652. Nonprofit Marketecture: Building Connected Systems to Scale Personalization - Maria Shanley and Charles Lehosit | Otter.ai

652. Nonprofit Marketecture: Building Connected Systems to Scale Personalization - Maria Shanley and Charles Lehosit

Sabrina Li32min

Jonathan McCoy

00:00

Hey, Becky, what you know?

Becky Endicott

00:01

Well, we're going to talk about one of our favorite topics today. You know, we've often talked about how we're marketers disguised as fundraisers, but we learned this really cool word that we're obsessed with called nonprofit architecture. I don't know who coined it, but I am here for it. It is this concept of how to design your tech systems so they actually work together and they work for you. And we're going to be talking about when you can set them up in that way, what is possible to be unlocked is really limitless. And we couldn't just have a marketing conversation. We had to bring in a case study, and we had to bring in experts and people who are actually doing the work. So today we're highlighting this really cool world case study with Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. They recently went through this really extensive, full digital transformation, and we're going to be hearing from Maria Shanley, their director of marketing and data management, who led the rebuild, and along with her, is our good friend Charles lihosett, who's the Senior Vice President of digital over at rkd Group, who has been oh so good to we are for good, such an early believer in this movement. And Charles is leading this team of more than 80 digital experts and friends, if you're like, what is cutting through the noise right now? What is that scroll stopping content that is going to get a believer to interact with my mission. This is the conversation we're going to have today. They're going to be talking about the challenges, the processes and the outcomes of how to truly create a connective ecosystem that powers smarter decisions and stronger donor relationships, which I know we are all here for. So Maria, Charles, welcome to the show. We're so excited to get into this.

Maria Shanley

01:47

Thank you for having us today.

Charles Lehosit

01:49

Thank you.

Becky Endicott

01:50

So before we dive into this really exciting case study, because we want to know from soup to nuts, how did you build a thing? We want to get to know the humans. So Maria, I want to start with you, and I just want to hear a little bit about your story. About your story and what led you into this nonprofit work.

Maria Shanley

02:13

Yeah, Maria Shanley, director of marketing and data management at the food bank, so I have a really amazing role and opportunity to oversee Marketing and Communications at the food bank, as well as the data side of things, which is the data analysis and data processing of gifts. And so I think like from my start is I went to UCF on a UCF night graduate, and I've always loved marketing, and that was my major, and my minor was management information systems. And so I feel like from the beginning, it was like

Maria Shanley

02:39

my school knew before I knew I was going to end up in nonprofit, and so my all of us, yeah, right. So you go to school, you pick a major and a minor, and then somehow you end up doing it for life, which is really cool. I don't know, not everybody gets a chance to do that, but I've been very thankful and grateful for my opportunity to work at the food bank. I have been here for 16 years, and so I started just writing emails and updating the website, and now I lead a team of nine and three different teams, and it's, it's changes every year. I love it, and, you know, I'm looking to help people I've I've found, or I've learned, that impact drives me, and I think that's why I stay here, right? Every year I get to try something different, do something new. And because of that, I've had the opportunity to speak at conferences or do feed in America sessions and talk to other food banks and share the success that we've had with our Giving Tuesday campaigns, our monthly donor growth campaigns that we do, our omnichannel campaigns that we do year round. It's just I love being able to share and help others and make the world better.

Becky Endicott

03:43

Well, I can tell we are inordinately lucky that we have you in this work. So thank you for staying in it. And Charles, Hi bud, like tell us what's going on. What's your story? We want to know you.

Charles Lehosit

03:57

It was my story, Maria. We are both Floridians. I'm a Floridian that found himself living in Kansas, currently on like a small farm, but I went to University of Florida, was majoring in Business and Computer Engineering, and interned at a small software startup. You know, had me take the shortcut to finish up college with a business degree, and I've always been the person that can talk to normal people and engineers. If you're an engineer and you're listening to this, you are definitely a normal person to me. But I guess that I was gonna say I've always been just a huge nerd, but I needed to kind of explain, like, the value of my nerdiness is I can, I can talk to to

Charles Lehosit

04:50

different types of nerds. Translate between the between them.

Becky Endicott

04:54

Here are people, for sure.

Maria Shanley

04:56

That's important too. We have somebody on my team. Who can do that? He's our translator for developers,

Jonathan McCoy

05:05

Well, friends. So we're talking today about digital transformation. What's unlocked once we kind of work through, getting our tech stack in order, getting our communication sync with our goals, and kind of all the technology in the background. So I'd love to, like, just like, jump in with you, Maria. Like, what was the decision like to decide, Okay, it's time to rebuild our tech stack. And what were some of those challenges or pain points that maybe could be signs to someone listening to be like, Oh, that's that's totally us. Like, I see us in your story that led you down this path to say, okay, something's got to change.

Maria Shanley

05:37

Yeah. So I think one of the biggest things I noticed was that we were starting to create a lot of custom fields in our database, and we were trying to fit things into places where there wasn't really a spot for we also experienced huge donor growth during covid, when there was also a huge need in our community. So we had a lot of donors step up to help. A lot of companies step up to help. So our data changed within that year. It grew our it grew our data structure changed. We were creating spots for things that didn't fit, and we realized how important it really was to connect our data at that point, our digital fundraising tool would bring in gifts into our CRM, but it wasn't connecting important data that we could see and so, and there was a lot of manual work that was happening as well. And so for us, we started looking at all these things. We looked at our contracts, we saw when they were up. That kind of gave us a timeline of, okay, this is how much time I have to do this. How do we work backwards from that we spent, we spent about a year talking to other food banks, other nonprofits. We worked with vendors to get advice on things. But the most important thing that we did, that was a big challenge, but also an opportunity, was we spoke with our team. We spoke with everybody that touched the database. It wasn't just the database for the fundraising team, it was the database that our grants team used, our finance team used, and we were able to bring everybody together to understand not just how they were using the tool that we had in the past, but what they wanted from a new tool. And I think that was really important, because at that point, we all connected even more as separate teams to understand like that we were moving forward towards one goal together.

Becky Endicott

07:33

Okay, that was genius. I have to tell you, Jon and I did this one time. I know Jon. I'm going to take you back. Do you remember the month that we batched gifts. We were marketers. We went from 150 person shop down to a 10 person shop. We had our gift processor was out. And I have to tell you, I think that I sat atop all of these marketing and data systems with a lot of ego before I actually got into them, and once you could see the process from the beginning to the end, because what I think you've done is really important, because when you fully know your systems and how people are using them and how to extract that data, then you're going to create an experience for your community. And if it's disjointed, or other people are having sort of a convoluted or a different way of approaching it, then that experience is going to be felt. So I think this approach is really, really smart that you took, and it really allowed the culture of your staff, probably, I'm assumed, to all feel like they had owners part of the process, absolutely, which is so, so strong and Charles, I want to know, from your perspective, when you look at a case study like this, what would be like the first step in planning a digital transformation for a nonprofit, we're going to have a lot of nonprofits listening, a lot of smaller nonprofits. We want to know, how do you approach aligning those mission goals with system design. What's your counsel on that?

Charles Lehosit

09:02

Love that question. So I think your first goal should be not letting you know perfect be the enemy of great. There you go. You're rarely going to find consensus among all teams. And why a lot of projects tend to fail to even take off, is that someone will say, Well, you can't move my thing. You can't move this. This has to stay here. And so it's giving people permission to say, okay, yeah, your thing, absolutely. We need technology to deliver this for your thing. But that may mean finance has their database. That may mean fundraising has a development has a different database, if they can align on the same awesome, but it won't always be the same, right? You may end up with layers or a stack that is optimized for each team. And that's not the wrong approach. You know, if you can find the one. And tool that everybody can work with. Awesome. The most important thing is that we have known planned integration points. We talk about donor journeys, but we don't really talk about the data journey of the donor, right? And we should picture it as like a marble run, and that's awesome. Have you ever had fun with a Marvel run when it just went like, boop? Or did you like, have fun with it when it was like, it went from here to here to here? That's

Becky Endicott

10:29

also called the gravitram at the science museum. Just Yes, I love that we can all visually see that

Charles Lehosit

10:36

exactly. And that's it's when we are building a architecture, that's really what we want people to think about, is that, you know, in in that intentional planning of, hey, we're going to have and allow for decoupled systems, but that, how does the data connect at the end of the day, and if it doesn't connect right away, what's the interim plan? What's the you know, what's the timing of this? Because where a lot of nonprofits fall into traps, will be unintentionally disconnecting the marble run where, hey, that email sign up on my website. It used to go somewhere, but I changed systems, and we the timing didn't line up, and so it doesn't go anywhere at the moment. Maybe the online fundraising platform used to be also my email marketing platform. It used to be a multi purpose, you know, one stop shop tool. And when you maybe change to a, maybe a more optimized, single purpose fundraising platform. All right, what are those donors going to? They're going to the CRM, but are they also syncing with the email marketing platform? And so that's again, but the marble run, where you know are, are the donors ending up in a like a dead end run. Are they ending up on a dead end road? And so it's okay to replace systems in steps, one by one, doing it all at once. That may be the Ultimately, the goal and what is needed once you start replacing systems. But you know, once you replace one system, well, this has the impact on what behind the data and and so what's the interim plan? Because likely there's going to be data that ends up being siloed.

Maria Shanley

12:32

There's a lot of decisions you have to make of where your data is going to go, how it's going to flow. A lot of spot checking of donors, seeing what their journey looked like, like if they came in from the digital fundraising tool, are they ending up in the email tool? You know, what are the emails they're receiving? What are the touches that are happening to them in the CRM and then using other tools, like we like to use Google Analytics, so that helps us see an even bigger picture of other things that might be happening. So a lot of spot checking, then it's really,

Becky Endicott

13:06

it's really cool work. It's like the secret shopper of of getting online and making your gift. I'm here for it.

Charles Lehosit

13:13

It's exactly that. Because if you think about like the folks listening today, if you've made a change earlier this year, act as as a donor, act as a visitor. Sign up for your own email again and spot check see if, like, oh, it's stuff landing where it's supposed to be, because it's easy for us to get tied up in the oh, well, that project got moved to next year. Well, then are we leaving the donors and subscribers in a kind of a holding cell at the moment, until that happens, and it's critical as this time of year is we need to make sure that that data is landing, even if it's manually or an interim solution.

Maria Shanley

13:51

Yeah, we had a diagram that showed when specific systems were launching and how they would impact specific groups at the end of development team like, and we did like monthly I did monthly updates with the whole with everybody, finance, grants, development, to let them know where we were, what was happening. Because we also did a monthly donor migration, which is another big change that happens, which is a little nerve wracking, but it was, it went well, and because our contract that we ended, we also had to launch a new website during this time period. You should do it all at once, not doing that ever again. But the team that I work with is amazing, and we took it step by step. And I think one of the best things that we ever did together as a team? Is we sat at the beginning and we told each other what we needed during these this time from each other. And so they came up with I wrote them down, because I always had them on my notebook, is they told me they needed focus, patience, learning, time and consistency, and we shared those words during all. All our meetings to remind ourselves, this is how we started, this is where we're at and look at what and I was able to show them, look what you've been able to do, but making sure these words are always very important and top of mind for everyone.

Jonathan McCoy

15:13

Props to you. Love how you're shepherding the team through this, how you're clearly doing a lot of things at the same time. But I want to call out the visualization I think is really important too, that so many even we are for good, not everybody on the team knows how everything connects. So it's like, we can't even watch out for each other. To say, is that working as we intend it to work like I think that's a powerful tool just to like, map it so we can see where's the flow of information and Hello, onboarding and people leaving and things changing. We just need that documented step. So this is so good. So I'm curious, Maria, now that your systems are all connected, what changes have you seen? And you know, how has this empowered your team, maybe, to have data that can turn into action.

Maria Shanley

15:58

So our last vendor meeting, I kid you not, was the first week in October. So our system so we are fresh in it, but already with our new digital tools, we've been able to see our email tool has a heat map feature where we've been able to change our emails already based on what we're seeing on those heat maps for the emails that we've already sent out on we're seeing more growth on our digital fundraising side, and those tools are a lot easier and faster to adapt to our big new CRM. I like to describe it. We were in a very comfortable studio where knew where every we knew where everything was at we our closets were filled with a bunch of stuff, but we knew where to find things. Now we're in this huge house where we have so many drawers and so much space, and we've put data in specific areas, and we've seen it work, but now it's like really thinking about, is this really the best space for our data and really, so spending, really the next year growing and understanding this new tool and the learning part of it, I think that's something that a lot of nonprofits don't talk about, is the dip that happens when you move over to a new tool and the just the work goes down, but it's only because everybody's still learning the tool and understanding what's happening with data. We're building new reports. We're coming up with new processes and so so I will say, like the faster tools that we've been able to adapt to, which is the email and digital fundraising, we're definitely seeing a lot more and growth. And the other one, we're we're in it. We're in it right now. What

Becky Endicott

17:44

does that functionally look like? Maria like? What did it look like before? And what does it look like now for you, and I'm would love to hear even an example of how something has been so accelerated. And, yes, yeah, any examples you have

Maria Shanley

17:59

before? We were having to know code for email. Building, oh, my now we're using a WYSIWYG our, yeah, our new direct marketing person. She didn't know code when she started, like, two years ago, and now she can

Becky Endicott

18:13

read code. I have not heard WYSIWYG since I was in Dreamweaver.

Maria Shanley

18:18

Exactly right. Building, emails is a lot faster seeing dashboards and data is a lot easier. With email, we have created dashboards in our CRM, but with the data that we're seeing from email and digital and fundraising, that's really cool, because we're able to see if a donor is also a volunteer, if they've attended an event, how else they're involved with the food bank, and that's something that we couldn't see before. And so just being able to have a 360 better view of our supporters and our donors and how they're interacting with the food bank is going to help us with any future campaigns that we include them in, as well as our stewardship team and ways to thank them and guide them and the work that they do

Jonathan McCoy

19:03

so good. I mean, I love that this is power. Like I feel like I'm going back to like knowledge is power, but data is power. And when we can get information in areas that we can actually build intelligent campaigns, we can build emails that are a lot more smarter, showing that we know who the human is on the other side, that's how this thing grows and scales, how we lean into the power of tech. So I'm curious, Charles. I mean, you have this huge team I'm still reeling from, like a team of 80 digital experts. Like, how cool is that? What is What does real time donor intelligence look like from a digital perspective? And how can maybe organizations lean into more personalization across channels, if that's even the right word, like what's available to us now that maybe we're not thinking of that we can really up level our digital engagement online.

Charles Lehosit

19:50

Yeah, that's fun question. What we want, you know, people to think about a personalization, especially if you're going from starting. From Scratch is that zero to 100 looks like a this is Jon on your website versus this is Becky on your website. And that can be intimidating, that level of hyper personalization. It doesn't have to be that, though, because what we really want is think about where. Where is Jon his journey, where's Becky and her journey. And so that means you fall into an audience or in a segment, and personal personalization at a segment or audience level, it's much more realistic and a good way to get into what's then attainable and sustainable in real time, meaning in real time, we can see someone that came from an email that's on your website, so we can know what segment they fell into from that email channel and know what they clicked on. So if we wanted to keep the consistent messaging, keep the consistent creative, so it's not hey, I went from this really compelling message to this hero banner on the on the homepage that isn't connected whatsoever to that message to now I'm finding my way again on a homepage that can be definitely not Maria's homepage, but a homepage that can be like the junk drawer for everything that an organization does. And so would encourage us all to think about, you know, website as more like fluid hot spots as content blocks, where it's not the entire website that needs to be rebuilt on the fly, but there could be blocks that are being personalized based on what we know about the channel, the audience that someone came from, in in real time, or where what they were interested in previous, in their maybe previous visit, that allows us to give them a better experience and a more, I think, more importantly, more consistent experience. So it's not them having to go, Okay, this current message really moved me, and now I'm seeing something that's that's describing something else, and I really want to get back to the message that moved me. So that consistent experience, we know it drives better conversion rates, more revenue. So what that really means is it creates a better experience for ultimately, our donors and supporters

Becky Endicott

22:17

keep the creative consistent. Is now one of my new phrases, your favorite phrases, because I really think you're on to something there. Because we've often talked about your website as it's the hub. It's like the front door. Usually when somebody is coming into your home, what kind of an experience do you want them to have? We have no idea which room they're going to turn into based on what's going on in their life, what's been triggered? Did they see an ad? Are they responding to an email? And I do think that having your house in order is one of the best ways that you can be an incredible host, and that you can also understand what people want and how to be hospitable in that, and how to be responsive in that how to be communicative. And I really love this conversation, and I have this question I want to ask to both of you, Maria, I'm going to start with you, if, if we have a nonprofit listener out there, and they're just thinking about starting to connect their systems right now, and this is a big effort. What are the most impactful first steps that you would recommend, where somebody could actually see the results without being very overwhelmed? What would be maybe that first step? Maria,

Maria Shanley

23:32

I think that first step would be talking with each other, and similar to what we did, and understanding how people are using the system, right? I think that we learned a lot from each other. During that time, we created this document called a matrix deeds document, and we went through it with every team and and wrote all the things that they needed, and we it was almost like a need, want deal breaker. And this helped us really understand where we were and how our teams were using what we where we wanted to go. I think a lot of there's a lot of really shiny tools out there that we all like and want, but you really have to look at where you are in your nonprofit journey as an organization, as well as what your team capacity is, right? If you don't have the team the support for a tool. You can get a shiny tool, but it's not going to help you.

Becky Endicott

24:26

How many of us have gotten CRMs that we can't fully flex all of the bells and whistles, but we were starry eyed when we saw them, and now they're just distractions. I think that that is such a good tip, and I love the CO build piece, because, again, everyone has ownership, everyone can drive into that process. Charles, what would you say is that really impactful first step? You'd recommend

Charles Lehosit

24:50

understanding what people do in their job. You know, we've had data team members from nonprofits actually document. Step by step what they do, and when you read it, you're like, oh, wow, this could be a really, let's see your October, really great horror movie of the but that same person they have probably grown attached to their tool, right? Is like humans get really good in their process, right? Really good work around and the process is the process to because of the constraints of the tool and how we work in it. And so documenting that is is extremely helpful, because it helps us then give allow us to say, hey, we like to give you permission to hit the reset button on some of this, right? Like, we don't want to move into a new house and bring the same habits that we had to form in our old house because we didn't fit in the old house anymore. And so we want to develop new habits and the new house. So really giving people permission to hit the reset button, and with the understanding that, like, we're not all hitting the reset button at once. We can hit the reset button on a if it takes 100 steps to do a thing. You know, reset button can be three steps, 10 steps. You know, 20 steps, it's incremental improvements and change. You know, knowing the destination helps, because that means, you know, do we agree this tool get us there. We might not be using every feature of this tool day one, but we know that this tool will allow us to have a brighter future.

Jonathan McCoy

26:28

I love the call out that just getting the new tech is not going to solve everything that you do have to develop new habits. You know, otherwise, you're going to have 22 junk drawers instead of just one. So it's like, how can we develop new systems? Which is why it's so important to bring the team very clear into this. And we're defining, like, what look success looks like, and what are those habits, what are those pain points that we keep tripping over? So such a rich convo with you too. You know, we can't help ourselves, like, we always go back to, like, the bigger story that captivates us to get into this work, which is the power of philanthropy in our lives. And so I'm curious if you, each of y'all, would share a moment, it could be personal, or it could be one that you witnessed of generosity or philanthropy that really has moved you and has stuck with you. Maria, I'll start with you. You're nodding, yeah.

Maria Shanley

27:16

So I've been thinking, I was thinking about this and the, I think it was my first or second week at the food bank. I didn't even know what a food bank was. When I first started, I didn't even know they existed. And I remember one day we had a family come, a mom come and ask for food, and we were able to provide her with resources and where she could get food, as well as a box. And I just remember looking outside as my boss was talking with her and looking at her car, and I saw a little kid just peek out from the side. And that was just, I think that was a very moving moment for me, because I was that really put the face of hunger in front of me where I'd never experienced it personally before I've seen it. So I think after that, I was like, Oh, this is important work. We need we need to help.

Jonathan McCoy

28:06

Yeah, this is all of us. Thank you for sharing that, Charles. What about you?

Charles Lehosit

28:11

My My parents instilled it in me is my mom was hired as the first dental hygienist at a rescue mission in Jacksonville, Florida, that was made available through like a Johnson and Johnson grant. So it was important to her for us to get us involved as kids early on, to volunteer at the food bank or the rescue mission or animal shelter, so we can help our neighbors and also, you know, get a perspective that there are others that need help all around us, and helping feels really good.

Becky Endicott

28:46

Helping does feel really good. And I mean, clearly this is my favorite question that we ask every single one of our guests, because it is a way to connect our humanity back to the work. And when we feel that level of privilege or humility or hope. I just find that people that work in this space, I don't know about you guys, I just want to chase it over and over and over again, that feeling never gets old to me. So I thank you both for the important roles that you are both serving in your respective jobs. I thank you for the way that you show up for people every single day. We need it right now. And you know our podcast well enough to know when we start to wind down. We're going to ask you a one good thing. So Charles, I'm going to come to you first. What's bubbling up for you today? It could be a secret to success, or something you live by. What's your one good thing?

Charles Lehosit

29:45

One good thing would be, gosh, gratitude for the team that I get to work with and so and expressing that gratitude on a daily basis. I think, you know, we all. Work so hard. Hearing an extra, thank you. Hearing an extra, you're awesome. Helps, because they fill up. They recharge my batteries. And so if I can help recharge theirs, just a little bit, a little that's a really small effort on my part, when you know, compared to everything else that's going on.

Becky Endicott

30:18

Charles, paying it forward. What about you,

Maria Shanley

30:21

Maria? Mine is grace, giving yourself and others grace to do what you can do with the understanding that there's a lot of other things happening in life outside of work and just giving each other grace. I think sometimes we're really hard on ourselves, and we want to get the things done, but we have to kind of step back and give people permission to do it at a certain like time period if they need it, right? That's how grace comes in.

Jonathan McCoy

30:53

I mean, thank you for taking what could have been such a heady Tech Talk and making it human, reminding us that it's the people that we need to center in this process. So thank you so much, y'all. I would love for our listeners to be able to connect with y'all. So Maria, I mean, tell us where they can find more info about second harvest, and maybe where you hang out online too.

Maria Shanley

31:14

I love LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me on there, posting about things happening at the food bank. I like to share things I've learned. I will probably be sharing more things we learned with our new tools. Like sharing is caring, which is the feed in America motto that a lot of food bankers follow. I really strongly believe in that. And yeah,

Jonathan McCoy

31:34

love that. Charles, how about you and the rkd group, where's the best way to connect? Also

Charles Lehosit

31:41

on LinkedIn. Feel free to if you like, to nerd out a little bit or a lot. Feel free to reach out. I'm good in big doses and little doses.

Becky Endicott

31:49

We're going to take you in any dose we can get you, Charles, we can tell you are most certainly for good. I just thank you all for bringing in this incredible conversation. Because the reality is, whether you have a CRM or a donation form, maybe you're working with email or web like we can do personalization at scale. We can create these seamless experiences for our donors, even if you're a one person shop, and guess what? It's going to be a gift to you, because you're not spinning all the plates the plates. I mean, it's like the systems are talking to each other. They're talking to you and Maria, thank you for this incredible example. We are rooting you on very heavily and all the things as you supply food to Central Florida, and rooting both of you on and all your work. Thank you for what you do. Thank

Unknown Speaker

32:37

you. Thank you. Grateful. Thanks. You.

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