74. Some Personal News

Engaging Gen Z + the Case for Piecemeal Tech Solutions

Nov 20, 2023

A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

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Then it sounds like you might find Feathr super valuable.

Think Hubspot but built specifically for nonprofits. Check it out for yourself:

Today’s SPN includes the following:

Ignore Gen Z at your peril: 8 approaches to engage them.
How to create content to build intention vs attract attention.
What do Walled Gardens and 2024’s privacy policies mean for Org’s building out their MarTech stack?

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

Let’s dig in.

Expertise Needed to Connect to Gen Z

Gen Z can’t be ignored. For starters their spending power is on the rise with $360 billion in disposable income (Bloomberg).

A reader of SPN shared this week that they felt - perhaps more than Gen X or millennials - that Gen Z is hard to accurately group together. I related to their fear of “getting it wrong”, which is arguably more important to recognize than just experimenting with different ways to connect.

Misfiring: An Example

Connecting with the Gen Z audience in the right way isn’t easy. If you get it wrong, the best case scenario is that you waste your budget and get ignored. But in the worst case scenario you risk not only misfiring with your Gen Z target, but upsetting your existing donor base at the same time.

The most obvious and recent consumer example has been Bud Light. Seemingly desperate to connect with their missing customer segment within Gen Z they hired a trans influencer called Dylan Mulvaney to promote the drink.

Not only did they end up offending their (traditional conservative) customer base, but they managed to upset their intended target audience when they fumbled their ability to defend the campaign - and ended up losing $6B/ 5% of their share price.

Skill Sets Required

The Gen Z group isn’t a homogenous cohort. Rather, they’re contradictions! They like low-fi content but also admire high craft. They have a short attention span but will binge an 8-hour show on Netflix.

Here are some skills that are needed - and maybe these are sourced courtesy of your agency partners - to approach this Gen Z audience on the right terms and avoid mashing them together as one.

What am I missing and what would you refine?

1. Authenticity is key. Gen Z can spot inauthentic marketing efforts a mile off. Be genuine, transparent, and honest in your brand messaging and interactions. Avoid using overly polished or staged content.
2. Evaluate your socials. Embrace supporter-generated content and video that doesn’t look like ‘advertising’ on TikTok, Snap, Instagram.
3. Gen Z lives on mobile. Make it easy for them to access, engage and donate to your Org on their phone.
4. Emphasize social and environmental responsibility (only if authentic, see bullet 1).
5. Stay informed on current culture. Incorporate relevant elements into your marketing content to stay connected.
6. Engage in conversation. Gen Z appreciates Org’s that actively listen to and engage with them.
7. Enable personalization and co-creation. More on that below from a technical perspective but involve them in co-creation initiatives - assets, campaigns, events.
8. Utilize influencers and micro-influencers. Triple-check that the influencers align with your Org values.

The smartest Org’s and agencies approach audiences as a mindset - reaching out to communities and their passions, not with communication based on when they were born. Communications have to be authentic; leverage those that live and breathe the channels they’re in. This requires a digital native skillset but they must understand:

- Your brand
- Your Org’s objectives
- Your analytics and how to drive ROI

Every Org’s marketing team needs to look at culture and its brand together: ask the hard questions and connect the two to get the right balance. Especially when looking to engage Gen Z.

Work that doesn’t connect, or work that entertains but doesn’t link back to your Org’s mission is equally worthless. In-house or agency, either way you need the right balance of brand oversight and creative practitioners that fits your niche to nail your approach to Gen Z.

Move Aside Attention - Build Intention

“I’ll teach you more in 10 slides than a $250,000 MBA” (and then is super generic).
“The one regret of the dying, you won’t believe #4” (then is super generic).
Or just a funny meme about the latest thing Elon said.

Do these one liners do well on social? Yes, often they do.

It also depends on how you define the term “well.” If all you want is attention (views, likes, comments, reposts, maybe even “followers”), then yeah, sure, they work.

But if you’re trying to raise funds, then an Elon meme isn’t going to convince anyone to drop $50/mo as a Sustainer nor seek you out in the wake of an emergency.

Creating content to build intention to support your Org needs to be the play this Quarter and continued into 2024.

How I think about doing that:

Focus on building trust. Leaning into overused viral templates, even from within our sector, is a sure-fire way to slowly erode trust and respect from the most engaged and discerning Supporters.
Shout about how good you are. If you’re digging wells and hydrating a village, you better consistently demonstrate how much you know about digging wells and how your work has helped others. Demonstrate your expertise and brag a little about your work (and share stories from those who’s lives you’re changing).
Prioritize DMs and replies - not likes, comments, followers. The highest engagement posts are often the worst at driving new Supporters. The best posts for driving donations often have mediocre engagement.
Really crack your content’s “job to be done.” It’s a phrase used a lot in Product Marketing and I love it because it preaches focus. What need (e.g. to advocate) and issue or problem (e.g. access to three nourishing meals a day) are you trying to help someone solve for? Focus there, figure that out and be the best at helping them solve it.

The Case for Piecemeal Technology Solutions

Next year we’ll likely see more “Allow tracking?” pop-up windows courtesy of the Digital Markets Act and some huge alliances will continue to get formed between service organizations and tech providers, like Omnicom investing into the Retail Media Networks space or GroupM positioning itself as Google’s cookie-less change pioneer. And Google may even get around to releasing those oft-talked of cookie-less changes in Chrome…

But the MarTech space won’t be getting any more transparent.

What does that mean for scaling Org’s building out their MarTech stack and what do you need to know about “Walled Gardens” in order to grow?

In this context, a “Walled Garden” is a platform (e.g. Amazon) that controls a particular data dimension – such as your Amazon account – allowing the technology behind it to track consumers across the web, on and off Amazon’s “owned” properties.

An example would be:

As a consumer, you’re logged into your Amazon account on your browser.
That allows Amazon to track all your purchases on Amazon.com, building your buyer “profile.”
That profile enables Amazon to provide personalized product recommendations in your price range and interest categories.
In addition, Amazon advertising products – such as Amazon DSP – can serve you ads outside of Amazon – for example, wherever you consume your news – still using that data from your Amazon profile.

The 4th bullet makes Walled Gardens and therefore Amazon DSP extremely attractive to marketers to use, even if they’re not promoting any products on Amazon.com. Amazon DSP gives them the unique ability to target users based on their transaction history – a high-quality predictor of future spending.

Amazon isn’t sharing that information with other platforms. Instead they’re locking it in their ecosystem and creating the so-called “Walled Garden,” where marketers have to use Amazon-supplied products to use Amazon-collected data.

The same logic applies to other large platforms:

Google has access to your Search, Email, and Maps history – which they make available only on Google Cloud and Marketing platforms.
Meta has access to your Facebook and Instagram behavior – which they make available only on Meta Ads.

Track, Visualize, Analyze and Target

Using this disproportionate data power, these big players have formed entire ecosystems – usually resembling tools - to Track (Google Analytics), Visualize (Looker), Analyze (Google Cloud), and Target (Google Marketing Platform) prospective donors – aiming to lock Org’s into using only their tools for all of their marketing needs.

Moreover, they disincentivize the use of other platforms by not sharing any of their data outside of the closed ecosystem. So, if your Org wanted to reach its prospective donors on both Google and Meta, it would be unable to track them in one place, resulting in more-than-optimal frequency and wasted marketing spend.

Walled Gardens have numerous advantages:

They allow for proper donor-level marketing across their owned properties.
They enable organizations to track and predict donor behavior using unique, high-quality data.
They provide closed-loop solutions that easily integrate, such as Google Ads native integration with Google Analytics.

But these advantages come at a cost:

Closed-loop platforms are more expensive. The average CPC on Bing.com is 70% lower than on Google Ads.
They obscure the data, not providing direct insights, forcing Org’s to trust their modeling. There’s no documentation on how Facebook is calculating Modeled Conversions.
They’re hard to implement in parts like Salesforce, where many use cases are only available when an entire stack is implemented. And a whole stack can easily cost over $1M per year in tech fees.

Philosophically, I’m against Walled Gardens.

Practically they’re a necessary evil. Most Org’s would benefit from a closed ecosystem that Google Marketing Platform or Amazon Advertising can provide. It simplifies the execution of what SPN talks about a lot – complete, centralized Donor Lifecycle marketing resulting in significant growth of online fundraising programs. And the most common of Walled Gardens – Google Ads and Meta Ads – are essentially a marketing utility. Everybody must use it.

But there’s a caveat – implementation and adoption matters.

Very few Org’s that I’ve worked with truly leverage the value that platforms can provide. An implementation of Salesforce really only for email marketing use cases is not driving any more weight than the same-level implementation of Hubspot, but the latter would be 3x cheaper. The same applies to the predictive donor lifetime modeling on AWS vs. open-source DataRobot or report visualization in Looker vs. Tableau.

People can be a little prone to fall in love with tech too easily, or overstate the importance of an implementation for their own resume-building purposes, counting on it to solve all problems.

Yet even the most effective and proper implementation of personalized donor journeys in the Salesforce Ad Studio won’t help if your Org only has three creative assets created a couple of years ago and approval of new assets takes a month of legal review.

The bottleneck for personalization will not be the tech but the internal process.

While I love the value Walled Gardens can bring – my advice to most Org’s trying to not only save money but also drive the most value is to think in terms of a piecemeal solution comprised of individual tools.

By explicitly choosing to implement solutions only for one use case at a time – such as creative optimization for current one-time donors to convert them to monthly, or my favorite example of running a personalized email program (which should comprise fewer emails than what you are sending now) – you’ll force your Org to change processes currently in place.

It will lead to faster creative approval, a more thought-out email program, or further optimized targeting in your retargeting campaigns. Focusing on one issue at hand, not having the distraction of multiple use cases that the walled garden can solve all at once, makes it easier for the Org to squeeze all the juice from that selected use case.

Finally, such a piecemeal solution would cost much less in tech fees. Where possible we must minimize overhead costs and every technology line item in the budget must be justified by positive ROI – which is easier done with platforms without an inflated price tag and excellent processes around utilizing them.

Your process will always beat tech – and a fully adopted individual platform will always beat the returns a more expensive yet not correctly adopted walled garden provides.

Now onto the fun stuff!