If you're looking to maximize your fundraising efforts, DonorBox's online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals with ease. Discover the world of simplified, seamless fundraising at DonorBox.org. DonorBox, helping you help others. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Podcast, I'm your host Megan Speer. Join today by Sean Litman, who's the founder of Givsuite, so we're going to talk in general all things digital fundraising and marketing, but specifically Google Grants, which I know is a big piece for so many nonprofits, and Sean has some definite wisdom on how to do them well. So I'm excited to dig into that. Sean, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Megan. It's really a pleasure to be on your show, and as I always say, when I get on a show, it's fun to be on the other side of the microphone for a change. Yeah, so you have your own podcast as well. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, totally. I'm a show called Profiting with Nonprofits, and we originally, the show started off as a weekly Facebook Live, and then I was like, "You know what, let's turn this into a podcast," and I did. And it's been going for the past two, almost two and a half years, I get a ton of listeners to it because I sit down with all sorts of different people on the show, like people in the nonprofit marketing space and nonprofit space in general, and we just have good conversations to learn about what they do and how their expertise can help anybody in the space. And we put it up on YouTube, and you can find it on our YouTube channel, The Nonprofit Academy. You can also find it on all major podcasting platforms, it's called Profiting with Nonprofits. So when it comes to Google Grants, there are an infinite amount of people at this point, it feels like, that are trying to get, like, put out information about how to do it and how we can do it for you, and some of it's super conflicting. You read one blog post that tells you to do it this way, and then the next one's like, "No, no, no, this is how we do it." So let's start with what's the kind of the, if a nonprofit does not have their Google grant set up yet, is that worth going after, and what's the best that they would take? Everybody's starting to talk about Google Grants, like it's the newest greatest thing in the marketing space. It's not. It's not. It's been around forever, a good a while. It's been around for so long, that there was a point where Google was giving you more than $10,000 a month, and you could have gotten grandfather into that plan, and then they switched it. But yeah, so there's a lot of conflicting information, and people aren't putting out outdated information. But in terms of your question, yeah, of course it's worth it, because it's not only the grant, you're part of Google for Nonprofits, and if you're not familiar with Google for Nonprofits, it's an awesome tool, because not only you get the grant, but you get Google Workspace for your entire organization, so you get free branded emails. So instead of paying Google for your branded emails, you get them for free, and you can have as many as you want, then you also get YouTube for Nonprofits. YouTube creators do the YouTube for Nonprofits is something new that they've actually been developing the product, and there's YouTube fundraising, which is a really cool product too. I can talk about that later. And then you get more Google Drive storage, so you get a terabyte of storage on your drive for your users, and it's really easy, because it's not like a grant where you have to write an LOR, and you have to write all these different things, or whatever. You just have to go on to Google's website, and I can give you the link, Google ads, like I think it's slash Nonprofits or something. And you felt the information, originally TechSoup was the one who was fulfilling this, but TechSoup doesn't do it anymore. Google has a system where all you have to do is file your information, upload your documentation, and then within 14 days you're approved. If your organization is legitimate, you have a website that works and functions, and you have your Nonprofit status somewhere displayed on your website, you'll get approved. It's very simple, and it's totally worth going after. Excellent. And so, are there restrictions that people should know about? Are there things that you can not use the grant for in terms of directing traffic? Yeah, so I mean, unlike paid ads, writing paid search ads, you can do whatever you want. But again, the rule that winning at search ads is be the answer to the problem someone's searching for, and if no one's searching for you, which no one is honest, let's be honest, nobody's on the internet looking for you, winning at search ads, be the answer to the problem that people are searching for, and then you win. Preach, yes. Yeah, because people don't realize that you're working with search ads, so how do you win at search ads? Someone is searching for someone who's looking for something specific on the internet. They're not looking specifically for your organization to give money to. So run is your question about any restrictions, it's not really a restriction, but it's really hard to create a search campaign around giving you money, because no one's looking for you. No one goes for who can I give my money to? No, because every Nigerian prince on the planet will come up, but you know, that's not going to happen. But one of the things that we've done with Google Grants is that we saw over the years how agencies tend to look at it as like a separate thing, they don't really pay attention to it, they don't really put much focus, much stock into it. And when you're dealing with search campaigns specifically, you have to be a little bit creative, a little bit out of the box in order to be able to get people to convert. So what we've done with that is we actually created a whole method about being the answer to the problem, creating an offer that can't be beat, driving them to the page to the offer, getting them onto an email sequence, then pushing them to become donors. Because one of the restrictions is you can't do direct sale. So like, who's going to directly purchase from you if they're not looking for what you're doing? It's not like you're using Google Shopping ads, because there's nothing to buy. But when you create these workarounds, when you create these campaigns, they're focused around key search terms that people are looking at. I like to call it like quasi SEO, because that's how SEO is, is it your building pages, you're building like based on key search terms. So when you're doing that with Google search ads and you're creating these funnels, people are going to come and they have more higher intent because they were searching for you. You give them an offer that's connected to what they were looking for, but it doesn't stop there. You have to keep following up with them. So this is where the email component comes in. And that's how you get them to become donors. Okay, so let's talk about that email for a moment. Because I think there is some, again, we'll talk about different schools of thought, how people can attack email. When you have folks that are coming into your funnel directly from that Google ad, is there best practice or best thoughts around what does that email series look like? How many are in it, when do we go in for the hard ask versus like some interesting information? What's your theory? Oh, perfect, perfect. So our theory and our methodology is you, we get you on. It's a 10 part sequence. People like Y10, because, and I'll explain to you by 10, is that the first half of the email sequence is all about continuing the conversation. They just signed up for an ebook. They just signed up for something. They don't know you from beans. They don't know you from, from, from Adam. So you want to, first of all, you want to thank them because if you don't think anybody, then, then you've lost at the nonprofit game. So you want to thank them for signing up and then you want to keep up the conversation. So I like to take all the social proof that the organizations give us. This whole, this is a very intensive process is we get all this content from you and all this testimonials, all these stories, and we turn it into emails because the first half of that sequence is all about social proof, showing you what we're up to, connecting with you, nurturing you to, to kind of warm you up. Because once you feel connected to the organization, it's going to be easier for you to open up your wallet. So that first five part email sequences, thank you, showing you what we're up to, continue the conversation, giving you a story, a testimonial, a testament to what we're doing. Show some pictures in there. And the call to actions are simple. Follow us on social media. Check out our website, you know, would you volunteer with us? Everything is very light, very easy because you're not trying to scare people away. I've seen people always go for the hard ask, like, why? You know, once again, I'm not going to give you money just because he asked for it. Right. And I'm not going to give you money because he said, donate now. I hate that call to action. So and then the second half is still that continued conversation, but it's pushing more specific programs, specific things, and then asking, would you like to partner with us, become a partner, become, join our, you know, volunteer with us? And then the last couple emails is more of a direct ask. You've been, you know, you've seen what we're doing. You've seen how we do things. We need you to help us, but it doesn't stop there because after they go through that 10 part sequence, there's more. We keep up the conversation. And one of the things we actually discovered that works really well is called the Meet the Heroes because every single organization has people working for them from the CEO to the janitor. And there's a specific reason why they're working there. So we've taken that for all the different organizations we work with and created another email sequence to highlight the different people in the organization to show them who you're dealing with, who you are and what you're all about. And what we found with those is those tended to yield higher donations, higher open rates, higher click rates. And on average, the average donation was about 150 bucks. Interesting. So when you do those series, is that just one person per email or we're introducing all of them? It's one person per email. And we've also just taken those and chunked it into social content to put on the organizations can use for social. Because when you're opening up the organization, you're showing the transparency people want to give. And we found that this one works really, really well. And it's just all about continuing the conversation. The Google Grants are always top of funnel. If you look at Google Grants as your end all be all marketing strategy, then you're going to lose. It's just not going to happen. But it's top of funnel and you just have to keep up the conversation. I really like this whole strategy that you've just laid out for everybody. I think phenomenal, super excited about that. And I think some really practical takeaways for a lot of folks. So thank you for doing that. With in Google Grant, and I admittedly am asking because I don't handle hours, someone else does that for me. So I don't pay much attention to that. I assume that there's some sort of key metrics that I'm supposed to be paying attention to or trackability to understand what's working and what's not. What are your thoughts on that? So it's really all relative, my biggest pet peeve on all these agencies that do this is that they charge you money for clicks and traffic. And I don't give a darn about clicks and traffic because it's not unless you're building audiences, which most of these people aren't building audiences because they don't know how. The metrics that you're looking for, it's all relative to the campaigns. It's all how you set up your conversion tracking. For example, with us, we put tag manager on the landing pages and we set up analytics to be able to check their tendencies and check the conversions. And we track a conversion as someone who's gone through the funnel, downloaded and got into the thank you page. And so we're able to track those conversions. And then we also see it because a lot of our users do use GIVE suite. So we have all the data, all the opt-ins go into GIVE suite and we're set up by tags to see who's been tagged for what so that we can check to make sure that this campaign was a success. And then it's put on an automation. So there's multiple redundancies, but it's all relative on how you set up and track your conversions and what you consider a conversion. And it's the same thing with donations, the same thing with any type of conversion tracking. It's all relative to you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the call out that clicks are not the metric. No, God, it drives me insane. I could honestly rant about this. It drives me insane that these agencies will charge people money to, and they're like, "We spent $10,000 your money this month. Look, you got 180 site visitors." I don't care. They didn't do anything. What did you do for me? Do I get any new emails? Do I get any leads? Because that's the whole thing with Google. They pitch it as, "Get more lead, get more traffic, get more volunteers, do this." They're actually really bad at selling their own program. Like they're absolutely got awful at selling their own program, and then they have the Google reps who are even worse. So they push the traffic and the volumes, but you have to have a good funnel around. If you don't have a good funnel, you don't have a good offer, you don't have a strong follow-up, and you don't know your audience, the whole thing's useless anyways. Elevate your fundraising strategy effortlessly with DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your operations, amplifies donations, and delivers a user-friendly experience for your supporters. And captivating donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, seamlessly monitor donations, and automate receipt generation. Joining is a breeze with no setup or monthly fees. From customizable donation forms and four times faster, ultra-swift checkout, to seamless in-person giving with DonorBox Live kiosk, DonorBox makes giving simple and fast for your donors. Visit DonorBox.org and unlock your full fundraising potential today. One of the things we've talked about a couple of different times on the podcast so far this season with other folks is the importance of segmentation when it comes to donors and these types of things. So obviously, you can't segment data that you don't have, first of all. So this is assuming that you're tracking all of the data. Don't assume. Yes. What? I was going to say something like you said there's a rule on it. So once the folks come from a Google grant, they come through the series, they come through the Meet the Hero series, do you recommend like tagging them in a certain way within your database to track where they are in terms of like ongoing marketing? Or once they come, if they haven't converted after they meet the heroes. Well, we keep up, I'll tell you, we actually, it's more ongoing emails than that. It's not just like that sequence. It's like, and then once you get past that, it's just another touch up email. Like, hey, this will be up to kind of thing, but yeah, definitely segmenting your audience to see where they're coming from is huge because then you're able to go ahead and see part of what we've done in Givsuite and when our users use it is that you're able to create different, everything's based on tags. So when someone goes through the sequences and if they've made a donation through that, then they're automatically put into the donation management says, everything's synced. Everyone thinks seamless and synced in one place. So you're going through the donation management system, which also creates an opportunity, whether you're recurring giver or a single giver or depending on what you're doing with their major gifts. So you have that opportunity in your pipeline already, so you can go back and reference that to see what that person's been doing. And so when it comes to audience segmentation for other campaigns, you can see which campaigns they had been on and then create email campaigns based on tags, email campaigns based on last actions and other things like that in order to be able to do what you want with them. Love that. I want to circle back to something that you had said previously though, and I think it was specifically around that Meet the Heroes series about chunking out that content onto social media. Yeah. I think so often we run into this kind of idea where like email lives in a silo and social media lives in a silo. But I do think that there's a tendency to double our workload, some of that content creation. So how much, if you were giving somebody an overall strategy, how much of the content that you're creating for one can be used on the other, should you have totally separate strategies for each? So let's all break it down for you like this. We're doing a podcast right now, right? Why do I love podcasting? Because you get four forms of content just by doing a podcast. You get audio, visual, social, and written. You're like written. Wow. So one of the things I do with podcasts is I take the audio recording, we transcribe and we turn into emails, we turn into blog articles. So right off the bat, we're spending 35 minutes right now doing four pieces of content. And they all go on different social platforms and they all go do different things. You can take an email sequence and just reword a few things, shorten the condensed, the condensed the content to make it fit for Instagram, then make length in the content to drop, to make it work for Facebook. And then you don't, you know, it's harder to do with an email, but you do kind of have a script for a video if you want to do a video. So really, it's a matter of seeing what getting the main points out of that content and seeing how it fits in other social platforms, because each social platform is its own living, breathing thing. That's why I actually don't touch social media for people because I feel like it has to come from within the organization. And so each social platform has its own power to it, has its own like verticals to it. So Instagram is attracting a different type. You're not going to get donations from Instagram because Instagram is visual. People are looking, people are scrolling, people are doing whatever. You might not get donations from Facebook, but Facebook is much better for that because it's an older demographic of people and you know how to talk to them in that way. TikTok as well, you have to understand how to go about your audiences and hit them where they are in order to be able to convert them. But if you're doing so much work to do it, then it's just a waste. So take one thing that you have, chunk it out, repackage it, and put it up. Yeah, absolutely, I love that. And so I do want to talk for a quick second here about Give Sweet's ability to help you do a lot of those things. Oh, yeah. So it's my understanding, at least from talking to you before, Give Sweet came out of the idea that like there wasn't a platform that you could find that was doing all the things. And so you went ahead and made one. Basically, basically, we found that there was a lot of different holes in the nonprofit space, especially as you know, for the small and medium sized organizations, they tend to get left in the dust with the tech stack is that, you know, things are out unattainable because of price, overhead, workload, all sorts of different things. And so when we had worked, you know, the first thing we always asked our clients is, okay, so what are you using for email marketing automation? And you know, they sell us at their MailChimp constant contact, I said, what are you using for donor management? They sell us this, that, and the other. So we have to get in there anyways and get into their systems in order to configure things while running on our campaigns. And all these systems were either old, archaic, very hard to use, very complicated, frustrating, and didn't do everything. And I'm saying like, why are you paying so much money for crap? Like just honestly, like it's straight up. And so we had, we had come up with this idea for GivSuite because the price point is there, it's affordable for smaller organizations. You get everything that you need in there, including a social media schedule, you get a full blown social media scheduler with where you can schedule all your content up there. So why do you have to pay $30 a month for HootSuite? It's the same capabilities. You get your email marketing tools in there with no list caps. So there goes MailChimp and constant contact and all these other things where you're paying for tiered pricing, which you can't afford anyways. And then you have all your crowdfunding tools in there. So instead of paying platform fees for crowdfunding and then paying processing, you have that all there, along with the donor management. We have a bajillion other features built in there. And we have, we actually do a strategic partnership with DonorSearch for anybody who's familiar with DonorSearch. It's a platform to help you raise more funds by doing research on your donors. And by integrating with us, smaller organizations can have the power of DonorSearch without having to pay their high annual fee. So we're trying to be the champion of the smaller organizations and really elevate your guys so you can elevate your communities and accelerate your monthly giving. And it's all under one roof one tab. So that way, if you have somebody, because a lot of these organizations, people come and go. So to retrain somebody on like Salesforce or DonorPerfect or something like, you're going to spend more time training them, whereas you just plug and play pop in. Here it is. Everything's there. And you move on. You go out changing the world. I love that. I think that sounds like a great resource for a lot of our folks. So thank you for sharing that. I love that. And is that a platform that somebody could help manage Google grants through or is that a place? Yep. Nope. Nope. You can absolutely upload, attach your Google ad account and your Facebook ad account and manage all your ads and everything from here. And because it's all synced to your Google, your Google workspace, you can connect your Google workspace. Once you sync your Google workspace, your calendars are there. Your ad accounts are there. Everything that's relevant to Google is all there. Nice. That's great. Yeah. Let's go back to the Google grant for a second, though. Okay. I think at this point, we've proven that it's a good deal. Everybody, I think you did an excellent job selling it for them. So good job you. But when somebody is first dipping their toe into getting that set up, are there pitfalls to avoid? Are there like given how many of these that you have helped successfully run for people? Are there best practices that we want to make sure we set up correctly from the start? Or like, hey, make sure you don't do this kind of tips and tricks that you would recommend for folks? Well, again, everything's relative and it's all depending on what your organization's doing. It's really about finding the campaigns that are going to convert the best for you. So for example, you know, we tend to deal with a lot of Jewish organizations where when you're dealing with something niche, a niche like that, you have to really be out of the box creative to be able to run search campaigns. So we've done that and we've outranked some of the largest Jewish organizations when it comes to getting our ads up there and getting signups and donations. So before you plan a campaign, you have to understand who your audience is, the type of campaigns that you're going to be running in order to really make sure that it works. I love that. I think that's good advice, no matter what campaign you're running, whether Google adds or any other to understand who you're actually trying to talk to you. Yeah. And people mess that one up all the time because they think that they're the greatest thing since sliced bread. So everyone's going to come to them and everyone's going to gravitate towards them. But if you don't understand who you're talking to, you don't understand how to talk to them. It's the same thing with email. Like it's the same thing with any marketing. Understanding your audience is paramount to actually being successful. If you're just going to spray and pray, then you're wasting your time, my time, I mean, I'm still getting paid, but you're wasting your time. I think one of the things, and circling back to something you said back at the beginning, because people are not googling for ways to spend their money, they're not going for ways to give it away. But we have to, and we had somebody earlier this season that was talking about this similar concept in providing value and making sure that you are offering something that provides value. So when we talk about, like, I want you to come to this page to download an ebook so that you can have this information or this particular resource, I think sometimes that's hard for nonprofits to think about if they're super cause-based and not necessarily like a content organization. So do you have tips that you give to your clients there about like what a valuable resource could be and what that would look like? Well, I mean, again, if you're cause-based, you can still create content because you're going out there and championing for a cause, there's still what to create around, meaning for trying to think, I do have an example of this, you can, I mean, I have to think it's a noodle scratcher there, but you know, again, when you're, you still have content, you still have stuff that people want to see, you still have stuff that people are interested in. So you have to pick something that's relevant to you, it's not, it's not like exact, I mean, when you're dealing with cause-based organizations and marketing, you still have to pick relevant things that are ideal, okay, I'll give you an example. We have an organization that we're working with right now that's been around longer than I've been alive. And they are a organization that they're the pioneer of cancer research here in Israel. They have worked, they work with sick kids and their families to really transform the way that these kids really live their lives. Actually a lot of them beat the cancer because of it. And so they're cause-based organization, they're fighting for a cause, they're going out there and doing all these different programs and things like that. So one of the things that they do is a, you can get your haircut and you can donate your hair to, as they make wigs for people, they make what would generally be a $5,000 wig, they'll give it to you for free and they do it on spot in their day center. So one of the campaigns we're running on search is to get people to want to be interested in donating there because they take donations from all over the world and you can get a certificate the whole thing. So we have a campaign running like that and it's effective because people are searching for ways they can donate their hair, they can give back, they can do all these different type of things and people are opting in and they're sending their hair. It's thinking outside of the box whereas most marketers and most marketing agencies are very linear. Marketers are linear humans. I'm sure you know this because you're in the marketing space. Marketers are very linear. If the gurus aren't saying it, then I'm, if Gary Vaynerchuk isn't saying it, then I'm not doing it or something silly like that. So when you go outside of the box, you end up doing much better because you're able to create campaigns that actually will convert. Yeah. That's great. I appreciate that because I think sometimes it is hard for the folks in the trenches to like, we want them to give to us. We want them to volunteer with us. We want all these things. Well, you got to stop focusing on you and focus on, you know, it's like any business. It's like, what do your customers want? Don't tell me what you want. I don't care about that. You know, like I have a friend of mine who's a caterer who we're trying to make a party and he's telling me, I don't want the menu that I want. I'm like, yes, I do. I want Chinese food and I want fried chicken and chicken fingers and I want the, yes, I do. I'm paying you money. Yeah. Don't tell me what I want, man. You know, yeah, it's the same thing. It's the same thing in this world and that's where these organizations always fall short is that they don't spend the time to do the market research, to do the audience research, to understand who they're trying to connect with. And once you understand who you're trying to connect with, it's easier to have the conversation. Wow. Well, Sean, this has been a wealth of information and some really practical tactical kind of tips for our audience. So I really appreciate all of your wisdom. If somebody wanted to follow up with you or find out more about Give Sweet and What You Guys Are Doing or Find the Podcast, how do they find you? So you can hit me up on LinkedIn. I'll give you that info and I will send you a link to our landing page for Give Sweet, where our site's still under construction. So we have a funnel up there that we actually built in Give Sweet and you can, you can book a demo with me and I'm happy to show it to you. The podcast is on all major podcasting platforms. I'll definitely give you a link to that as well. And it seems to be listed on nonprofit hug. And so you got me sold. So that's where you can find me. Well, good. Thank you so much. Again, my guest has been Sean Letman, who's the founder of Give Sweet. Thank you so much. Sean. We really appreciate all of your wisdom today. Thanks for joining me. My pleasure. This has been another episode of the nonprofit hug podcast. I'm your host Megan Speer and we'll see you next time. [Music] [Music]
