Ep 52: The Messaging Gap: 3 Critical Components You're Missing

EPISODE 52

enhance your nonprofit leadership and foster stronger, more meaningful connections with your followers

 
 
 

Discover how honesty and imperfection can make your brand more relatable, how fostering a two-way conversation can deeply engage your clients, donors, and fans, and an inspiring vision can elevate the know-like-trust factor. Whether you're a brand, an entrepreneur, or an organization, this episode will guide you in crafting messages that resonate and forge meaningful connections.

“You can be relatable, even if you’re an large brand or organization, but you’ve got to dial it in. It’s about humanizing your story — but it takes honesty and imperfection. ”
— Christina Edwards

This episode promises to transform your understanding of relatability, providing insights drawn from successful thought leaders like Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, and Katie Sturino, founder of Mega Babe.

Marketing messages and fundraising efforts should create meaningful relationships with your audience, not merely ask for donations or support. We delve into the power of honesty, vulnerability, and the importance of two-way conversations.

We discuss how these elements build stronger relationships with your followers and help keep your mission at the forefront. Learn how to go micro in your mission messaging, breaking down bigger aspirations into manageable tasks and connecting with your audience on a more personal level.

A critical part of this connection is your email welcome series. We stress the importance of automating this process, and establishing impactful communication right from the start. We cover how to optimize this series, deciding on the frequency of emails, and ensure that each message fosters relatability, relationship-building, and reflects the aspirational goals of your mission.

So, if you’re looking to enhance your nonprofit leadership and foster stronger, more meaningful connections with your followers, this episode is a must-listen.

Think you’ve reached out to “everyone” in your network? Out of ideas to get noticed and get funded?  Generate leads for your nonprofit or social impact business: https://www.splendidcourses.com/prospect

Steal my Prospect List! Lead Gen just got a lot easier!

Resources mentioned:

 
 
 

Links may be affiliate links which means I may earn a commission at no cost to you.

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs. Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here, ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go. Today, we're going to talk about the three things that I feel like your supporters, your prospective clients, the followers that you have on social media have just been waiting for you to do, and maybe there are three things that haven't really been to the forefront of your mind before, because you're probably thinking they're waiting for me to sell them a thing, they're waiting for me to tell them about an upcoming fundraiser we have. They're waiting for me to tell them about that. That's what I'm going to say. No, so this is three pieces that are really missing for me from when I think about the brands, the businesses and the missions that I support, the ones that I have a deep connection to, the ones that have developed that deep connection. They're doing these three things. And the ones that maybe I came in, I bought a product, maybe I came in, I made a one-time donation and then I just they just fell off the wayside, right, I just forgot about them. These are the brands and missions that aren't doing this. Okay, so we're going to go over the three different things, and I want you to zoom out for a second and think about it. In this application, which is, these three things can be show up, can be iterated in a couple of different ways. You can do this through your email marketing. You can do this through your social media marketing. You can do this even through any written messaging, direct mail, on your website. You can do this. The way, the platforms and modalities in which you do these three things is not just, oh, you have to do this on social media. You can do this in different places. So, with that being said, let's dig in. The first thing that I think you're the people that you're like. Where are they? Or the people that you wish would take more action, the people that you would wish would come back and support your mission. The first thing they've been waiting for you to do is be relatable, be relatable. Being relatable and just the word relatable has been something that I've literally written down in my notes lately, in my, my iPhone has, like the little notes thing I'll just, I just wrote down the word relatable and what I've noticed is when I think of the thought leaders that I most identify with, again, the math, the brand's emissions that I most support. It's usually there's some Like I'm getting a glimpse in, there's a relatability to it. Okay, so I'm gonna give you a couple of different examples of Brands and thought leaders that are relatable, and then you can apply this to your own mission. So a Bunch are coming to mind. Okay, first one, sarah Blakely. We've talked about her. She's the founder of Spakes. She's she's kind of a what's the word I'm thinking of is goofball like she's hilarious, she, she is just, unapologetically, her, she's silly, she is, is not perfect. She's going to give her audience a glimpse behind the scenes of that imperfection, which then Immediately, you're like ooh, that's relatable. Like when her kid's hair looks bananas and she's showing up to school you know, for carpool, and she's dressed in pajamas because everybody, everybody slept in late, right? Totally relatable. The founder of a brand called mega babe, which I love, which is a like a beauty brand. Her name is Katie Serino and she's so cool and one of the things that she did which was so relatable but also a little polarizing for people is, I think, maybe last year or something like that. On a few of her social networks, especially on Instagram. She was talking about how she thinks that oh my gosh, what are those chairs called? I just had to Google it. At a ronda tears, she's like is it just me? Or at a ronda chairs, like the most uncomfortable chair in the world. And she talked about how, like, once you get in them, they just really uncomfortable, they're impossible to get out of. And then there was like us, I just I'm slurry of people who were like, oh my God, they really are. And her whole thought was just like why are we all buying more Adirondack t-chairs which I totally have some of and when she brought that up, I'm like they really are pretty uncomfortable. Relatable, it's relatable. We think about maybe more mission driven organizations, really. I mean, mega Babe is a mission driven organization, by the way, and she will talk about some of the things that other beauty brands are not talking about. That is really, really relatable. That is talking about some of the things that women experience and need and that maybe some of the other kind of the tried and true beauty brands aren't talking about. Right, so, being relatable Again, let's move to some mission driven organizations. I feel like that is a place where a lot may be struggle because they're not sure. How do you be relatable when you're not a thought leader, you're not one single individual, you're a mission, you're a brand, you're a nonprofit organization. One of the ways that you do that is you got to dial it in. You got to go micro, not macro, ok. So a founder telling a personal story, right. If you've ever gotten an email from an organization that started with the subject line whoops, ok, I know I've gotten several, because maybe the previous email didn't went out too early, maybe the previous email didn't have a link in it, maybe the previous email, instead of saying first name and auto inputting the person's first name, had some sort of tech issue and totally messed up that automation, right? So if you've ever gotten an email from an organization that said whoops, it probably. Number one made you want to open it because you're curious. Number two, actually connected you with the organization because you're like, yeah, damn, they feel really bad, they made this mistake, it's all right, it's all right. Everybody makes mistakes, like I. Like a whoops email because, number one, it says you're getting an arena and number two, it's just acknowledging like, hey, human error, humans, humans make errors. And it's not also serious, it's OK. So one way you can be relatable, particularly in emails, is just going micro, where it's from a specific staff member, it's from a specific person's point of view and they can share their point of view of like hey, I'm writing this, I just spilled coffee on my shirt again. Hello Monday, anyone else having a Monday? Monday, boom, relatable, ok. So a hint with being relatable is it takes honesty and it takes imperfection. I don't think you can be relatable If you're striving for perfection. Somebody recently said on a panel I was on that they have this like I don't know 40 step checklist before they send out an email. And I was like holy crap, what's the point? What is the point? Are we going for perfection? Is this going on 100,000 billboards across the US? Are we just sending out an email today? We don't need perfection. We've run it through Grammarly. Make sure our links work, make sure our spellings as good as it's going to get, and we go. We don't do a 40 point checklist, ok. Second piece, second thing that I think your most perfect fit supporters and clients have been waiting for. What you're waiting for you to do is be relational. Ok, be relational, which means develop relationships. So here's what I mean. Do your clients? Do your donors? Do your fans feel seen and heard? The difference here is do they feel like they're being talked at when they're in your community? Maybe they follow you on Instagram or maybe they subscribe to your email list. Does it feel like they're that you're being talked at versus with? There really is a nuance and a difference between talking, even online, even when it's not the same as picking up the phone or texting a friend. There is a difference when there is a with versus an at. Ok, it's almost like the parent with the child. Right, if where you're trying you're saying a direct command put your shoes on. Right, you're just trying to get the person to put their shoes on. That is not a with conversation, that is an at conversation. You want to make sure you're not doing that with any of your marketing and your messaging and your fundraising. Ok, you want to make sure that it is a two way conversation. To stay top of mind, when I feel like Katie Estrino, the founder of Megababe, is actually like does anyone else hate Adirondack chairs? I'm like, oh my God, I've never thought about it before. Yes, I think I do. Right, she's literally using her favorite social network to pull people. She's dropping a Q&A box. Maybe, if you're doing email, you're asking people to reply or fill out a survey, right? Literally asking what do you think of this? What is your opinion on this? Would you be interested? Tell me the things, right? So the hint with that is you want to make sure that you're not showing up in their inbox Just when you want something, right? So if you are sending an email with all three of these steps, these are emails that are not saying click here, donate now, buy today, sign up, volunteer. Being relational is a two-way conversation, meaning I'm creating and developing trust and connection with you, and that means I'm not always asking for something. I'm not always saying, hey, open your wallet, christina, right, and instead I'm saying, hey, what do you think of this? Hey, this is what I've been up to. What are your thoughts on this? Anyone else hate it? Adirondack chairs you love them. Tell me why you love them. Tell me the best brand. Do they make an Adirondack chair cushion I need to know about? Like, tell me the things, right? Being relational so you want to make sure that, yes, you are showing up sometimes in their inbox to make an offer, to ask them to take action, but not always Same for social media. We see this a lot, I would say more with, like solar printers or small businesses, where a lot of those clients and customers will show up and be pushing out a product or service and then forget this nurture process, forget this connection process and then we flip flop it in the nonprofit world. What I see is that a lot of y'all are instead showing up on social media only just this sort of this vague, mission, non specific type of posts and never making offers or very rarely making offers. But it's still lacking the depth of the relatability and the relational piece. Okay, so you want to make sure that there's a nice balance of both and you can pause this and you can go look at your, your IG feed and see, like, how relatable am I, how relatable is our organization? How much have we actually prompted and tried actively to create a two way conversation? How many times are we, are we doing that how often? And the other question to that, just to kind of check on your balances and how often are we actually actively campaigning, selling, launching fundraising, like actively acting people to take action? Okay, third piece. Third thing that I think is missing out for most organizations Be aspirational. Aspirational is that vision that makes me sign up for your email list to begin with. Is that thing that nudge that? Oh, I want to get involved, I want to know more, I want to live in a world where that's true, where you make that happen. That's aspirational. So that may be the tipping point why a lot of people take action to begin with. Okay, so if you think about a donor that made a single donation, you think about a client or customer that bought a single thing. They took one action once to get into your world. Somebody who downloaded a freebie to opt into your email list Okay, they were. They were in a place of, like aspirational, whatever vision you were painting in that moment got them in. They took a step in the door and a lot of times what I see is I'm opening the front door of my house, I take a step in and then I just stand there like in the foyer right, instead of making sure that you're continuing to invite them in, and almost like touring a house right, turing a house which actually I'm going to go into a story about that. This weekend there was an open house on my street and the house looked really cool and I was like, ooh, let's go look at an open house. And I walked in the door and the real estate agent was very much just done. You could tell she was like I'm done, I am not painting any picture. You have walked in the door and you can show yourself around. I am not. She was not going to paint the picture of what's possible. Hey, this room here is a flex room. You could use it as your office. You could use it as blah, blah, blah and check it out over here. And here's something that the owner recently did. There was none of that. It literally was like Christina, please enjoy your self-guided tour and don't let the door hit you on the way out, like it was just boom. And it cracked me up because the only thing she said to me and my husband was it was hot out. She's like we have popsicles If you want a popsicle. I was like what? Okay, I don't think I want a popsicle, but I do want to take a look at this house. So where are you doing? You're letting people in. They're coming in the door. They're like oh, your mission's kind of cool. I'm interested, looks interesting, but as they are in your world, they're following you on Facebook. Maybe they're even in a Facebook group that you founded. Maybe they're on your email list. Whatever the version of your world is, how often are you saying this is what we are here to solve and here's how we're solving it? And the future, the next 24 months, looks like this here's what we accomplished today, here's what's ahead. Here's some celebrations, here's some wins. How often are you actively showing happy customers and clients? How often are you celebrating being vocal? How often? That's the first piece, and the second piece is, literally, how are you guiding me through the house saying, you know, they put a pool in the backyard. Come on, come, let me show you. They added a little detached, almost like a detached oh my gosh studio apartment in the back house and instead of saying to me this could be an office, this could be an Airbnb, this could be, you know, an in-law suite or something like that, nothing it was. Show yourself around, you figure it out, you ideate for yourself, right? We wanna make sure we're guiding people or walking with people, so make sure that, like, the aspirational pieces of your mission are something that you refer back to often, and I would make a homework assignment here, which is write down a list of, like, what are we aspiring to do? That's the prompt. What are we aspiring to do? What am I aspiring to do? What is my mission aspiring to do? And I think it's hard to say like the 10 or 20 year version. I like to go a little shorter than that, like in the next year, in the next five years. Yes, you can go. Like I'm going to a charity water. We want a world where everyone has clean drinking water, right, that is a huge vision, okay, so, yes, there's that. But what is the smaller version? What is the five year version of that? What does that look like? How many wells or clean drinking water sources? Or maybe how many countries or communities Like, how are we chipping away at that audacious, important, aspirational goal? Write down a list, and if it were me, I'd bullet it out. So they were like little bite-sized pieces. So let's sum up the first three and then I'm going to show you how you can do this, because I don't want you to go through this and then go well, crap, I need to hire somebody to do this, I need a communications person, I need an entire team to execute this. I'm going to show you how to do this on autopilot. So the first three, or the top three, are be relatable. Stop trying to be perfect. Be honest. Tell me about how you overslept today. Tell me about, maybe, how you dropped your kids off to school and then, like, took a 20 minute nap. Hello, that was me before you started your day, like, be relatable. Step two be relational. Make sure you're creating two way conversations with the people that are your perfect fit. And let's actually dig into that for one more. Second, one of the things that I always talk to my personal like one-to-one coaching clients about is talk to your best customer. Talk to your best donor, your best whatever. Don't create content and create stories and messaging and try and be relational around people who are like, kind of don't really love what you're doing or are a little abrasive or require a lot of effort. Talk to your best person. That's how you want to build and ask those prompts. Think about them when you're writing. That's the hack there, okay. Step three be aspirational. Make sure often you're talking to me about that aspirational thing that exists in this world. That is the reason why you keep doing this work. I want to hear about it. I want to hear how you're making it happen and I want to hear what's next. It's like giving people a scoop of what's next, what you're working on, and also it helps to just from a Woo perspective, it helps to just manifest it. The more people you tell I'm doing this, the more people are like she's doing this, it's happening. So those are the three steps. Now here's the fun part. I promise you can automate this. You can automate this. The one of the easiest, lowest lifts like the entry level version of automating this three step process is through an email welcome series. What is an email welcome series? It is simply an automated series, meaning if a new subscriber signs up to your email list ops into your email list. I sign up today, then I am in an automated drip campaign that will send me a series of emails that can do just this. One is really focusing on the relatability piece, maybe One is really relational and one is really aspirational, or maybe kind of inject a little of both of all of it in both, in all of them. You get to decide what that looks like. The point is is that I want you to know this is something you can automate and is worth automating. I like to think of these series as a five email series, so email one, two, three, four, five. If you wanna start with three, you can. I like to think of them as a five email drip, that basically, as Christina ops into your email list, I am sent a series of emails over the course of a few weeks. That helps to develop that connection and that trust and starts to show me a bit more about you and your organization. Now you write this email series once you use an automated software. My favorite one is ConvertKit, because it's so easy to use. Deliverability is great as well. That's my favorite one. I'll link to it in the notes, but basically it does it in the background. So, for example, if I opt into your email list at 1 am tonight, then I get the first email and then maybe a week later I get the second one and a week after that I get the third one. You get to decide and you can have different themes and focus points for each email. And then what's really, really important is what a lot of people come to me and ask, which is when do I ask for the second gift? When do I ask for them to become a monthly donor? When do I ask for a sale. When do I ask for them to take another action? So I walk you through this process. I have an email welcome series workshop where I teach a couple of different things One, what to put in each email. Two, how you should think about the frequency Should it be a week, should it be less than a week? It's a really important piece. The first 30 days that a customer opts into or a donor opts into your world are the most important 30 days. That is the make or break for me of whether or not they will remember and keep you top of mind. Okay, so we talk about the frequency and then we talk about when to ask for that second action. I'm going to link to the welcome series workshop in the notes. You can access it on demand and something I've been thinking about a lot lately was how I can help you get there faster, and the answer to that question with this workshop was templates. I tend to have this like push pull relationship with templates, because I want you to show up as you online and not to show up as watered down version of you. But I realize that templates are really, really useful when they are given context and when there is a system to work with templates and I realized, like Christina, you actually use templates too in your life. I use social templates with my friend from your social team. She has the best social media templates. Those are the templates I use, not for all, but for a lot of my social posts. So like, okay, we can do templates for this. So what I did is I created five email templates, but what was really important to me was I added a video training to go along with it, so that you curate the templates to sound and make sure that all three things are attached to the emails you write. So you have the framework and then I give you the prompts to fill them in. So they are relational, they are relatable, they are aspirational. So I have now the workshop and the mini training for you and I will link to that in the workshop and the mini training, the workshop and the training, the templates with the mini training and I will link for that to you. So that's it for today. Take a moment and think about where can I automate, where can I inject a little bit more of relatability or relationship building or aspirational vision focus in any of my marketing messaging, communications and fundraising, like any of that kind of holistic piece of your content, because I can tell you we're waiting for it. So many of us are waiting for it. The reason why I double down, I like and follow the brands and organizations that I like and follow and then share their content is because they're doing these things. Okay, they're doing these things. And the reasons why I might unfollow, unsubscribe or just forget about which I think is the most common thing that will happen is you just forget you were on the list in the first place. You forget you were following that person in the first place is because they're not doing these things. Okay, so that's what I've got for you. Make sure you're doing those three steps and if you need help in any of these pieces, get on my calendar. Book a discovery call with me and let's talk. I'll see you next time. If you ask me, everyone should have a coach, especially you. I wanna invite you to schedule a free discovery call with me. Go to splendidatlcom, forward, slash contact. You'll see my calendar there. Book a call with me. You'll learn about my smart growth method, where we can grow your business or organization sustainably, with ease and massive impact.

You Get To Have Purpose And Profit. I’ll Show You How.

 
 
PodcastChristina Edwardspurpose and profit, marketing, entrepreneurship, purpose driven, nonprofit, social impact, mindsetComment