Influencer Marketing for Nonprofits [Nonprofit Marketing with Ashwath Narayanan, Part 5]

Transcript

Fundraising Essentials for Nonprofits

Intro:

[0:00] When it comes to fundraising for your nonprofit, it should come as no surprise that awareness, trust, and relationships are mission critical to your success. But how does one go about scaling awareness, trust, and relationships? It sounds almost paradoxical.

Well, as the famous author Robert Cialdini says in his seminal book, Influence, people are strongly influenced by factors such as likability, perceived authority, a sense of belonging, and social proof, the validation from others.

If you think about it, this points pretty distinctly to influencer marketing, i.e. Leveraging the likability and authority of others with established followings to scale your message and validate your legitimacy. My next guest is Ashwath Narayanan. He’s the Gen Z savant behind Social Current, an NPO-specific influencer marketing platform.

[0:44] Influencer marketing seems easy enough on the surface, but if you’ve ever tried to orchestrate it, you’ll learn pretty quickly that scaling influencer marketing brings all kinds of headaches. Headaches like scaling the legal, scaling the contract, scaling the payments, accountability, attribution of results, so many other things.

Enter Social Current, the only nonprofit-focused influencer marketing platform, at least at the time of this recording. Ashwath and I are going to go through the good, the bad, and the ugly of influencer marketing, from choosing the right influencers in the first place, integrating them into events, cultivating longer-term relationships so you can work with them again and again, and nailing the execution of the influencer or marketing initiative.

So many other relevant details. It’s an awesome conversation and you’re definitely going to want to stay tuned until the very end. Do you want more nonprofit marketing content just like this? Then please click subscribe and we’ll pop right up in your feed. Do you want a discounted trial of Ashwa software?

[1:38] Well, there’s a coupon code in the description below. Do you like where this is headed? Please make a little donation of kindness to our channel by hitting the like button and now stay tuned for Ashwa Narayanan.

Do you want more nonprofit marketing content just like this, then please click subscribe and we’ll pop right up in your feed. Do you want to check out Ashwa’s software?

Well, there’s a link in the description below that’ll take you right to it. And if you like where this is headed, please make a little donation of kindness to our channel by hitting the like button. And now, Ashwath Narayanan.

Meet Ashwath Narayanan

Interview:

[2:19] And we’re back with another episode of the niche marketing podcast today my guest is Ashwath from social current Ashwath thanks for being on the show thanks for having me so excited to have you here we have of course known each other for a couple years now but have yet to meet in person so one of the great things about doing this is the opportunity to do just that, to meet my guests in person.

So, before we get into the heart of what we’ll be talking about today, which is influencer marketing specific to the nonprofit space, perhaps you could give the audience just a little background on yourself personally, and then we’ll talk a little bit about your company as well. For sure. I think I can try to do both in one sort of paragraph. Even better. So, hey, everyone. My name’s Ashwath. It’s good to be with you all. Hope you’re comfortable and sort of tuning in.

[3:05] I’m the co-founder at Social Current. A little background on me. So, I grew up in India. I was born in the U.S., grew up in India, then moved back to the U.S. for college about six-ish years ago to D.C., to GW.

When I was at GW, I was in a lot of sorts of social impact spaces, a lot of nonprofit spaces. And really developed a passion for impact and helping nonprofit organizations. And at the same time, I found myself sort of in these spaces doing the same thing again and again, which was helping these organizations figure out how to reach young people more effectively.

[3:37] And a lot of the time I was the only young person there. This is my sophomore year of college, by the way. And so, I was like, why are there no more young people in these spaces? This doesn’t make a ton of sense. Maybe I should do something about it. Founded Social Current with two other folks.

One I went to high school with, one I went to college with, and the whole goal was we’re going to start an agency, we’re going to hire more young people, and we’re going to do good work for these organizations, help them with the wheels and TikTok and all this sort of random stuff. So, we started there, and this organization called Community Change, they’re DC-based, they reached out and they were like, hey, we’re doing this campaign around the child tax credit. it.

We’re trying to figure out how to get it outside of the media, outside of paywalls, outside of DC and into our communities. How do we do that? And we were like, why don’t you hire a bunch of TikTok creators and Instagram creators that got the policy themselves and let them literally say, this is what I used it for. And we did that. The goal was to reach a hundred thousand people. We’d have four times as much and sent almost 10,000 people to a website with the resources. And we were like, Like, holy shit, this is awesome. We get to be on TikTok all the time.

The Birth of Social Current

[4:44] We get to pay people, and we get to sort of have an impact and we’re going to do just that. And so that’s what Social Current does now. We help nonprofits, impact orgs, purpose-sharing organizations work with creators through both an agency and a managed service and a platform.

So just trying to help people find influencers and leverage them to reach communities more effectively, whatever the goal might be. That’s fantastic. It’s a beautiful thing when you can make your life’s work not only something that.

[5:10] You’re passionate about something, but something that you’re motivated and influenced by that it doesn’t feel as much like work. And then also, you know, there’s the demand, there’s product market fit, you’re in a fantastic place, and clearly, you’re quite good at it. So, you reference Social Current as both a platform and a managed service.

[5:30] Managed service, in case you’re not sure, essentially is kind of a one-for-you are marketing agency style engagement. But the platform, tell us more about the platform. When we found a social current, not a lot of folks were doing influence marketing for nonprofits. Most of the clients that work with us do it for the first time and then continue. But as we were doing it again and again for organizations, we were doing the exact same thing. We were helping them find creators. We were helping them work with them more effectively. We were sending them contracts, payments, 1099s, understanding what they care about, putting all that in one database.

And so, you were like, there has to be technology out there for the nonprofit or impact space because why are we sending 2,000 contracts and 1099s a year? We tried looking for it and apparently there was none. There was technology for e-commerce, for enterprise, but there was nothing for advocacy orgs or nonprofits or impact orgs that found you creators that matched your mission.

And so, we decided we would build it. And so, over the last year, we’ve been building sort of a self-service platform where you sign up as an organization, you create a campaign, we match you with folks that match your values. You contract them, pay them all in the platform to then reach out to your community. And yeah, we’ve been beating it for the last couple of weeks. We’ve got about 10 organizations, 600 creators on it. I’ve been hoping to scale it up this year. No doubt that you will.

First Steps in Influencer Marketing

[6:50] All right, very good. So, let’s take a step back or just start from the top in terms of if you’re a nonprofit, let’s assume you’re a smaller, more scrappy nonprofit and resources are limited, but you’re convinced that influencer marketing is a good fit. What’s the first step or first couple steps you need to take to start to make that come to reality? For nonprofits that are sort of just starting to explore this, the first recommendation I always have is understand who your influencers are. And so suppose you’re a sort of local nonprofit and you’re in a city. Are there influencers that are in your city that create content around your city that you could then reach out to?

And so understanding who your influencers are is the first step so that then you can start reaching out, building relationships to work with them. But before doing all of that, you need to know who sort of your creators are and how you could hypothetically work with them.

In addition to that, you know, there’s also cause-based influencers. So, like you can figure out if there’s someone that talks about your cause that has a really strong tie to it and work with them too. So, who is the first thing you want to do when it comes to thinking about influencers even? And then the outreach.

[8:01] How do you identify them? Yeah. And I know you might have to mention your own platform here, and that’s perfectly fine because, frankly, that’s why you created it. Exactly. If there’s other tools that you’d like to reference, please do. But how do you find them? And then we might as well talk about how do you reach out to them? You can use our platform. You can use other platforms out there.

But I think a lot of finding influencers isn’t as complicated and accessible as people think. A lot of times as simple as going to these platforms, searching, using specific keywords, finding people within those keywords, emailing them to reach out. There’s obviously tips and optimizations like you want to use your mobile for TikTok and YouTube and you don’t want to use Instagram to search because the search is terrible. So, I would use your phone, just Google, just TikTok a few searches around like keywords that are around your cause, around your nonprofit.

[8:56] Find people who might be talking about it or find people who seem like they could talk about it, email them, ask them if they’d be willing to, or ask them if they’re interested in sort of working with you on a paid collaboration and then go from there. But it starts with like trying to figure out who and searching on these platforms and then reaching out. A couple of things that actually jump out at me there.

So, to start, I mean, as marketers, we want to be not just effective, we want to be efficient. So for TikTok, I believe you specifically highlighted to use mobile search. Are you essentially saying that there’s no more efficient way to identify influencers than to use a mobile phone and go through with keyword searches on TikTok? There’s no secret sauce beyond that?

[9:38] Yep, other than our platform. Okay, because the platform does make it more efficient. And we do that mobile searching for them before, and then we scale through building a network of influencers through sort of our own collaborations. And so every time we work in an organization on a campaign, those creators become available to other organizations.

So, there’s sort of a network effect. But for folks starting out, yeah, no better way to search other than just going on TikTok. Okay. That’s important to understand because, you know, the scroll on mobile, I mean, that can get old fast. Exactly. And then in terms of picking the right ones, obviously cause aligned. Got it, of course. But what about, are there tips, tricks, secrets perhaps to the most efficient way to recruit influencers that are going to have an impact, that are actually going to work?

I know that, for example, going big isn’t always the best means to an end. Although I suppose maybe in a nonprofit, they might be less likely to gouge you for money than maybe in other industries. But still, talk about getting the right influencers beyond cause alignment. For sure. So, I think you have to think about a few factors. The first one is you have to think about ft.

[10:53] Obviously, you want to make sure they’re cause aligned, but you also want to make sure their content is aligned with your organization, and they have an organic tie to it. For example, if you’re sort of like a food focused nonprofit.

[11:06] Like it might be making more sense to work with food creators or chefs. And so trying to find sort of what that fit is, is important. And then the content style, making sure that sort of your concept, your organization can fit into someone’s content style.

And then obviously you look at all the data on the platforms around like shares, comments, engagements, actually go through the comments, see if they’re like first, second, those kinds of comments, or if they’re actually comments that reflect the relationship a creator has with their audience. And then also look at them on other platforms.

A lot of times what people will think is like, if someone has a big presence on TikTok, that’s it. I’m good. Let’s work with them. But you want to see if they have not an equally big but some significant presence on Instagram and YouTube because that shows that they can move their audience across their own platforms and they’re more likely to move it across you, to you, to your organization.

And so, exploring how they’re sort of building relationships on other platforms is important. If they have a Patreon, a SubStack, if they can get someone to pay them $5 a month or $10 a month, that’s huge. Someone is paying them just for their content. They’re more likely to convert for you. And so all those sort of external things around like how someone has a strong community are super important to look at too. You dropped some really good nuggets in there. I want to go back to the Patreon sub stack thing.

[12:25] If I heard you correctly, are you going to bias outreach to certain influencers first and foremost if they have a sub stack and a Patreon that seems active? Yes and no. So, it depends on your goal. So, if your goal is sort of a more fundraising acquisition-oriented goal, you want to find creators with really strong communities because they have the strongest relationships.

[12:46] If your goal is persuasion and awareness, you want to find creators that have the most views. If your goal is really good content that you can then run ads on that are highly converting, it doesn’t really matter unless you can find someone with really good content. And so depending on the goal, you want to sort of tailor it to find the right types of creators. But there’s no sort of like this creator is perfect for everything. Like if your goal is to reach, you know, a million people, maybe the Patreon creator is really good at reaching 100,000 people. And so maybe they’re not the right ones.

But if your goal is 10,000 petition signatures, maybe you work with them. And so it really depends on what your goal is. But understanding that and then figuring out who to reach is really important because otherwise you’re sort of trying to fit a creator into the wrong box. And then it won’t work. You’ll end up paying a bunch of money. It won’t, you know, you’ll be unhappy. They’ll be unhappy. And its sort of a lose-lose.

Yeah. Take that last 90 seconds, replay it in slow motion three times because that was really good. One of the funny things about interviewing niche marketers for a living is they just say things that they take for granted. They do all day, every day that the audience is like, wait, wait, what? Like rewind, backspace.

Building Long-Term Relationships

[13:54] All right. Good stuff. That’s my way of saying good stuff, Ashwath. We build these partnerships; we build these relationships. Let’s assume that effort is successful, but it’s not about one and done if you’re doing it right. You really want to be able to cultivate a long-term partnership and relationship. Yep. So give me the inside baseball on how one can go about putting themselves in a position to have long-term partnerships with some of these influencers.

[14:20] So the way I sort of talk to a lot of nonprofits about this is that it isn’t really that different from how you’re cultivating relationships with donors, with volunteers, with the press, with celebrities, with all these other stakeholders that you have. You’re not going to these stakeholders, working with them once or getting that donation and then sort of disappearing, right?

You’re going to them, you’re getting that donation, but then you’re checking in with them, giving them updates. And so thinking about like how you can build sort of a ladder of engagement with creators where you do that first post and then maybe you check in with them every month or maybe you comment on their content or you share updates around what you’re doing or you share impact with them around like, hey, this year we did X, Y, Z and you were an important part of that or you invite them to events or maybe you have them be on your advisory board.

Like there’s so many other ways you can build relationships with creators that a lot of nonprofits are doing in every other arena of what they’re doing. But for some reason, they don’t think about that, doing that with creators. And so start thinking about like, Like, how are you engaging other people and how you could do the same with creators? Because you’re doing it and you know how to do it. You just need to do it with creators.

[15:26] Yeah. And, you know, I find that the first part of that, which it’s one of those things that seems so obvious, and frankly, it is so obvious, this comment on their stuff, hit the like button, make an effort to go back and forth. Obvious, right? And yet, I think when push comes to shove, a lot of organizations, they just go, yeah, yeah. I mean, am I really going to allocate resources to that?

Because everything has a time and a cost, right? And so, the answer is yes, you’re really going to allocate resources to that. Exactly. You’re going to really have somebody, whether it’s an intern or a paid employee or whatever it is, liking the content from these people as a way to make sure that you stay top of mind. It is essentially worth the investment and the way to extract additional value long-term, correct?

Exactly. And some nonprofits sort of also have folks that are focused on mid-sized donors and large donors and small donors. And so you could also loop this into like, you could assign sort of if this creator is a mid-sized creator, like maybe part of what the mid-sized donor engagement manager is doing is like commenting on these creators. And so, it doesn’t have to, you don’t have to comment on everything.

Thousand creators. It can be 10 and you cultivate relationships and hop on calls. And so you can loop it into existing processes you’re doing to ideally make it a little easier and save time and capacity as well.

Legal Considerations in Influencer Marketing

[16:45] All right, good stuff. And then something that comes up time and time again in our preliminary research around marketing and nonprofits is just the legal and potentially ethical considerations associated with it. So, could you touch on if and when that comes up for you and what best practices or recommendations you have in that regard? When we’re talking to new clients, potential clients, existing clients, they ask a lot about, okay, what do we do if tomorrow this creator is canceled, or they do something messed up?

And my sort of go-to answer is like, what would you do if an employee is canceled tomorrow, or you are canceled tomorrow? You know, there’s so many sorts of like other people in your organization that you’re vetting and you’re interviewing, and you want to do the same thing with creators.

But at the end of the day that you’re sort of hiring them to do something and you know you’re not tying your entire brand value to them and their brand value to you and so it’s important to make sure that you understand that and aren’t scared about working with influencers about that that being said you also contract them through sort of a contract structure that makes sure they indemnify you and don’t tie your actions to them and so there’s like sort of making sure you get the legal stuff out of the way but also making sure you understand that like not every single thing they do in their entire lives is going to be tied to you because that’s just not how social media works.

That’s not how news sort of content cycles works either. And you touch on the legal considerations here. And is it safe to assume that this is something your platform helps facilitate?

[18:13] Exactly. We’ve got template contracts. We can talk you through all the terms, but if you work through us, our platform will automate all of those.

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[19:24] Today you’re doing a great job being modest about the platform but i actually want to encourage you to talk about a few functionalities from in a very unintentional way and that is that you know again while influencer marketing in the non-profit space is something that I’m I only have a little bit of experience in I’ve been in marketing for several decades and have touched influencer uh pretty much since its inception.

And one of the biggest challenges with it is kind of the tedious and time-consuming nature of it. Because as you said yourself, it’s not hard to go on any of these platforms, do a search and identify people, but it’s the right people at scale, making sure they follow through what they say they’re going to do.

You just touched on scaling the indemnification aspect of it. So could you talk about anything I didn’t just mention or revisit things you mentioned that a platform, whether it’s yours or anyone’s, a good platform is going to help you make more efficient and do it scale.

You touched on most of the major things, but the financial parts of it are also a big challenge. How could I forget the financial part of it? Exactly. And a lot of nonprofits, a lot of times they’ll have slower financial processes and creators hate that. Creators don’t want to get paid net 90.

[20:39] Creators don’t want to get paid net 60. They do their work and then get paid 60 days later. And so a lot of, but it’s hard for nonprofits to process them because you have less capacity. And so, what a lot of what you want to look for in platforms, which we do is like making sure that you have, they have financial mechanisms to pay creators more effectively so that you can pay one invoice, they split it up to 10 creators, a hundred creators. You also want to make sure that they can pay creators in different formats. Like.

[21:07] Some creators want Zelle, some want Venmo, some want Cash App, some want, you know, ACH. And so all of those things that your finance department might not be able to do, a platform should be able to do. For example, we pay creators in whatever, they can choose how to get paid through sort of tech we use.

[21:24] And so it’s important to sort of think about like the financial parts of this, because even though you want the creator to believe in sort of all this stuff around your mission and do good, They also have to pay rent and they have to make sure that they can pay themselves for the work and feel comfortable at the end of the day wanting to work with you again. What about the accountability aspect of making sure that they deliver as promised?

That also is on our platform. For example, you don’t pay someone, the payment doesn’t get distributed until they’ve completed the deliverable. And so that very part of it makes it easier. But we also have contracts where you have to do it. If not, you have to back out and communicate that to the brand. And we also have time-bound things.

For example, if you notify a creator and want to work with them and they don’t respond to 48 to 72 hours, we know that they’re likely to not be interested. And so we’ll communicate that with you, but we’re also incentivizing the creator to communicate why they’re not interested so that you can then take that learning and use that to communicate with other creators to sort of move around it.

And so we’re building in a sort of a lot of incentives on the creator side and also a lot of research and knowledge for the organizations based on creator behavior too.
Good stuff. I find that one of the fundamental mistakes a lot of companies that are just dabbling in influencer marketing make is not using a platform.

Leveraging Influencers for Event Promotion

[22:40] Yeah. Let’s talk about…

[22:42] Influencers as a mechanism through which we can promote events. Events are a crucial effort in the nonprofit marketing space. So the ability to leverage influencers to boost those events is super important. So, if you could. The way I think about events is in two ways for creators and influencers. One is to use them to promote events. And then the second one is to use events to build relationships with influencers. With events, the fit is even more important than anything else you’re doing. Because again, a lot of events, if they’re in person, you want to make sure that the creator has the right audience and people in a specific location.

[23:20] And so you don’t want to work with a national creator with a million followers if you want a hundred people in your city. So, you want to work with a local influencer. You want to work with someone that has at least, you know, 10, 15, 20,000 people that are in that city so that you can then drive them and make the content relevant to them or in that industry.

And so, the fit becomes a lot more important than anything else when it comes to events. And then sort of on the second piece, a lot of organizations have events and creators are always looking for things to do and they always want access to things and experiences that they can then talk about and create content around.

And so, a lot of organizations, we recommend creating events and then having some sort of component where you can engage creators and invite them to be a part of your community and be a part of the event and learn more about your work, but also build something unique for them so that they can come. And then also, we talked about the relationship piece.

And so, this becomes one of the mechanisms to build a relationship with the creator. And then maybe they go back and talk about it. Or maybe the next time you have a rapid response, maybe that creator is like, oh, I remember this nonprofit that does cool work in space. I’m going to highlight them because everyone is talking about food insecurity right now or something like that. And so, you can use events to like, like you can work with creators to promote them, but you can also work with events to promote.

[24:39] Build relationships with creators. I love that. That’s brilliant. Can you think of a specific example just to take the use case you just outlined and kind of bring it home a little bit? We had a client; they celebrated like their 20-year founding story in New York about a couple of months ago. And so what they did was they reached out to us a week before the event, and they were like, hey, we have this event.

We’re doing a gala focused on young people in New York, we want to have some creators come. We can give them VIP access and a table and everything. And we send about 10 creators. Within a week, we were able to find 10 creators and just give them sort of this cool opportunity. And it was a young person’s gala. So, all the creators are young people in New York.

They cared about impact. And so, they went to this event. And then some of the people that did content after it have reached millions of people. But all that also resulted in this organization. They’re called Do Something, building a stronger relationship with these creators. And now these creators are thinking about, like, what is this organization doing?

What courses do they have for young people? Or how are they thinking about voting this year? And so, they’re now going to stay in touch with this organization. But they also had a tangible impact of this content about the gala reaching a lot of people.

[25:54] That’s a great example. I want to bring it back a little bit to this brass tacks of reaching out to the influencers or creators in the first place and getting

Strategies for Effective Outreach

[26:05] then to open the DM, to open the email, whatever it is. What are some tips, tricks, tactics at a real, again, tactical level to help increase open rate to get on their radar in the first place? For sure. If you have a budget, mention it. A lot of influencers get a lot of people telling them to do stuff without any pay. And if you do have the ability to pay the creators, mention it immediately.

For example, we only do pay creator work but tell them. And that is specified. This is a paid campaign. That way, they’re more likely to at least give it more consideration. Also, don’t DM email creators, especially ones with good audiences. Have a lot of community members and fans reaching out via DMs. And so, we found a lot of success just emailing people, messaging them on LinkedIn. Super ironic, by the way. Exactly.

[26:59] And so email them, LinkedIn them, maybe go for a more professional platform. If they have an agent, email the agent. Keep the email short. And like we do this with our team all the time, like bullet point the email. Like you want to see how you can grab someone’s attention fast. And assuming they’re getting 10, 15, 100 outreach messages every day, any given time, you want to capture attention.

And so, stay clearly like what you do, your timeline, what you’re looking for, what your goals are, and then sort of let the creator do what they want with that. And after that, you can hop on a call. But the goal with the first email is to not get them to do a video with you. It’s to just get them to engage with you and start a relationship. And so, what you can do to get that response is really important. Be short, concise, bullet point your email, and then make sure to say it’s paid if it’s paid.

Are you mentioning the paid part right in the subject line? We do that sometimes for some campaigns, and then for some we’ll do it first sentence. But typically, yeah. So you split testing. We split test it. And your platform allows for emails as well? So the way it works, our platforms all opt-in. So, you don’t have to email creators if you use our platform.

[28:14] Ah, gotcha. So you go into our platform, we match you with sort of custom creators we’ve curated for you. And then you pitch them, and it goes to them. They get SMS email. And then in the platform, they can go and accept it or they can negotiate with you. It comes back to you. You send them the brief. They film, go back and forth, go live. And so, our platform sort of, we’re doing all that email work in advance,

Ensuring Authenticity and Trust

[28:39] understanding what these creators care about and then matching them based on that. I don’t feel like our conversation would be complete without some discussion about authenticity and trust because certainly you can get, as a brand or an organization, you can get carried away with this and start to stray too far maybe from your core mission. Talk a little bit about, I mean, staying authentic.

A lot of how we think about working with creators is trying to think about like the communities you’re trying to reach and then find creators from those communities to work with them. And so, if you’re trying to reach young people, find a young creator. You know, if you’re trying to reach people in a specific state, try to find someone from that state that has a story or an authentic sort of voice around it. And that will negate a lot of issues you’ll have maybe with Facebook ads or Google ads were like you might not seem authentic, but here you’re working with a voice from the community and investing in that voice. And so, a lot of sorts of working with creators will give you and your organization authenticity.

[29:38] Make sure to sort of figure out what your red flags are. Like if you’re, you know, doing work around a serious topic, maybe don’t work with comedy creators, maybe work with, you know, creators that have a more sort of serious content tone and don’t take everything, you know, with the goal of making their audience laugh. And so like, think through like, who is the right fit for organization and work with them. And think really deeply about that, because that can have impact outside of just that creative collaboration and can impact your brand as an organization too. You touch on another adjacent area, which is, what are we going to do?

[30:12] So in other words, you make contact with the creator. They say, yes, I’d be interested in mentioning your cause or building awareness for your cause. But then the question is, okay, well, what are we going to do? So is that usually the type of thing where the creator leads the charge there? Or instead, should the organization come to the table with specific ideas or just talk through how that usually pans out?

Here, there’s like two levels of expertise. One is the messaging and the research and the cause and the work that the organization’s doing, and then the distribution. And both are equally important. And it’s important both come to the table with their sides. And so I always recommend organizations come with like, okay, here’s our goal. Here’s all the facts around the campaign.

[30:57] And then we expect you, we want you to be as creative as possible. You have our permission to be as creative as possible. and then verbally or in a written format specifying that to make sure that the creator feels like they have the power to do what they know how to do best.

And the creator can then take it and then come up with a concept and see how they fit into the content, run that by the organization. Organization can make sure it actually fits and doesn’t include something inappropriate for them and then the creator can film and then go live. So, it’s like a collaborative process, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

[31:30] I would recommend organizations not be too afraid of coming to the table with specifics around what they want to do, but then not too many specifics about how they want to do it and leave that how to the creator. Really interesting. Have you seen campaigns fall apart in this area where the organization behind it was too narrow or specific or regimented in how they wanted to do things?

All the time, without naming too many names. I think a lot of times, especially for some organizations that have to run all the content through legal, for example, like that’s where things will fall apart. Where like legal is line editing every script and every line and the creator is like, this is not in my voice. And that’s not authentic anymore. And that’s not authentic.

And that’s where sort of we’ll have a conversation with both sides. And part of that is asking the creator if they would maybe be open to just creating this asset set for the organization to use in paid but not on their own channel and so that’s one way the other way is like to tell the organization sure we’ll do this it will not perform well are you okay with that um and then if they’re okay with it creator will go live won’t perform well we all knew that was going to happen and organization knows and so like but there’s other ways to sort of like if they if the organization’s logic is this will this has performed better in paid in the past maybe then the creator can do a paid asset and instead of like posting on their own organic channels, they’d be more comfortable sort of filming an ad and then the organization using it or something like that. Aha.

[32:58] I’m glad I touched on that. Clearly, this is a bit of an infection point in the whole process. And I would imagine this starts to build the case for having an experienced team actually manage some of the communication. So, this is where you’re done for you or managed service comes in. Exactly. And we’ll be sort of the mediator there to make sure that we’re managing expectations on the brand side and the creator side and sort of bringing those two sides together. Gotcha. So hopefully you use Ashwath and Social Current to mediate these discussions.

But even if you don’t, one of the takeaways is be prepared for this type of back and forth and working through this specific case. Because creators want to have artistic integrity and artistic control of what they put out. And this leads right back to the whole authenticity thing. If you’re engineering and micromanaging their message, you’re starting to run the authenticity component into the ground. And maybe at that point, you just turn it into a a paid advertisement instead.

Exactly. And sort of, you know, if your goal is to produce a very specific piece of content, you can say that to the creator in advance, or you can also hire an actor and a videographer and just film that separately too. And so, it’s like, what is your goal for working with creators and making sure

Crafting Effective Calls to Action

[34:06] you meet that goal by letting them do what they do best. All right. And so, one last thing with the time we have left, speaking of meeting goals and objectives, calls to action. I mean, because at the end of the day, we want people to take an action, and we have some type of measurable or KPI with which the campaign will be.

[34:24] Measured for success. So, any tips, tricks, tactics for making sure that, well, effective CTAs and effective measurable results? The right creator that has that community-based audience we talked about a little earlier can basically do any CTA because they have such a strong audience. And so thinking through like what your goals are. So, if your goal is a conversion event, working with those types of creators, but then also layering in a paid ad strategy. Because when you think about the experience of watching a creator and then taking action.

[34:56] You have to watch a creator’s video. Then you have to click on the link to go to their profile. You have to click on the link in their bio. And you have to hit follow link because Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube will say, are you okay going to this link? Then you go to the link. So the actions to sort of go from like a creator’s content to the end page are pretty fragmented.

And so, boosting a creator’s content or whitelisting a creator’s content and then having a direct button with a call to action can often be a way to sort of ensure more call-to-action petitions or fundraising or whatever your goal is. And so, I would recommend like if you have a sort of more conversion-oriented call to action, work with creators to leverage their organic reach and then also work with creators to boost it to then leverage paid reach.

That way you’re sort of getting the best of both worlds and getting high conversions in the paid, but also getting their followers and audiences as well. So that’s what I would recommend when it comes to sort of like a more action-oriented thing. Clearly, you’re a wealth of information on the subject, Ashwath. That was fantastic.

[35:58] If people want to get in touch with you or learn more about your platform or your managed service, what’s the best way to make that happen? Go to socialcurrent.co, social, and then current with a A, not an E, and reach out. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me.