Nonprofit Branding and Websites [Nonprofit Marketing with Alex Morse, Part 3]

Introduction to Alex Morse

John Bertino:

[0:00] Our next guest is Alex Morse, an experienced entrepreneur, tech founder, and agency owner who some may know as the co-founder of Hopsie, a well-known fundraising tool built by non-profit leaders. In addition to Hopsie, Alex is the owner of the non-profit-focused boutique marketing agency, Side Sea. I caught up with Alex in his hometown of Portland, Maine. What an incredible city that is. Man, the food there is just incredible. Oh my God. Anyway, Alex is a lifer in the non-profit space. He knows all aspects of it, from the branding and web to the digital marketing, fundraising, and most definitely the tech side of things through all his experience with Hopsie and developing hundreds of websites for companies.

And for what it’s worth, Alex is just a seasoned entrepreneur in general. This guy has successfully launched many e-commerce sites and just really knows his stuff. During this show, we’ll cover nonprofit brand development, the critical component of consistency and brand identity, including making unique and consistent messaging standards for internal and external communications like social media, PR. If you’re a nonprofit, you’re going to be doing a ton of that stuff. Peer-to-peer fundraising from a guy who knows all about it and who regularly equips his 501c3s with websites and the tools to maximize peer-to-peer fundraising success.

John Bertino:

[1:12] Speaking of websites, what makes a great nonprofit website? Alex is going to give away the goods from optimizing that get involved page to optimizing user journeys and donation pages. Last but not least, some tips for getting it all done on the budget, the last thing a nonprofit wants to do is squander donations on ineffective marketing, right?

Of course, that’s exactly why you must listen to this episode and all of the episodes in our entire nonprofit marketing series. We’ve got the goods and there’s a link in the show notes for the full playlist. Have a question for Alex? Drop it in the comments section and we’ll get you an answer. Like what you hear? Do us a favor and hit the like button. Make a little kindness donation to our small but mighty YouTube show. And now,

Music:

[1:54] Music

John Bertino:

[2:05] And we’re back with another episode of the Niche Marketing Podcast. As always, I’m your host, Jon Bertino, founder and CEO of The Agency Guide. If you’re unhappy with your agency, and most people are, please give us a look at theagencyguide.com. We represent about 300 different vetted marketing teams across the US and internationally as well, to whom we can matchmake to your specific scope of work, industry, budget, things like that. And we’ve been doing it for over 10

years now. But today, I’m delighted to be here sitting with a longtime agency colleague of mine, Alex Morse, founder and CEO of Side Sea in Portland, Maine. Alex, so glad to have you on the show.

Alex Morse:

[2:42] Thank you, John. Pretty excited to be here.

John Bertino:

[2:44] Awesome. So, you know, it’s funny, sometimes when I do these, I’m just meeting the agency or the market for the first time. Other times, we’ve had a few interactions. In this case, we’ve worked on quite a few projects at this point. I’ve known you for several years now, but it’s our first time meeting in person.

Yep. And really, it’s been some time since we’ve talked much about the history of your agency, so I’m excited to get right into that. But I guess before we get to the agency, give us just a little brief background on yourself and ultimately what led you to starting a marketing company. Wow.

Alex Morse:

[3:12] Well, it kind of dovetails into what you just said because it’s a pretty serpentine and organic story as far as how I got into this. I grew up all over the place. My dad was in the Air Force. So, I just actually finished my 27th move. Hard to answer the question of where you from are. Whoa.

John Bertino:

[3:33] Where were you born?

Alex Morse:

[3:35] I was born in New Hampshire in a hospital that no longer exists. It was knocked down about three years after I was born. But yeah, just jumped all over the place. I’d say my formative years were spent growing up in Texas and then North Carolina. But I went post-college to New York City. I started a career in the conference industry. So, we were doing big B2B events, primarily focused in strategic HR, leadership development, recruitment.

John Bertino:

[4:03] What was it your company or you’re working

Alex Morse:

[4:04] For someone no working for someone yeah it was actually a company i did data mining for in high school and then found out they had opened up a sales office and wanted to go to the city so that was that was basically the impetus there um, And I started doing that. I did really well in sales. I ended up growing on that team to the sales director and I built out a team of 46 reps. I ended up kind of hitting this wall. I didn’t understand it at the time.

Everything’s clear in hindsight, but I just didn’t see a lot of value in what we were doing. It was purely there to make money. It was, what have you done for me lately? A lot of cold calling. Every month you’re resetting everything. Just a lot of pressure. I was obviously, I was making great money, but I wasn’t really happy. So, I decided to quit because I’m kind of a leap of faith person.

Didn’t really know what I was going to do but ended up forming a consultancy where I was training outsourced salespeople for the conference industry in New York, in Costa Rica. So, I had operations down there and was flying back and forth every two weeks. Tough gig. Yeah, well, I realized that the same problems were there pretty quickly because on my 15th fight to Costa Rica, I was like, I don’t want to go to Costa Rica. So, I knew pretty quickly it was not going to work.

Alex Morse:

[5:30] So at that time, my current co-founder, Ben, he is a developer, kind of guy that can learn a language in a weekend, can basically code anything. And he had been approaching me over the sort of two years leading up to that with some ideas for startups and wanting a business guy because he doesn’t really like talking to people, doesn’t have the gift of gab, but I didn’t really like any of his ideas.

Ideas and he finally approached me with the idea to launch a non-profit so his sister had just married a gentleman from Ghana and they had identified a group of about 20 kids or so in the town that he grew up in that had been dropping out of school because of financial reasons so you had usually a single mom dad had either left or passed away and they couldn’t afford to pay tuition because even public school in Ghana costs money.

Alex Morse:

[6:32] So they were trying to start a nonprofit to fill that gap and just generate the funds to pay the tuition so the kids can go back to school. And they wanted to bring me on to run events and development, right? Fundraising. And I jumped on the opportunity. It was a nights and weekend thing in the beginning. And that was like my path to actually doing something impactful.

So, I really threw myself into it. I’m a big networker. So, a huge part of the early years of Incoso, which was the nonprofit, we’re spent just networking with people. And I ended up connecting with the founders of an organization called Watsi, which was the first VC-backed nonprofit that went through Y Combinator.

Alex Morse:

[7:21] So basically, they had been given a philanthropic VC funding round, which wasn’t expected to be paid back and they had been coding a platform for crowdfunding, medical procedures for people that couldn’t afford them all over the world and they were kind of following the charity water model of like we’re going to communicate impact through storytelling and direct to cause info marketing we’re not going to be the group that sends that 30 page annual newsletter that has here’s the percentage we spend on operations here’s the percentage we spent on programming.

We’re actually going to make people feel a value exchange. Like you’re giving towards this surgery. Now you’re seeing when the surgery is happening, what’s happening with the kid after.

John Bertino:

[8:04] Yeah, novel idea.

Alex Morse:

[8:05] Yep. And at the time it was getting big because Charity Water was gaining steam. This is 2012.

Launching a Non-Profit

Alex Morse:

[8:12] So we ended up deciding we were going to build an app to do that same model for student sponsorship. And we started getting really into it. And the idea was microfinance, so as little as five bucks towards a tuition payment, you could get six updates throughout the year on the kid that you were supporting.

Um awesome and we built it was obviously very alpha stage like yeah didn’t look very good but it worked and um roughly what year is this this is 2012 okay yep so, we launched it was I’ll literally never forget because we launched we sent out our emails for the like official launch of everything and within 15 minutes the Boston marathon bombing happened this was like spring 2013 when we launched.

John Bertino:

[9:02] So we were like,

Alex Morse:

[9:04] Shit, we’re not going to get funded. Nobody’s going to care about these kids. But that wasn’t the case, and it worked. So, we had all the kids funded in roughly two to three weeks.

So, this was the first group of 20. And then a bunch of nonprofits started reaching out that I’ve been networking with and asking like, how do we get a 501c3 and they saw it and they were like this is really cool like we want to we want to try it too so that was the first company that was launched in May of 2013 Hopsie um still in operation today that’s the fundraising application and we ended up hacking together a white labeled back end and launching an alpha with about 15 groups in New York um this is like stripe is still early you.

We ended up on our first client, all the donations went into our bank account, which is totally illegal. And then we sent them back to the nonprofit. So, we learned about Stripe Connect and how to figure that out.

Alex Morse:

[10:04] And then it started to go once we really took a stab at rebuilding it, thinking about feature set, then making it look good.

So that platform, we ran for about a year and a half. And then basically we’re running out of money because we’ll talk a lot about this, but smaller nonprofits, which was our focus.

Birth of Side Sea

Alex Morse:

[10:28] The technical know-how is a huge gap um so we were spending basically all of our time pro bono consulting and training and giving people ideas and the basics of how to market and right um use this and integrate it into a website yeah well it’s cloud-based so it’s hosted on its own pages but we can mimic the URL and make it feel like the site because it is a white label tool but yeah basically the subscribership stayed low we were not charging very much for it also and that in turn led to the birth of side sea income because we were pretty adamant that we didn’t want to raise money we were super mission focused on making the impact of our customers kind of our success metric, not our actual revenue, which in business terms is probably pretty idiotic, but it’s been a huge part of the culture from the beginning.

John Bertino:

[11:29] And not idiotic at all.

Alex Morse:

[11:30] Yeah. Our agency was a no-brainer because Eric and Ben, Eric who we brought on a little bit later as a founding partner, had built an agency in Tucson, Arizona prior to this and sold it. So, we ended up kind of modeling off that. I was doing the sales and the finance and all the business stuff, and they were doing the design and the development. That started to take off. So, we ended up scaling out the team.

Fast forward to today, we’re 26 people. We have copywriting, we have development, both front and back end. We’ve got a big design team, strategists, and we are basically a full-service agency that does everything but media production and photography in-house, solely focused in the nonprofit sector.

John Bertino:

[12:23] Yeah, excellent. Why Side Sea? Is it because of the location here in Portland?

Alex Morse:

[12:27] Or no i mean we were in New York when we started it so I guess New York is by the ocean but yeah no it’s not a great glorious story of naming okay you know back in those days we were pretty cognizant that six character URLs with dot com were going to be far and few between right so we had bought quite a few and you know Hopsie sounded like a tech startup so we chose Hopsie yeah we went through a bunch of ideas of like hands of philanthropy social impact entrepreneurs and sure trying to kind of backfill it but it never worked so we just stuck with Hopsie and then side sea it just sounded right because in the beginning it was our side sea agency ah so it’s like that’s the side sea that we’re focused on Hopsie right but we owned it so we used it yeah it’s.

John Bertino:

[13:18] Got a nice ring to it

Non-Profit Brand Development

Alex Morse:

[13:19] Yeah I like it everybody calls this seaside but well.

John Bertino:

[13:23] Speaking of naming, we wanted to bring you in not just because of your in-depth background in all things nonprofit, but we wanted to get some content specific as it relates to brand development and web considerations for nonprofits.

And so, on the brand side of things, I know it’s a broad question, but where do you start? So, if you’re talking to a nonprofit that wants to try to do it themselves, or you’re just trying to hold someone’s hand through the process of building a great brand, talk us through what that looks like and how to do it right. Yeah.

Alex Morse:

[13:58] Well, it’s very dependent. One thing you’ll learn working in nonprofit is it’s not a one-size-fts-all industry. If you think e-com or other big web-based companies, there are a lot of best practices that can be shared between. And there are some in nonprofit, but every program is super unique, and it’s constrained for different reasons, whether it’s size of team, operating budget, physical infrastructure, actual know-how, and the skills of the workers.

So, it’s very much an approach we take, at least, is… One reason you work with an agency is because we’re actually going to do the research and we’re going to understand the cause, who the actual target audience is, what different tertiary audiences might be opportunities. We’re going to do competitive research and we’re going to create something unique. That’s a critical piece.

Alex Morse:

[14:55] People are exposed to, I believe, roughly 160 brands a day now just with how much people are on social media and browsing the web. So, uniqueness is critical. And consistency is critical. If you’re not unique and you’re not consistent, then you’re invisible, right?

And that’s where an agency’s expertise can actually create something that will fulfill that. But as far as the brand, it really is dependent a lot on audience and a lot on founding team and board. You know, we’re trying to think of aesthetic preference for, you know, an icon or a mark, something that is actually going to make sense and is going to be something that excites both the audience and the team.

Alex Morse:

[15:40] You know, branding is, it’s a process and it’s something were. You really have to factor in the organization itself as well as the market that you’re going after. Because I think that’s a missed opportunity area for a lot of people is how much value there is in a team feeling united behind something as well as an audience being receptive to it.

John Bertino:

[16:05] Yeah. And a lot of what I’ve learned about branding originated through my colleague, Steven Picanza is a mutual connection of ours. I’ve often heard him talk in terms of when it comes to the messaging component of a strong brand, it’s not just to communicate externally to the world. It’s also to communicate internally.

So, everyone understands we’re all talking the same language internally, what we stand for, what we’re about, what we do and don’t say, these types of things, sometimes equally important. Let me actually take a quick step back there. I think I think the term branding in general, when you’re not in it every day like we are, throw some people for a loop. They might just think it’s a logo.

Alex Morse:

[16:47] Right.

Understanding Branding Elements

John Bertino:

[16:48] So for those that are maybe a little less traveled in the branding space, could you just quickly define what the core elements are, even down to when you ultimately deliver a brand standard, a brand book, what does that consist of and why? Yep.

Alex Morse:

[17:03] I mean, there’s a lot of variation. There’s sort of a spectrum as far as what can be delivered, but I would say the core elements would be your logo, your typography, and your color palette. On the identity side, it goes much deeper.

John Bertino:

[17:19] Right?

Alex Morse:

[17:20] Because I think of branding as visual and identity, which would encompass values, purpose, mission, vision, goals, program language, everything that you’re going to use to identify with the visual brand. Got it.

So, a typical brand guideline would have, variations of the logo we’re always going to have a horizontal and a vertical and an icon only it’s going to have the color palette along with some suggestions and rules around where things should be used typography sets and generally that’s going to be at least two because we think that you know segmenting out body from heading and sort of title copy can just add a bit more depth and elevate the feel of a brand.

And then usage examples and ways of actually executing it. And this is where with nonprofits in particular, depending on the capacity of the team, their know-how, how they market, what channels they’re actually approaching.

Alex Morse:

[18:32] On the smaller side, there tends to be a lot of what, if you were to go to a big business and deliver, seems extremely basic, but it can be unbelievably helpful in maintaining that consistency, especially around like media use, what types of imagery and the feelings behind the types of imagery that we want to use on certain channels or areas of the site.

Why does that help? It helps a lot because a lot of people don’t have experience with marketing and branding and left to their own devices, they will do things that will make them invisible.

John Bertino:

[19:07] Which waters down that consistency exactly and dilutes the brand and shoot yourself in the foot essentially exactly.

Alex Morse:

[19:16] It’s similar in web design which we’ll get to later but, We have such a range of what a back end of a website can look like depending on the skill level and know-how of the client where a client might actually want something pretty locked down that they can’t screw up versus clients that have designers and copywriters and want more flexibility to be able to create new pages in the future and really have that extensibility.

John Bertino:

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Social Media Strategy

John Bertino:

[20:45] To learn more, visit www.theagencyguide.com today. Before we get to that, and to some extent, I think we just touched on this, but social media, right? Broad subject. Could you explain the intersection of how a really strong brand helps power and fuel stronger organic social media?

Alex Morse:

[21:10] Yeah, well, I mean, I kind of have a unique take on social media because I perceive it as a channel. Like, it’s evolved a lot. You know, social media used to be a place where you could post and gain organic following and interest. It’s not really anymore. Like, unless you’re creating something completely new or spending a lot of money, it’s very hard to get a lot of value out of using social media as like a primary marketing channel.

I think for nonprofits in particular, because you have to be good at efficiency and kind of recycling because you spend a lot of time on program execution and day-to-day tasks and in many cases like manual data entry and work that takes a lot of time. So, content strategy and nonprofit should really be centered around the actual creation of the content and then using things like email and social media and any other channel you can think of to distribute it.

John Bertino:

[22:11] Yeah, distribution mechanism. Exactly.

Alex Morse:

[22:13] Yeah, and it’s also tough because, you know, spend on social, if you’re doing actual advertising, like a ROAS model is really hard to create in nonprofit. You’re not selling something. So, unless you have a grant funding it, or you have some benefactor who’s going to like to let you advertise at their dime, you’re not selling. It’s a lot harder to generate a return because donations especially are pretty challenging. Like if you think crowdfunding, email is the number one channel. 80% of gifts and crowdfunding campaigns come from email.

Social media is maybe like 15%. So, it’s a really tough place for nonprofits. But from the perspective of pushing out stories and impact and having beautiful imagery that It can grow your brand as far as how professional it feels and building trust. That’s where it’s valuable. So, if you see it as a channel and use something like Later or Buffer to automate it, your main goal is like, let’s write the stories and get the beautiful photography. And then we’ll push that out through all the channels that we can.

John Bertino:

[23:23] Yeah, you touched on trust there, which undoubtedly is super important in this niche, every niche really. But if you’re asking people to donate to a cause, they need to not only believe in the cause but believe in the legitimacy of the operation. You know, it’s funny with branding, it’s one of these things where you go, well, obviously a strong brand is going to help build trust. And yet I still find myself and you probably too having to explain to a lot of companies why it’s worth investing in.

Alex Morse:

[23:51] Yeah. Well, it’s huge. I mean, especially a nonprofit profit. Because it’s rampant. You know, there are a lot of examples that people are aware of where money hasn’t been handled well. And that kind of ripples out to the entire industry, even though most groups are doing really good work and putting all their money towards the cause. So, trust is huge.

And, you know, especially with new donors, if you think about, getting somebody into the fold and being able to nurture them and make them feel something, a connection to the cause, I think that’s where the work is because it takes more now. It used to have kept us alive, donate so you can get a tax-deductible receipt, and it shifted to actual value-driven giving where I’m a person that wants to have an impact on the future of the world or a certain area that needs a lot of help.

So, I’m kind of curating where I give based off of that. And it’s where the storytelling comes in. You have to really do the work to

Building Trust in Non-Profits

Alex Morse:

[24:58] create that value exchange. So, they receive the feelings that you as a nonprofit practitioner get being on the front lines that you assume everybody else feels, but none of them feel. You’ve got to give that feeling to your supporters. So, they feel like they’re actually doing the thing.

The Importance of Websites

John Bertino:

[25:16] Let’s shift gears a little bit to websites.

Alex Morse:

[25:19] Websites yeah what.

John Bertino:

[25:21] Makes a great website especially through the lens of a non-profit

Alex Morse:

[25:27] Gosh I’m gonna keep answering the questions the same way that’s okay because every cause is different um and we’re also a custom shop, so we approach each project from ground zero big learning listening phase establish where you’re trying to go over the next five years, do a bunch of work before we even start designing.

John Bertino:

[25:48] And the answer in marketing is always, it depends.

Alex Morse:

[25:50] Yeah. But critically, I mean, I think… Really working to simplify your website and its content so that the user journeys you design in actually get conversions is critical. I think in particular because nonprofits are board driven, and I know if your nonprofits out there hearing me right now, you’re going to relate to this, but somebody that works for the nonprofit versus a board member, they’re pretty beholden to what that group wants to see happen. And a lot of times, they want

everything that they’ve ever done to be on a website. And a huge part of our work is talking to both the practitioners and the board members and trying to at least move the needle closer to the idea of let’s see the website as a tool. Let’s really hone in on what we want people to do. And then let’s design for that.

John Bertino:

[26:48] Less is more?

Alex Morse:

[26:49] Less is more, definitely. Definitely. And with information architecture and structuring a site properly, if you do need to have a ton of content on a site, the key is where it’s organized. So, the further the user clicks, they’re rewarded with more depth of content. But at the top level, you want to keep it extremely simple and see your website as a filter to basically get a user to what they want to do as quickly as possible.

John Bertino:

[27:16] I’ve never quite heard it said like that. This is about our 30th interview. Yeah. I matchmake brands with agencies for a living.

Alex Morse:

[27:27] Yeah.

John Bertino:

[27:28] 300 agencies. And I’ve been in marketing for 20 years.

Alex Morse:

[27:31] Yeah.

John Bertino:

[27:32] And I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say, make it so the further they click, they’re rewarded with more depth of content. I mean, I’ve seen it that way.

Alex Morse:

[27:40] It’s the curious user. A lot of people need more convincing, so they’re willing to sit on the site and click to find it. A huge number of people, I would say the vast majority of people, are coming to the site to do something and they want to do it quickly. A conversion could be learning about your program. We see every user journey as a valid conversion, even though it’s different than buying a product on an e-commerce site. But maybe they want to read a story that their friend told them about. Maybe they want to research who the actual staff people are, the board members.

Maybe they want to check out last year’s financials and annual report because they’re vetting you know from that perspective maybe they want to sign up for a newsletter maybe they want to make a donation there’s a lot of possibilities but honing in on what those are what’s going to be valuable to people and making it as easy as possible to get to them increases the performance of a site is.

John Bertino:

[28:37] A tightrope that needs to be walked get it all in there but do it in such a way that feels really

seamless and easy and uncomplicated and uncrowded. Okay. So that’s key. What else? And I know for a nonprofit, like there’s definitely certain things that you need to incorporate that maybe you’re not thinking about with like an e-commerce store.

Alex Morse:

[28:58] Yeah. I mean, I think certainly on the technical side, big opportunities lie in understanding the stack and understanding the functional elements that are needed. Because a lot of times, and this is similar across industries, but I think it’s more pronounced in nonprofit, platforms that exist are generally built in a way to kind of one size fts all everybody.

Alex Morse:

[29:27] And nonprofits have very nuanced ways that they do things. So, in the best-case scenario, you’re going to find like a platform that’ll serve 80% of your use case, right? And a lot of that comes from how the Google algorithm works and, you know, sort of difficulty in a non-educated from a tech standpoint viewer researching software products for their own organization. So, a big part there is like, what are you actually trying to do?

What do you want the user to do? how do you actually do it on the back end and selecting good tools so that you can ideally save a lot of that manual work for the nonprofit when they’re actually operating the site after you’re done designing it. But I think just to go back to what you said, one thing that’s really popular in nonprofit sites now is designing kind of flexible pages that can house digital versions of annual reports.

Alex Morse:

[30:28] That way it becomes a tool that can be used year after year. You save on print.

John Bertino:

[30:34] Because transparency is really important. You have to have these things. Oh, yeah.

Alex Morse:

[30:38] Yeah. There’s always going to be space for a Form 990, which is their tax fling. Um you’re most of the most of the time going to have some form of a get involved page, which is primary for fundraising in ways that people can volunteer attend events that kind of thing um but then again there are a lot of groups that don’t fundraise from the general public that are found like funded by foundations or grants and um you know some advocacy campaigns pains are more focused on getting a signature to a petition than actually generating funds. So yeah, it’s a lot of learning upfront and then crafting for that.

John Bertino:

[31:21] Yeah. What about peer to peer? This was an element that, and this is part of the rewarding thing about what we’re doing here with the Niche Marketing Podcast is as we start to dive into a niche, we do a lot of research so we can prepare for these types of interviews and certain things start to bubble up as unique to that niche, but critically important. You mentioned advocacy, that would be one of those.

That was a new term for me, but now I’m very familiar with it. Peer-to-peer fundraising is another now, and intellectually I get it, but there’s, I gather, kind of an art and a science to making that work. Can you talk about that a little bit? You’d be our first guest we really go down on this with.

Alex Morse:

[32:02] Big time. Well, so it’s a lot of times lumped into the same as crowdfunding, right? Crowdfunding is completely different from peer-to-peer because in crowdfunding, you’re, as the nonprofit, still the marketer, right?

You’re actually going out and doing the soliciting and you’re managing the follow-ups and everything that happens within there. Peer-to-peer is where you have to put on your management hat because your job is now going to be leading other people who are going to be doing the marketing, right? So, they’re fundraising on your behalf.

John Bertino:

[32:35] It’s crowdsourcing the marketing in a way.

Alex Morse:

[32:39] Kind of, yeah. And it’s great because a lot of times it’s a very effective means for tapping into folks that you don’t have direct access to. It’s always going to be family members and networks of people that support you because a lot of times you’re going to find those that sign up for the crowdfunding projects are from people that you already have a relationship with. Unless you’re doing like marathons and you’re one of the nonprofits that can get that person into the New York City Marathon.

Alex Morse:

[33:16] But really, it’s about equipping those folks with what they need to be successful. A lot of what we do in groups that are doing peer-to-peer is creating toolkits for them. with marketing schedules, content, and assets from the nonprofit. Schedules? Yep. Yeah, because usually a successful peer-to-peer campaign will be based off a period of time. I would say the average is like a 30-day push.

So, it’s giving the individual that’s going to become a marketer who potentially is somebody who’s never marketed in their life every single thing that they need to do that and be successful. And some people that know how to market will look at your toolkit and do it their own way. Yep. But most people have no clue, and they will say, oh, it says I’m supposed to send out the email today. Gotcha. And so, you’ll create a schedule, you’ll equip them with templates for usually at least three or four emails, because we like to think of these as drip campaigns or series.

John Bertino:

[34:23] Yeah, sure.

Alex Morse:

[34:25] You’ll equip them with media assets. you know we love to include a ton of photography a ton of copy that you can then share with folks about the organization why you support them why it’s important to support this cause, social media templates and just general lines of communication back into the non-profit person who’s going to be managing it all especially if you get into team-based fundraising where you basically have a structure where nonprofit coordinator works with team leaders who then work with their teams.

That happens a lot with golf tournaments and sort of sporting type events. But yeah, it’s a fabulous way to gain new individuals that then you can nurture into being actual supporters of your group. I think things to keep in mind are that most of those people, when they give, are giving to their nephew or their grandson,

Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Insights

Alex Morse:

[35:29] they’re not giving to you as the non-profit. So having a good strategy for educating them on you separately after the event and nurturing them into being a supporter in their own right is critical.

Alex Morse:

[35:44] That’s a big piece. And then also just being prepared at the upfront, because crowdfunding might be a 30-day thing, or peer-to-peer might be a 30-day campaign, and you might say, oh, we can do that. But you’re talking probably at least a month to two months in the prep, and then a month after in getting those nurturing-type communications out and thanking everybody.

And so, it really pays to think of it the same way you would plan your annual gala or some big event. If you’re prepared, it’s successful. If you just throw a link up on the site, hey, come create a fundraiser on our behalf, it’s not going to do anything.

John Bertino:

[36:27] Can you think of some specific executions of a peer-to-peer fundraising strategy that went over particularly well, perhaps through the lens of past clients you’ve worked with or something like that? Putting you on the spot. I didn’t prepare you for the question.

Alex Morse:

[36:44] No, I mean, one is kind of cool because it’s different than what I just said. But we have a client that has really leveraged influencer marketing for peer-to-peer where they can find, and I won’t get into details about who they are, but in this case, they are a faith-based organization.

And there’s a lot of individuals that are pastors and faith-based content creators on social media that have very large followings. And partnering with them to hold 24-hour live peer-to-peer fundraisers for things that they want to do through the nonprofit has been extremely successful.

So, that’s kind of a cool thing. Yeah, that’s neat. That’s bringing social media kind of back into me thinking there are other ways that it can be really valuable other than just like a channel and distribution piece.

John Bertino:

[37:43] Sure.

Alex Morse:

[37:43] Um but yeah other than that we’ve had a lot of successful ones where the organizations do it either on an annual basis like around giving Tuesday um or they do kind of core it’s part of their actual fundraising model that’s happening all the time groups that do uh running events and biking events things like that um the other that can kind of slow burn um and it certainly takes having relationships with your group and network.

But being able to offer to people getting married the ability to create a fundraiser page where you can accept gifts in lieu of wedding presents, and similarly for birthdays, we’ve seen that be successful too.

Budget-Constrained Non-Profit Strategies

John Bertino:

[38:31] Those are some good ones. Okay, great. Just going back to the situation many nonprofits find themselves in where they’re being somewhat budget constrained. I mean, every nonprofit’s a little bit different, but I know a lot of the startup orgs are, again, budget constrained. If you were consulting, even if just pro bono, trying to help somebody out that was trying to get it off the ground, how would you talk through the website piece in a way to get it done efficiently and cost effectively and any tools or resources you would recommend as part of that process?

Alex Morse:

[39:05] Yeah, I mean, I think we have conversations about budget very early on when we engage with clients because there are certain budget ranges that just won’t be able to work with our team. Mm-hmm. We’re certainly, for the quality of work that we do, probably in the range of like 60% to 70% less than if you went to an agency of a similar caliber in Boston or New York or LA. We’ve done a lot as far as with Hopsie and our model, we can have developers in sort of cross-functional roles where they work on both programs.

And that allows us to keep our nonprofit rates a lot lower than most groups. But really, it’s about value. And there’s a great TEDx talk by Dan Pallotta, which if you look him up, there’s a little questionable stuff going on because he’s run some very expensive marketing campaigns for non-profits. Okay. But the main point of his speech is something that’s super valuable in that, you’ll never, like if you’re a non-profit and you build schools in some far-off place, in an area that really needs them.

Alex Morse:

[40:24] It’s always easy to find some wealthy individual who will give $10,000 to build a school and put their name on it, right? But that same person would never give $10,000 to do a website that could then let you fundraise enough to build 100 schools.

So, the way that people judge the sector overall is really constraining because spending on marketing is very high risk. Like if you do a big spend and then it doesn’t pan out. You usually see executive directors gone. Somebody else is being brought in. It’s just different. You’re for profit. You can blow $100 million on some new innovative strategy, and it falls fat. And you’re patted on the back, and you can do it again. Sure. Very different. Obviously, depends on the size of the company.

John Bertino:

[41:12] There’s some caveats there with that example. that will.

Alex Morse:

[41:17] But really, I think they’re phased approaches. That’s one way that we do things is get into the discovery, learn what they’re trying to accomplish, have conversations with them about fiscal years and grants they’re applying for, how much potentially they could get their board to, give on top of what is an approved budget, how fundraising could potentially factor into that, And then create a project plan that’s going to phase the work out, right?

So, sometimes getting the brand done in a very simple, beautiful site that’s going to drive donations and get you signups for your newsletter and communicate about your programs well isn’t a huge lift. Left, but adding the membership functionality for your group, that’s going to be a substantial investment on top of it, right? So maybe we start here, get this new messaging out, raise a bunch of money, and add in membership in six months or a year.

Alex Morse:

[42:15] So there’s definitely strategies there. I think if the group has very little budget, which we speak to all the time, we end up granting them a license to Hopsie and try and help them fundraise and that has then years down the line turned into some of our best website customers, so that’s been one way to approach it and then there’s obviously a lot of low cost tools out there you know you can, get a decent looking Squarespace site up without having a ton of knowledge and expertise.

And then you could have us take a look at it and give you some revisions and feedback or implement them for you. Um, so things like that are ways we can work with people that’ll have less. Um, but you know, we’ve also done some really big websites for nonprofits and there are a good number out there that can and operate, you know, like a for-profit business as far as their team size and their budgets for these things. So, you know, it depends. Yeah.

John Bertino:

[43:18] You and I have mostly worked together in the context of your agency, Side Sea. I personally haven’t had a ton of exposure to Hopsie, but I would imagine, and please do correct me if I’m wrong, but part of the genesis or the idea, the value prop, if you will,

Overview of Hopsie

John Bertino:

[43:31] of Hopsie is that it solves a lot of those challenges or needs that nonprofits have with one tool. So, I think it’s directly relevant. Could you just fill in any gaps on what exactly HOPSIE is, what it does, and why it’s important or helps?

Alex Morse:

[43:48] Right. So, the original tool, when it kind of came into its first version, was purely focused on providing a really nice, beautiful white label donation form that was mobile responsive and GDPR compliant and all of the accessibility pieces. Um.

Alex Morse:

[44:09] And then we added on the crowdfunding and peer-to-peer modules. But a core piece is the email functionality, which is a transactional email system. So one of the keyways that we could save a ton of time for nonprofits is by having a system that can automate more than just a tax receipt.

Alex Morse:

[44:29] So it’s built in a way where you can tie these templates that allow dynamic data to be pulled in as far as what the donor enters into the form. And you can set them to go out based off different triggers that’ll happen within the software. And those can be set to go out immediately when that action occurs or based off a delay. So, when somebody donates in Hopsie, you’re actually triggering a drip series that can go out over time.

That immediately saves an enormous amount of work because now as a nonprofit practitioner, say you’re a volunteer or a one-person team, you don’t have to remember to thank the donor or three times over the next six months, right? We’re actually on the cusp of releasing a completely new tool, which is a very, very large piece of software that’s

been in development and kind of the culmination of all of our experience in the space over the last 12 years. So, it’s introducing CRM events, sponsorship tracking, all the fundraising tools, email and SMS marketing, tons of integrations and automations, it’s going to be an all-in-one. So right now, Hopsie is really focused on donations and comms, but we are releasing what you’re talking about.

John Bertino:

[45:50] So, I think we covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time,

Contacting Alex Morse

John Bertino:

[45:53] and I really appreciate that. For those that want to get in touch with you, Alex, and learn more about Side Sea or Hopsie or how you can help, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Alex Morse:

[46:02] Yep. So sidesea.com, S-I-D-E-S-E-A.

John Bertino:

[46:07] Not seaside.

Alex Morse:

[46:08] No, not seaside. Side S-E-A. Yeah, that’s definitely the best way. We’ve got a great portfolio up there with a lot of fairly in-depth case studies, both on branding projects as well as websites and software that we’ve built, because we do a lot of software as well outside of Hopsie.

And yeah, that would be the best way. I get everything. So, you’d probably hear from me if you fill out our contact form.

John Bertino:

[46:37] Excellent. And that’s one of the really nice things about boutique agencies, if I could define you that way, is 20-some people. As a guy that represents a couple hundred agencies, I find a direct correlation between that size of somewhere between 10 and 40 people to be one of the best sizes to work with. It all depends. ends. Yep. But, uh, you know, you tend to have only a layer to remove from top talent or top strategists while getting a lot of experience behind it as well.

Alex Morse:

[47:10] So I’m pretty hands-on. It’s, it’s definitely a passion project. So awesome.

John Bertino:

[47:14] Well, that’s fantastic. Thanks so much for carving out the time. It was excellent to have you on the show and we’ll talk again soon. All right. Thanks.