna capture that. If they don't understand their organization and they don't have a plan for themselves, I don't know that I can come in or really any marketing person can come in and definitively make a difference for them. I think it really takes having an idea of where you want your organization to go and how you want it to grow and what do you wanna highlight through the year? And so we talked through that. I sent some strategic questions. We put that together in whatever we've agreed to. If we agreed a blog post, we say, okay, we're gonna do one blog post a month and update one page of your website, for example. And I love doing it that way. Google likes when we create new pages on our website and blogs our pages. That was my little tidbit, I think last time. And any content that I create, when you talk about who owns it, which is I guess the kind of copyright question of this, any content I own, it's in my agreement, the client owns the content, I do not own it. I do not reuse it, I might reuse a good idea, but I'm a writer, I can rewrite it so that it doesn't match. So it's all yours, you do own it. So let me clarify, when we're going out and we're looking at the landscape of professional content writers, this should be like something that's like a warning flag or something that we, that's the best practice and that's a standard that the client always maintains the copyright even though they might not have created it? I don't know that there is a standard, it's a great question, it's my standard. I feel like you've hired me and paid me to write this content on your behalf. So it's really yours, it's your brand, your voice, it's yours. I think it comes from when I first entered the industry website designers sometimes owned the website and so you had to kind of get it out of the hawk. And so I said, oh no, they own the content, it's yours. I can write other content, I can judge it, but yeah, my content's all original. So that's a big thing. I think asking what their process is is part of your process as a nonprofit as a prospective client of a writer is to ask what their process is. If they have trouble answering that question or say, well, you know, it's really up to you, that's, I don't know that you're gonna, they haven't set expectations for you. And I think that'll be challenging to work with somebody who can't, who doesn't have their own process of how they do things. What do you do upfront and what's your deliverable? For me, I rarely have to do full rewrite. I don't ever have to do full rewrites. We'll have to do some minor edits sometimes. And that's usually, you know, a word choice. I use one word, they prefer a different word. And that's a learning process. But for the most part, because we've done all that work on the front end, I deliver it and it's usually pretty close to what they want, if not right on target. I think that's different. I hear a lot of other writers say, we go through multiple edits, might be because they're not listening. I don't know, it could be their front end process. But I found over the years that that's what works for me. And I feel like you should have it, whoever you work with, you should have some idea what your process is. Copyright, you own it in terms of cost. I have more experience. So it's going to cost more to work with me, but also there's value in the deliverable. There's also value in, maybe I can get it done faster or more efficiently than a less experienced writer. But it does come at a cost. So you kind of have to balance those things. Like if you have a mid-level writer who's got experience and has a true passion for your nonprofit, you're rescuing puppies and their mom had a puppy rescue. Well, that might be the person. I love dogs a lot, but if they already have experience with puppy rescue and they're an experienced writer, that might be your person, right? So you kind of have to weigh it. You have to probably talk to a few different people and it might be the person that clicks with you and not necessarily the person that on paper or on a resume, if you will, checks all the boxes. You want it to be a good fit. Ask about the process and ask in terms of, you have quantity on here. How much content do you need and how much could you repurpose? And what do you already have that we could really just give a jujju and put it up on the website? I had a client last year. They sent out a monthly newsletter. So the first 12 articles we put on the website were SEO ready newsletters. So they had written the newsletter. We made it pretty, put headers, keywords, and we got it up on their website. So when they launched their website, they had 12 pieces of content already. So that's something to think about too. And that would cut back on the cost a little bit as well. In my opinion, in working with me, that we could kind of package it as a project rather than going on a monthly. And so that's something to ask as well is how do you package and deliver what you're writing for us? Could we package it a different way? Because we know working with nonprofits, there's a cost consideration. Well, and this is a great opportunity for all of us as we look into next year's budget or start to really think about how we want to review and renew our contracts if you joined us yesterday, right? And say, really, I don't know how might we engage with a content writer to best leverage perhaps what we already have or where we want to go. And I think that's wonderful. And you have a really helpful and insightful blog post on your own website that I know we wanted to reference here so that everyone can take a look at the ultimate guide to hiring a content writer for your marketing agency slash non-profit, right? Like a little bit of that. I was gonna say, that's the secret. This is really for anybody. And it goes in a little more of the nuts and bolts than what we were able to talk about today. But it's really, you know, ask questions. Do they have experience? Do they have, you know, for nonprofits? I would say ask them, do you have a passion for what we do? Is it even of interest to you to write about this? It might not. I don't know. Great question. And again, I feel like I wanna reference back to, you know, you wanna work with people that you know, like and trust and the like is a really big one. As well as the mission connect. There are so many, we talk about this often 1.8 million nonprofits that are registered in our nation. And so they're, within those 1.8, there are nine main sectors of the nonprofit. So finding someone that, you know, really does connect to the mission or the sector, I think is another win-win. And you always bring such valuable content. No wonder you are the content writer that really helped to leverage so many organizations, businesses across the nation. So thank you for sharing your time and your talents with us. We are so lucky to have Anne McCauley Lopez joining us today. Anne is the owner, president, CEO, all those agency content writer and she can help you. Trust me, I have experienced her work firsthand, phenomenal to work with, full transparency. I'm one of those that says, Anne, I don't have time to do this. Here's what I want. Can you just create it? And she's really great at that. I'm sure that's not how you prefer to work with everyone but just sharing that if she can work with me, she can do magic with you as well. I love it. I think that's great. You know, Jared, this has been a fabulous, fabulous show just based on the content that we have had from a myriad of guests for the past two weeks. It's fascinating to see how this is kind of a wrap up to so many of the conversations we've had. So thank you so much, Anne. It's been amazing. We also wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors. Without you, we would not be here having these discussions. Again, our presenting sponsors help us in so many ways and they help the nonprofit sector tremendously. And every single one of our sponsors, Jared, if you think about it, they have really moved their service levels to that online position. Because of the pandemics, I mean, it seems like this is where we've gone. And so this is even more of an important issue as we're moving forward. So it's really been exciting, Anne, to kind of have you help us reframe some of these things. I've really, really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Hey, everybody, as we like to end every episode of the nonprofit show, we wanna remind you to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.