Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Leadership window podcast with Dr. Patrick Jenks. Each week through a social sector lens, Patrick interviews leaders and experts and puts us in touch with trends and tips for leading effectively. Patrick is a board certified executive coach, a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, a best selling author, award winning photographer and a professional speaker.
And now, here's Dr. Patrick Jinks.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 147 of the Leadership Window. I think it's 147. I probably should have gone back and looked before I said that. Whatever it is, welcome.
I don't know where you are. We're recording this right now in this whole big, you know, winter storm that's been all in the media.
Not a big deal here in Columbia, South Carolina, Little bit bigger deal up in Rochester, New York where my guest today, Neil Callanan, is checking in from. But I hope you're safe and dry and warm or, or you're out skiing or snowing or sledding or doing something fun. Just be safe.
Welcome to the show. Yeah, I'm really excited about this guest. I don't know, we talked briefly, Neil and I did before we set up this call, but I don't remember if I don't remember how deep I got in to you, Neil, with how important a topic this is for me.
My doctoral dissertation was on nonprofit mission. Measurement is all about how we measure impact and you know, the mission of what we're, the missions of what we're doing.
And so this appealed to me immediately when I heard what you're doing and saw what you were doing. Neil is the founder of a company called Loose Grip. He can tell you more about that. I think it's an interesting title and I, he, he alluded to it briefly when we talked earlier.
But he's maybe more importantly the creator of an impact framework, Grasp.
And so he's an impact marketing strategist. And this is really about the intersection between data and marketing, or as he would say it, data and storytelling.
But Neil's got 15 plus years of aligning what he calls activism with business growth. So a lot of who they work with is not the nonprofit sector specifically as in organizations, but in businesses who are purpose driven companies. And I'm really interested in learning more about that too.
There's a lot here, as you might imagine in Neil's bio, that I'm gonna, I might actually let him tell us what he kind of wants to tell us rather than me reading down this whole long list of amazing things.
But mainly just Neil, thanks for coming. This is exciting I've been looking forward to this.
[00:02:50] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. I'm.
It's not often I get to talk to folks with a doctoral dissertation and the topic that we are often spending our energy thinking about. So it's cool.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Well, I imagine there will be some intersections and then, you know, our, our view of what we were trying to achieve in the research maybe slightly different than what you're trying to do in yours. But I. Let me give you the opportunity to reintroduce yourself. What did I miss?
I'd particularly like to know too, sort of what you're on a mission to do and how you arrived at this point.
[00:03:23] Speaker C: Sure.
Well, I think he actually covered it pretty well.
I got into the sort of marketing and business world, you know, 15, 20 years ago, primarily through starting Loose Script, which as you mentioned, is sort of the digital agency that I've been running since then.
And you know, our specialization has always been more on the campaign side. So, you know, marketing campaigns and paid media and that kind of thing.
And in the last probably five years or so, we sort of lucked into the idea of working with the brands who kind of have a dual purpose. They need to sell some services, but they also really have a charter to do by kind of working with those brands that we did was sort of unique and that it was frankly exciting for me. I would much rather spend my energy helping figure, figure out the impact somebody's having as they're trying to change the world than just the impact they're having when they're trying to sell a couple more things. And so it's been really exciting. And that's what kind of led us down the path of Grasp. And you know, we, we specialize a lot in data analytics at Loose Grip, but Grasp is mostly focused in on doing it for activism for brands or nonprofits or folks, you know, who are really trying to change the planet for the better.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: That, that's amazing.
So Neil, one of the thing when you were talking about businesses, you know, looking at not only their, their business metrics, but being purpose driven in the non profit sector, we call that a double bottom line. Is that a term you guys use? Are you familiar with that term?
[00:05:04] Speaker C: I'm very familiar with the term. That's, it's, I think aligned well with sort of how the for profit space thinks about it. I wouldn't say they necessarily are thinking about it as so clearly sort of 50, 50 bottom line, but I do think it's, it's very, you know, similar and it attracts in a very tangible way to what nonprofits do when they're trying to, you know, both, both keep their fundraising goals up, but also potentially have a purpose that is not so specifically called to gathering dollars or donations or whatever it might be.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And just to be clear, are you serving, are you actually serving nonprofit organizations with, with data and storytelling or is this really your customers, your clients are businesses that happen to have purpose driven brands?
[00:05:54] Speaker C: It could be either of the two. I would say most often today it looks like businesses that are sort of purpose driven. I would say where the space is and where we hope to go with it. Definitely includes some more on the nonprofit side, but more so in the.
If you think about the types of organizations who might be still aligning really closely with for profit businesses. So sort of like the 1% for the planets or the B Corps or the. Those that. That type of organization itself. So not only the companies who might fit into that kind of certification, but hopefully our goal is to get more involved with the types of companies who are sort of, you know, kind of gathering up those types of companies in a, in a way that we can align with that sort of serves. Serves to two purposes and one is to grow the impact that they're having, but also encourage the businesses that they're working.
People like to go out and do more.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: So Neil, is, is.
Is the company, is Loose Grip a data company or is it a marketing company?
[00:06:59] Speaker C: I would say if you think that they are two separate things, your marketing agency is probably wrong today.
Yeah, I would say we lead everything we do with data and that's at the backbone of what we've always done. You know, honestly, we started when I started my career. It was sort of early days. Omniture and Google Analytics and nerdy tech that goes into it today. Back then and today, you know, we look at things very differently and we have a whole lot more data and different data sets. But I think the goal is to utilize data to do a better job of whatever it is you're trying to do. And that could be serving any number of causes, but it could also just be selling more stuff on your website or getting more impact from your social media following or leveraging your email newsletter in a certain way. We're really good at building this stuff, but I would say what makes us unique is understanding how to allow data to inform doing it better.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: So can you give us an example of the kinds of data we're talking about here?
For many of our listeners who lead in the nonprofit sector, when we talk about impact data, it's all about the outcomes of the programs we're running and the social issues we're trying to solve. And yes, we have business metrics. You know, we have revenue over expenses and we have employee turnover metrics and there's all of that donor metrics.
When you're working with connecting data to storytelling for the companies you're working with, what kind of data are we talking about?
[00:08:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question. It can be anything from sort of traditional marketing data. I would say today that looks like a lot of metrics that come via either the E commerce side of things. Right. So it could be as simple as conversion rate or, you know, revenue per visitor.
But it could also be more on the educational side. I think is often probably just as relevant to the nonprofit space where we might be looking at data about how long people are engaging with the content that you're creating or the messages that you're putting out there. And I would say where this really relates to the nonprofit spaces, I think nonprofits generally, they understand the value of communicating the message and educating their audience. Right. That's a pretty core tenet of how nonprofits typically operate. Right. And that could be annual reports and, you know, updates about fundraising campaigns and impact stories and all that kind of thing.
But what I would say is, you know, the metrics that have traditionally been around haven't really allowed folks to really measure the success of that. So what typically happens is you might have a activism forward brand or nonprofit put six months into creating a really killer impact report or an annual report or some type of educational piece, and all the energy goes towards getting it out the door and then, you know, kind of move on to the next thing.
And I would say today there's a lot more opportunities to leverage data to understand how much depth of interaction are you creating with your, with your audience. And so if your goal is to educate or to inform prior to, you know, trying to drive action, we can really look at different data sources today that could be video consumption, like looking at, you know, average view times. We could look to see where people fall off in a web series.
There's a lot of opportunities for data. And what I would say is the data we start with is what's the thing that's going to be most impactful and what are you really trying to do? And there's enough individual micro level pieces of data to build that story up. But we try to start with thinking hard about what, what would you actually want the experience to look like? If you could design the perfect experience for a new prospective donor or a new prospective member or a new prospective customer. And then we can go search for the data that is potentially the most indicative of that, that kind of story.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: So that the data you're describing right now sounds like marketing data.
In other words, what marketing vehicles are working the best or what does data tell us? Where does the data tell us we should be marketing and communicating and what kind of interaction and engagement are we getting?
Where does the. How. How is that any different for what you're calling, I think you said activism forward or something like that. A purpose driven.
What. What about the impact of, give us an example, I guess of a purpose driven company or an activist company that is also wanting to communicate the impact they're making on their social cause or whatever that sort of thing is. Do you collect and work with that kind of data?
[00:12:00] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. Okay.
Yeah. So I think a couple examples that you could think of would be, you know, we work with some folks like Ben and Jerry's or Dove or these kinds of brands where, you know, core to their actual brand is an activism and a value spent. And so it's not, I would say today as easy to just say, yeah, we're going to keep speaking up about the causes that we're invested in. You also kind of have to rationalize why you're doing it, especially as sort of folks get more and more conservative with what is being allowed to be pushed out from, from a brand perspective. And that the default, I would say today is if something's a little bit scary, most brands are going to go run any other way unless they're armed with data to say, hey, how does this actually impact our sales and what is the activism really looking like? Right. Because it's easy to say, I actually don't think we should be posting anything about, you know, a specific cause or climate change or voting rights or whatever it might be, because it's all downside. Well, typically it's actually all downside just because they're not able to articulate the impact on, of the upside. Right. And so if we can come in and say, actually we helped 11,000 people in XYZ city register to vote, or we had 150,000 signups on this climate change pledge.
The data can help keep these brands willing to, you know, engage in, in a value specific thing. And so I would say, you know, it's, it's sort of like you're, you're building up the credibility internally. And for the for profit brands, it's a lot more about building the story and the credibility internally so that then leadership or the board or the investors don't go run any other way at the first sign of any type of polarization or conflict or politicism. Right. And so, you know, the data is ultimately, you know, it all lives in a world where we're looking at, at numbers and data points. But I would say the, the story that we're trying to help tell is why would we even do this? Why are we, why are we talking about this? Why would we take the time to put our neck out there?
Because we're a ice cream brand or a soap brand or we're a, you know, a ski resort who's just trying to get people to come ski. Right. Like there's the data can help build the case for being willing to engage in those conversations.
And that can happen both in terms of the engagement metrics on the content and education, all the things. But ultimately where the magic happens is we can say here was what the impact that you had on the planet or your purpose or your cause. And also here's how those messages impacted your for profits. Did you sell more stuff when you started talking about these things? Did you sell less stuff when you started talking about these things? Did you lose a bunch of followers? Did you lose a bunch of subscribers? You know, what is the actual impact? So having the data can help rationalize doing it in the first place and maintaining commitment to activism because it's not always easy, especially in a world where, you know, there's can be a little bit more of a target on folks back today than there would have been five years ago or 10 years ago if they jump into a political conversation or they, you know, ESGs.
Scary topic today, right? Di all that stuff that a lot of brands are scared of that. And I find that mostly what they're scared of is they don't know the information of what the impact is that they're really having. And if you don't know the impact, then of course you're going to say no, let's, let's say less things. It's scary to say stuff unless you have data that says, oh, actually when we stick our neck out, we sell more things or we plant more trees or we get more folks invested in diversity education, you know, whatever the thing might be. Right? Yeah.
If you have the data, it can make the decision making a whole lot more sound.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: That's fascinating because if you, if you think, and we, we won't get into politics by any stretch but to, to like these companies start to come to mind. Bud Light comes to mind, right? And the Dylan Mulvaney spokesperson thing, you know, what, what did they get from that? What did they lose from that? If you watch social media, you'll hear both sides, you'll hear, oh man, they've lost, you know, or whatever. And other sides, you'll hear, you know, hey, since then, you know, they were actually smart, they knew what they were doing. Here's their data. Or you look at American Eagle and the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad and of course, you know, some, some of these are just like, are you, is it activism or is it just provoking? Is just provocative for the, for the purpose. But that's the kind of data that you would look the American Eagle or Bud Light or anybody else would have to look at and say, was the juice worth the squeeze?
[00:17:00] Speaker C: Yeah, well, and today I would say in both of those cases, right, the social media voices are really loud, typically the critical social media voices. And I would say they don't always line up really clearly with the actual customers and the actual, you know, I, we have some customers for clients where every time they post a thing there's three or four comments on it, right? Oh, taking my business elsewhere, switching whatever, xyz, competitor, brand, you know, literally on every post for the last decade. Right. And if that were the case, then they'd be out of customers by now. Right. So I think there is a level of virtual signaling that happens as response to brands. And you know, brands aren't the ones who are committed to, to a purpose. And I, and I don't think that they're engaging solely for the purpose of sort of juicing an algorithm or spooling up controversy.
I think they have a better time looking at data and seeing the long term impacts on their brand and saying, okay, well what does this look like for our customers? You know, you could, I'll give you a perfect example, right? It could be something like if we were to take, to extrapolate on the Bud Light example, well, let's look at user behavior from returning visitors versus new visitors and see is there actually a difference? Right. Can we dive a little deeper into are these the kind of folks who have actually previously purchased from us who are filling out a form that says we're never going to buy from you again.
We can look and see how much there is there, oftentimes through a number of data sources and kind of dig a little bit more into is this noise or is this real impact? And in some cases it is real impact that maybe people, you could Misspeak. Right. Or there could be a misconnection with your target audience. But I don't know, I guess I would say, I would infer that a lot of times the noisier the feedback is doesn't really align with how much that's going to impact the brand. Because if you are somebody like Ben and Jerry's and you say, okay, when we post this kind of content about voting rights or about Minneapolis or about whatever we average on it, you know, 100 bad comments. Right. I'm just using fake numbers here. Right. But like 100 negative responses.
But if you are just looking at negative versus positive, it's not always one to one. Right. So it might be we've actually really engaged with our local audience or with people who are really happy that we're speaking out and they're going to go out and buy some ice cream today.
So it may be that, that both things can be true. But if you can't measure, it's really easy to measure how many people hit the, you know, made a bad comment. It's not as easy to measure the impact on your really, you know, your best long term customers. And the challenge comes is figuring out which data points are telling you the story that can really help you make decisions about what fits for your brand and for your audience.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So when it comes to the impact metrics, can you give an example of even if it's not in exact numbers of movement that a company has made in an area, for example, there's a, there's actually a Harvard case, it's a number of years old now. But about Ikea and how IKEA got criticized and really got their brand hurt with the notion that one of their third party suppliers, not even directly, but one of their third party suppliers in India was using child labor in the rug market.
And what they did is this is the part of the Harvard case, is they effectively turned that on its head and created an impact brand about that they partnered with Save the Children.
To this day the IKEA foundation donates, you know, millions of dollars to Save the Children. And they've got metrics on what Save the Children is doing and how much their dollars have helped and in terms of schooling and jobs or, you know, housing, whatever those things are.
And so this was a, this was a great story of an organization that took a negative brand and turned it positive by responding to it in the way that they had. I'm just wondering if you have any example of a company that you've worked with that talks about like what are they saying about the impact they're making? Can you give us some examples of that?
[00:21:52] Speaker C: Sure. Well, I would say, you know, the sort of number one case study that everybody points to is a brand like Patagonia, right? Where they.
Throughout the history of Patagonia, the reason they're one of the most beloved trusted brands is in the 80s they were putting out ads that said, do not buy this jacket, reuse your old one. Right.
They're putting messages out and then they're standing behind those messages. But their willingness to look deep at that impact is sort of what makes it sustainable long term for them as part of a brand. So in that example, part of what they said was, hey, we found out that our supply chain was not as clean as we thought it was. And the factories, like you said in the Ikea example, were not as clean or as upright as folks upstanding as they maybe were positioned to be.
And they didn't come out with a campaign that tried to pretend that wasn't real. They came out with messaging that said, we're going to do better, we have to do better. And our metrics that we're going to use to gauge that are going to be things like average wage transparency and living wage transparency that we take out from that we're going to push publish on our, you know, in our yearly report, we're going to start gathering numbers about which factories are above and below the benchmarks and what the plan is for each to get them to a level that we feel comfortable with. Right. So I would say that the specific metrics can be anything, right? It can be about your supply chain, it can be about the donations and, you know, how many, you know, trees you planted or, you know, recycled items were not put into the to waste.
It can be anything. But what I would encourage that it be something that people can really stand behind. Right. And that your company, whether you are for profit or nonprofit, can really stand behind that as a long term metric to be able to say, hey, our impact is going to be measured like this and we're going to tell you about it even when it's not great.
Because without that credibility, I think a lot of the audience starts to glaze over a little bit. Right? So if you are always saying our hope is to change the planet like this, well, if you actually just hitting batting a thousand and it's happening every time, then the chances are that metric's not really valid. Right. You need to be able to look critically at your impact and understand when you have more and when you have less of your desired outcomes and then learn from that, communicate that to your stakeholders internally and externally. So long winded way of saying, I think the specific metrics are less important. What's more important is that you have a few that you can commit to over time. And when I say a few, I mean two or three, not 30. Yeah, the more metrics you have, the easier it is to kind of gloss over and point to the one that's really good.
And if your goal is to, you know, plant trees that grow to 10ft and well, then you can't be talking about how many seedlings you put in place because your goal is to plant trees that got to 10ft. So how many trees happened to do that this year? You know, and there's a lot of ways to sort of fudge the numbers. And it gets easier to fudge the numbers if you have more of them. So long way of saying less is less is almost always more. When it comes to thinking about how to measure your impact, whether that's on the marketing side or the non profit.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Impact side, you have a, a 10 question, 10 favorite questions that you have on your grasp your impact.com website. And I love these questions and it's interesting because when I think about these questions through. We're not going to go through them all. People can go to the website and find them really easily. But one of the things that I like about it is question five says what you just said.
It's not what are all our KPIs, it's what are our primary KPIs. Which ones of the KPIs are reflecting brand strength, which reflects the activism and the outcomes and which reflect the revenue growth.
And I really liked that question even when I read it because it, it said exactly what you just said is. And I've seen organizations, even in strategic planning, they have so many KPIs and they confuse their KPIs with their objectives.
You know, the KPIs are just the indicators of whether or not you're achieving the objective. But what are the, what are those core objectives and which primary KPIs best tell the story? So I, I just wanted to reemphasize that. I really liked that and I love this list of questions.
[00:26:41] Speaker C: Yeah, we love the idea that, you know, when we do a workshop, little peek behind the window, it happens the same basically every time. Right. So part of this objective and KPI setting is that we start by talking with folks and trying to get a better understanding about what is their brand's objective? What is their nonprofit's objective?
And it can be dual.
Dual purpose, like we said it might be. Well, we want to sell ice cream and change the world.
But then I'm going to start asking harder questions like, well, what do you mean when you say change the world? Or what do you mean when you say save the planet? Or what do you mean when you say, you know, improve conditions for X, Y or Z? Right.
And what we typically do in those workshops is get as many folks from as many different facets of the organization as possible. Right? Because we want to have some leadership folks, but we also want to have some people who are actually in the trenches doing the work.
And we'll come out and we'll have groups split into some sort of smaller groups and we'll say, okay, come back with your 10 best KPIs that you think are indicative for this objective. And maybe that objective is about selling the thing. We'll say, okay, well, so you wanted to sell more T shirts.
So the objective is sell more T shirts. What are the KPIs that could roll up into that? And we'll have them just kind of give us a list 10 and then come back and talk about it with the other groups. And we go through this process where I'm going to eventually say, okay, now let's get rid of seven of those and you guys decide which seven we're going to get rid of and if they play a role in that. We say we determined we weren't going to worry about website visits because website visits is not as good of a metric as something further down the funnel for this specific, you know, sales goal.
So we're not going to look at website visits as a metric as a KPI. We're not going to look at it as a thing that says we're doing well or that we're doing poorly. Because there's a better metric that we all agreed was ranked higher in terms of how well it tied to that specific objective. And by stripping it out and sort of saying, no, we're intentionally going to kind of ignore those metrics. They might be contributing up into a different metric that we care about. But we're not going to start by measuring these success that we're having with the seventh ranked KPI that the groups come to with. And by going through that a little bit more interactively, we get to hear the different stakeholders say, actually, I think this is a much better way to measure the impact that we're having on sales or on the planet or on whatever. And it's not as much that there's going to be a perfect metric, but does everything amazing. It's more about that you pick a few that can be measured effectively and you look at them regularly and repeatedly and then, you know, be willing to change them a year later. But, you know, less is more. And when we get into to asking the questions, a lot of times what we're trying to do is get folks to realize that, yeah, those data points are really good and that dashboard is really pretty, but it's not going to tell us about the impact we're having on that specific objective. So let's focus in on the thing that is.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
Can you, I love frameworks.
Can you quickly walk us through what is the Grasp framework?
[00:30:04] Speaker C: Sure.
Well, it's a lot about what I just said, but put most simply, we start by creating an objective, a set of objectives, and we think about all marketing and communication as having a specific objective. And that seems obvious, but I would tell you that for most clients we work with, having clear clarity on the objectives is often the biggest hurdle.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:30:33] Speaker C: And so we typically try to start with two or three objectives and then we're going to assign those tags to literally every piece of, of content that goes out, every message that goes out, every email, newsletter, every follow on confirmation email, if they're selling stuff, every, you know, piece of social media content.
So to give you an example, a lot of times for these values forward brands, an objective, a set of objectives might look like Engage, Convert, and Discover, each of which have three very disparate purposes, but they overlap a whole lot. Right. So for Engaged, that's when we're looking at content that is designed to educate. So that would be where we really care about the depth of interaction. Right. So, so we want to know how much time did they spend reading the thing or watching the video or listening to the podcast, or how much attention was actually garnered from our target audience? How much time did we get an opportunity to get our message across, get our educational, to inform?
So that's Engage, Discover is often way more about just we need more eyeballs. Right. We want to get this message in front of as many people as possible. And we don't care so much about the depth of interaction. We care primarily about how many people we were able to get the message in front of. We're not going to worry in that discover phase about, you know, what, how deep, how much time did they spend with it?
You know, we're mostly convert concerned with did we get some more folks. Did it. Did the algorithm, you know, like what we were pushing it out. Did we get it in front of more people than we were hoping? And then we get to convert. That's just a very specific action when we know we want people to do a specific thing. And what's nice about starting with those categories is convert can be, did they sign this voting rights petition? Or convert can be, did they buy our product to get delivered to their house? Right now, it can be both things. And then we can measure KPIs. We set up KPIs in the workshop like I just spoke about, for that align to each of the three. So. So that we know the purpose of a piece of content that goes out in an engaged category with the objective of engage is not going to be measured by the same objectives or the same KPIs as something that's going out under discover. So what that means is if I am saying, hey, how many.
How many people signed our voting rights, signed up for our voting rights petition?
And so, okay, well, the number was 10,000.
Well, what the tendency is if you don't assign the KPIs and the objectives up front is that if the number was not the number you want it to be. So say maybe the number was 5,000 and whereas last year's was 10,000, there's an instinct to jump in and say, okay, well, could we.
Is there another piece of data that's going to tell the story a little bit better? Right? Well, but look how many thousands of new followers we had or how many visits to the website or, you know, how many people opened up our emails. Those metrics are not ones that are going to be ranked for our convert content. And so it prevents us from going down the path of looking at the wrong metrics to tell how well, to tell how good of a job we're doing with our purpose or our profits, right? And so when we build a framework, we're just basically trying to prevent glamour metrics from infecting everywhere we are, right? And so by defining that in advance as part of the framework, you just drastically increases the chances of success.
And I will say, honestly, when I say defining it in advance, I mean the framework. But also, just as human beings, if we have to decide what we want the outcome to be, there's a much better chance we're going to hit that outcome. And I would venture to say that most brands, especially honestly in the nonprofit space, when they're putting messages out to the world, there's no real objective for it. Right. It's like. Well, we put out our newsletter because we want folks to stay informed. Well, stay informed is not an objective. Right. The objective should be tangible and measurable. Measurable and stay informed is a really hard thing to just loosely measure. Right.
So just by deciding.
[00:34:58] Speaker B: That's a good point though, because visibility, right. Or, or what some people call image branding, reinforcing. You know, we used to hear that about billboards, right? The billboards don't sell, they just reinforce a brand.
They expand visibility.
I don't know how you measure some of those things, but are those, are those meaningful metrics in your world?
[00:35:24] Speaker C: No, not really.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:28] Speaker C: I would say that they're measured. They're, they're not meaningful metrics because we have better metrics today. Right.
I will, I will say there are folks who are really great experts in, you know, sort of physical billboard marketing, and we are not that. Right. I can't, I can't really tell you how to effectively measure that.
But what I would say is that, you know, if you're trying to gauge brand, what you're also, you're ultimately trying to do is understand either. Is there more brand affinity? Are people more excited about purchasing our brand? Are they, is there more folks who are willing to opt into being communicated with?
Is there folks who are spending more time voluntarily listening to our marketing messages, opening our emails, watching our videos, whatever it might be, coming back to our website, coming to our event if we're in a non profit space. Right. Like there's, there are ways to measure brand marketing and I just don't think that they're done very effectively when it's just big numbers. How many impressions did we get? How many, you know, that kind of thing?
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, it's, it's, it's. You can measure how many cars drive by a billboard. You can't measure how many eyes pay attention to it or for how long.
You. But you're right. In the digital space, you can measure so many more things more effectively.
Yeah. Let me ask you this.
I do have a number of questions opened up here and I don't want to take too much longer, but I mentioned my doctoral dissertation in, in my dissertation, what I, what I learned in my research, both the, both the secondary and the primary research, was that most non profits don't effectively measure their performance against their stated missions. I have a mission statement, right? Should enrich the lives of youth or to end homelessness or to, you know, you name it, most of them do. Are not effective at measuring their performance against their stated missions. And the reasons are numerous. Most of them just don't have well written mission statements. That's their biggest problem. Their missions are not measurable.
But they also, you know, there were things like, well, measurement, data collection and measurement and tracking takes tools, takes expertise.
A lot of times in the non profit world, foundations or funders that, that give them grants won't fund that kind of work.
And another is just we, we don't know how to do it.
We, we don't know how to make, we don't know what we're. So most of them don't. My, I'd say all that to ask in the for profit world, in your experience, how many, how many percentage or whatever, just ballpark.
How many companies or organizations would you say know what they're doing in this space versus not even, not even on the radar of these kinds of metrics and storytelling, data and story, the understanding around all that with their marketing and their missions.
[00:38:52] Speaker C: It's a very good question. I would say, honestly, I'm pretty pessimistic about it.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: I think I would be too.
[00:39:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say it's, I don't know, maybe 20% pretty effectively.
You know, the difference is between the for profit and the nonprofit space is honestly the for profit brands typically have more funds to throw at what seem to be solutions that often are just distractions. Right? And I could go on all day about my hatred for dashboards, but there are, they're really good brands who you and I buy from every day, who spend tens of millions of dollars a year maintaining dashboards that nobody ever looks at that don't inform any decision making, that don't inform impact measurement. Right. That are just a bunch of pretty things on a slide that are pretty like, you know, it feels good to look at it the first time, right? It feels like you're really controlling something.
But, but ultimately they don't drive much measurement. So I would say the for profit brands just have a lot more money to waste on the wrong things.
And if you don't have your objective clearly defined, just like it is in the nonprofit space, you can go searching for the right dashboard for the rest of your life. For a hundred lives. If you don't know what you're trying to measure and what you hope to do with the information, then a tool's not going to save you, a consultant's not going to save you, a internal team of data scientists aren't going to save you.
You know, you got to have clarity on what you want to do. And what impact looks like for you as your brand or as your non profit. And if you define it, sometimes the metrics are, they don't have to be Boisean, statistically driven software, double blind, you know, complicated things. Right. It can be that you say, hey, actually there's, here's a, here's a way we could measure it. Well, one way I like is, I'll give one example which is that we had a brand who, they have all the data in the world they sell. It's kind of like high end outdoor gear, right? So thousand dollar tents and sleeping bags and stuff, right. And when we went through the process with them, what's pretty clear is like they had an idea of their e commerce metrics because that's stuff that was being tracked a lot via a hundred dashboards. Said, all right, how many tents did we sell today? Is that more or less than yesterday?
Smiley face, right.
But they also had a pretty firm commitment to wanting to build their brand and to build the awareness of the stories that they had out in the, in the world about what this kind of gear could allow you to do.
Climb the mountains, you know, skydive, whatever. The thing is, right, the aspirational stories and, but they were a relatively new brand and so they were trying to figure out how do we measure the growth of our brand outside of the growth of the product. And what we ended up doing was instead of looking at big, you know, fancy numbers, we just looked at every piece of gear that they sold that didn't wasn't in service of a specific adventure. Right? So a branded T shirt that you wouldn't wear when you were hiking Mount Everest, Right. It was just like something where somebody was excited about the brand or this $2 stickers that people would add on to their purchase of a thousand dollar tent. Right? So we basically bucketed all these non tactical purchases into a really clear metric that they could look at on a monthly basis and say, how many brand lovers did we create last month? Right? How many net new purchases were there from new visitors of people who bought something that had our logo or one of our stories or one of our slogans that didn't actually help them climb the mountain? Or it wasn't a piece of gear, it wasn't a tent, it wasn't a sleeping bag, it was just an unrelated piece. And that metric is not statistically driven. It's really just a way to say, hey, we, we want to measure the growth of our brand and the people who are excited about advocating for it. So how could we do that. And in that particular case, which was five years ago, that was a really easy way to take a couple pieces of data and say, yeah, are we getting people to. If we just look at how many tents we're selling or how many dollars we. You're going to just be totally overwhelmed by the thousand dollar tents. Right. But if we said we're not really looking at the number of stickers that we sell as a, a revenue tool, but it is a brand tool. And so how can we use those, turn those numbers into something that tells the story a little bit more effectively about.
Are people excited to represent our brand or vice versa?
[00:43:48] Speaker B: You. So one of the things that I'm sort of realizing as we talk is that when you say storytelling and turning data into stories, often we think about that externally.
What's the story we're telling our clients, customers, supporters, whoever?
You're talking largely, if, if not majority, you can tell me you're talking about the story that it tells us internally. Like what, what, what are we learning from our data that informs our decisions and our marketing strategies and those things. There's an internal story that we often don't think about.
I'm thinking about again, many, many of my organizations I'm familiar with is we always think about storytelling as outward facing, about how many, you know, how many homeless families we got homes and how many.
How we're, you know, raising the graduation rate in our community.
But what is the internal data telling us and what story is it telling our board so that they can make strategic decisions? What story is it telling our program directors so that we can determine whether or not a program is even worth continuing to run?
So I don't know, I don't know if there's a percentage in the storytelling you're trying to create or help your clients with. How much of it is internal storytelling versus external storytelling?
[00:45:25] Speaker C: I think you're spot on. Honestly. I would say 9010 is. And it's not 9010 in terms of internal versus external.
[00:45:34] Speaker B: Internal. 90.
[00:45:35] Speaker C: Yeah. I would say where I find the data and insights to be most helpful is when you're using them to inform action internally, to expand your influence internally, that that ratio would change a lot if you're working with really, really small nonprofits where there's three people on staff or whatever. Right.
Because there's less of a chance that there's just big gaps in how people perceive the goals or the impacts or the successes that you're having. But if you have 100 people or a thousand people in your Organization, there's a really large chance that different people think the goals are different.
[00:46:18] Speaker B: And the shareholders, their dashboard is a different one than some of the program people or even the marketing people. Different audiences are honed in on different things that matter to them.
[00:46:35] Speaker C: Yeah. And if, you know, let's keep it in the nonprofit space for a little bit because I think the example works there too.
There's a foundation that I used to chair the board of and they do called I am Able foundation, and they are chartered to make fitness and the outdoors more accessible to adaptive athletes. So they could be wheelchair bound, it could be cognitive disabilities, it could be any number of things. And you know, what they didn't have a great feel on when we started rebuilding their brand was, yeah, we understand the goal, but what about internally?
Do we understand what the impact of the different initiatives that we have are? Right. And so if you don't have that information, you end up just reporting on how many funds you raise every year. Right. How many more funds did we raise? And I would say a perfect example there that ended up changing the structure of the foundation pretty drastically was it's very easy to measure physical purchases. And I would, I'm sure you have companies or non profits you work with who have the same challenge where, you know the old adage in nonprofit spaces that everybody wants to fund the building of a school, but nobody wants to fund a teacher to sit in it because it feels good to buy a physical thing. Right. To support my. Put my name, Dr. Patrick Jenks supplied this. This well in Sub Saharan Africa. And now people have water less sexy to support the ongoing maintenance of said. Well, right. And to say, oh, well, we're going to have a hundred dollars a month that goes to the maintenance of this well.
So anyway, in this space where we were working, what that ended up being was because we had such an easier time selling the stories of physical gear donations. Meaning I'm a handicapped kid and I want to try hand cycling. I want to try mountain biking with a hand cycle for the first time. And we would raise some money and we'd donate a $10,000, you know, hand cycle to these kids. And it felt really good.
People, we had no problems telling the story. Right. Here's a pretty picture of a smiling kid with a new piece of equipment.
But it didn't do a very good job telling about how that impact, how that money was spent comparatively to impacting kids through classes and through programming and through personal training and through group fitness. And what we learned pretty quickly was we had a hundred Times the impact. Literally 100 times the impact. When we funded a group fitness class for these same kind of kids. Or we got us a rental fleet of hand cycles so that kids could come and try it or adults could come and try it before they decided that they needed a $10,000 donation. Because for $10,000, we can run a lot of group fitness.
But in order to get internal buy in on the process, we really needed to be able to understand that impact. And so getting into numbers of things like hours of programming initiated or, you know, for your $10,000, we will impact 1,000 hours of, you know, adaptive kids. Right. Like being able to put some numeric numbers on the ongoing classes and the more soft, soft skills versus buying hard goods allowed us to shift the focus of the foundation to doing both. Right. Because otherwise we were always just putting a piece of gear out and saying, hey, who wants to help us fundraise for Jimmy's new basketball wheelchair? We would make the money, we would buy the wheelchair, and then it was over. We didn't have any visibility into if Jimmy actually loved playing basketball five years later. We didn't have a good feel on whether that story allowed us to go out and fundraise for other kids. But once we started looking at metrics that were more about the impact that we were having in the community versus rather than the purchase or the number of donations, it allowed us to shift how we thought about impact overall. And then thus the metrics that the sort of feed up in place.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: Well, you're all over the nonprofit world now with that whole framework.
And in outcome measurement in the nonprofit world, we call it the difference between activities, outputs and outcomes.
We're really good. The nonprofit sector is really good at telling the world and feeling good about the activities.
[00:51:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:51:21] Speaker B: And we feel really good about the number of people that we're, quote, serving.
What we're not good at is what change are we making with those activities for those people?
And so what's changed? What difference did we make for those. So again, outputs versus outcomes sort of thing, man, really, we could just go and go and go because we're, we're in a. We're in a world where this is, this is of interest to me, Great interest to me.
Data is.
Somebody said once, show me an organization's budget and I'll tell you what they care about.
You know, that's data nets and you. And it tells a story. An organization's financial statements tell a story.
I've told this story on this show before, but it's been A couple years, I think we was. I was at a workshop, one of Harvard's executive education, add on kind of things.
And it was about nonprofit strategy. And one of the components was financial statements. Nonprofit financial statements. Right. The balance sheet, the net income statement, and the cash flow statement. And we were given. We had a study group and we were given the financial statements of 10 nonprofits, all three documents for 10 different nonprofits. And we weren't. We didn't know the names were redacted on the financials, but we were given the list of the 10.
Our job was to match them.
And we had a CPA on the team who could look at a financial statement and go, ah, this one's the Boy Scouts.
We're like, how do you. How do you know that's the Boy Scout? This one is the Red Cross. This one is United Way. And he was saying, because look under the assets, under land and equipment, look how much.
Who owns a lot of land. Boy Scouts have all these camps, right? Or who operates on pledge receivables, promises of gifts. Well, United Way does to do these payroll deductions at the beginning of the year, and they're not paid till the end of the year or even next year. That's why their pledge receivables is so high instead of their cash or, you know, so it was.
It was the ability to look at data on a sheet and quickly turn it into a story. And I think that's what it sounds like. That's what you're trying to help organizations do. But more with. More with sort of the marketing and client engagement, you know, field.
[00:54:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I definitely. I love that example from. For our business for loosecript infographic.
I am a spreadsheet averse guy.
My brain just does not work. I'm sure there's a more articulate way to say it, but I look at numbers on a spreadsheet and it just makes me want to cry. It's not the way my brain processes information.
And so we have really great team who has done some financial forecasting and auditing for us on a biannual basis. And. And I'm always kind of saying, all right, we need maybe three metrics for running the success of this business.
And what was really interesting for me this year is we have always looked at our business under the guise of profitability and margins, net margins and growth and all that.
And it was really fun. She came back this year and said, hey, I want to add a metric. And you guys as a team struggle to market yourselves, to invest money in promoting the company.
So we're going to decide what that goal is in advance. And every month we're going to report on whether or not you spent that money the way you said you were going to. And as a, you know, not so much recovered, very cheap person, my instinct is to spend as little of money as possible on anything other than executing the work.
But by giving us a really clear and easy number to say, you said this year you wanted to spend 50,000 bucks on promoting the brand.
Are you on track to do that or not?
It changed my perspective. Instead of saying, we gotta find ways to spend less money and more of like, oh, we really should be investing a little bit more in promoting that piece of content or trying that new tool or doing that thing. And it kind of gave me the freedom to say, oh, if that's the objective, if the objective is actually spend a little bit more money in that space, I can create a plan to do that and do it a little bit more effectively. But I need to have somebody say to me, that's an okay objective to have. And so that's what we try to do. In that same way, when we talk to brands, we say, or nonprofits may say, you are going to decide what your goal and your impact is. And it may be that some of the metrics that we put in place might not necessarily tie directly to that, but we're going to say, how could we measure the path towards getting there? And if the path is, you know, trying new channels or, you know, testing and trying new message strategies or using influencers to get our message out.
Yeah, you might not always be able to say, and that generated 412 donations, which is an average donation, return of investment of X versus Y.
But you can say, we believe in this as a process, and so let's measure whether or not we're trying that. So at the end of the year, if you go, okay, well, our influencers are really big part of our donation strategy, our recruitment strategy.
If you don't know if you actually did the thing, then it's hard to measure or not whether you had the impact. Right. So the first step, a lot of times is sort of committing to the objective and then figuring out, can we do that thing or not? You know?
[00:57:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And d and debrief. How did it go? What did it get us? Do we want to. Are we on the right track or do we need to shift gears? I mean, that's even what strategy is all about.
I have a question for you about your clientele.
And then and then we'll get into our wrap up questions here.
Do you serve? I'm thinking of local mom, even mom and pop sometimes, but not even mom and pop, just local small businesses. They, they reside in one community.
They're not a franchise, they're not a national brand. You know, we talked about Dove and Ikea and all these.
Do you serve clients in that space too? I'm thinking back to my United Way days when I saw local companies who were really good at branding on their community engagement and contributions versus we just run an auto shop and, you know, make money.
Do you. So is that a part of your clientele? Do you work a lot with those kinds of companies? Are you more into the, the bigger brand work?
[00:58:25] Speaker C: I would say, I mean, full transparency. We're more into the bigger brand work and not necessarily for the reason that you would think, which would be money more. So the, our frameworks and our optionality for how we execute them are directly correlated to how much data these companies have. And so at the real local level, you know, if it's last week we had 57 widgets sold and this week there was 62.
It's hard for me to really glean a lot from that information and help you change how you might change your marketing or prioritize different things in your business. So there is just a kind of baseline threshold of statistical data that we need to operate our frameworks really effectively. And so at the small level, it just becomes really hard to do that.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm thinking of a couple of. So I'll give you two examples. Maybe, maybe there's an in between somewhere. So local companies, but the more sophisticated ones, for example, I'm going to name them out. Up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, there's a restaurant chain called Isaac's.
They do sandwiches and I think they're a brewery as well, but it's completely local. Was, it was founded by a couple of local people who cared about the community.
I don't know how, how much they are outside of the Lancaster community, but I think they're pretty much in Lancaster.
But they are, they're a big deal there. Like, there's several Isaacs shops. They're, they're very, they're always full. They're very, they, they're known in the community. Everybody knows them. They, they serve a ton of people and they do catering for all these, you know, organisms. I mean, I, I just couldn't go anywhere and not run into something Isaacs was doing in the community.
I don't know what data they collect, but I'm imagining that it's probably more sophisticated than, you know, a single mom and pop deli downtown.
[01:00:32] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. And I think what is probably more important than the size in the example you're giving is the clear. It's. Yeah, I don't know. Isaac's right, but I. It sounds like there's a pretty clear commitment to community involvement is very important to how they run their business.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:00:50] Speaker C: And that commitment is kind of the you know, prerequisite to do this really effectively, to be able to say not only we're not going to, you know, just post on Martin Luther King Day and on Mother's Day about our commitment to, you know, society, but this is something we commit to over time and repeatedly. And we can point to when we did it really well and maybe we can point to when we didn't do it as effectively. And I think that could certainly happen at the local level. It just requires that the company really believe in that message. Right. They believe in the ability to engage with the, the local market.
[01:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And to start with, they understand it.
You know, they, they, they under. I mean, you have to have even an understanding of, of what we're talking about here. But I just wondered because sort of what. Because, you know, the, the nonprofit listeners we have are all supported by businesses in their communities.
And I imagine, you know, their board members are all people who would care a lot about this stuff. So I'm going to do a couple things. First, I'm. I want to point to the two websites again for people to check out, particularly the grasp your impact. What I appreciate about that is the, the resources that you give there, but grasp your impact.com and the other one, the company named Lucy loosegrip.net you. I, I meant to ask you to tell us where the loose grip term comes from.
[01:02:19] Speaker C: Sure. Loose grip is a metaphor about, you know, a lot of activities. Golf, baseball, mountain biking.
You actually have more results when you loosen up your grip a little bit. So over gripping and over tightening actually results in less control and less outcomes. And when we think about marketing, especially on the digital marketing side, it's the idea of if you just let. Loosen up your control a little bit, you're likely to see better results.
[01:02:52] Speaker B: I love the analogy. I love it.
Neil, we really could go on a long time. There are two questions I like to ask all my guests, and the first one, because I love the stories, is who comes to mind as a leader in your life, whether you know them or not, even a leader in your life who's had profound impact on leadership and your view of leadership and why.
[01:03:19] Speaker C: Sure.
Well, actually speak to. You know, I referenced the I'm Able foundation earlier. The I'm Able foundation was founded by a buddy of mine, Chris cag, who is a disabled Marine who. Who sort of embodied for me a different style of leadership and not necessarily just in the rah rah. This is a great story of a Marine who is coming back to have a big impact on society, but just the way Chris could tell his story and does tell his story.
He's a guy who took adversity that he faced in his life and yes, he turned it into a successful nonprofit and thousands of kids getting kids and adults and wounded veterans and all kinds of folks getting access to care that they wouldn't have otherwise. An opportunity that wouldn't have otherwise. But what I learned from him was more on the storytelling side and he could turn a room of high functioning business leaders into a sloppy, tear driven mess just by telling his story. And he did it with such authenticity, does it with such authenticity that it really impacted how I thought about what impact looks like and how important storytelling is to it. He's just a great storyteller and by honing that message repeatedly, the impact that he had on the world was much bigger. Right. The the way he's able to continue to have an organization that is, you know, impacting kids every day is not a small part impacted by the idea that his narrative and his story and his journey and being able to articulate them clearly with excitement and, you know, motivation.
It changed how. How important I perceived all that stuff to be.
[01:05:21] Speaker B: I love that you selected someone related to storytelling and their ability to tell a story and how that inspired you because that matches what you're doing. Spot on.
Last question, Neil. If you had 15 seconds from the top of the hill with a megaphone and all the leaders of the world are at the bottom of the hill to hear the. The Neil Callanan 15 second sound bite on leadership. Right. The most important thing for all leaders to keep in mind. What would that be?
[01:05:52] Speaker C: I'm a big believer in empathy and, you know, both thinking about how important it is to get inside the shoes of the folks who you're serving, but also the folks who you work with day to day. I think a lot of our decisions are actually made by factors that aren't really so obvious to folks. If you don't take a step to say I wonder why that person is reacting like this or I wonder why we are unwilling to commit to this message or to this new tool and just taking a step back for me instead of trying to muscle through that as a leader and, and spend a little bit more time thinking through why somebody might be having that experience or that reaction. I think has really helped me both as a leader of folks on our team, but also just to understand how to influence those we work with regularly.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: Man, I love it.
Empathy. That's a, that's a good, that's a good takeaway word for the day. That, that and storytelling and data.
Lots of words.
Neil, thanks, man. This is some good unpacking.
A lot of it's over my head, if I'm honest with you, in terms of this marketing stuff.
But I'm, I'm glad there are people out there like you who know it and can help folks. So if you're interested in learning more, again, everyone go to grasp your impact.com and or loose grip.net to learn a little bit more.
And let's get better at telling our stories because I know the listeners of this program have amazing stories to tell. So let's tell them informed on good data. Neil, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Everyone, lead on.
