“The campaign I loved that flopped…”

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi everybody, welcome back to the Nonprofit Diaries. Here we share the stories that do not make the newsletter. I'm your host, Kimberly Bottom, and guys, we have a repeat guest, and I asked her back because I just love this woman's whole personality and narrative, and she has so many good stories to tell. So if you didn't see our first episode, first of all, you missed out with her. But we have another continuation of uh Maria Rio's experiences, lived experiences. So, just as a recap, she is the founder and CEO of Further Together. It's a fundraising firm that helps bold justice-driven nonprofits and executive directors grow and diversify their fundraising revenue. And she's just a fundraiser at heart. She's done the work and she understands the gaps and the opportunities for us to level up as an industry. And today we're going to talk about something that didn't go as planned, but that we learned from it. So, Maria, welcome back. Thank you for coming back to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

So excited to be here. Thanks again for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to talk about this because when we were chatting about ideas, you were like, I had this idea for a fundraiser, and it was such a good idea. And you told me the idea, and I was like, that's a great idea, but it didn't go as planned. So we'll start there with your with uh setting the stage for your diary entry. Tell me about you were working at a nonprofit as a fundraiser. Tell me about the idea that you had.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Okay, so I'm working at a nonprofit as a fundraiser, and I had noticed that donors were giving around certain dates. So of course, end of year, but also Remembrance Day, Canada Day, right? These were very important dates in the donor calendar. So I had campaigns already ready to go. And I thought maybe Valentine's Day will speak to these donors as well. So this is at a time where I was working in a human rights organization. So I could understand why uh Remembrance Day and Canada Day worked really well. But I wasn't sure if Valentine's Day would because it didn't have the same kind of tie to that nationalism, patriotism that the charter would invoke, right? So I'm like, I will put together all of our cases that are all about queer love. So times where we sued the government to make sure that they were on the right side of history when it came to queer relationships, queer marriage, all that stuff. I put all these uh stories together. I write my appeals, I send out an email campaign on the theme of love is love. Like, we're so excited that you've been along for the journey, keep supporting, you know, these kind of cases, right? So I send out an email appeal campaign, and then I also sent out handwritten Valentines to all of our major donors.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Oh my gosh, that's so sweet.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

I know. So sweet. So like I went out, got the Valentine's Days cards, like wrote it, mailed it, like buying.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

I can just see like how much you enjoyed actually doing that.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah, because it's like a way to show gratitude, right? So it was like a gratitude piece as well as a solicitation piece all coming together, right? It flopped. It completely flopped. So usually I say probably we would raise like $20,000 each time we did a small email campaign like that. I think we probably raised like two. So it was just such a disappointment.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

That, but okay, so now you're like, okay, we definitely didn't raise the funds. How did you sort of like audit what happened?

SPEAKER_01 3:32

I think at the time, like it was really hard for me to understand why it didn't work. Like I I could see that it didn't work, and now I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna do that again next year. The end, right? Yeah. Um, so that was helpful. But I was thinking about it today in preparation for the podcast episode, and I was thinking it was a misalignment in values because the values that were causing people to give was like patriotism, uh patriotism, nationalism, like maintaining Canadian values alive and well. And I was pitching a little bit too niche for that. It was queer love specifically, so it wasn't like queer love is a Canadian value, for example, right? Like we're a welcoming, inclusive place. It it was like this deserves to be protected, and please continue to protect it. So I think the tie could have been better to that, like nationalism, to the charter, to that kind of stuff, versus me as a queer person, like wrote it in a different way that they would have received it.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

100% understand that. And you probably had some people on the receiving end of that campaign that felt so seen and so appreciative. Obviously, that you know, the $2,000 came from somewhere, people did resonate with it, but to your point, you know, when you report to your board and your leadership on a grand scale and they go, well, why was it less? It's it's yes, okay, maybe it didn't have the broader appeal. So do you feel like as a fundraiser, those types of appeals are not worth doing just because they don't bring in rent? Like what what what it how did that change the way you looked at doing very specific appeals like that?

SPEAKER_01 5:10

So I think that my campaign planning must have had a gap.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Because I must have not known exactly who the audience was, right? So that's a problem that a lot of nonprofits have. Like we don't collect enough data, right? And we don't have enough kind of like funnels and journeys to track all of this stuff. And at the time, like I was still learning what a funnel was and like how to actually track, like, is this a service user that's opening my email or a donor, right? So I've like grown my skills exponentially since then. But at the time, I don't think I had the like right information to understand who the audience was to write directly to that audience, basically. I think I had made assumptions about like, well, we do this work and they have supported us in the past, so they must care about this work. But because we did so many different things, any one of those things could be an entryway into the organization. So that's why it resonated enough to get $2,000, but not to get 20. It wasn't one of those like main strings to pull to bring people into the organization. So I think I would definitely still do a you know a queer campaign. I've done it hundreds of times more successfully than that one. Um, but it's just the audience is exactly who you need to be thinking about. So I've done it for like a queer film festival, for a queer theater, right? Uh, it just makes more sense to really niche down there versus like for this organization. If I had known more about the audience, they could have tailored it a little bit better to them.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Yeah, that makes sense. And and honestly, even too, if you have like segments of your supporter base that would resonate more with this campaign versus, like you said, the more overarching patriotism, it's still probably worth doing. Maybe you don't dump all the budget and the time into, you know, making it as big as those national campaigns, but there is something so powerful, and like the reason we're in this work to begin with, about making individual communities feel seen and appreciated. And we don't want to forget that for the sake of funding the operation, you know?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Yeah, definitely. I just think that I learned a lot as well. So a lot of organizations were afraid to test something in case it does fail. Yeah. Because we don't have time and we don't have money. So failure is actually costing us in a way that we can't replace that time or money, right? But I think it gives you information on what not to do as well, which is something that a lot of small nonprofits are always like, we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. Yeah, you need to try things, but you also need to realize when something doesn't work and not do it again. Yes. So I think that that was kind of the lesson for me. Like you tried it, it didn't work. And some things you iterate year over year, but this one, it just didn't hit for me the way that I wanted it to, even for a test.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Right. And that makes sense. One of my favorite quotes is there's no failing, right? You either win or you learn. And that's really what it is. To your point, you might not have run that exact campaign again, but you learn something about your audience. And if you're gonna fail, fail fast, right? You have to take those risks, or otherwise you're not doing enough exploration to make your nonprofit evolve and scale with the people that you are serving. So it's a scary thing to like try something new, but I love that it didn't hinder you moving forward, right? Like it didn't work out at this organization, but it's not like you shied away from doing that type of campaign at other places. You just said, okay, I think I know a little bit more now about audience targeting and how I'm gonna draft the messaging, and that's all you can do is just be better the next time around.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Definitely, and also I think it really speaks to the need to like pre-warm your audience on something, right? So maybe the previous person had been talking about you know equality, but through the lens of racism exclusively or disability justice or something like that, and the audience hadn't been like pre-warm to understand, like, oh, we also do this, right? And if they don't know, it seems a little bit out of the blue to be like, oh, we did this uh two years ago, and we're continuing to do it in the future, so continue to support us. And you know what? I actually thought about it because it was gonna be a test. I knew that this was not tested because what I did was like it was email campaigns, so it was like let's say like six emails or something like that, plus the Valentine's Day cards themselves, so like a box of you know 40 cost what $10, right? So in total, most of it was my actual time, like collecting the stories and then writing them down into appeals, but everything else was already paid for uh because we already had MailChimp, we already had a website, we already had subscribed, right? So I tested in a way that wasn't uh too difficult, and I think that a lot of organizations could replicate something like that quite easily because it was very cheap to test, like other than my time, of course.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Yes, of course. But see, I love that reframe. It wasn't a failure. You went in knowing it was a test and you got results, therefore it was a wild success, right? Like that's awesome. I love this. Perception is reality, but truly, it was. If you went in knowing, like it you didn't go in and dump your entire annual budget into it, you just said, and and I love Maria personally that you said this is important to me as a human. Like I would appreciate getting a Valentine, or this is something that you really poured your heart into. I can literally like picture you in my mind right now, like sitting in a room and it's quiet and everybody's left and you're writing love notes. And that just warms my little heart to think that this is this is why we do fundraising because we want to touch people. And like it's never a bad idea to try, even if the revenue that comes in isn't isn't what we expected it to be. Like I for me, this was a win all around.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Oh, I love that. Thank you. I just like really understand how innovation really depends on you know, iterative and trying things and failing at things and getting back up. And it's something that I've become very comfortable with because, like, for example, at the same organization, I had to build a new website and I had never done that before. So the first day that I tried, I actually deleted our website for a good hour.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

You deleted the whole website, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

So that sucked.

unknown 11:29

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah, but you know, we got it back up. Okay, and by we I mean I, right? So like I was able to try it again, and we got it back up. And then, like, okay, so that didn't work. Let's try this other thing, right? Let's try different software, let's not turn off all the plugins at once, let's do one at a time so it gets a break. So you learn, right? But you can only learn by making mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yeah, exactly. And to that point, not that anybody wants to delete their website, but like, you know, doing website revamps, especially with like the younger kids coming into the the giving funnel that do everything online and do everything, you know, via websites. Just keeping the website like it is because you don't know how to do it isn't an option. Like, you do have to try things that are new and hard to you in order to help your nonprofit evolve. So I'm I'm glad that you're brave, but I can only imagine. Like, I can feel in my stomach right now what you found when that website disappeared.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

My God, sheer panic. I'm like, no. I'm like, I'm definitely gonna get fired.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

It came back. You got it back. It's totally fine. That's a moment you'll never regret. Although I you probably still wake up with a cold sweat in the middle of the night every once in a while, remembering what that felt like.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

But, you know, redoing the website got got the right eyes on our work at the right time during COVID, right? So it was just such a helpful thing to do. But you know, small nonprofits, we never want to spend money, we want to do it ourselves and to do things yourself, to innovate, like you always had to try. And as you were saying, like with the digital fundraising landscape, it's rapidly changing.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

So while fundraising on TikTok would have been like a great idea maybe two years ago, maybe it's not today. Maybe you should be focusing on how to get listed on AI chat. So if a donor types in, where should I donate to? your pops up. And you have to try and you have to fail to get that right.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

You do 100%. Yeah. Digital in particular is evolving at the speed of light. And again, you and I don't say that to strike fear into the hearts of fundraisers. That's not the point of that, right? It is the point to be like, hey, listen to your gut. When something tells you that we need to change the way we're doing things in order to evolve, just do it. Imperfect action is the goal here, right? Just progress is what we're aiming for. Well, thank you for coming back on the podcast to share even more knowledge drops. I just, I love your energy. I love your unapologetic movement through life, right? Like, you know you're not gonna like nail it the first time, every time, and you do it anyway. And that's such a flex. Like, I feel like we need more people with, again, just the audacity. That's that's what I'm calling it. I know that's that's kind of a weird word, but like just do it like you know what you're doing. If it doesn't work out, pivot. It's fine. We're all we're all in this together.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

And we're all experts at pivoting and problem solving. Like you with fundraiser, you have to be such an expert in adaptability. So don't worry. You'll try it. It won't go the same way that you always wanted to, but that's okay. You'll be totally fine. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

And when in doubt, go follow Maria on LinkedIn and she'll just make you feel better about the world in general. So that's my advice as we leave here today. Um, so thank you again, Maria, for coming back on the podcast. I would love to have you back, so keep bringing those stories. And for those people listening out there, this is your reminder to hydrate and practice self care and your reminder to come share your story on the podcast. I would love to speak with you. There is a link in the description that you can fill out a form and we'll connect and we'll make it happen. Maria, thanks again for being here, and everyone, we will see you next time.

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