59. Some Personal News

Tobes’ Project Update & Why Voice Search is Where the Party's At

Sep 03, 2023

Happy Sunday. Welcome back! Thanks for granting me a week off. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

Did you know Every Action was the first to call out the potential power of Voice Search for the nonprofit sector way back in 2019? Hat tip to them! Not until recently have I seen its potential.

Today I’m going to explore the following:

Creating opportunities for young people
Assessing for a “speed-first” mindset
How Voice Search allows you to have your cake and eat it too

As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.

Let’s dig in!

Next Gen Opportunities: Impact Search

As regular readers will have seen, I include jobs in the Wednesday edition of SPN. The good ones aren’t so easy to come across but there are satisfactory resources to comb through. When I performed a similar search but for nonprofit internships the results were underwhelming and so fragmented.

I’d love to expose more young people to the sector and think we can be better at opening that door to everyone. There are hundreds of nonprofit internships available at any one time but there isn’t a platform adequately showcasing them in one place. Nor is there a library of content introducing young people to a host of nonprofits, their respective missions and the people doing the work of the work. So I’ve recently set out to solve for this.

In building out the platform, I’ll adopt a lot of the marketing and technology approaches discussed in this newsletter. Over time I’ll build out profile pages for each Org that will include a donate button and create space for branded content.

If you’re up for being an early adopter or tester of the platform or have some internships live or in the pipe, hit reply and let’s chat.

Hiring for Speed

Keeping with the jobs and opportunity theme, I’ve seen some really exciting Director/VP level roles published this week. If you’re the one having to sift through hordes of candidates next week, what are you looking for? In response to edition 53 where I explored “Speed: How to make it 6 days not 6 months to get in front of your target audience” I received a great question: How do you assess a speed-first mindset during an interview process?

Granted it’s not something that leaps out from a pile of resumes. Here’s my take on how I’ve fine-tuned my radar to assess hires with a speed-first mindset.

Including case-based questions has paid dividends. Better still committing a whole 45 mins interview to talking in the abstract and breaking down how they’d solve for “X” . It allows you time to explore how somebody thinks and ask exploratory questions like “I want us to get to 10,000 newsletter subscribers in 6 months. How do we do that?” Or “I want to come up with a new scalable event model that’s going to help us acquire 1,000 donors by the end of the year. How do I do that?”

There’s a few key signals to look for. How scrappy are their ideas? Can they quickly put pen to paper and ideate? Obviously they’ll have to research things and they don’t have a ton of context, but if every answer always starts and ends with “I’d talk to other people” or “I’d do research on this” that’s an early indicator that this is someone that’s prone to burying their head in the sand.

Dig deep into their skill sets with your follow-up questions. If they say they want to assess the performance of your website, I always ask “How would you do that? What tools would you use to get that done in a week?” The time constraint is an important element to the question.

Shortening the implementation window for their ideas encourages people to think a little more dynamically. I’ll say “That’s a great suggestion, now I want you to do it in one day. How would you deliver on this tomorrow?” Rarely is there a right answer. It’s also supposed to be fun.

Throughout the conversation I listen for their ability to prioritize and find a way to get to the same impact but in a shorter time frame. I also probe at their ability to uncover hidden assumptions. Questions like “What might go wrong?” and “What must be true for this idea to work?” are helpful. When they list their hypotheses I ask them how they can vet them in a few days rather than weeks.

As I mentioned this should also be a fun exercise, especially for the candidate. A speed-first mindset is critical in marketing, donor experience and fundraising roles. With the sheer amount of work on our plates we need to be building teams that are proactive, engaged and committed for the long term. It’s on us to put the preparation work in to ensure the candidate experience is as good as the outcome we’re all driving toward.

Shout Out to VSEO

Many of us have shiny new thing syndrome. I’m guilty of taking one too many demo calls with businesses in the hopes of finding a tool or framework that’s going to 5x my net-new revenue or retention opportunities on the spot.

But if you look at emerging Channels over the last 5 years, for example - Snap, Telegram, Discord or even Metaverse… only TikTok has really built a moat around its offering and stood the test of time.

That said, out of the corner of one eye I’ve watched Voice Search grow up and become an interesting proposition. It’s under-utilized. And my sense is that’s about to change.

Why Does it Matter? 34% of people in the US use voice search at least once a month. That share surges to 51% among the 20-25 years old bracket. Those numbers don’t make it a meaningful medium for non-profits, yet - most people use it to look up the weather, find a song, buy movie tickets, or add a grocery store stop to their navigation while driving.

The Real Value is In Between the Lines (like most good things). Focusing on SEO for voice search forces us to become closer to our donors. It’ll also likely ensure top organic rankings in traditional search. More generally I suspect it’ll open up the wider Org to at least explore emerging AI solutions too. I’m going to jump into each of these in turn.

Get Closer to Donors. Voice search (VSEO) is conversational by nature - forcing a different approach to SEO and over time SEM. Branded keywords don’t work - potential, or even current, donors aren’t asking their HomePods to “donate to Save the Children” while cooking their Sunday Roast. Long-tail keywords, including everyday words like “what, how, when,” rule the roost.

Here are a few tactics that help get VSEO up and going:

Create more informational pages explaining your Organization’s impact, specific pillars of what you’re doing, and - ideally - how it connects to the broader domestic or global agenda.
1. The goal here is to ingest your Org into the conversation when potential donors are searching for information about what’s happening in the world – whether it’s the latest updates on the war in Ukraine or the status of a rescue operation in Hawaii. Suppose your Org works to relieve those affected, and you do the rest of the tactics in the next section. In that case, your information will be given to donors - creating an immediate opportunity for a donation from a qualified suspect.
Include statistics and captions: “How many girls don’t have access to hygiene products in Malawi?” or “How many children lack primary education in Ghana?”.
Talk to your current donors about what encouraged them to donate and what questions they had about your Org before doing so. Take those and create a word-for-word FAQ page.
(If your Org is locally focused) Take bullet #1 and make it your own. When people - local or tourists - in your geo of interest are looking for “notable facts about their surroundings” your content will rank high.

You’re not only optimizing for Voice Search in this approach. The added benefit is you’re making the Org’s website more accessible to donors, regardless of the medium they used to find you. Not to mention the value the marketing team will elicit in talking to donors directly to understand their intent.

Ensure Better Rankings in Traditional Search. If your team commits to doing VSEO, you’re guaranteed to improve your conventional search rankings. These two go hand-in-hand - voice search is essentially picking up one of the top three results on the google.com page for the same search query.

Technically speaking, there’s more to it: voice search is extremely mobile-oriented and Google is adding VSEO results as a considerably sized portion of its traditional ranking algorithm.

Page speed and usage of the https:// protocol are the most critical factors to successful VSEO outcomes, and slightly longer, clearly categorized pages tend to do best. All of these factors affect your traditional search as well! Here are a few tactics how to accomplish both at once:

Prioritize page load. This is not a novelty - now you have a straightforward way to “measure” it instead of arbitrary benchmarks. If your content is showing up in voice search – you’re doing well!
Talk to your web development partner about your “HTML schema”. Voice Search interprets the content on your page via these markers - the more precise you distinguish your pages into proper content types, as well as sections (such as Question, Answer, Video Explanation, Review, and others) – the better it will make your website rank both for Voice Search and for traditional Mobile Search.

Embracing Emerging AI Solutions. The rise of large-language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT is bound to give Voice Search a second rebirth – much more potent than the first coming ever was. AI is already being used to distill the best content into a short-form answer. At some point shortly, the best-optimized content for this use case will also be the content created by AI. They use the same algorithms! Now is the right time to explore this end of the capabilities, to be ahead of the curve, and to grab an early adopter advantage.

I was blown away a few weeks ago when I first used Beautiful.ai. I tested it to turn a one thousand-words-long document into a presentation and then used d-id.com to create an avatar to narrate it – all in 5 minutes. Here are 3 possible use cases for your Org:

Use narrator AI tools to create personalized thank-you videos for your donors to come in their email right after the donation – instead of old and boring plain text ones. Some of them – d-id included – will also allow you to create an avatar of a specific person (your CEO or brand ambassador?) to be used in such videos.
Use ChatGPT and other conversational LLMs to see how AI views your content. Ask it to summarize your best-performing pages or those you aim to have in the top ranks for Voice Search to validate that your content structure and HTML schemas work as intended.
Use AI tools to help you quickly generate tens and hundreds of slightly personalized narratives for web pages answering different types of conversational questions you got from your donors – saving tons of time.

Data Privacy. The last and critical element of this puzzle. While Org’s are nowhere near the scrutiny healthcare or financial service industries are under, extra caution is more than warranted when using AI tools.

Use cases for data fed into these models are still wildly unclear. Anyone see Zoom’s recent change to their privacy policy allowing them to use everything you say in meetings for training their LLMs?

I’ve been using these two rules of thumb to ensure I consider privacy while still getting to learn new tricks and leverage the advantages AI can afford:

Never feed any donor or confidential Org’s data to any AI models, whether as files or in prompts themselves.
Never treat generative AI as truly “generative.” AI tools reform, repurpose, and reshuffle the content already created - they don’t have principles of exclusivity or copyright. There’s a fair chance somebody else can get the same image or text blurb in response to their prompt, so AI can’t be used for creating normally copyright-protected material such as ad imagery, or this newsletter!

That’s it for today. I hope you’re inspired to try some VSEO or test using narrator AI tools to create personalized thank-you videos for your donors. Donor behavior and expectations are changing, as is how and where they’re wanting to engage with Organizations. These are exciting times.

Now onto the fun stuff!

Interesting Reads

Def Jam founder Rick Rubin is a long way from a typical music exec - as his recent book on Creativity shows. He has a regular podcast and his latest guest is legendary Ad-Man Rory Sutherland. It’s long but so far it’s really good.

Creator Economy 2.0: What we’ve learned, why it’s hard, and what’s next.

What’s really causing big media company disruption?

Dozens of big brands have blocked GPTBot, OpenAI’s new web crawler. (Have you?)

A CIO and CTO technology guide to generative AI.

How businesses focus on promotions and tech drive basket size and lifetime value - lots of cross-over with thinking between for-profit-non-profit.

TikTok Shopping Trend report 2023 (the commentary is particularly helpful).

TikTok Execs Reveal How TV & Films Go Viral on Their Platform.

Aback to school special of Metaverse News.