 appreciate it. Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. I'm very excited to be able to hopefully impart some of my experience and knowledge upon all of you. So before I get too far, let me formally introduce myself. First of all, I do want to just say it's an honor to be here with you all. And Aretha and TechSoup, thank you so much for your continued support and opportunity. But I'd like to formally introduce myself. I am currently the director of strategic marketing here at TAP Network. I'll give you a brief background of our agency and our relationship at TechSoup. But to give you guys a little background around my experience in marketing, I actually graduated from Berkeley College of Music with a degree in management and marketing in hopes of becoming a successful singer-songwriter. I don't know if any of you have been here in any of my webinars before. It is not uncommon for me to maybe sing a jingle every now and then. So I got my degree in management and marketing. And after a few years of playing as a start of being artists in Los Angeles, I was really lucky. And I secured a position at Apple and I served as the Los Angeles City corporate trainer, developing talent aligned with customer experience and brand management. So from that point, I kind of ended my time at Apple and I jumped ship and I found myself in the world of startups and I usually find a few fans in the audiences here of my previous company, Exploding Kittens. I don't know if anybody's a tabletop gamer out there, but I was actually employee number eight and I was really grateful to be their director of branding and marketing and I helped launch us to be international throughout Europe and Asia. Yes, I love the Exploding Kittens fans. It's really fun. Yeah. So I had a blast. I really got a lot of my chops on more of the technical marketing experience there. But I really, really started to miss my feel good elements of authentic story art from my music career and I found myself back here away from LA. I'm back on the East Coast, just outside of Philadelphia. And I started consulting for nonprofits before I officially joined TAP Network in 2019. So a little bit about TAP Network. We are TechSoup's marketing and technology partner. And our core focus is really striving to empower organizations for good. So essentially, your vision is our mission. So over the past two years, I've had the amazing opportunity to lead our strategic partner partnership with TechSoup delivering digital marketing and website services through the TechSoup marketplace, as well as developing educational content like what we're experiencing today. So now I've gotten through the boring stuff. Sorry guys. Let's dive into today's conversation, which is setting a marketing budget for 2022. Very important conversation. A lot of things have been happening over the last two years. I think this is a great opportunity for us to really level set and come together on a collective understanding of what's important and how do we communicate that to our board of directors, as well as our executive director. So as most of you have experienced, the nonprofit industry has gone through a massive digital transformation as the pandemic forced all of us to shift to digital. Obviously beyond just moving to Zoom calls, program teams needing to figure out remote interventions, digital communication has become critical, and marketing teams really had to move to digital tactics that can reach those quarantined individuals and audiences. So as we move through the materials today, I wanted to kind of set the stage. Exploding kittens is not evil, Henry. Sorry, Google it. It's a fun. It's like Russian roulette needs to know. But but as we move through the materials today, I wanted to set the stage with some key data metrics that I hope will help resonate as you move forward and you look into 2022 and developing not only a marketing strategy, but a marketing budget and communicating the need for that marketing budget to your board, or to your executive director and internal teams. So recently, there was a study done that real that came out that identified that 20% of all nonprofits have absolutely no firm marketing budget at all. My goal today, whether or not you're looking at a setting aside $500 identifying $1,200, whatever the case may be, I would love it if we can all of us agree at the end of this conversation today to at least make the case and do the work. I'm sorry. Oh, sorry. And do the work to hopefully get some level of agreement and track forward on building out a marketing budget for yourselves. Comparatively, 65%. This is a very interesting metric from pre pandemic to post pandemic. 65% of all audience interactions are for nonprofits are digital. This is compared to 41% of interactions just before the pandemic in December of 2019. Think about that. That's a massive growth. And we're going to continue to see that growth become the baseline as we move forward. So we're really going to be focusing on how do we invest our time and our and our resources into elevating and escalating what you guys are doing around the digital space. And lastly, one thing that I know most people know about, but I just want to reiterate, all nonprofits have an opportunity of engaging with Google ad grants at $10,000 a month in free Google ads. That's an amazing opportunity. There's a lot of pieces that come into play. That's a whole entire separate webinar topic. But I just want to bring all of these to our attention as we move through the topics and the points of discussion for this webinar today. So let's dive in and see what exactly we're going to talk about. So the first thing is I'm going to briefly talk a little bit about why it is important for us to invest in our digital marketing communications, right? What are what are the key reasons why? Why is this actually an important conversation to be having with ourselves? If you're a I saw someone as a new director of marketing, a paid director of marketing, now you need to plead the case to your executive director and your board. Why is this so important? There's some qualitative and quantitative elements to that. Then we're going to talk a little bit about what are the elements that go into a strong digital marketing strategy. The reason why this is so important is when you are addressing your marketing budget, you need to know what what it is that you're going to be doing. Then where I want to give you guys just a baseline understanding of common but budgeting methodologies, sort of to convince you all to apply what we call an adaptive goal based budgeting approach to your marketing budget. I'm going to give you guys after we kind of review all of those topics, I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can plan and budget for those key elements, identifying sort of like what is the investment and what are the measurements around each of those individual components. And then I'm going to offer you guys a couple best practices tips and tricks on ways to increase your capacity to lower overhead costs on your digital marketing work. And we're always looking for ways we can increase capacity, lower overhead. And then as a partner with TechSoup, we've provided and published lots of resources. So I'm going to give you guys access to a few of those, and then deliver a short brief Q&A. So I'm going to be very quick here. But I think for all of those that are struggling to provide, as I mentioned before, the qualitative and quantitative value in digital marketing and communications, it's important for us to really think about the benefits of investing in it, and how much the landscape has truly and exponentially elevated the critical need for ongoing investment at the organizational level. So with an increase of audiences as we talked about before, interacting with nonprofits digitally by 24%. So we're talking 65 from 41%. We're talking 24% increase since 2019. Your digital marketing is undoubtedly the main driving force behind your organization's impact. It's the tool that allows you to grow your organization, expand your reach, and surpass your goals. So your marketing supports your organization by these following pieces, establishing your credibility, increasing support of your mission, finding and converting the audience your organization serves, generating funding and donations, attracting constituents you need, like volunteers and supporters, organizing action around the issues that you seek to change, and driving social behavior and the social change behind that. In order to help your organization stand apart, in addition to just the overarching digital marketing communications, an optimized website can serve as a red revenue generator for increasing lead flow through your entire stages of engagement along the way. Starting with those who are unfamiliar with your organization, a good website and marketing strategy clearly showcases your organization's mission and impact on the communities that you guys serve. This helps convert those individuals into either supporters, volunteers, donors, partners, or end of service utilizers. Obviously, the most important piece here is increased visibility online. If you're able to continuously increase your visibility online, you're going to continue to see a growth in the impact and the ability to serve and deliver your mission. And with that corporate partnerships, sponsorships will join and support your organization in the long run. So let's talk a little bit about the website component. A lot of us think about digital marketing in terms of social media and email. Absolutely true. But if the marketing is the force driving traffic and awareness, your organization website is serving as the hub that is driving the whole machine. So a well designed responsive website should be literally should be the centerpiece of your organization. So I wanted to put out a few valuable components that your website should drive and the functionality that it should be serving. It should clearly state your mission and values. It should exhibit upcoming events and collect registrations. It should position your organization as a thought leader and a change maker in your space. It should create a space to showcase your organization's impact, encourage social media sharing and interaction. This is developing that stickiness nature to your website. It should truly tell a compelling story that leverages emotional reactions and highlights. This is key highlights multiple ways to get involved. So as a general thumb, you'll you do want to update your website design and structure every two years. That is something that you want to maybe put into a long term digital marketing strategy or marketing budget. However, today, I really want to talk about the components that your digital communications, social media, if and when you're utilizing paid advertising like Google ad grants, your content strategy, your email marketing, ensuring that the central vehicle of your website is also accounted for in your strategy along the way. So I know we're talking about budget, but before we get to budget, we have to talk about strategy. We've got the why, what are the important components? Why is this an important topic for us to be talking about? Now we're going to talk about the what what are the pieces in play here that we need to be identifying and making account for. So we're going to talk a little bit about the inbound marketing methodology. I know I have a couple of previous attendants attendees here today. So you may see some of these topics before. But let me tell you, it can never you can never go through these these steps too many times. It's such an important thing to constantly remind ourselves as we're moving through strategically communicating what our organization does and how we can continue to increase our impact. So the inbound inbound methodology is actually the bread and butter of nonprofit marketing. So this method involves testing a wide net seeking to capture interest of target audiences while offering them meaningful content and relevant call to actions. Basically, I want you to do X, Y, and Z at this stage along the way, ultimately converting them into a desired outcome. Whether or not that be fundraising, volunteer acquisition, sponsor and partnerships or direct service delivery, right? So you can kind of see here we've got this first stage is a track. This is the wide net. We grab them with some really compelling content on our social media. Our keywords might be showing up on Google search. A friend of yours might be sharing a blog post on their social media. And that allows them to come to your website and really convert. We're going to compel them through narrative to fill out forms, respond to calls to actions to engage with really directed landing pages, and ultimately offer us as a nonprofit their information into our CRM, where we can appropriately email them with the relevant information and additional calls to action, as well as potential automated workflows, depending on the capacity of your platforms, ultimately leading in some level of a final supporter and the ability to report that information, report that experience back to the top of the funnel back to the the first stage here, and continue to drive and grow and engage your audience members. So the way that we apply this inbound methodology, this sort of wide net to small net, it's really a tactical approach of a very common, very well known marketing tool that we call the marketing funnel. So this method really relies on that marketing funnel. It's basically just a fancy depiction of the process. So in this diagram, for the case of this conversation, for the case of this budgeting, you know, we're not all of us have one and a half million dollar operating budgets, we really have to think conscientiously about what are the pieces of this funnel that are going to be driving the most growth and the most opportunity for our organizations. So for the sake of this conversation today, I've identified some of the more critical elements that all of your marketing and communications teams should be addressing when looking at that inbound methodology and ultimately developing your marketing strategy and the budget to be able to deliver those pieces of the puzzle. So for the sake of everyone here today, and I've seen a couple of questions come through, I'll just answer again, you will be getting these slides in an email. So you'll have all of these things to reference. I really wanted to talk about and highlight the key components to the marketing mix. We're talking content, content, content development, right? So the benefits of all of this is that you have all internal control, right? You have the overhead control, you have the talent control, you have the subject matter, matter expertise control, you're not relying on the pay to play methodology of paid advertising, you're really driving genuine, authentic, organic traffic around the topics that are most valuable to your organization, as well as your target audiences themselves. So these pieces, these drive inbound marketing. So for all of my nonprofit clients I work with, we really try to start with a very basic workflow, very similar to this, and apply these different content types like social media posts, blogs, web landing pages, inquiry forms, automated and sometimes manual email, sort of conversations and communications. We apply these content types, subject matters and relevant forms of automated content to reach a particular desired outcome. So I know we're gonna, I know we're thinking a little bit like, okay, where does the budget part come from? We have to know what we're building in order to allocate that budget appropriately. And that starts with the strategic approach, right? So this is the roadmap to designing your strategy for any singular individual along the way. When looking at a strategy from a higher level perspective. This is the most important way to understand your ROI. It's to set your goals and have a plan of attack. Developing these key elements out the gate, aligning them with your organizational goals, and then investing in the right content with the right messaging along the way. Your agency can actually build something that meets the needs of your organization. So when we build out a marketing strategy for a client, the first thing that we identify is our key objectives. We are developing those organizational key objectives and what we call key performance indicators or KPIs. And those KPIs may be an example as we as are outlined here from a smart goal. An example might be we want to increase our individual donor count by 5% in the next six months. Right? That's one example. So that would be one key sort of objective and one smart goal outlines. We have six months to increase increase our donor count by 5% in the next month. Another option might be we want to increase the conversion of a one time donor to an ongoing donor or a monthly supporter by 2% in the next year. So we really want to keep these things specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based. These metrics, those KPIs don't let them scare you. You might say 2%, 5%, but you have to figure out exactly what's going to actually be attainable. And it's really not an indication of whether or not you're succeeding or failure, it's really just holding yourselves accountable and saying how do I need to pivot the following steps in order to align more appropriately? So once we have those key objectives, those KPIs outlined those smart goals built out. The next step is an incredibly useful exercise. What we want to do is identify those individuals that we are looking to target from those goals, right? So we're looking at like, what is their age range? What is their location? Do they have similar similar pains and gains? Are they usually more tied to the emotional impact of your organization? There may be more than one, right? But what you really want to understand is their background, their motivations and develop this fictitious personality so that when you move to step three, you can start to develop the appropriate messaging that relates back to those target personas. You're going to captivate and develop the narrative that's really going to compel them to take one step to the next. So what pieces of information are important to them? How will you continue to attract and convert those through a series of touch points across your social media, website content, and email marketing? Alright, so now that we have the strategy, the high level strategy, this is where I want to talk a little bit about the budgeting methodology. This is the meat and potatoes of today's conversation. So I'm going to talk through a little bit about common sort of regularly well known methodologies and talk through what we like to apply here at our agency, which is an adaptive goal based budgeting approach. So you guys might be familiar with these. These are three traditional or more commonly known approaches to building a budget. So let's talk through each one of them and we'll identify some of the pros and cons as we as we move through. So the percentage method, it's a good way to keep your budget healthy in comparison to the overall yearly budget of your organization. Many organizations will group together their marketing into a single line item that includes marketing, fundraising, and communications. Traditionally, the percentage of your operating budget is going to be 10 to 20%. And some of the pros to this is that it can actually scale with your operating budget. However, let's be honest, from a cons perspective, a lot of us don't have a very large operating budget. And there is a sort of pivot point in the amount of marketing and web that's necessary to grow. And so there's sometimes is going to have to be maybe a higher percentage of investment to see that growth. And that's why I'll talk a little bit about why the the sort of the adaptive project based budgeting is the best way to go. Secondly, we have our dollar method. This is incredibly simple. It's the simplest way you might have heard of it. You guys might be implementing it in your own organization today. It is a we have $2,000 a month, regardless of how much money organization is making, or regardless of how much we are seeing from an ROI perspective. So this is a very simple budget. But however, it can really lead to stagnancy. And honestly, missing opportunities for leveraging growth, because the idea is you're really fixating yourself on the dollar amount, you're not necessarily fixating yourself on the outcomes and the incremental ROI along the way. And you've missed out an opportunity to say this is working really, really well. Then we need to invest and double down on our investment for that. And then the incremental method is a little bit of a combination of the top two methods. It starts with a base budget. This method increases and decreases the budget on a regular basis, typically quarterly, depending on your immediate past performance. While this is beneficial, since it encourages a regular analysis of what's what's working, what avenues of communications are working, it does have some cons to it in which, you know, the success of a particular initiative may be a little bit more dynamic. So it might be restricting your ability to fully test and analyze results of a period of time. So let's talk about adaptive goal based methodology. This to me is I think the the appropriate approach for us to take and to look at. And then we're going to break this down into the key components, the individual elements that are going to take that you guys have to necessarily address and incorporate as you're building your best tracking your marketing and web's expected and measurable impact on an organization's broader strategic smart goals, right? So we're going back to that strategy, we're going back to identifying, you know, those individual smart goals around a particular initiative, your budget is going to be continually optimized in a way that prioritizes the tactics and initiatives that create the highest returns. So you're constantly forced to identify and look at what am I doing? And what are the measurement impacts that are happening? So I can continuously pivot along the way to continue to see utilize optimizations and giving up on on tactics and strategies that aren't working. Additionally, each dollar spent on marketing communications and fundraising has a meaningful return on your organization's goals, and budgets are constantly optimized so the tactics and initiatives within the highest returns are taking priority. So essentially, each dollar spent is really being utilized to its benefit to this maximum ability. I do want to talk a little bit about before we go to the individual tactics elements, some important overhead costs to consider during your budgeting approach. So here's the thing is 2021, we're almost in 2022, technology has clearly taken a stronghold of our world. There are tools out there that are affordable that are going to be able to return just from a functionality and operational perspective, an incredible amount of return. So I want you guys if you aren't already utilizing some of these tools and elements to definitely take a look and make sure that you're setting aside your monthly, quarterly or annual budget to address some of these pieces. The first one is your social media scheduler. A couple of examples, Hootsuite, Agora Pulse and Sprout Social. The benefits of this is it allows you to bulk the work of your social media postings to create your efficiency and increase capacity, right? We're not spending 30 minutes a day trying to figure out what are we going to post about we can really elevate our strategy and build out those pieces in chunks of time on our schedule. Additionally, all of these tools provide some level of reporting ability, right? We can really take a look and see what posts are driving engagement for optimization, what types of content are working really well and resonating, what's getting the clicks, what's getting the views, what's getting the shares, what's getting the likes, and we can really isolate and identify what are the pieces that are resonating well with our audiences. The second piece that I want everybody to really think through is your email marketing tool and or your CRM. So some great examples here would be Mailchimp, Active Campaign, or potentially HubSpot. Just to give everybody a heads up HubSpot is about is in the process of launching an amazing partnership with TechSoup that I'm very, very excited about. They have an incredibly robust solution that I highly suggest all of you doing your initial work and research in. But essentially, the goal here is to leverage automated emails to help increase engagement and steward those relationships in a personalized and timely manner. And then, oh, yes, I love that, Hope Spring. Yes, HubSpot's amazing, isn't it? And then the last piece that I think everyone should definitely be considering and line iteming on your budget is the costs of hosting, securing and allowing for ongoing landing page development and additional content updates. Your website should be secure. If I'm going to your website and it says it's not secure, what's the likelihood that I'm going to make a donation on your website? Probably slim to none. So you want to make sure that you're paying and you have the appropriate security certificates that your pages load in a timely manner, and as well as updating it on a regular basis with information and landing pages when necessary. These are very important things. No one wants to go to a website and the latest post was from 2018. What have you guys been doing? I'm not going to donate to you in 2021. If I don't see anything that's from between the last three years. So ensuring that you're identifying and you're sort of line iteming some of these quote unquote overhead costs on a monthly quarterly and annual basis. It's a great place to start. And there's lots of different solutions out there. So I didn't necessarily provide a full like budget line item. But I think each of you should be looking at investing at least one of these tools in each of these three categories. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about the monthly deliverables. Remember that lovely little sort of roadmap that we talked about that framework that I talked about. How do we get someone from going from one step to the other? It takes a lot of moving pieces from a content perspective. So what I wanted to help guide you guys around because I know organizations don't necessarily have the resources to hire someone else to do it. So I wanted to maybe give you guys some benchmarks internally when you're looking at your own resources from an hourly basis from how much time does this get? Does this require from an investment perspective? So I wanted to give you guys some sort of benchmarks here around what this should look like and how you can account this from a resources and then link each of those individual deliverables with the necessary ROI measurable ROI components, right? Because each step has a specific ROI along the way. So what are you looking at to ensure that the time spent is actually seeing an increase of these individual metrics along the way to ultimately succeed in whatever final objective or sort of outcome it is that you're looking for. So let's talk a little bit about social media planning and scheduling. I know this might sound crazy to all of you, but if you are doing it correctly, building and writing a post for social media, one single post can take up to 20 to 45 minutes per post. This is including building the assets, the visual components, making sure that you have the right tagging, the partners tag, the right hashtags and the measurements that you're looking around those individual social media posts are how many followers have you increased? How many likes are you getting on an individual post? How many shares and how many clicks are going out to whatever call to action, the final sort of next step is in that call to action within that individual social media post. Writing blogs, this is fundamental, absolutely fundamental. Yes, thank you. I'm sorry. I'm trying to stay up with the trying to say yes, Janet, thank you. I totally agree. It is time consuming, but it is so important. We're talking about the widest net you're casting, right? So it's really, really vital that you spend a lot of time either hourly or you outsource it with somebody who has a really strong strategy around the way to lead those individuals. The last thing you do, though, I'm just going to say this here from a strategic point, not necessarily from a budgeting point. If you're not asking somebody to do something on a social media post, there's no reason in posting it. Just think about it that way. Always have a call to action. That call to action could be read this blog. How's that? Where you have the opportunity to deliver a long form narrative of a particular topic. You have the opportunity to present yourselves as a thought leader within the industry. You might be able to tell a narrative that's really resounds with an individual who's reading it, who's compelled to say, hey, I love this story. Let me share it with my fellow network, right? That's how people can start to identify and learn about other organizations. So we're talking about a 500 to 700 word log, depending on how much research and how skilled the writer is. We're talking two to four hours per blog to develop that. The measurements of the ROI around that is, are these blogs driving subscribers? Are they driving readerships? Most importantly, just like a social media post, are they driving actions around particular calls to action? So are they saying donate today? Learn more, sign up to hear about our next story. What calls to actions? That is the ROI and the purpose of that blog writing piece. Secondly, I mean, we could talk about SEO for hours and hours. It also helps boost your ranking. If you're regularly posting new content that's relevant to your organization and to your sector, it'll boost your ranking on search engines as well. Another component on your website is your inquiry forms. Do you have a volunteer inquiry form? Someone who's just interested in participating. So who, you know, do I, if I'm interested in volunteering, do I have the ability to actually say, hey, I'm interested and I want to collect their information or I'm really interested in more information about your organization. So the investment here is really about 30 minutes per performs on the back end of your website. And the measurement that you're going to be looking towards for the ROI is how many submissions are you actually getting based on the number of visitors to either that page or that section of your website? Another compelling element to your marketing strategy is landing pages. A landing page has one singular call to action. It could be regarding a capital campaign. It could be regarding a particular volunteer opportunity. It could be your donation landing page. Really, the investment in time is usually about eight to 10 hours per page when we're talking about developing copy and we're developing design, the development piece and a lot of these, a lot of websites today, you can do a lot of this on your own, or you can outsource this material and these services as well. What you're really looking for from an ROI perspective is how many people are actually getting there. And then what is the number of individuals who are actually converting on that page, whether or not it's signing up for a volunteer opportunity, saying they're going to attend an event, make a donation, whatever the case may be, you're really looking at those two components to evaluate is this landing page functioning and working to the best of our ability? Are we meeting those KPIs around these particular metrics? The next piece is your email workflows and automations. So I'm sure many of you guys have signed up for a TechSoup subscription of some sort and you get an automatic reply. Hey, welcome to the TechSoup webinars. Here's next week's sort of selection of webinars. Those are actual email workflows that are automated on the back end of TechSoup's platform on HubSpot. So investing and building out those individual workflows takes some time. So I'm generally going to sort of give a general outline of three to five hours per workflow. Obviously this depends on the number of emails that you're looking to deliver. So if we were to go back to the example of the strategy that we were talking about of individual donations, right? So we have somebody who may have signed up for our newsletter, and then we follow up that newsletter email with an automated make a donation based on this outcome. And we might send a second one saying it's the end of the year. These are automated emails, right? So the way that we would necessarily measure the success of these individual marketing components is the number of submissions into those different email workflows, the number of emails that are actually individually opened, and then the percentage of clicks based out of the opens of those emails. So we're looking at each of these individual pieces along the way. And then the last piece that is always important to consider when you're looking at your monthly sort of deliverables and your measurable ROI is really focusing in and ensuring that you're being planned full and that you're scheduling your pieces of content to be published on a regular basis. So here are a couple of things to consider along the way. These are some tactics, best practices that I might have that I might suggest to increase capacity. The first is higher marketing or communications in turn. Lots of students are looking for the opportunity to put their communications and marketing degrees to work. I personally worked with organizations that have tackled amazing projects with the younger generation that are bringing innovative, interesting ideas to what could normally have been or traditionally have been a little bit more of a stagnant experience. And fortunately, a lot of schools offer credit to students making their your guys's internship opportunities. No cost, right? They're paying for their for the credit and you guys don't have to pay the intern an actual dollar value. They're they're gaining through that learning experience. As I mentioned before, plan and bulk your work, spending the time to three or content calendars at a monthly and quarterly vantage point will allow you to plan ahead with you and your team. You'll also be more more accurately able to look in the rear view mirror and see what worked what didn't work because you knew where you were going and where you actually ended up. So be sure to leverage these tools that can automate publishing of social media and blog posts so that you aren't spending an hour every day going like, what do I post about? And then the third thing, and I think this is something that I see a lot of opportunities with organizations and nonprofits that I work with is lead on your partners and your industry experts. These folks are more than excited to have their content, whether or not it's their blogs, articles, their past presentations, you know, media appearances to have those shared across your community and get more eyeballs on that information and that content. So be sure to identify and think through who are my partners? Who are my industry experts that I have a relationship? And how can I develop those pieces of content into my overarching digital marketing and website marketing budget and strategy? So we're getting near the end. I'm going to get to some Q&A. I see quite a few questions are coming in through here and I apologize. It's been a little bit hard for me to pay attention. I'm on two screens today. So I'm not able to see as much at one time, but you will be getting links to some of these additional resources. I want you guys to all understand this is not an easy process. I've been doing it for 12 years now and I'm still learning every single day. But I think it's just really important that you guys start somewhere. And I wanted to give you guys some individual resources that I think are going to be helpful to consider from your sort of digital literacy and just something that would be very helpful for you guys to move along the way. So with that, I'm going to go through and answer a few of these questions. What is the role of the snail male channel in 2022? This was submitted by an anonymous attendee. Honestly, snail male is a challenging thing. The only way that you can really actively monitor and understand the return on investment through a snail male channel is going to be developing individual QR codes that are going to appropriately attract or you have hyper targeted. Oh, OK, sorry. I'm also getting some other questions in here. Aretha, do you want to help me prioritize these or should I just go for it? No, you you do the Q&A and then now go to the chat room and answer them once you finish with all the Q&A. OK, perfect. I mean, I'll I'll give I'll feed them to you once you solve the Q&A. Perfect. I just want to make sure. Sorry, guys. Yeah. So the snail male is going to be really challenging. You have to have to have a very hyper targeted geographical area for snail male or you have to have a very strong digital element to your snail male efforts that are going to appropriately check track the outcome to me. Personally, we don't necessarily from an agency perspective manage a lot of snail male efforts. And I think given the metrics that we saw before, which is sixty five percent of individuals are going to be interacting with organizations through digital up from forty one percent. It may not necessarily be a strong element of investing in that high high value, which is, you know, postcards. You're printing everything and you're paying for the actual mailing process. So I'm going to add to that. That's of course I just got an email from my bank who I think with just online USA and it was just about snail mail. They said we're we're no longer doing mail because the post office told us there's going to be an additional five day delay. They said so everything's going to be electronic. And I was like, whoa, it's twenty twenty almost twenty twenty two, so we're definitely moving away from snail mail. Not to be confused with losing gorilla marketing, which is where you have a lot of boots on the ground, handing out information, not sending it through the post office necessarily. That that still, I think, has a strong element, not so much during covid because it's harder to interact with ones individually. But, you know, it's going to kind of come down, I think, to your geographical area and the sort of the majority of what it is that you're looking to achieve there. So Asan asked which social media scheduler tool is free or less expensive to sign up. So I would say the last time that I did some heavy research into affordable social media tools, HootSuite has a free component to it. It's not going to give you all of the capabilities. So it's a great one to maybe start with. So HootSuite, Agora Pulse and Sprout Social are a little bit on the higher end, so they may not necessarily be the right solution. But there's also some other ones that I'm not maybe necessarily fully smarter Q, I believe, was one that we used for a few clients in the past. And I it's been about two or three years since I've used smarter Q. Our agency primarily provides Agora Pulse to our clients. So that's our number one tool that we use internally. All right. So Henry, how much would we spend on social media? Speaking more around boosted posts on Facebook meta? That's a great question, Henry. So I think again, it's going to come down to we're talking paid advertising, a majority of what I talked about today. And I know that we didn't get to touch on it. And it really wasn't the core component of what I wanted to focus on today because we have a lot more control over, I think, our organic side of it. But I would start at like $50 campaign if you're looking at boosting posts. Now, consider this. There's two sides, sponsored posts and boosted content. Sponsored posts are our individual ads that are running that are separate from the organic content. So you could boost your blog about the state of affairs and housing and security within the United States. And your your you wrote that blog and you want to get more eyeballs on it. That would be a boosted post. And maybe you say, hey, I wrote I wrote this article, our organization published this article, we'd like to get a few more eyeballs on it. We want to also pick individual demographic points around people who like X, Y and Z pages who live in a certain area, who may or may not have certain other demographic or geographical sort of components or elements to their their personas. But I think it's going to come down, Henry, to like kind of seeing what you're able to play with and getting approval from your board and saying, we'd really like to increase readership to drive more donations. And I'd like to propose a three month strategy on boosting this line of content at $50 a month. Because if we, you know, and if you go into the back end of Facebook, it'll tell you how many people are you potentially going to reach given the parameters of that demographic. I hope that answers your question. Sylvia Blaine, how often should we be releasing blog posts and or and our vlogs also acceptable? That's a great question. Vlogs are amazing if you can if you. The bandwidth to do that vlogs now, depending on how long they are, 30 to 60 seconds, three minutes maximum, unless it's a really beautifully built or highly entertaining sort of content piece. It's not known. It's not so much how how much should you do it? How often, but how consistently you should do it? Right. Don't commit yourself to doing four blog posts a month. If you know, you can't manage it. The most important thing is to is maintain consistency so that your audiences are starting to understand, OK, I know when and how to anticipate and expect to see something coming through from this organization. So it might start off if you're looking at building and kind of scaling this approach and scaling the strategy and scaling your budget. You know, let's do one blog a month and we're going to focus on this topic for month one, this topic for month two, this topic for month three. See how those response and if you may be throw a vlog in there, if you have the ability, a video testimonial, I don't know, a showcase of maybe one of your events that comes out. They are somewhat interchangeable, but they're not necessarily going to house and function in the exact same way. So I hope that answers a question. So just think, Sylvia, it's not so much quantity, it's consistency and quality. Can you phrase with some good KPIs that we need to measure? That's a great question, Cathy. So Cathy is asking, what are some good KPIs? This is a very challenging, open, open question. And the the interesting thing is if any of you guys have a MailChimp account and have looked and the they say, based on your industry, your open rate should be this, but yours is this, either it's higher or lower. There are some public benchmarks that will identify some sort of basic expectations of what you could consider from a key performance indicator. Another piece is just to start to kind of say, hey, I'd like to see a 3 percent increase. Organizations are going to have to some degree, their own element or their own sort of KPIs within themselves. So as I mentioned in the presentation, I don't want you guys to be afraid of KPIs because I think it's a really healthy way to start addressing and looking at how you manage the results of what it is the work that you're doing. So start fair, look at your past look at your past year's worth of web traffic. So if you see regularly five hundred visitors per month, a KPI set today is we want to see 10,000 visitors over the next six months. That's probably not a realistic KPI. So utilize as much as you have on the data that you do have and then thinking through what your goals are and how those KPIs are going to help drive the conversion rates and drive the success, the impact around that and start to feel around with some different KPIs. If you're looking for general numbers, just like the basic like number line items, those measurements that I outlined in the slides that we'll send to you, those are the numbers that you would want to be identified as increasing or monitoring and saying I want to increase three percent of my open rate on this particular email marketing campaign. I want to make sure that if I send a thank you email to my donor, are we getting a 90 percent open rate and there's a call to action that says increase your donation by five dollars today and get X, Y and Z or it's going to get matched by our partner of ours. But look at those measurements on that one particular slide. All right. Robert, I'm totally confused about all of this. Who would I contact to find out about all of this? All right, so it sounds like there may be some opportunities for you and I've got those resources. And Robert, I'm also going to be sending out a link if you want to with an email address. We have some opportunities to do some consultations if you need a little bit more handholding around some of these topics. I know they're a little bit out there. There's also some great one hundred level courses as well. I apologize if I went a little bit to to highbrow here. I'm so sorry. So I hope that we're able to help figure that out for you. Emily, what processes tools do you recommend to systematically assess our metrics and determine the success or failure of a marketing initiatives? Well, that's a lot of the question. So you're going to want to be measuring each of those pieces along the way that I outlined before. And you're going to reference those back to the pieces of your journey map and identify how they're performing and how they're increasing the number of people that's going from one stage to the next, right? So that that one, I would say, is how to how to answer that question. I'm going to go through here. I'm sorry, guys. There's so many questions coming. This is amazing. Yeah, they're they're understanding the Q&A section now. I love it. Do I keep a KPI spreadsheet? That's a great question. So actually the way that a lot of this is Sylvia, she's asking about, you know, how do you manage and monitor your KPIs? We do this on a monthly and analytics and recording perspective. So obviously we set out our strategy. We say our goal is over the next three months or the next month or the next six months or the year. We have that goal outlined. And then we continue to monitor each of those KPIs along the way. So what are we looking to do and how are we measuring that? We're measuring that by increasing this by 3 percent. So we monitor on a monthly basis more from a reporting perspective. For us internally as an agency, we manage that through a database, a spreadsheet, for lack of better terms, a fancy database spreadsheet that is running those numbers on a month to month growth basis. So we're able to analyze that. Additionally, we do evaluate individual content pieces that might be overperforming or highly performing and saying, wow, this this piece of content, whether or not it was a social media post, got three X likes or five X shares or 10 X clicks. And or we say this blog post somehow got 15,000 readership on it. We identify those sort of anomalies of the high level successes and we say, hey, you know, what was the element? What? How can we replicate this successful piece here? Margo, I'm sorry if I missed your question. So I hope that was helpful with the KPIs. There is an organization that offers to get nonprofits to break even or better for only $12,000 per year. OK, I can't make that assessment because I don't know if I don't know that organization, I will say. That makes me I would definitely do some more investigating into the reputation of the organization. Oh, that's all I'm going to say. I can't I don't want to get into much of a politic piece there. Just be, you know, research your first question. Oh, sorry, I'm trying to do this. We've been doing mostly these things for three years, but our income is still limited to 10 percent or so of overall budget. Growing slowly. All right, so you're asking, how do you access the millionaires for each nonprofit because we can't continue with large grants or gifts? You're you're looking at maybe. Oh, I think that's a very personal question, Margo. Sorry, I'm not. I'm just understanding it now. I think that is something that I would want to talk to more of a business strategist perspective. I know it's overwhelming. I know there's a lot going on, but I think you want to go through a little bit more of a business strategy and business modeling approach there. But I hope everything goes OK. I would be. But I do want to say do some more information around and research around that organization that's offering to help you guys with the $12,000 a year. Probably a good idea. Can you explain the Google ad and nonprofit opportunity? Oh, yay, Terrell in. OK, so Terrell is asking about the Google ad grant opportunity as well as you're hiring a marketing intern. And I believe someone else mentioned they wanted to know how to find an intern. It may have gotten answered if it wasn't the it was in the chat. Check out your local universities post. A lot of local these will have an internship program that you as a nonprofit can reach out to. So definitely, definitely check that out. The Google ad grant opportunity is essentially it's it's very closely tied with TechSoup. You have to be sort of approved as a Google approved nonprofit organization. And TechSoup helps with that validation process. And then you submit your website to an evaluation. And what happens is you either get approved or or denied based on your website presence. And we do over here at TechSoup and TAP offer consulting or consulting on what elements of your website prevented you from potentially accessing or gaining that opportunity with the ad grants. And then you're given ten thousand dollars a month in free advertising through the Google ad networks. So, guys, I really appreciate everyone's patience. I know we're at the end here. Please feel free to reach out to us over here at TAP Network. I know marketing budget is a big conversation. I hope I'm giving you guys a little bit of the pieces to help you process the free ad at TechSoup at TAP.com. As Aretha said, we will be getting you guys these slides as well as the links to the resources outlined in that last slide as well. And the presentation will be available for you guys after the fact. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You guys have been fabulous. And I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you, everybody. Bye.