We Discuss How Matt Hugg Started An Online Course Platform Using LifterLMS Aimed At The Non-Profit Sector.

We Discuss How Matt Hugg Has Started An Online Course Platform Using LifterLMS Aimed At The Non-Profit Sector.

Matt Hugg is an experienced writer, veteran fundraiser, and sought-after instructor and speaker in philanthropy, fundraising, and marketing, Matt brings a unique perspective to all his projects.

This weeks show is Sponsored By Kinsta Hosting

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 391. We have got a great guest on the show folks. This is going to be a great interview. It’s going to be multilayered. We’ve got Matt Hugg with us. Matt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Matt: Sure. I am a nonprofit educator and consultant. Largely in fundraising, but I am doing a lot of work across the nonprofit sector. I have been doing this for about 30 some years. And I opened up a new platform for education and nonprofits called nonprofit courses. And so far 350, actually more than 350 courses up there. And a variety of disciplines from accounting all the way across to whatever there would be in nonprofits.

Jonathon: That sounds great. And I’ve got my cohost come back from a little break. Cindy would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Cindy: Hello everyone. Cindy Nicholson here from thecoursewhisperer.com. So I help people who want to create online courses but need a little help making it happen.

Matt: And she’s featured on nonprofit courses.

Jonathon: And I’m the founder of WP Tonic. We are a WordPress focused development and marketing agency that specializes in building courses with Lifter LMS and Learn Dash specifically. And if you got fed up with your presence SAS solution and you’re looking for the freedom and flexibility of WordPress, we’re the company for you.

Matt: And I can say that when you go to nonprofit courses you’ll see a Lifter LMS demonstration that wasn’t intended here. It was just kind of something we add.

Jonathon: What are we going to do, folks? We’re going to be discussing the show is Matt`s experience of building a platform which is not only for himself but for other people as well. Using open source software. His experience with nonprofits. The specific requirements they have. And also writing for the web and writing content that is suitable for a website that does engage and drive people to your website in general. And specifically if you a learning management system or membership site. So it should be a feature rich discussion. So Matt, how long have you been in nonprofit courses. Why did you start it? What was the need that you saw that you were going to help?

Matt: So it’s been up a little less than a year. And it actually in some respects was accidental, at least to find the URL. I was looking for something else and saw www.dot.courses was that what they call a top level domain like.org and dot com. And what do nonprofits wasn’t taken and now it is. And I originally fact got involved with Lifter LMS and looking to do my own course. Because I saw that a lot of people were out there who were looking for good information. And didn’t have either the time, the resources to go to a conference or take a graduate program. And I teach in a lot of graduate programs. I teach fundraising and nonprofit management and I’ve taught in four different programs. And yet that’s a serious commitment.

Even going to a seminar these days or going to a local professional association conference is a real commitment to take the time out of your day. And to pay the money to do all that. And it’s not like I don’t want people to do these things. I really think those are important. But when you’re boss shows up at your desk today and says, by next week I want to have a social media plan on my desk. You don’t have time to wait for that conference. You need to get that stuff now. And so the idea is to go directly to a one stop shop where you’re going to have a variety of voices and be able to grab the content you need. It’s going to help you with that. And the same is true if you have volunteers, you need to ramp up on some particular skill.

Or if you have a board. You’re going to have a board meeting coming up. You want to talk about planned giving and you want everybody to be on the same page with that. Well, there are more than enough videos on our site to talk about planned giving that a good executive director can pick out some key ones to get that conversation started. So it’s just this on demand learning opportunity. And also a lot of the courses on nonprofit courses are for sale. From a pretty broad price range from like 10 bucks to $500 or something even more. On the other hand, a chunk of the content, I’m committed to having at least 50% of the content free. Because it’s important to support the nonprofit sector. And there’s a lot of good stuff out there that people has that they’re offering. And I want to kind of tie it all together.

Jonathon: So just a few questions before I throw it over to Cindy. Why WordPress? Why Lifter LMS? Why did you choose that rather than a fully SAS like Kajabi or Teachable? Why Lifter LMS?

Matt: Well, I’ll tell you, it started with my son. He kind of got me into WordPress. But then once I discovered how flexible it was. The ability to add plugins if I needed to add some design. And it was a gradual thing. Believe me, when I first looked at it, it was like, oh my gosh, what is this? And then I started adding all the parts together and it really made a lot of sense to me. I did some research and discovered lifter. I felt really good about it. I had a chance to talk to the leadership of the company a little bit. And I had some assurance that it wasn’t going away anytime soon. And it was a bit of an investment. Not huge, but I had to kind of jump in on it. And that’s really worked out well too. Because it divides the courses out from posts and from pages and membership as well.

So it really had the flexibility. Now I will tell you that I have used LMS is my experience with LMS has been the academic world. With things like Break Space and Moodle and Blackboard and there’s another one I’m forgetting. But I found that those and things like them, we’re too complicated for what I want to do. There was a real balance between, between sophistication that I didn’t want that actually, some of them, I won’t mention the name of one I actually started with. That was, that forced me to have certain features I didn’t want. Whereas Lifter I was able to opt out of some things and make it a cleaner site, which I was really looking for. And I wasn’t looking for the academic what I had to build a for the teaching I had done in a university.

Jonathon: That’s fantastic. Cindy?

Cindy: So well I don’t know if you’ve had a nonprofit on the podcast before Jonathan? I’ve only been around for a year, Matt, so I’m, Jonathan’s been around for a long time.

Jonathon: Can you tell?

Cindy: I am curious about with this nonprofit world in sure. So if we have people who are listening to this podcast, they may have courses themselves. Why should people look to the nonprofit world? What’s the opportunity in the nonprofit world?

Matt: I’d be happy to. I’ll say there is a lot of opportunity out there. And it’s fine. I was just, so I’m teaching a class right now and I was grading a paper, final paper. And this fella said that he has to convince his leadership that nonprofit doesn’t equal poverty. Because a lot of people think that and it’s not the case. And like I’m in Philadelphia and in Philadelphia, the biggest employers in the city are nonprofits. And we’re talking about three major universities, a lot of significant schools after that. A couple of health systems and insurance company and of course then there’s a big social service agencies. And so the nonprofit world is bigger than one thinks. And just like a for profit, you can go from what is effectively a sole proprietor, although that’s not quite how it’s organized. To major corporate structure on the other end.

So there’s a lot of good opportunity out there, especially in education to get people up and running on things. Healthcare is really done well with this. I mean, having a healthcare management degree is normal these days. Where the doctors used to run the hospitals. Right now the health care managers do. And the rest of the nonprofit field is really getting into that. And I mean the last 10, 15 years you see a lot better, solid education for that. But back to my point earlier, there’s always that gap in there where people need to be able to grab stuff quickly. And that’s for folks who are doing courses. That is a major opportunity. It’s also honestly good content marketing. One of the things that I find is a lot of my folks who have courses on my site is doing it.

They provide, one of the rules of my site is it has to be educational, no infomercials. But even within those rules, they’re providing some really solid information, good education. And then they do it because people pick up the phone and call them and say, hey, now I would’ve worked with you on whatever that is. And then the other kind of the backwards part of this is I had one person telling me that he’s going to put up videos on the site. Because he wants to not look like a bad guy to customers who can’t afford what he does. And in other words, he wants to be able to refer them to the videos and say, listen, you’re not quite as big as I want. I want to work with a, or I can work with. But here, go here first and really ramp up on this.

And that’ll get you started. And so he looks like a hero as opposed to somebody who just doesn’t want to bother with the small stuff. But the nonprofit world is actually a, Oh gosh, in the US. And there’s a distinction here in the US. There’s 1,000,500 thousand or something nonprofits out there was, translates into several hundreds of thousands of volunteers and employees. But there’s also the, what the rest of the world with those are charities to the rest of the world. In the United States terms your 501 C3`s. There is a class of nonprofits that aren’t charities. Those are the mutual insurance companies that are the credit unions that are the chambers of commerce that are the cemetery corporations. And these don’t receive charitable gifts but they do get charitable benefits.

They get benefits through the nonprofit codes worldwide. This isn’t just an American thing. And so you can work with nonprofits to any number of levels in any number of ways and get a lot of benefit out of it.

Cindy: I just think that the online medium is a great opportunity for the nonprofit industry because of the access to the information easier. And it’s not necessarily people who are there for long term either.

Matt: And actually is one other thing that comes to mind is I had a friend of mine with a software company who does a lot of social media tell me that the best time for them, if for getting people looking at their social media is on Saturday night. Which totally blew our brains like why is this? And the answer I think is we’ll be oscillated that it is because nonprofit people work a lot of long hours and do and work a lot of odd hours. And so they’re not going to open it up on Tuesday at 10 o’clock when they’re at the desk. They’re going to be on the living room couch looking at it on Saturday night.

Cindy: Yeah. That’s interesting. Jonathon?

Jonathon: Yeah, I think it’s a fantastic idea because, what you say, do you know a lot of these nonprofits they are volunteers. Or they’re people that I haven`t had an enormous amount of experience about various aspects involved in running a nonprofit effectively. And have you one place to go to and having a number of separate courses around other subjects is just a fantastic idea Matt. What has been some of the things you’ve learned in the over the year that’s surprised you about building something in the community that have surprised you?

Matt: Well, I don’t surprise you or not, but I had had to pick a much more efficient with how I do the processes. One of the things I pitched my students all the time and I’ll say here is, Michael Gerber’s the EMS right. And systematizing things and making it happen. And I’ve really had to do that. My approach to working with courses initially was to take everything kind of in and divvy it out in modules, as if you were to use this program modules equal courses. And I found that that was just highly inefficient. I had to actually connect out and do what I call direct connect. So most of the courses now, what you’ll find on the site, will connect directly to somebody’s website. Whoever the host is, whether they have on a YouTube, they have it on their website. Maybe they’re on Teachable or whatever. And that just makes it much more efficient for me to get the material up and not have to engage a lot of people in doing it.

I have a couple of people who help. A wonderful woman in Scotland who does some work for me. But you just got to be much more efficient. So that was one of the things. I think I have a lot of connections in the fundraising world. And so things got kind of skewed that way. And I’ve been building connections and other aspects of nonprofit management and that’s been really good. The one thing you’ll find and kind of back to your comment about, running nonprofits. Is that the people who are engaged in nonprofits, and this is almost like any small business in some respects are really good at the thing. Whatever their mission is. So if there a social worker, they are really ends up being a social worker.

And then they were kind of unexpectedly often put into the capacity of being executive director. And they’re a social worker first. And so they got to figure out all this other stuff. So I like to characterize them as intelligent. Very intelligent actually, but newbies to whatever they’re doing to what it is. And then they gain experience of course, over time with that. And my mission is to kind of ramp them up more quickly. And I found some good interest in that. Right now I am a bit of a content vacuum cleaner. So I’ve been sucking up content to have on the site. And to assure people that this is good for them as a business. As well as for the nonprofits. And I think that’s important.

And the idea here is to build a community where I think of as every time you drive down, you see a home depot, you’re going to see a Lowe’s. If you see a McDonald’s, you’re going to see a burger king across the street. There are competitors. But why are they close to each other? Because they bring in more business for each other. And I think folks are starting to wake up to that. And say if I, my content is out there on my own site getting 10 or 15 hits, views. But if I’m in with everybody else, now it’s funneling into getting many more views because they’re there to look at other things and they’re going to pick up, oh, hey, there’s an interesting one. And go see there’s two. So a bit of a marketplace.

Jonathon: Fantastic. We are going to go for our break. When we come back we will talk to Matt some more about his own journey and about the nonprofit world. We’ll be back in a few moments’ folks.

Announcer: Do you want to spend more time making money online? Then use WP Tonic as your trusted WordPress developer partner. They will keep your WordPress website secure and up-to-date so you can concentrate on the things that make you money. Examples of WP`s client services are landing pages, page layouts, widgets, updates and modifications. WP Tonic is well known and trusted in the WordPress community. They stand behind their work with full, no questions asked. 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Sign up with WP Tonic today. That`s wp-tonic.com just like the podcast.

Jonathon: We’re coming back. We’ve had an interesting discussion by a unique platform that Matt been built in the nonprofit world using Lifter LMS. One of my favorite learning management plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. Cindy got question?

Cindy: So you don’t have to be a nonprofit company to post courses on your site. Is that correct?

Matt: Of course, yes, you’re right. You’re exactly right. In fact, most, I don’t know that I have anybody, any nonprofits yet as content providers.

Cindy: Yeah. So that’s why I think this opportunity is so cool. Because it could be anybody. So tell me about what kind of topics nonprofit companies would benefit from? And what are some of the more popular courses that you found that people are investing in?

Matt: Yeah, anything that’s on the site has to be connected to nonprofits in some way. It’s not necessarily that it’s best if it’s speaking directly to them. But there are a lot of related things that crossover a lot of things. Like there are some HR issues or general management, organizational dynamic things which people really benefit from. But I’m seeing a lot of interest in starting nonprofit material. I’m seeing a lot of interest in boards and board training. And that could be a group dynamic things. It could be the kind of the basics of one on one of what a board. Well, let me broaden that. Revenue generation is really important. It doesn’t have to be fundraising. A lot of nonprofits effect actually one of the secrets in the nonprofit world is that fundraising is not the primary revenue source for most nonprofits.

It’s usually fee for service. So if you do something that talks about how to get more patients in the door or how to bring in more clients or one way or another, that’s really important. In my marketing courses and even in fundraising, I talk about that business is a one to one. We’re going to. I’m giving you a pencil. You’re give me a nickel or a nonprofit is a, I give you a pencil. And then somebody else gives me the nickel. So it’s a kind of a trilateral relationship. And in that case, then the customers are different. And so the marketing is different. And marketing is another thing that nonprofits really benefit from knowing about. So yeah, there are a lot of topics like that. A lot of the niches that are specifically nonprofit focus, but then a lot of them that are broader that can be brought to the benefit of the nonprofit world.

Cindy: Yeah. And as you say, the people who might be leading the nonprofit may not have expertise in some of these other areas. So if you’re able to ramp that up, that can

Matt: Oh yeah. Well, I mean we’re talking about building websites in WordPress and all that. Well that would be perfect for this because so many nonprofits are building their own websites. Are figuring out what backed I was just on the phone with somebody who, was talking to me about that. And yeah. So that’s one of those broader skills that can really be brought to bear.

Cindy: Yeah, exactly. Jonathan.

Jonathon: So also do you see a big possibility with nonprofits with their own requirements to train and get up to speed volunteers and other people in their organization?

Matt: Yeah. I think there is. Well first of all there are professional certifications. And some of the material on the site is actually qualifies for professional certification points or credits or whatever their organization’s calling them. Some internal professional development that way is good. I actually would welcome. I don’t have any yet, but something I’ve been playing with is, for an organization to put their material on the site, and have it free for those people within it. And then maybe paid and money would go to the organization for specific in house kind of training whether it might be certain protective services training or whatever it is. So that they can actually benefit from that as well as the other people who might take it. So yeah, there’s, there is really good opportunity that way of, for internal training for the staff for sure.

Jonathon: Oh, that’s great. So what are your next steps in your plan? What do you hope to be able down in the near future?

Matt: Well, like I said earlier, I’m being a bit of a content vacuum cleaner. So I’m really trying to suck up as much content into the site as possible. And really what I’m looking to do is build viewership. I want folks to kind of. I’m a pretty good viewership now. I want to get a lot of viewers, a lot of people coming through. I really want to make this work. And eventually we didn’t talk about revenue model but perfectly open to it. They revenues come from affiliate connections with providers. Who are charging and then eventually for advertising, I’d like to see folks who want to connect into the nonprofit world, be able to put up advertising and get known through their presence on nonprofit courses. I think that will benefit, that’ll keep the free courses free but also will benefit the nonprofits because they’ll see certain vendors out there that they want to connect with one way or another. So yeah, getting just building the content and then the viewership is where this is all going right now. So as I say, click early and often.

Cindy: Just to follow up with that, I guess because you kind of have two different types of customers, so to speak, courses on your website, but also then you are at the nonprofit organizations to come to your site too. I the courses receive them. So how do you manage all of that? Because there’s kind of almost two different people that you need to attract to your site.

Matt: Most of my content right now with a couple of exceptions I’ve had, I’m starting now to have people come to me and say, hey, this is really cool. I want to put something up, which is great. But most of my social media and my emails and all that is going to people who are, who our potential viewers. I also have actually the first one is in the queue and mothers are coming for the content experts. Some social media and other things out there for that. I put out a weekly sometimes, send me weekly, twice a week. Something I called new course alerts, which tells folks what new things are on the site to kind of engage them that way. But, I’ve been trolling YouTube, I’ve been doing a other things, a couple of their clients for some other projects and I happened to type in like a one seven faces of philanthropy, which is a, a big nonprofit fundraising book from years ago. I wonder to refer somebody to it and I was looking for a summary and then I found out, oh, well these people are putting on, have done a video on that. So I’m going to contact them directly and talk to them about getting that on the site. But I’m welcomed to have people’s contact me. But so far I’ve been reaching out to them and that, and I have to tell you that that does control the flow a bit because there are only so many hours in a day.

Cindy: So you probably want to do some degree of due diligence as well to make sure that, yeah, you’re happy with the quality of the course before you put it on your site as well. Is that right?

Matt: That true. And that’s the other thing too. There are certain, and I’ve gotten, I could have developed that skill through my academic side. So I am a person who would say that looking at YouTube videos is the equivalent of reading an article. I mean, they’re largely the same to assign to a class. And as I did that and I really developed a bit of a library for my students, I’m able to pretty quickly triage what is quality, good content for this and what is it? And I kind of apply that skill to what we’re looking got here. We’re not going to get any robot voices or anything like that. That’s not where this has gone. Yeah, exactly.

Jonathon: Oh that`s great. Before we wrap up the podcast part of the show. And hopefully, Matt will agree to stay on for some bonus content. I just want to talk about one of our great sponsors. And that’s WP Fusion. What is WP Fusion? It enables your WordPress and you’re learning management system to really communicate effectively with your CRM, like active campaign drip. There’s a host of them in the market at the present moment. And it puts that communication on steroids. So you can do these great automatic marketing funnels that everybody’s talking about. And really personalize the content that you’re showing, to different people that have gone through your website. It’s really interesting. It’s really important. So if that sounds interesting for yourself or you’re working for a client. Go to the WP fusion website and use the coupon code WP Tonic all upper case. And you’ll get exclusive deal.

You’ll get 25% of any of the packages that WP Fusion offers. And they got a lot of training on there. And you can see how easy is to integrate effectively with your WordPress website. You’re learning management system with your CRM of choice. Before we wrap up the show I would like to say that we’re going to be doing a webinar. Unfortunately, last month’s one we had to cancel because we were having some technical problems. They have been sorted out folks. So we’re doing a webinar free webinar on the seven things you need to know before you do your first course. And we’d be doing that in May on Thursday the 30th at 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. And if you want to register it for that, all you have to do is go to the WP tonic, WP hyphen tonic backstroke webinar. And then you can register for free and the course. He’s also going to be totally free the Webinar and you be lovely live company of Cindy for hour. We’re going to cover a load of stuff. Well we will see you next week where we’re going to have another excellent guess like Matt. If you want to see the bonus content go to the WP tonic YouTube channel. I normally post the full interview plus bonus content on there before you can listen to it on iTunes. Or you can go to the WP tonic website and there’d be a full set of show notes. We’ll see you next week. Bye.

 

Bonus Content

Jonathon: That was a mouth full.

Matt: I like that idea about the fusion product you’re talking about. But also send me a note on the Webinar because I’m thinking I ought to push that out to my content providers. That’d be happy to do that because I really want people to. I don’t know, Cindy, if you’ve gotten anybody but I’ve been talking about, yeah.

Jonathon: When it comes to actually nonprofits and content and providing content. What are some of the key things you think nonprofits need to know about this whole world of the Internet, websites, content?

Matt: I think like anything else it’s a parsing out what is real, what isn’t real. I think, and there’s a real dynamic there. In other words, and that’s one of the thing. I mean plug myself here. The number one rule for my website is it’s educational. And everybody I speak to, they get that. And so their content is educational. That’s not the case for everybody. And so being able to discern what’s education and what’s kind of infomercial is important. What other things as far as content goes? I think that putting out. I mean we talked earlier about writing and about getting things in a kind of a graspable format. One of the issue but a lot of my content providers and I talked to him about this put out long stuff.

They’re putting out like an hour webinar. No, no, no, 20 minutes is really good. Think about our tolerance for sitting for a TV show. And being able to have something that’s really tight, and you’re distracted and all that. So less is more and being able to chop things up into smaller pieces to get folks focus. That’s really important because so many people just lose, well not only do they lose their attention on it, but they also get distracted. Something else happens. They have to stop. You don’t want them to stop on minute 15 of 50. You want them to stop on minute 12 of 15 so that they can come back and finish it up easily.

Jonathon: I also think lot of people in a lot of nonprofit Southward. We’ve unlocked a junior or somebody that’s got English degree. They kind of frown on to the website and it depends on the resources and the maturity of the organization. A lot of them don’t realize it’s a combination of social media, video with written content. In a semi engaging format. Would you agree with that?

Matt: Well, I’ll tell you I don`t only agree with that. I can prove it in fundraising. Multichannel marketing is much more effective. You can’t like this whole idea of, well direct mail is dead. Direct mail isn’t dead direct mail is like thick of movies. Its television didn’t kill movies. Television made movies do what they did best, which is telling a really different kind of story than a television show. And the same thing with direct mail and social media. That you would use them in combination and it’s much better. And the same thing on a website using different kinds of media. The written word video, audio is much more effective than just plastering stuff up. The other thing that’s really much more effective as you can have the same words, his exact same that you would in a paper document, but formatting it is huge in being able to format something so that it’s easily readable and you pick it up quickly as opposed to having big thick block paragraphs.

You’d be surprised that we’ve been talking about this for years. But people still, you know, big thick block paragraphs because they don’t understand that it’s a different writing style. I mean, one of my frustrating clients when my writing side of my world are English majors, because they. And God bless them, they know all the rules but, but colloquial English does not follow all the rules. And so being able to know your audience, which is another part of this too. Knowing your target audience and who you’re writing to, having that Avatar out there in your head of that person who you’re, you’re writing to or who’s going to get your website, those are major things to keep in mind.

Cindy: You’re speaking my language there, Matt, because I think it’s especially important with the medium to, to be super concise, super clear as to what you’re conveying because there’s so many other distractions. If you’re going to a lecture hall while you’re often stuck there for the hour or what have you, whereas on a computer you can flip over to easily to other websites like it just, it’s even more important to be super concise with your message when it comes to being online. So anyway, you’re speaking my language.

Matt: Well the other thing too is stories. I mean, the human brain is wired to understand stories and to hear stories. So being able to elucidate something in terms of not only the facts themselves. But bring them in, engage them emotionally in the story really makes a difference. I mean, what are the retailer’s saying? People buy emotionally and justify logically. Well, get them engaged in buying that thick of that car you bought. Oh, I love that car. It just fits me. But do you know it gets so many miles to a gallon and that it gets this and that, you know, and you can name all the specs of the car you’re justifying at that point. Get them hooked on that emotion first.

Cindy: I imagine in the nonprofit world, that storytelling to get them to connect emotionally is important.

Matt: I’s huge. It really is. Daniel Pink talks about what does that autonomy, mastery, purpose, right? Nonprofits own purpose. And so their ability to work with those emotional stories should be really good. And yet I am always shocked at how people can make a really exciting story sound dull.

Cindy: A question for you though, Matt. So if somebody is listening to the podcast, they think they have a course that might work for your website. What’s the process? What do they do in terms of?

Matt: Yeah, just the reach out to me. Send me a note at Matthugg@nonprofitedu.com. I’ve tried to get the idea that it was an educational thing, right? So that’s probably the easiest way to go or go to the website, nonprofit courses. And you’ll see up at the top, one of the links is for content providers and you’ll find some things there. You’ll find your video there Cindy. But also ways to connect in with me as well.

Cindy: So if they’re not sure they can reach out to see whether or not you can vet them from that perspective, it makes sense.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I’m starting to get more calls on this and I’m happy to talk to folks about it. Think that’s really great.

Cindy: Yeah, that’s awesome. Jonathan.

Jonathon: So Matt are there some specific nonprofit organizations that you think are really getting it right with their online messaging story telling them general online marketing?

Matt: Gosh, I’ve always been impressed with World Vision’s work. They’re a children organization. They work largely with children in developing countries. I’ve actually had a lot of personal interaction with them and, feel that they do a good job. And I know actually I know the digital media people or at least one of the people there and have a feel good about it. It’s work. I’m thinking who else? I mean I tend to be inclined toward the other organizations like that Heifer for example. Is another one, they’re doing well. Well, it depends on what we’re talking about in terms of messaging, you know, telling stories that way. You can find it.

Jonathon: There is one area where I think a lot of people do full, but it’s very subjective and it was a discussion I was having. We’ve a previous guest last week. It’s building a feeling of community. I’ve been approached by a couple people that are looking to run it in the political arena. When you go to their websites, they’re attractive. They’ve been obviously the copies professionally they’ve got, they’ve invested a lot of money in video and video production, but there’s no real sense of walls. So wanting to build a community apart from consistently trying to get your email address, it’s about this tricky thing about building real community before you ask him for money from people.

Matt: Well, so I mean, I live in both worlds. When they say no money, no mission, no mission, no money, first of all, telling stories that are, are authentic. And you know, authentic is a really kind of a hackneyed word in so many ways. But it’s true that if get somebody’s personality out, it really makes a big difference. And people overlook all sorts of believing. I know people look over all sorts of imperfections based on right, and if, if they like you, if they, I want to connect with you. So that’s one. Another one is consistency is being able to tell a message all the time that is within the realm of what you’re doing. Think about, I like to, especially in the nonprofit world, remind folks that we are in largely more in the advertising business and the journalism business though is we can tell the same story different ways, time and time again.

But one thing we can learn from the advertising businesses that the advertisers who are always there, even with little stuff here and there are the ones you remember. and that’s the community you build a lot of nonprofits, this is kind of outside the nonprofit world might be a little known fact even outside fundraising that if that back to us talking about direct mail earlier at one point that people will send you a small amounts of money over time we’ll leave you in their will at a much higher rate than somebody who makes a big gift. And that’s fascinating because they feel part of your community and you may never have interacted with them personally, but they feel like they know you, they feel like you are part of their family and they want to see your mission continue. So they, these are the ones who tend to be giving in the will, as opposed to somebody who you talked to and you do the big major gift score. But those little drips are really going to add up over time. It makes a big difference, not only in their regular monthly giving, we’ll say yep. But in that final giving when they’re, will mature as they say in the business. So building that sense of community, it consistencies here, it really is. You can’t just be a one and them thing.

Jonathon: Right. Man, I’m going to wrap up the bonus content. It’s been a blast talking to you. You are going to have to come back.

Matt: Thank you so much.

Jonathon: Come back on the show. I think we’ve covered a lot of interesting content. Like I say folks if you’re watching this. Before the 30th of May we’re doing a free webinar. The seven things you need to know to do your first course. It’s with me and my better half Cindy. We will be doing that at 9:00 AM Pacific standard time on the 30th of May. So if you’re watching that before the 30th, please join it. You can go to WP tonic back slash webinar and you can sign up for free. And you’d be given some reminder emails so you don’t miss joining us live on 9:00 AM on the 30th of May. We’ll see you next week folks, where we can have another great guest like Matt. Speak to you soon. Thanks. Bye.

 

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have a great and hard-hitting round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies where we discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress and online articles/stories of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/

SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES
#391 WP-Tonic Show With Special Guest Matt Hugg was last modified: by