Season 3, Episode 5
“A good ask has passion; it has impact, and it has urgency...
I mean, if we don't have three of those things, we're not making a really good appeal.”
Matt talks to Julie Lacouture, fundraising strategist and founder of Good Ways, Inc. a consulting firm that helps nonprofits raise money, awareness and supporting digital tools. (She also co-hosts the podcast, “How We Run: Tips and Tales of Nonprofit Success” with Trent Stamp, but since they’re a competitor, we won’t mention that again.)
The pair discuss topics ranging from, “what makes a good ask?” to “how and when to approach your donors.”
Matt:
All right, Julie, we didn't do one thing, which is my fault. We didn't talk about social media. And I think people are really, really curious about how to use social media to fundraise. And I still think that fundraising major donors, this is, is you know, in-person, one-on-one kind of thing, but online, how do you raise money from Facebook?
Julie:
Okay. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, there is a phenomenon that happens where I always think of an iceberg, cause you're comparing what you see from another organization. So you see them on Facebook going viral, right. But you have no idea. What's under the surface of the water that got them there.
And I will tell you this, there are very few organizations that are raising money, like big money exclusively on Facebook. What you're usually seeing is a peer to peer campaign where all the people who are excited about the nonprofit are posting on Facebook. That's your best use of social media by far for most organizations is to enable the people that love you to use their own social media.
It's very hard to have a strategy where you're raising money on social media or you're, you know, going viral on purpose. So that's the question I think. I'm sick of answering, right? Like it's, it's one of those things where it's like, don't, don't ask me, don't ask me that, like, you need a complete strategy and it involves content and it involves email and involves a little bit of social, but, but don't, don't think that you're going to be able to use that hammer, for every nail,
It's a really hard thing to master.
Matt:
I think that's the same thing by the way, with GoFund me, people think, oh, if I just, if I just set up a go fund me, that's not the way it works.
Well, no, it's the same thing with having a donation page. It's not like it would have worked for your donation page.
Julie:
If that was the case. It's not an, if you build it, they will come the situation. You know, you have to work really, really hard to get people to come into your donation page. And then even the people that come to your donation pages, not even, gosh, it's not even, it's not even a good percentage that make it through.
People are really surprised at how much work it takes. When I was at donors, choose, we used to do an event every year called the blogger challenge where bloggers would compete against each other to raise the most money for public school teachers. And when I would tell people about the work we would do behind the scenes to make that event, I mean, it raised millions of dollars.
What they didn't realize was like how much time I spent on the phone, how much time I spent talking to bloggers and setting up their pages for them and making it happen and how much work behind the scenes may of that event go and how much technology required from our it team and how much power it required from the marketing team.
But there's a tremendous amount of offline work to make online things successful.