 Welcome, and thanks for joining us for the nonprofit show. We're excited that you have chosen to spend your time with us here. Today, we are helping John Lepp with his book launch, and it's all about creative deviations. John is joining us again. He's not a new face, not a new voice, and we're really glad to have you back. John is the author of Creative Deviations and works with agents of good. Joins us from Canada, and we are thrilled to have you. So we'd love some of your weather right now, because as we shared in the Green Room Tratter, it's a little bit warm over here. But fair warning, John told us that he is caffeinated up, so he is ready to nerd out, and it's going to be a really good juicy conversation. Julia Patrick joins us, of course. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm honored that she keeps me around. I'm Jarrett Ransom. I haven't been kicked off or fired yet. I'm the non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group, and if you can't tell, I have a lot of fun here serving as co-host. Thanks also to our sponsors, because they keep us playing in this playground. So thank you to Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy, Nonprofit Nerd, your part-time controller, Nonprofit Atlas, the non-profit thought leader, as well as Staffing Boutique. These companies exist to help you do more good. They also help us stream onto these various platforms, Roku, YouTube, Fire TV, Vimeo. So if you missed any of our almost 600, yes, 600 episodes, you can find them on these platforms as well as podcast forms. So if you are a podcast listener like I am, go ahead and queue up the non-profit show, start your day or end your day with us if you're going on a road trip or traveling, or even if you're tired of binging Netflix, come on and binge, sorry, binge Julia and I on the non-profit show. And of course, John today as our guest, just honored to have you back, John. So welcome back my friend, glad to have you. Very kind, I appreciate that. Thanks for the intro. You know, John, I love the name of your business. I think an agent of good is like, that's the title I wanna have. Before we get into your book and really this fabulous work that you're doing and sharing, can you talk to us a little bit about what your firm does and your approach to working with nonprofits? Sure, I mean, the nutshell, I'm not gonna bore him with our detailed bio of what we do, the nutshell is that Jen Love and I have been running agents of good since 2009 and we serve charities mostly with our individual giving programs. So in that we work with a lot of direct mail still, a lot of digital work. We do a lot of coaching. We help our friends and colleagues around the world improve themselves in the work every day. And Jen, I'm a storytellers, I'm a designer and a writer, Jen is a writer. We love sharing stories of amazing people in this world and we're very blessed to have this job. So I love it, it's great to do this every day. It's amazing. You know, I think it's such a neat thing to talk to people like you who have that creative spirit but understand the nuts and bolts of business and how we can kind of marry the two. And when we heard you had written a book and that you have a new book out, we were like, we have to get you on and learn more about this because it's a really interesting premise. And so creative deviations, talk to us about this. How did you come about this? There's a book that was written in 1995 by a chap named George Smith, English fellow and the book was called Asking Properly. And so when I started out my career, that was a book that really everyone had to read. And really it talked about how the sort of smallest deviations, the nearest bit of pioneering in our work can actually lead to really amazing things. And I remember reading it and then being trained by many amazing fundraisers through my career who taught me all these things in this book. And I think I sat down like, I don't know maybe five or six years ago on a vacation. And I thought I'd reread again and I was struck by how much of it still was true. And there were things that people still weren't doing that were taught and shared in this book. And also the foundation of my own understanding of my work. So George talked about this idea of deviations which I really, really love because in our work, we've been accused of being innovative. And for me, innovative is a scary word. I don't want people to think of this as innovative because we're not innovative. We're just basically just doing the basics right over and over and over and over again. So creative deviations is a real about fundamental understanding of direct marketing and direct response. It's about how to tell great stories. It's like what are the components you need to make something successful? How to creatively tell these stories? So it's sort of a bit of, it's an evergreen book that should cover off a lot of different ideas with tons of examples and creativity. So I'm super excited by it, obviously. Wow, you know, I love, Jared, don't you think we don't use or hear the word creativity very much in the nonprofit sector? No, or deviation, right? Like disruption, innovation, that's starting to kind of get out there. And you're right, John, typically it's a negative connotation. Like, whoa, that is just too much. We can't do that. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want any of this to be scarier and intimidating because it really isn't. I mean, at the end of the day, the two things I like to get across is that we are having conversations with these other people we call humans. And every day in our work, that's what we're doing. So anything that's in this book is just helping you have better conversations with these humans who really, really want to help you. That's what they want to do. But we get in the way of that all the time. So again, there's nothing too scary in here. I mean, yes, we push some boundaries in terms of here's some different ways you can do these things. Like when I was on the show before, we talked about Ruby the Hummingbird, using a voice like that can be very intimidating, but that becomes a professionalism conversation. We're afraid to be vulnerable and emotional in our storytelling. These are things that just get in the way of letting donors do what they really want to do, which is help us. And we do it very, very well and it drives me crazy. So this again, it really leans into the idea let's go the way and just connect with other humans and be normal humans who are just saying we could use your help with this. Do you want to help us? So I have to witness to you, John. One of my clients, it's a child welfare organization and the modality or the vehicle that they use is pet therapy. And what we decided to do for one of their recent direct mail pieces was instead of a person telling the story, we used the dog. And the dog told the story and I kept thinking of Ruby and I kept thinking of a mascot. And we received so many letters of that was amazing. I loved hearing the story of spot or I loved hearing, and it's like that was creative because I really feel like our ego was taken away and we shot straight from a dog. What would the dog say? All the way down to like my favorite dog park and my favorite kibble and it was just like, it was fun and it was lighthearted. And that was such a good response from so many of the people that received it. So thank you for planting that seed. My pleasure. Yeah, I mean, it's scary to talk about it. It's scary to do, but that is an extreme example. There are lots of things again that you can do that aren't quite as scary because it gets as you probably experienced that people get really nervous about that kind of storytelling. But that's a deviation. Everyone else is doing the same thing 90, 95% of the time. Everyone's doing exactly the same thing. So what are the small little things you can do that will actually put you on a whole different path with your storytelling and fundraising? Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, as Julia has the slide up that creativity, how does creativity begin to impact donors? And how have you seen that? Because this is not your first radio, you started in 2009. So how have you started to really see how creativity impacts our donors, our giving, that culture of philanthropy? Again, I think it's creativity. When I talk about design creativity, I'm really talking about how everything works together. It is partially graphic design. It is partially writing. It's partially all these different, partially strategies. All creativity is all of these things. And so the thing is that there are little things. Like I think as a direct mail nerd, I'm always thinking about the other envelope. And I've joked with this a million times that I lie awake at night thinking about the other envelope because if I make a mess of it, then it's brilliant letter written by Jen Love or Tom or her or really anybody won't get read and acted upon. And so, it's a small moment of what can I do and what can I send so that when that donor reaches into your mailbox and opens the lid and pulls all of their packs out and the United States are getting what? Between 40 and 50 appeals in sometimes per day. So they're pulling a big stack of mail and how can you stand out? And that's my job number one. It's actually not that difficult because most organizations are sending their number 10 envelope. So again, using a larger envelope or a smaller envelope that is massive in the context of being innovative and creative because everyone is doing exactly the same thing. And I talk about like handwriting instead of using your dumb logo on the top corner of the envelope. Just get your ID of the letter sign to write their name and their address in the top corner and put that on there. Also that looks like personal mail. If you put it for a first class stamp on it smear some ink, put a couple of coffee rings on it. I mean, this pack is getting opened immediately. But that's all monumentally innovative and monumentally creative compared to what everyone else is doing. So, and these things by themselves are no big deal. I mean, I think it's fascinating if you were like really a stamp on an angle. I'm like, yes, a stamp on an angle is a very 2022, here we are is a very, very innovative idea because no one's doing it. So it's funny you mentioned the envelope, Sean, because with inflation and shipping these number nine and 10 envelopes are really hard to come by. And so we might be forced to deviate, right? And wow, what if that actually changed the dynamics and the metrics in a good way? Are you having that same challenge with actually getting a hold of envelopes of a certain size? Yeah, absolutely. And we're, I mean, paper supplies issue all over the place. But I'm for this. I like this idea. The reason I like this idea is because it's gonna force organizations to think about who are they actually mailing? Who are they going to spend the money on and make sure they do a good job of it? The days of like, let's just send out a 10 million piece package to everybody that's crap is has to stop. It'll have stops. You have to be more thoughtful. We're gonna spend the money and that's actually make money, right? That shotgun approach, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's too profound. It's like digital. I was like, digital is free. No, digital is not free. It's costing you a lot of money actually to use digital because a lot of you are using it incorrectly because you're just like, well, I can just send out a thousand emails or 10,000 emails, but it is costing money because you're doing it wrong. You're not being thoughtful about who you're actually mailing or what you're asking for. So again, these things for me, I like this idea of scare in that context that like limitation of like, wow, we can't, we can't mail everybody. No, you actually segment who you're talking to. All your donors are all different. You have to think of them as different people because they're different people. All right, be mindful, separate the list, maybe even change up the story a little bit. Those little deviations, the way to change or to maneuver a cruise ship, a cargo ship is by one degree, right? One degree turn every time. So these little creative deviations will truly make a big impact. What about the storytelling that you can share with us, John? Like, how are you seeing the storytelling connecting with the donors? So every conference we go to right now, one of the chapters and one of the deviations in the book is called Storytelling Is Dead because every single, everything you go to, I want to talk about story, story, story. You need a good story. You have to tell a good story all the time. What you're actually missing is something more important. In my coaching, I see letters far too often that are filled with an interesting story and nothing else. First and foremost, you actually need to be clear on what you're asking for. And sometimes that's your offer. When you can figure out what you're actually asking for and you've done that properly, sometimes you don't even need a story. So, but storytelling, stories are important. I'm not discounting stories, but you still need an offer first. But stories, since we've been cavemen and cavewomen, we've been telling each other stories. We're connected to each other in our communities, in through our friends and families and people in our lives by the stories we share with one another. When I share a story, I'm sharing my values and things I believe in as a human or organizationally by telling stories. So again, we're telling stories that represent our values as an organization. So I break down in the book like a letter to show how every single paragraph of this letter that Jen wrote touches on a value of the organization and has an emotion attached to it. And our letters should look like that. It should have exchange of values and exchange of emotions because when we're sitting here talking and having a conversation over Rosé or water or wherever we're drinking, we're sharing values. We're sharing our stories and it allows you to connect with me or go, this guy's a jerk, right? So storytelling is super, super important, but a clear offer. What you still have to ask for something. And I see too many letters that just tell great stories or okay stories sometimes and don't actually get around to asking for anything. And that's a big flaw. So people are like, what's all a great story? I'm like, yeah, but you didn't ask me for anything. So it failed. You know, I've never, I don't know, Jared, correct me if we're wrong, if I'm wrong. I've never heard anybody talk about that. We're now in our like third year of the nonprofit show. And you're right, everybody's hammering, storytelling, storytelling, storytelling, but not that actual action or ask or next step. It's really an interesting way to be more thoughtful about why we're telling the story. Yeah, and I wanna ask John, do you recommend that we ask once in this, let's say it's a direct mail-in piece or are we asking multiple times? You can ask multiple times in a direct mail piece as long as you're asking for the same thing multiple times. Yes. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, again, one of the things that George talked about a little bit in his book was the idea of asking for one thing. In North America, we have a thing called the annual appeal. A lot of cherry-scented annual appeals. And the premise of an annual appeal is basically renew your support, renew your support. Well, in the UK, for example, or Australia or New Zealand, they don't use that kind of approach at all as much as I know. They use more of what we call a special approach. So every appeal they send out is a special piece that asks for something specific. It's not, we're not asking to renew your support. We're saying, here's an issue we're asking for your help on. And so every appeal you send out is saying, here's an issue we're working on. We need your help with this. This is what your formulas will do. This is the impact that we'll have. Thank you for doing that. So again, we on the North America side have gotten a bit, some of my charity colleagues get on me for this or I think we're too British in our approach. But when you ask for something specifically, if I'm having a conversation with you guys, obviously I need your help, I've got a specific thing, not just say renew your friendship with me and then I'll see you in a year for another glass of wine. You know, we sit down, we talk about, the things we're working on, we need help with, right? And we have to do that in our fundraising too. It is an ongoing conversation and the conversation is two-sided. So again, to answer your question, yes, you can ask multiple times in a pack, but make sure you're only asking for the same thing. Don't ask me for 50 things in a mail pack. And I see reply forms is against in here too. Reply forms that have too many decisions I need to make as a donor. Analysis paralysis is an actual real thing that happens to us as we all know when you're standing at a restaurant looking the big menu of all the things you can buy, you get frozen. It's too much, too much. But if there's three things on a menu, I can make a new decision, I'm probably gonna make a decision. But when there's a hundred things, I'm just like, oh, it's too exhausting. I need to go. And you walk away and you think, I'll get to that later and then let's be honest, we don't get back to it because all of those options are still there. I'm with you, John, give me two options, I'll pick one or don't even give me an option, tell me what I'm having. Exactly right, and the more you do that for your donor, it's the same thing. The more they're going to do it because you made it easy for them to make decisions. So they'll do it. Now, what about, you know, it sounds like you've really got this under wraps, you know how to do it, you do it across the globe, you do it so well. Is this really something that someone outside of our organization can do? I mean, clearly you're doing it, but talk to us about this. I want to come across wellness very, very cautiously because I do believe that people can learn these things. There's a reason why I wrote this book was because I do want, my dad was a teacher, my wife's parents were teachers, I'm surrounded by teachers. You know, I want to actually teach people and give them a book that they can go, okay, this isn't scary, it is scary. This is challenging me, but I can do this, I've got this. So I'm going to try a couple of things that are outside our comfort zone, but we can do this. I think my major concern is people who are in charge of fundraising or in charge of direct response that are making decisions or approving things that have no idea about these things. I'm sure everyone watching this show today goes through the conferences, they watch shows like this, they learn a lot constantly, and yet they're undermined by bosses or people who have no idea and no experience at all of what they're talking about and putting their subjective opinions on this work. It's like, you know, I've argued with people with marketing comms, marketing comms, people approving fundraising makes no sense to me. Marketing comms doesn't have to make money, my work does. If the envelope I make doesn't raise money, then I get fired or you get fired. And so again, that's where I run the problems. I'm not concerned about regular staff because we're all investing ourselves, we're all learning, we're all the time, we're trying new things. It's the people who don't know what they're talking about that are really making our work really difficult and destroying a lot of very amazing things that would actually further our sector. They're not helping at all. That's like a, that's crazy, that's crazy talk, John. I'm gonna have to think about that because you know, I do see that in our sector. I see these organizations that have made major and are making major, major financial commitments to a marketing comm, you know, we call them marcom but marketing communications departments. And you are right, it is separate from our fund development and we're being measured in different ways. It's a really interesting comment, interesting way to look at it. Yeah, and I also see it at the board table, right? Wow. Directors and John, that hit me so hard at home with, you know, these are subjective opinions. These are not professional. These are not based off of data, right? And one of the big ones is we send out too many pieces. We send out too many communications. We are emailing too often or mailing too often or oh my gosh, if we do that again, we're gonna lose our followers. Well, you might lose a few but I say good riddance, right? Because you're also reinvesting in those people that are right there walking side by side and they actually with metrics tend to give more, tend to give longer and actually shows a positive swing as opposed to that negative. So preach it, say it again, my friend. It has to be right though. I think that's a thing, Jared. I mean, it has to follow with what John is saying is what is that strategy so that you're not just peppering stuff out just to tick the box to say, yeah, I got this out this month or this week. And I say this in the book too. I mean, as a designer, I have my own preferences and fonts and colors and that sort of thing but I have to check all of that. And so any designer I hire or work or bring on board, I have to sort of untrain them from all these things they've been freaking taught at school because it's not about what you think. I have to think about what actually works and I know what works and that's what I have to put in my work. So again, these things are learnable. The only other thing I would throw out there and I'm clear about this is there work. We live in a world that's looking for defendants all the time. Just tell me the answer. Just tell me that there are very few defendants in fundraising. This is a craft. This is an art form. There are lots of things you can try and test and you will see certain things emerge over and over and over again. But again, if you're looking for, if a consultant's gonna show up and give you defendants, this will all work all the time. This will never work for you. You don't mean run away. There is nuance in this art form. It is a craft and it's worth trying different things. You're not gonna break it. But again, it's people who have no idea about anything, a frequency or colors or any of this stuff that are actually getting the way of our organizations making a heck of a lot of money and making a bigger impact on whatever problem we're trying to solve. So that does rub me the wrong way. Constantly. So then given that, and I respect that opinion, what is an appropriate process or time to help guide us to see if we are doing the right thing? I mean, if we're saying, okay, we're gonna do a direct mail piece and it's gonna solve all our problems, that's not really what's happening. We need to have a journey and understand, right? But what does that look like? Is that two quarters? Is that a whole year? Is that six years? What is it that we should be thinking about in terms of understanding the impacts of these actions and these decisions that we take? I'm still not sure I understand the question. Does that- Like how long is that process gonna be? I think we've put all our eggs in one basket and we're like, we're gonna do a direct mail and it's gonna solve all our problems as opposed to doing what you're saying. And really have a journey and a process to evaluate. But how long should we be on that journey to understand if it's working or not? It's never ending. I mean, it's like human relationships. I mean, I can't grow a best friend overnight. It takes time and I'm not saying your daughters wanna be your best friend. But again, when you acknowledge the fact that I'm mentoring to like us, we've never actually met the three of us in real life and stuff, but we've already had a couple conversations. We are sharing our values with one another. We know when we do get together, we're gonna be like further along versus the first time. We're investing in this work and stuff. It does take time, but organizationally think we're just supposed to send something into the world and go, you have to give it to us because we're doing this and not even say thanks. And people are like, oh, the donors don't care. They're a bit fatigued to giving everyone stuff. No, no, you're not doing the hard work you need to do on your side. They're prepared to do it, but not if you make a step up first. So again, it is an ongoing thing. It does take time. You can't just like do one mail pack. It's like frequency. You can't do one mail pack a year and think it's gonna make any big splash in the water because your donors are being asked all over the place by lots of people. You need to invest in them by sending them things that they care about and ask lots of questions. What am I gonna care about? Why should they care about this right now? Why is this an issue for them? Why should they do something for us? And how can we allow them to do that as easily as possible? Those are questions you have to ask yourself before you do any appeal at all. But like not doing that, it's too much hard work. I always focus on the ask, think, report, repeat pattern. Ask, think, report, repeat. Ask, think, report, repeat. And then also Julia really looking at this quarterly, what are the metrics? And as John said, it's an ongoing thing. We don't stop. We just continue gathering data, analyzing data and making these creative deviations as we continue throughout the year. One of the things I do is create a 12-month calendar, but that 12-month calendar is really next year's calendar as well because you're analyzing what you did last year and you're making those creative deviations based off of data and metrics. It's never ending, right? I don't think it is. And I think to John's point, we're barraged with so many opportunities to support and promote and those things change. I mean, hello, look at COVID. Look at how many of our donors and our funders completely shifted because of what was going on. So yeah, this is an ever moving target, if you will. And I think that's part of the frustration, but that's why we need the creativity. I wanna let everybody know John Lep's book, Creative Deviations. John, how can we get this book? If you go to abesogood.org slash creative or just go to that homepage, you'll see a link for it and it'll click through right now to the publisher's website. So it's on pre-sell, it's just start selling. It should be up in Amazon very, very soon. We're working on a digital version as well for people who are like in Australia and don't wanna wait six years to get it in the mailbox so they can download a digital version as soon as possible. But that's easiest way is just go to our website and you click through from there. Awesome. And do you have a copy sitting on your desk? I have, this is the printer proof. So this is- Ah! It's just- Awesome! So there's lots of pictures and the font is very, very big. So it's very readable. I've written it at a grade, I think it's 5.6 reading level. The reading eats is something like 82%. So this is a very easy reading, easy to look at. So don't worry, everything's nice and big and lots of things to look at. I love it. I'm gonna grab my Rosé, a highlighter, a pen and your book. I cannot wait to get my hands on that. Yeah. Yes, I hope it finds an audience. I really honestly, I know I wrote this freaking thing but I actually really do think this is stuff that's based on all the things I've been sharing my whole career and have been helped me through my life and my career. I really do think this is gonna make a big difference to many, many organizations if they take the time to look at it. And it's evergreen. I hope it's around for at least a generation because I think it's gonna make a big difference. So I- Well, thank you for your creativity and taking the deviations that you and your company do all the time through your leadership. I really appreciate it. It's very refreshing. Thank you. Thank you both. I appreciate it too. It's been lovely. And my goal for you is that there's a conversation somewhere down path, maybe decades, and somebody quotes you, like you quoted your British author. Well, Smith, yes. Thank you, Mr. Smith. I think that's a cool thing because we need as much information as we can get and especially on this topic. So this is amazing. We look forward to getting that in our hot little hands and I agree, Jarrett, we need to sit down and go through this with our markers and our pens. Again, John Lepp, agents of good, agentsofgood.org. Check him out and see what he's got going on. Really important stuff here and we have loved having you back on. Again, we wanna thank all of the sponsors that we love that are here with us every day as well. William Morang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit nerd, fundraising academy, nonprofit Atlas, nonprofit thought leader and staffing boutique. Without these folks, we would not be here day in, day out marching towards our 600 episode. Wow, amazing. Hard to believe, huh, Jarrett? Yeah. You're like, really? No, there's days, but conversations like this are totally that booster shot of energy. Yesterday was as well and so I really do love it. I give grief at times, but it is so much fun. It is fun. It's amazing. This is amazing work we get to do every day. Absolutely, absolutely. It's true, it makes a difference. Hey, everybody, as we like to end every episode, we want to remind ourselves and our viewers and our listeners to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.