I hope you had a relaxing weekend. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
In this week’s SPN:
Build trust with data
Learnings from Google’s Pixel “Pawtraits” campaign
Creating a safe space to mess around
Jobs & Opps
Let’s dig in!
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You can autodetect a donor’s location and display suggested donations in their local currency. Then wow them by generating receipts in their local currency 🇦🇪 not your Org’s 🇺🇸.
Donor. Experience. Matters.
Game-changer? It was for me.
Building Trust
A few stats I saw this week before we get started:
84% of marketers are under pressure to prove ROI in order to justify their marketing spend or budget increases for campaigns and initiatives. The same survey also found that 61% of marketing leaders do not use ROI when making strategy decisions because they aren’t confident in their own data.
80% of CEOs don’t trust or are unimpressed with their CMOs. In comparison, just 10% of the same CEOs feel that way about their CFOs and CIOs.
I can’t help but feel these are connected.
At its core, the main goal of marketing is to help drive revenue - plain and simple. Marketing isn’t just about making your brand look and feel good. Whatever your title is in the marketing org, your responsibility is to raise funds.
And if your focus is to make the brand feel relevant and sparkle in the spotlight then you should be able to explain how and why that will impact fundraising.
Over the last 18 months I’ve had an inside look at over 20 nonprofit Org’s. I’ve seen board decks, 5-year plan strategy slides, monthly reports, you name it.
The biggest problem I see in all of it? The lack of clarity that Marketing teams present with. Buzzwords, acronyms, massive amounts of data on a slide. Everything but - showing how marketing is impacting fundraising revenue in a simple and clear way.
The problem isn’t that your CEO “doesn’t get marketing.” The problem is they care about how marketing is impacting revenue and you’re making that impossible to understand or even worse hiding from it.
So, how do we bridge this gap? How do we build trust with the CEO again?
Understand your key marketing metrics and show how you’re pacing against them month over month.
Understand your Org’s fundraising goals and show how your marketing plans will impact those goals (with numbers not fluff). They have to connect. This goes for all parts of marketing too - don’t just cherry pick.
No surprises. You should know first if a month seems off because average donation amounts are down or web traffic is taking a dip. Be the first one to communicate that to the finance team and CEO so they know what’s coming and may be able to help adjust.
Help them understand what is happening and why - give context to the numbers they’re seeing on a spreadsheet.
And as a result of doing these things I’d wager that what you’ll find is a CEO who’s able to better understand what you’re trying to achieve and have confidence you’re trying to do it responsibly. The conversation will switch from why are we spending this to questions like:
What audiences are performing well enough that we can funnel more money into them?
How can we help get the team to go faster? What resources do we need in order to do so.
Jobs & Opps
The Nature Conservancy: Director, MarComms Northeast US
National Trust for Historic Preservation: Senior Director, Digital Marketing
National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA): Director, Communications
Center for American Progress: VP/SVP Digital Advocacy
Project Healthy Minds: VP, Brand Partnerships
Pixel Pawtraits
Did you see Google’s Pixel 8 Pro campaign at the end of last year? They created this fab campaign that addressed America’s rescue shelter crisis while showing off the capabilities of its smartphone’s AI-powered camera.
Google’s insight came courtesy of The Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science who looked at 468 photos of young and adult black Labrador mixed breed dogs. They found that those with a high-quality adoption profile photo were adopted within 14 days, compared to 43 days for those with a poor photo.
Based on this insight, Google created Pixel Pawtraits. They donated photography kits that included its new smartphone to animal rescue shelters, so they could use its camera to take more appealing pictures of their pups.
Google then built their campaign around pictures taken by the participating animal shelters and lit up their social media channels with it. Check out this 1 minute reel:
Key takeaways 🛠️
How are you positioning your Org’s campaign? Unlike Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign series, the Pixel Pawtraits campaign is not just about beautiful or impressive images for beauty’s sake. There’s a real-world cause behind this campaign: the Google Pixel 8 Pro camera is so good it can be the difference between a dog being adopted or not.
What’s your insight? The campaign feels like an excellent product demo based on a compelling, emotionally engaging insight: letting real people experiment with the Pixel 8 Pro (rather than creating a slick, professional demo) proves that it’s easy to use and achieves results in real-world settings. The proof is in the difference in photos – the blurry, pixelated, dark, badly framed images are replaced with bright, color-corrected portraits.
Distill but don’t dilute your message. The simplicity of the campaign is key. Complex, AI-enabled camera features and technical specs are communicated in clear, friendly terms – even the least tech-savvy person can see from this campaign that the Pixel 8 Pro makes it easier to capture higher-quality images.
The battle for attention is only going to increase as the year rolls on and fundraising markets deal with an onslaught of media impressions from Election fervor. Finding new ways to appeal to supporters and drive donation consideration is critical. This checks that box for me.
Audacious Experimentation
You need a safe space to mess around if you’re going to orchestrate growth that is both repeatable and scalable.
The idea I’d like to leave you with is this: How can you try systematically to institutionalize Experimentation and create space to “mess around more”?
The point isn’t to play it safe and get it right the first time. The beauty of the system lies in millions of people trying new things, most of which will fail outright. Even Steve Jobs launched the ROKR E1 phone with Motorola before the iPhone.
Sometimes total busts precede and chart the way for total home runs. An example could well be the new r1 AI pocket device, dropped by Rabbit in January. It’s the first device of its kind, and it’s by messing around that we may find the next big device.
Same story with Humane’s recent ai pin phone.
Both Rabbit and Humane are betting on the future of devices, and new operating systems.
3 things can happen:
their devices are a home run and go mainstream (least likely scenario)
their experiments pave the way for them to build something else more successful (more likely)
thanks to Rabbit and Humane messing around, they chart the way for some other innovation by another company in the future (most likely)
Either way, there’s a win in there. How’s this applicable to your Org?
It’s why we should push the amount of time we spend playing freely in Experimentation. Looking outside of our sector always feeds my sense of wonder. A/B tests can be part of our Experimentation, but the idea is to be much bolder in what you consider a test here.
You might think by experimenting too boldly that bad ideas will slip into the net. There’s risk, of course. Yes. But there’s a more interesting question: “is this what happens if we’re too risk-averse and we snuff out the good - or game changing - ideas around donor experience or storytelling, for instance, before they even have a chance to flicker with possibility?”
What could you do more of to create a culture on your team that not only tolerates, but actively encourages bold, even audacious, experimentation?
Some loose ideas:
Google (X) and Amazon (Lab126) can afford full-loaded “Innovation Labs” with dedicated teams that operate with a mandate to push the boundaries of what’s possible. That’s a big thing to pull off and invest in, but you can take inspiration here by either 1) carving out time for yourself to think that way or 2) spin up a pod with some people at your Org to periodically meet with the freedom to idea-jam around the unconventional and even the outlandish.
Related, try and bring 20% time or some variation of it to your team, where even 1/2 a day a week you get to work on whatever you want. Combined with a little “crazy” pod, you might gain some momentum around discovering something completely new.
Create a “Fail Fast, Learn Faster” culture. Celebrate not just the wins but also the instructive failures. Teams have to share their “failed” experiments openly. It shows everyone that taking risks and failure is part of the growth process.
Create a “Portfolio Mindset” culture. Rather than viewing each project or idea as a make-or-break situation, encourage a portfolio approach. Similar to investing in the markets, not everything will pay off. But it’s the diversification of ideas and experiments that will increase the chances of hitting upon something big.
You ready to mess around?
That's all for today!
Don’t hesitate to email with any questions. Thank you to those that do.
And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.
And now onto the fun stuff!
Interesting Reads this Week
The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024
YouTube advertising revenue surpassed Network revenue in Q3 for the first time
AWS Wants To Be The Backbone Of Independent Ad Tech
LG Ads Study Finds Viewers Want To Buy Products via TV
CB Insights: Generative AI predictions for 2024
The Knowledge Economy Is Over: Welcome to the Allocation Economy
Have a great week!