What Makes a Great Social Impact Marketing Team

What makes an EXCEPTIONAL social impact marketing team?

Often, when we get this question from clients, they are trying to determine what ROLES to hire for.

But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Instead, it’s best to think about the QUALITIES and CULTURE of a successful marketing philosophy for your brand.

Because you can build a highly-skilled marketing team and still totally flop if:

↳ You don’t have vision as a brand
↳ You don’t let them create BOLD, scroll-stopping content
↳ You micro-manage and add arduous approval processes

In today’s episode of Designing Tomorrow, Eric distill’s what he’s seen work the best when building out your in-house marketing team at your social impact org.

And at the end, he outlines how he would structure the marketing department for social impact orgs at different sizes.

Jonathan STRONGLY disagrees with his recommendations at first, but starts to come around towards the end. Eric hopes to get him eventually.

Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts. 

Episode Highlights 

• [02:15] - The importance of brand strategy
• [05:05] - Knowing your audience deeply 
• [07:55] - Creating scroll-stopping content 
• [13:42] - Balancing cadence and quality 
• [17:14] - Evaluation and curiosity in marketing 
• [20:45] - The role of leadership in marketing success 
• [22:47] - Building marketing teams across different organizational sizes 
• [24:26] - The role of content in marketing
• [28:06] - In-house capacity vs. agency support 
• [31:54] - Challenges of scaling a marketing team 

Quotes

• "You have to understand who you're talking to. Who are you actually speaking to, who's reading this?" - Jonathan Hicken [01:54]
• "If you start to just do marketing... and just putting content out there for the sake of putting content out there, but there's not a solid brand strategy... you're kind of setting yourself up for failure." - Eric Ressler [02:15]
• "At the end of the day, if you or your marketing team are not spending time with the people that you're serving... you're never going to get it." - Jonathan Hicken [06:32]
• "We need to find ways to get more creative and more emotional, sometimes more fun with our content, even if that feels intuitively wrong." - Eric Ressler [12:51]
• "Doing the reps is only helpful if you are curious about the outcomes and you're evaluating the outcomes and then you're evolving based on those experiments that you're having." - Eric Ressler [18:55]
• "This is an executive director or CEO problem. If your teams are not communicating well, that means you're not doing a good enough job of creating an environment in which they're forced to coordinate and where their goals are sort of mutually reinforcing." - Jonathan Hicken  [20:45]
• "We need to understand how the product works, what the value of the product is, and I need to be put in front of the right people in order to make the sale." - Jonathan Hicken  [21:30]
• "The most successful marketing teams that I've seen stay small and nimble. Small teams can make huge impacts when that's true." - Eric Ressler [32:15]

Resources

• Rethinking Your Unhealthy Relationship with Social Impact Marketing
• Is Your Social Impact Marketing Strategy Built on a Strong Foundation or a House of Cards?
• Podcast - We Are For Good — Nonprofit Trends That Matter in 2023: Marketing is Mission
• Marketing Isn’t Overhead, It’s an Impact Multiplier
• Ethical Storytelling Resource - Maria Bryan Creative

Transcript

Eric Ressler [00:00]:

Jonathan, one of the most common questions we get from clients is how can we make the best possible marketing team for our social impact organization, especially after working with us and doing a big rebrand or website overhaul or helping to rethink their communications in their digital engagement strategy? How can we actually sustain that and do we need to add people to do that? Should we be asking people to take on some of this work as part of their work? So I thought it would be good to do an episode where we kind of dig into what actually makes a great social impact marketing team, and we're going to explore it not just in terms of the people in the seats, but what are the qualities, what are the capabilities, what are the kind of pillars that you should be paying attention to as a social impact leader if you're trying to really up your game when it comes to brand and marketing, are you in? 

Jonathan Hicken [00:48]:

Let’s do it.

[01:13]:

So I want to start by outlining what some of these kind of key pillars to building a successful social impact marketing team look like. And then eventually I will get to what would a team look like in terms of the number of people and their roles. And I think really the only way to do that is by different sizes of team. No one size fits all marketing teams. So the first pillar that I think is really important when it comes to marketing is that you need to be building marketing on top of a very solid brand strategy. If you don't have a solid brand strategy, you could be doing the best marketing work in the world, but it's not actually going to make a huge impact. Is that something that you've seen before?

Jonathan Hicken [01:54]:

Absolutely. And to bring that even more tightly is you have to understand who you're talking to. Who are you actually speaking to, who's reading this? And this gets into, some companies use personas, but there's other ways of going about understanding your customer or your client, but you got to understand who you're talking to, the person that's going to be reading or listening.

Eric Ressler [02:15]:

Yeah, exactly. But if you start to just do marketing, kind of like all willy-nilly I'll say, and just putting content out there for the sake of putting content out there, but there's not a solid brand strategy that you're kind of working against, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure. And I see this happen sometimes with marketing teams where they don't have leadership guiding them around what is the strategy for the brand? What's the strategic plan for the organization? Where are we going? What's the vision? If that's not clear, then you can't do marketing effectively. And so is that related to building out a marketing team? I think it's kind of a precursor or a prerequisite to doing marketing well. So I think it's important to kind of acknowledge that. The second thing I think is really important to doing marketing effectively is thinking about marketing and brand building as a core business function, the same way that you think about development and fundraising and impact evaluation reporting. If you think about marketing as this kind of thing that you do after the real work is done, in my opinion and in my experience, you're always going to struggle with marketing. It's

Jonathan Hicken [03:24]:

A trap that we can fall into in the social impact space where we think of marketing as secondary because it's one of those, if we build it, they shall come sort of mentalities. But I think we've learned, and many of us have learned the hard way, that doesn't work.

Eric Ressler [03:40]:

It doesn't work. And I think that there's always been this kind of stigma around marketing and the social impact space. Sometimes it kind of gets tied into this whole broader discussion around overhead and how much of your work is going directly to program work and helping people that you're trying to serve, all that kind of stuff. I think there's enough evidence at this point, and maybe I'm a little biased here, this is the work that I do day in and day out that investing in marketing can be, and when done effectively is an impact multiplier for your work. So thinking about marketing as an investment in the future of your organization that has the potential to elevate all of the rest of the work that you're doing. Because so much of success today is around earning attention, turning attention into action, and if you do marketing and brand building effectively, it can really supercharge all of those efforts.

[04:29]:

So that's one thing that I think is really critical is if you're going to be effective at marketing, you need to think about it and place it at the same level as all of the other core business functions. And what does that look like? It means talking about it with your board, talking about it with your team, having a budget for it across the board if that's an annual budget or per program, however you want to do it, not having it be this thing that you get to if there's extra time or money because there's never extra time or money when you're doing this work.

[05:05]:

The next thing that I think is really important, and you hinted at this as to be an effective social impact marketing team is to know your audience. And when I say know your audience, I think that's something that people say a lot, but really deeply know your audience and how do you get to know your audience? You get to know your audience by spending time with them, by talking to them, to having discussions with them, to interacting with them online, in person, in any channel. And instead of thinking about your marketing as a megaphone, thinking about it more as a conversation and an opportunity to engage and converse and share ideas with your community. I know this is something you're big on, so I'd love to hear your perspective. Yeah,

Jonathan Hicken [05:44]:

I would take that even further. I would say someone on your marketing team, not just executive leadership, not just your board, but someone on your marketing team. It's best if they themselves understand or have experienced the impact that your organization is trying to deliver

Eric Ressler [05:59]:

So they have some kind of lived experience. That's right,

Jonathan Hicken [06:02]:

That's right. Either themselves personally, someone in their family, someone in their close circle, but to deeply understand the meaning behind the impact that your organization delivers, I think is a critical component to building a great team.

Eric Ressler [06:15]:

So what would you suggest if you're a marketer in a social impact organization and maybe you don't have that lived experience, are there ways that you've seen effectively work to learn through your community, through conversation or other research methodology?

Jonathan Hicken [06:32]:

Yeah, I mean it is both the easiest and the most difficult thing to do, which is to spend your own time with the people who you're serving or in the space that you're serving. There is no other way to do it. You can put together the fanciest research plans and you can have the fanciest consultants from the fanciest firms, but at the end of the day, if you or your marketing team are not spending time with the people that you're serving or in the environment that you're trying to work in, you're never going to get it.

Eric Ressler [07:02]:

And I think this is something that we've struggled with frankly, because there's only so much of this work that we can do as a consultancy or an agency. When our clients do this work day in and day out and they spend the time and the effort to truly, deeply know their audience that they're serving, their audience of supporters, it makes our jobs so much easier because they can bring those insights to us and we can use those insights to inform our creative approach, our strategic approach, and you can just see how everything clicks so much more when there is that understanding and alignment. So I think this is critical. It's an easy one to kind of skip over. Oh yeah, we know our audience, but do you really deeply know them? Do you understand them? And are you keeping a pulse on how their behaviors and their motivations are changing? I think that's critical.

[07:55]:

The next one, creating scroll, stopping creative content. And what I mean by that is content that is not just boilerplate expected information centered content, but content that is actually engaging, emotional, interesting, literally stopping people in their scroll. And I think this is again, something you hear people say, but it's really, really, really hard to do this well. And this is actually, I think one of the things that especially social impact organizations are the worst at in my experience, and again, it's hard, so I'm not here to blame people for this, but we have, I think the reason this frustrates me is because social impact organizations have literally the best raw ingredients for storytelling of any type of organization in the world, but if the execution of that storytelling and that content is not approached effectively, then they're not getting the most juice out of that raw content that they have.

[08:55]:

And so this is something that we could spend an entire podcast talking about, but at a high level, we want to understand the culture of whatever platform, a distribution platform or channel that we are creating for. We want to kind of select a couple that we get really good at instead of just trying to blast content all over the place and distribute it without personalizing it for each culture of each channel or platform. And we need to tell three key stories in our content, and the first is what I call a case for support, which is essentially why does our mission or our issue matter? The second is stories of impact, so actual content that is proof that your organization is making a meaningful, effective difference. And the third is calls to action. Basically inviting your community to participate, to show up, to take action, and you have to strike a balance there between those three. Often we see people maybe do really well at one of those three types of core content, but not so well on the other two. In our experience, getting all three humming is really important.

Jonathan Hicken [10:00]:

Something I've seen is in the social impact space, sometimes I think sometimes we can tend to take our cause so seriously and because we so deeply care about it that sometimes it can kind of get into our heads that creating scroll, stopping content as you put it, is exploitative in some way that we're exploiting the people we serve or we're using maybe in some cases pain for people who are dealing with real human suffering that maybe that's actually exploiting the people we're serving. And I think that that can be a barrier, whether it's a high stakes social impact organization or a relatively low stakes one. I think we as leaders sometimes get caught in this trap where we feel a little bad or a little dirty sharing these stories out there, and I think part of it is just overcoming the fear and realizing that sharing those stories is an impact accelerator.

Eric Ressler [10:53]:

Yeah, I mean I think it's a valid point though. You have to do storytelling ethically, and if you are approaching storytelling in a kind of extractive way where you're essentially just using people's pain and suffering to gather attention in a way that's not sensitive to that pain and suffering, or you don't have the right amount of buy-in from people's individual stories, there is a way, there are scenarios where that's taken too far and it is extractive, so there's a balance to strike there. There's a ton of content out there about how to do ethical storytelling these days. Maybe we can link to some resources in the show notes for folks who are interested in that. Maybe we'll even do a show on that in the future because I think it is a very valid point, but I think we don't want to let that get in the way of storytelling in general because it is one of the superpowers that we have as social impact organizations to actually reach people and to get attention.

[11:48]:

I think this one, creative content scroll, stopping content, this is a lifelong pursuit. You are not done with this, and I don't care how much experience you have with marketing and brand building, this is something you are always learning. This is something I'm learning every single day, and I've been doing this for a very long time at this point, and it's always changing too, the culture of these platforms and what's actually breaking through. So I think spending just as much time on how are you packaging your content? What's the hook for your content? How are you framing your stories? Is that likely to break through and capture attention? Because if it's not, then it doesn't matter how important the story is. If no one's seeing it or reading it or engaging with it, then you're not doing service to the story itself. So spending way more time on this than you think you need to, I think is critical. Yeah, I

Jonathan Hicken [12:34]:

Think, look, this is kind of a great time to experiment with content because there are many, there's infinite content where you can experiment and try new things and get creative, and I think that there's generally a patience for that and actually an interest to see some wacky ideas out there in some cases.

Eric Ressler [12:51]:

Yeah, I mean, last point on this, I think a lot of social impact content is very serious. These are serious issues. They have real stakes. People's livelihoods are at stake sometimes, and so I get why it's so serious, but you can't throw a white paper up on Twitter and expect people to read it. You can't do long form audio on TikTok and expect people to interact with that. So we need to find ways to get more creative and more emotional, sometimes more fun with our content, even if that feels intuitively wrong, because at the end of the day, we need to find ways to actually get these ideas out into the world in a way that actually works for how people engage with content today.

[13:42]:

The other kind of related point to that, what makes a really good social impact marketing team? Consistency and consistency is a word that a lot of times I think immediately people go to a publishing cadence for, and that is a big part of it is creating a story for your subscribers or your followers or your community around, I can expect a new episode every week, or I can expect a new email once a month, and there's some level of training your audience what to expect and being consistent. The other thing is largely people are going to miss your content. No one is reading every single one of your emails. No one has even seen every single one of your social posts because of how algorithms work. So when it comes to consistency, let's just start by talking a little bit about cadence. What I usually advise is what is the cadence that you can realistically commit to that's going to break through the threshold of whatever particular channel or platform that we're talking about, and each channel or platform has some rough kind of threshold.

[14:44]:

It's not a perfect equation, but I think we all have a sense of what's reasonable and what can you do before you start to actually lose quality, right? Because if you start to commit to a cadence where you're a slave to the cadence and you just have to keep putting it out at a certain clip, but it's not a sustainable clip for you and your capacity, inevitably quality is going to suffer, engagement's going to go down, and then you start to run into the opposite problem. On the flip side, if you're just completely sporadic and there's no cadence to what you're doing or there's no consistency to what you're doing, then that can be an issue as well, because people are just like, well, I don't know what to expect. There's not enough threshold that you're breaking through and actually capturing attention. So consistency in the broader sense of the word I think is something that's important. I know you've run a lot of marketing and fundraising campaigns internally. How have you thought about cadence, consistency, having content pillars, some of these things?

Jonathan Hicken [15:40]:

Yeah, the way I think about this is how often does my audience or does my constituent base need value from me or from my organization? So kind of actually mapping it to my customer's needs more so than our own. So just to give you an example, right? I'm going to simplify here because I know that animal shelters are more complex than this, but let's imagine we're working at an animal shelter and part of our marketing is telling sweet, cute stories of the animals that are up for adoption. If I'm marketing, the outcome I care about is adoption rates. I want more animals adopted more quickly, and I'm talking to an audience of people that will adopt once every 10 years. Do I need to be reminding that same group of people who have adopted, about the new animals that are up for adoption every week? Now, you could argue that actually that helps to reinforce the impact we're having and maybe we'll bring donations. But the point I'm trying to make is do I need to get one family to adopt another animal? No, they already got that value from me. They got it once they already did an adoption. Maybe I'm going to market to that group a little bit differently than to people who are looking to adopt.

Eric Ressler [16:56]:

So just having personalization and being aware of the context of your marketing is certainly important when it comes to cadence as well.

[17:14]:

Okay, so this next point I think is kind of again, an ongoing thing, and I have this written down as evaluation, experimentation and curiosity. To me, these are qualities of an effective marketing team, whether that's the team itself or individuals within the team, these are the qualities that you need to nurture and build over time. To be effective marketers, you have to be willing to play the long game, but more than that, you need to stay curious, curious about why did that thing that we thought was going to be so successful and get so much engagement flop? Why did the thing we thought was going to flop get so much engagement and why was this successful? So having a mindset of curiosity I feel like is so important because it can be really easy to get discouraged as a marketer if you've put a lot of time and energy into something, into a campaign or a piece of content or whatever it is, and it doesn't get the reception that you're hoping for.

[18:08]:

It's discouraging, right? It's like, well, why? What went wrong? Where did I go wrong? You even start to get introspective about this, and I think as I've been doing a lot of this work for myself and for cosmic and helping clients with it, the most successful marketers that I've seen, they do the reps, they're consistent, and through that consistency, they build skill. There's this kind of, I don't know if it's a true story, but I'm going to tell it anyway, a science experiment where they broke a pottery class into two cohorts and cohort one, they assigned them to build the most beautiful vase they possibly could in a certain amount of time. Let's say it was a month. And cohort two, they asked them to build as many vases as they possibly could within that same amount of time. The outcomes were that the vases in cohort two ended up being significantly better, skillfully created vases than cohort one because they did the reps.

[18:59]:

They weren't setting out for excellence. Excellence was achieved through repetition and learning. So another comment is the 10,000 hour rule from Malcolm Gladwell. So I think doing the reps is so much of this, but doing the reps is only helpful if you are curious about the outcomes and you're evaluating the outcomes and then you're evolving based on those experiments that you're having. So these are some of the qualities that I think drive effective marketing teams. There's one more that I think is really, really important, especially in the social impact space, which is that there's a strong connection between marketing and fundraising or sales. If you're a social enterprise, and this is something that I think seems very obvious. We want marketing to drive sales or to drive donations or support or action if you're an advocacy brand. But oftentimes these roles get kind of siloed or these efforts get kind of siloed. So there's fundraisers out there or salespeople out there kind of working deals, and then there's marketing people out there kind of putting out messages, but the left hand and the right hand are talking to each other. Have you ever experienced that? Oh,

Jonathan Hicken [20:08]:

I've experienced this in for-profit tech and in nonprofit social impact. I mean, as long as there's marketing in any sort of financial transaction involved, this problem's going to exist. So don't feel bad if you have this problem in your organization. And the good news is it is solvable, and a lot of it comes down to having your niche and your brand and your messaging and your audience all really, really well-defined and making sure that the leaders from both the sales or fundraising and the marketing organizations are forced to work together and coordinate. Look, I think this is actually a problem. This is an executive director or CEO problem. If your teams are not communicating well, that means you're not doing a good enough job of creating an environment in which they're forced to coordinate and where their goals are sort of mutually reinforcing. You want your marketing leader to be successful when sales is successful and vice versa. And so that is an executive leadership problem, and you need to get the right levers in place for that motivation to emerge.

Eric Ressler [21:06]:

And I think the real tragedy here is that they have so much potential to work synergistically. If we talk about fundraising and marketing, what do fundraisers need? They need stories of impact. They need content to give their potential donors and to reinforce their impact. I'm not saying that's all they need, but as a past fundraiser, I mean, that's got to be gold for you,

Jonathan Hicken [21:28]:

Right? Yeah. We need the stories and we also need the names of people. So I think this applies to a for-profit sales organization too. We need to understand how the product works, what the value of the product is, and I need to be put in front of the right people in order to make the sale. And the same thing exists in nonprofit fundraising too. I need, actually, in my role as executive director, I do quite a bit of fundraising. And so one thing I ask for my team is to basically qualify potential donors and serve them up to me at the right time. So I need to make sure I'm getting in front of the right people, and then when I'm in front of the right people, I need to have the stories that absolutely slap. So this can be built, these systems. I'm building that system as we speak, this play between marketing and fundraising. I've seen it work before and it can work again.

Eric Ressler [22:12]:

And I think on the flip side, as a marketer, you want to understand deeply your audience going back to an earlier point, and if you can get information from your fundraising team, your sales team, around what are the things that are lighting people up that gives you content ideas for future content production as well. So you could see how these two systems should be working together synergistically, and when they don't, it is really holding everything back.

[22:47]:

So I want to talk a little bit about answering the question, well, what should my marketing team even look like? There is no one answer to that, right? There's not one silver bullet playbook for how should I build a marketing team? I do have some kind of rough benchmarks I've tried to put together based on different sized organizations. So I'm going to see what you think about these. I think if you are less than a million dollars in revenue a year, I think executive director led marketing is the way to go or CEO LED marketing, and it could be supported by individual consultants or freelancers to help with some of the more executional tactical parts of it. But in terms of coming up with the ideas, what are the stories that we're telling the audience when you're that small? I think frankly that this is best done from CEO or executive director. Agree.

Jonathan Hicken [23:36]:

You're not suggesting that the CEO or executive director is producing the content themselves. They're just leading the person, perhaps the one person that is doing the marketing. Do I understand that? Right? I am

Eric Ressler [23:47]:

Actually suggesting that they do lead the marketing themselves,

Jonathan Hicken [23:50]:

That they're producing the content themselves,

Eric Ressler [23:52]:

And again, not necessarily only them, but that they are deeply engaged in the marketing content production.

Jonathan Hicken [23:59]:

I think that's a real dangerous approach, to be honest with you. I think you as executive director need to be making sure you're spending your time on the highest leverage activities. I think there may be cases where actually your time is best spent on those activities, but my gut reaction is actually, as an executive director, your time is best used raising money directly from donors and foundations or from investors, and that you're out there improving the product or service.

Eric Ressler [24:26]:

In my opinion. I'm starting to see a trend of a lot more, especially smaller organizations where going back to one of the earlier points around marketing being seen as a core important function that it isn't thought of as lesser than fundraising or lesser than any of these other things that are important. So am I suggesting that A CEO should spend 75% of their day on marketing? Definitely not 25% of their day. I think that's reasonable personally, and I think that that will actually make you a better leader because to do marketing well, you have to be able to connect it to fundraising. You have to be able to connect it to knowing your audience. The act of publishing and producing content forces you to sharpen and crystallize your ideas. So I think it's a healthy debate to have, and I could see your perspective, but I'm seeing a lot more of this happen in the B2B world especially.

[25:18]:

We talk about content being king. This is a way that you can do that and live that authentically. But if it's starting to get in the way, if it's taken too far to the point where, yeah, you're getting caught up in intoxication of storytelling and it's fun and you enjoy it, but then you're not doing some of your other core responsibilities as an executive director, then I think it's gone too far. And I think especially as you get larger and some of those other responsibilities become more necessary, as your team grows and you have more responsibilities, then you're inevitably going to have to kind of give some of that up. So that's my thought on small teams, if you're between one to 5 million in revenue at this point, in my opinion, you should have at least one agency partner for bigger lifts, right? So website overhauls rebrand, some of these bigger plays that you're going to do.

[26:10]:

And the reason I say that, obviously I'm biased here because I run a creative agency, you're not yet big enough where it makes sense to essentially build your own in-house agency. Yet I think there does become a point where that is a good idea, and I've seen this happen successfully, but I think at this size, you have an agency partner for bigger lifts, but you do start to build out more in-house capacity. What would that look like? Maybe a CMO type role, that kind of is a marketing manager, that's overseeing all of the marketing responsibilities that's coordinating with contractors or individuals on the team. That's talking to the fundraising staff, that's talking to the executive director that kind of owns this as their only job, right? Their main job. I think at that point, maybe you also start to bring on either full-time or part-time or contract content producers like writers, photographers, designers, people who can actually help with the nuts and bolts, day-to-day content production.

[27:03]:

But I still think the executive director or CEO should still be pretty closely involved in marketing. Now, are they doing as much of the content production? Maybe not, but does this small team set up a corner of the office to easily create short form video, and does the executive director or CEO come in for an hour session once or twice a week to help create some of that content? In my opinion, yes. That would be a really good strategy. Does that executive director or CEO sometimes pen an op-ed or write an article or help oversee the production of a bigger piece of hero content? In my opinion, yes. That would still be a good strategy. So I don't know. What do you think about the one to 5 million? Yeah,

Jonathan Hicken [27:42]:

That sounds like a pretty good fit from what I've experienced right now. One question I have for you is when it comes to bringing in agency help, you suggest that it should be kind of for the big swing for rebrand or big strategic pivot. When is it appropriate to bring in an outside agency or vendor for the day-to-Day stuff, the cadence related work?

Eric Ressler [28:06]:

This might be slightly controversial. I don't think it makes sense to bring an agency on to help with that stuff. I've seen the most success happen from teams where they build that day-to-Day capacity and expertise in-House with the support of external agencies or consultants for evaluation of bigger pieces. And the reason I say that is because, especially today so much about marketing is about authenticity, around deeply understanding you, deeply understanding your community, deeply understanding your issue, and it's really hard to get an agency at that level on the Daily Pulse essentially, that has to be their only client to do that effectively. Some people might argue there are agencies that figure out how to do that well. We help our clients with ongoing marketing work, but we do it more in a consultative evaluation standpoint. So we help give them the tools they need to do their marketing.

[28:57]:

We let them go do that. We help build that capacity. We help advise on what kind of content they should be doing, what channels, all that kind of stuff, get 'em fully set up and then teach them to go. And then we evaluate how those efforts have panned out and then advise on how to make strategic shifts based on what we're seeing work. But we're trying to teach them to fish. We are not trying to just take it off. And I think that often what happens is like, ah, we know we need to do this. We know we need to be on these channels. We know we need to put stuff out consistently. We don't have the capacity to do that. Let's just bring someone on to just offload this too. That is not going to work. And I think probably everyone has tried that and failed, or if you haven't tried it, if you do try it, there's a high likelihood that it will fail.

[29:38]:

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying I've seen that not work more times than it works, and I believe so strongly in this work that I think it should be something you're building capacity for just fundraising, just like your program work, just like organizational development or any other important core pillar of your work. And it's just a balance of when do you do it in house? When do you bring staff in for it? We have a client right now who just hired a full-time photographer and videographer. That person is going to be out there collecting content every single day as their job. That is a gold mine for that organization to have that content. This is the kind of stuff that's really going to kind of elevate your marketing, especially as you start to get closer to that 5 million a year mark. Now, if we talk about over 5 million a year, that's where I think things start to change.

[30:24]:

You're going to want to scale your team up, continue to build out even more in-house capacity. At this point, you should look like a small agency within your organization, in my opinion, around building brand and around marketing. You will still likely have an agency partner or even more likely multiple agency partners for different niche skill sets to help support that team. And the executive director or CEO in my opinion, should still be involved, but a little bit more at an advisory level in less that CEO or executive director has built up their own skill and finds this to be quite valuable and decides that it is still an important element of their day-to-day work, I've seen that work quite well as well.

Jonathan Hicken [31:08]:

Yeah, I mean, CEOs, executive directors, I mean, we have personas ourselves. We have sales and marketing oriented CEOs and product and service oriented CEOs. So yeah, for certain it'll depend on the CEO e at an organization that size. I think once you're at that size, now you're starting to talk about having segmented marketing campaigns and efforts, right? Where you're having your customer constituent marketing strategy and you have your donor or your investor related strategy, and you have overlapping skill sets between these different sorts of subteams. Yeah, I mean, at that point, I would build my dream team, and you've laid out some of the skills already of the kinds of people and the kinds of skills I would want to bring on my dream team. But for sure, I think once you're at that size, what you've laid out makes a lot of sense.

Eric Ressler [31:54]:

The last thing I'll say on that though is that even if you could afford to build a very large marketing team, the most successful marketing teams that I've seen stay small and nimble. And I think the distinction there, they have their own agency to do the work. They don't have tons of levels of hierarchy to navigate to get any one social post put out or campaign put out. They're hired for their skills and their expertise and their value and fit and cultural alignment, and then they're left to do their thing. They get to do marketing and they get to own it. And there might be some oversight and some strategic input from the CEO and other stakeholders, but they feel like they have the freedom to just be creative. And small teams can make huge impacts when that's true. And so I think even if you are a bigger organization and you are building out an in-house marketing team, don't feel like you need to make it huge for it to be successful, sometimes the smallest teams are the most successful. I have a few takeaways from this that I want to make sure people get, and I want to see if you have any as well. The first big one, marketing is a core business function. Invest accordingly, focus on core competencies and then let that determine team size and structure instead of the other way around, and that small teams can be more nimble and effective than large marketing teams. Do you have takeaways?

Jonathan Hicken [33:22]:

Yeah. This has got me thinking about a couple of things. A or what are the skill sets, the raw skill sets of a marketing team? And I think the good news is that it's the same across different organizational sizes, and maybe sometimes it's the case that one person has all these skills, and maybe it's the case that multiple people have these skills and there's overlap. But when I think about marketing, I'm thinking about somebody who's really great on the quant side, so someone who really understands the numbers and who's getting me from marketing to sales or fundraising and managing that pipeline very, very closely. I want somebody who's a killer content creator, like you said, a producer of some sort, written visual, you name it. And I want a killer brand marketer, someone who deeply is this is the leader who deeply understands the constituents and the problems the most, and is bringing that knowledge and wisdom to the rest of the team, the rest of the organization. I think those skills are consistent across any size organization. So if I'm building a team, I'm making sure I have those three core competencies included.

Eric Ressler [34:24]:

Awesome. I think that's a good place to wrap. Thanks, Jonathan. 

Jonathan Hicken [34:26]:

Thank You, Eric.