53. Some Personal News
Speed: How to make it 6 days, not six months, to get in front of your target audience
Happy Sunday. To those I spoke to this week or spent time with in-person - thank you. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
People have plenty of different definitions for excellence in nonprofit marketing - structured thinking, results-oriented, working well with the fundraising team, a great brand... All of those attributes are important, but speed is the single most critical characteristic of a winning team.
This edition of SPN covers the following:
How to improve team velocity
Signals that point to a poky marketing department
Approaches to speed up your marketing
As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.
Let’s dig in!
7 Ways to Improve Team Velocity
Inspired by @LennySan
Narrow your team’s focus by taking one thing off their plate (e.g. a goal, a project).
Have one or two no-meeting days a week (e.g. “No-meeting Wednesday”).
Put one person’s ass on the line (i.e. a DRI) for each goal/outcome - directly responsible individual.
Find one blocker that is slowing your team down and unblock it.
Ask your marketing and fundraising operations people (web/MarTech/implementation Project Managers) what is most slowing their day-to-day work down, and improve it.
Cancel a standing meeting and handle it async.
Let go of under-performers.
SIGNALS: Warning Lights
Having spent some of my week with car mechanics, I’m in “check engine light” mode. Here are signals that point to a poky marketing department:
Your goals are all long-term
If the metrics for your fundraising and marketing programs all say “At the end of the quarter we’ll have this” that’s a red flag.
Long-term business goals are important, but they need to be complemented with short-term goals, such as “In two weeks, we’ll have achieved/discovered/learnt X.” I learned this the hard way when building programs in the early days at unicef Kid Power.
My impact goals were too far into the future, which meant I was hand-cuffing myself from driving the acquisition program at the right velocity week-over-week and surfacing problems faster.
Your team lacks new learnings
If you ask, “What do we know this week that we didn’t know last week?” there’d better be a new answer to that question.
Put another way, if it’s been two months and you’re still struggling with the same challenges, you’re not prioritizing your marketing efforts correctly.
Fast teams are always solving new problems. This was something I learnt as we built out our digital capabilities at unicef. Don’t show up to the bi-weekly partner meeting complaining about the same problem.
You’re too dependent on other teams
Many leaders accept limitations that can be removed, especially when it comes to cross-functional dependencies. How often do you hear something like, “Well, it takes the Web Team a month to build us a landing page”?
Earlier in my career I accepted these as facts. With experience I learned it was my responsibility to voice, even demand, what marketing needed to succeed.
In marketing and fundraising, there’s lots of trial and error before finding campaigns that work. If it was as easy as pulling out your credit card to use AdWords to grow your Org’s revenue, that’s what all nonprofits would do - and soon drive the ROI and scale in that channel down to nothing.
Speed Up Your Marketing
It can be hard and uncomfortable to do new things, which tempts us to spend months of planning and creation in isolation to get it right. But you’re passing up on a ton of learning.
My guess is that if you asked anyone in a marketing org if their team moves slowly, most would say no. After all, look at all the web pages, decks and creative assets they’ve created!
What happens after six months if a campaign isn’t gaining the right traction? People have a much harder time pivoting or divesting completely from it. Now they’re bogged down with projects that are going nowhere - everyone knows it, but few are willing to cut their losses and pull the plug.
There are 6 approaches I’ve picked up, moulded into versions that make sense for me and my environment, that may help your teams inject some more urgency. Take what’s helpful to you. I use programs and campaigns interchangeably, but they convey the same meaning.
1. Lean into Motion Goals
Instead of spending all your time building the perfect plan for End of Year, the best thing you can do now is to try to ship something within 1 - 2 weeks. This was probably the biggest shift my team and I engineered in the way we operated.
Static friction is a lot higher than kinetic friction. Once it’s set in motion, everything is easier. Setting motion goals gets everyone moving. For example: release a campaign, on one channel, with one ask, under one content pillar, this week.
The immediate push back I’d get was: “We just came up with this angle, we haven’t done any analysis, we haven’t built anything around it. How could we possibly start fundraising around it? We need to do research first.”
But it actually doesn’t matter if you hit that goal of releasing the campaign in a week; what matters is that it forces you out of defence and into offence - it helps you get real data.
Say it’s a partnership campaign in collab with the Corp Partnerships team. You need to build a potential list of partners. You have to reach out to them, so you create your pitch for the outreach. You have to talk to partners, so you have to outline your value proposition at a high level.
But at this stage, nothing that you’ve created is so precious that you’re going to latch onto it and insist it’s a pillar of any program. You’ve only been working on it for a week! Yet it gets you moving and testing the mechanics. Where am I experiencing the most friction? What seems to be the hardest thing that we need to figure out?”
It should take six days, not six months, to get in front of your target audience with a marketing concept.
That said leaders need to get out of their people’s way and let them execute. And fail. And do it differently to you. And repeat.
2. Obsess Over Weekly Targets
The biggest light-bulb moment for me was switching to weekly goals in every single program, no matter how new it was.
Quarterly goals are important, but they also leave a lot of whitespace, and you have no way of knowing if you’re on track.
What can you do every single week to move the needle? To this day I pick the goal that’s the furthest down the funnel that could still be impacted every week and create a consistent execution rhythm for the team.
If you only think about goals on a quarterly basis, your learning and iteration cycle is dramatically slower.
A marketer with weekly goals has 12x more “at-bats” than someone who is only lifting their head up and evaluating quarterly.
3. Capture Goals in a Dashboard
Share beyond the immediate marketing team. You don’t want to invite too many questions when you’re still validating hypotheses and excavating the unknowns.
But in my experience, that protectiveness can be really detrimental - it just keeps you in the dark longer. Strive to find a balance. How?
For starters make sure any dashboard is incredibly simple and easy to digest.
Anyone needs to be able to pick up on the most critical information, even if they’re not sitting in the meetings. That means keeping it high level.
4. Establish a Bi-Weekly Learning Meeting
I borrowed this idea from a brilliant growth product leader, and it works really well for marketing and fundraising.
Every two weeks host a meeting where you try to codify learnings across the team. The goal is to articulate what people have learned that they didn’t know two weeks ago.
If you don’t know where to start, here’s a simple prompt you can use, continuing with our partner example:
Hypothesis. “We believed that an X model would create a meaningful incentive for Y to join our program.
Test: “We created A, and we published it to B audiences, but they reacted with C behavior.”
Learning: “We learned that 1a isn’t going to be a major driver, but we also learned 2b, so we can monetize a lot higher while achieving our goal to deliver a more consistent experience to our donor file.”
The learnings don't always have to come from a statistically significant A/B test - qualitative directional learnings can be as important.
5. Pick the Right Tools - not just the shiniest tools
Technology is a hugely important, yet underrated, aspect of being fast - it’s the biggest enabler for speed once your programs hit scale.
At the beginning of any new program, I keep it low-tech. Otherwise that just contributes to the sunk cost fallacy. If you spent a ton of money on a tool specifically for a new marketing program - I’ve seen it many times for brand measurement, for it to be never used again so you’re always comparing apples to oranges for relevancy, awareness scores etc - it's going to be much harder to divest later.
As the campaign continues to gain traction and buy-in across the Org, it’s important to consider how you can use marketing automation tools to give your engine a tune up - as long as you’re prioritizing the right functionality.
Decide on your campaign’s goals and the top three workflows you need to speed up before you start taking donations. Any one tool is only as valuable as it is simple and enables speed.
When adding to your MarTech stack, prioritize technology that has ease-of-use and removes repetitive workflows for your team, not old-school enterprise tools that technically can enable a workflow if you bring on an army to operate them.
6. Make a Decision on Whether to Go Forward
If after one quarter of iterating you keep missing goals and just can’t get it right, honestly assess if you should abandon the campaign. It’s what Q3 is for: Testing.
Can you problem-solve your way out of it, or is it a waste of time? It takes gumption to pull the plug.
My goal by the end of Q3 is to make a decision on whether what we’re building is going to scale for EOY, as opposed to spending six months tinkering. Alternatively you have to live with that inertia as an Org.
Looking back, the root cause where things go awry is often the same. When I’ve needed to pull the plug on a campaign, it usually comes down to having the wrong assumptions about the donors desire and interest.
We want them to be one way, and it would be really convenient for us if they were interested in X, but they’re not. Maybe they have less time to learn more about Y that we thought they did, or we’re less important to them than we thought.
Sometimes you can validate it with research but sometimes you have to start getting out there and trying to make it work before you realize you’re facing a dead-end and have to cut your losses. That’s okay - that’s what moving fast is all about.
Takeaways:
Embrace speed and focus on gathering real data to iterate and improve.
Bi-weekly learning meetings foster a culture of continuous improvement, bring people together and ensure that insights are captured and disseminated effectively.
Prioritize simplicity and functionality over shiny “features”.
That’s all for today. I hope there were some nuggets here that you found useful and can put to work. Now onto the interesting stuff:
Interesting Reads
Thinking Fast & Slow. I’ve a very tatty copy sitting on a shelf next to me.
A big study based on Meta giving academic researchers access to internal data: do newsfeed algorithms and virality change people’s politics? Not really, no. Lesson, perhaps: beware of ideas that sound intuitively true but lack any empirical base.
IBM is open-sourcing their geospatial foundation AI model, built with NASA’s satellite data. Named watsonx.ai, it’s a huge move towards global, open collaboration on innovations in climate and Earth science.
A 1974 CIA assessment of the outlook for China for the next decade and for the year 2000. Hint: didn’t quite turn out this way.
Leveraging attention data to drive better outcomes.
Amazon is getting close to taking on SpaceX in LEO broadband.
A very good assessment of what was wrong with Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, and what he broke after he bought it, from Esther Crawford, who was on the inside.
A long and comprehensive guide to tactics for getting good results out of ChatGPT - so-called prompt engineering.
Some Sunday thoughts on running.
Thank you for reading Some Personal News
How can I help you? I use my experience, expertise and network to help mission-driven organizations solve interesting problems and grow.