Join me and co-founder of Pond, Mitch Stein, to talk about the power of community building, the role of trust in doing business with nonprofits and what pink sherbert has to do with marketing.
Mitch is the founder of the online platform Pond that helps nonprofits and consultants connect. Part of his journey was building trusting and authentic relationships when trust was not a given. Join us to hear what he’s learned about building community and how you can apply it to your work.
To connect with Mitch: Pond
To connect with Mitch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchsteinpond/
Quote from Mitch: “Brand IS happening whether you’re intentional about it or not”
To find the Mom Test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hla1jzhan78
To sign up for Fund Your Strategic Vision visit: https://brookerichie-babbage.lpages.co/fund-your-strategic-vision/
Episode Transcript
RHEA 00:00
Welcome to the nonprofit lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong. Hey, my guess listeners. It’s Rhea Wong with you once again with nonprofit low down. Today, my guest is Mitch Stein, who is the co-founder and CEO of Pond.
RHEA 00:13
And we’re talking about tips for community building. So it’s gonna be an interesting conversation because Pond is actually not a nonprofit, but it serves nonprofits. We’ll talk all of about that. So welcome, Mitch!
MITCH 00:24
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really exciting to be here.
RHEA 00:27
It is so exciting to see you here because you’re one of these people who pops up on my LinkedIn feed all the time. And I was like, why don’t I talk to Mitch to be on the Pond? So before we jump into it, Mitch, tell us a little bit about your unconventional path to a nonprofit.
MITCH 00:42
Yeah, it’s a great way to start. I was actually just chatting to someone this morning, who was like, whenever I talk to people like you that are trying to start startups in the nonprofit space, I can’t help but get protected and think this is my world and you. And they’re like, but I get it.
MITCH 00:56
I get it. So I realized there’s always some of that head-scratching around how people got here. But no, I was an investment thinker for seven years. I worked at Goldman Sachs and a few different jobs there.
MITCH 10:09
But I was getting really involved in the nonprofit world just as a fundraiser and a board member at the LGBT Center here in New York. I joined their event cycle for the cause, the Northeast AIDS ride, which is a 275-mile bike ride from Boston to New York.
MITCH 01:23
I lost my uncle Marlon to AIDS. And so my dad and I joined that event together. And it was really the first big event I’d done in this world and just completely fell in love. And so it became this huge passion project.
MITCH 01:36
And I mean, it changed my life. It changed my relationship with my family. It was just really amazing to see the impact that community could have on, you know, on me, on my family, on the people around me. And I just knew I wanted to do more and be connected.
MITCH 01:52
I also got very frustrated with the technology platform they were using to run the bike ride. And I covered technology companies as a banker, not that that makes me a technologist. But I was at least familiar with the space and I was like, come on, there has to be something better out there.
MITCH 02:07
And as I learned and talked with the organization I heard about they were stuck in these bad contracts. They couldn’t get out of how much of a pain it was to find something new. And I just started asking around friends and people that other organizations.
MITCH 02:19
And it was just this shared experience over and over again, whenever I have to search for software or something for my nonprofit or a new vendor. It’s this huge rigor that more feels like we’re reinventing the wheel every time. We don’t really know what to do.
MITCH 02:32
These decisions take forever. And I just felt like there could be a better solution for an enormous market. And we all know the nonprofit space is huge. And it’s super fragmented, you know, in every local county across the country.
MITCH 02:41
And it’s fragmented on both sides of that market. Think about the nonprofit as the buyer, and then all the vendors that are buying things from to run their organizations. Those are also localized into different places, and that from a business perspective always screams, oh, this is an opportunity for a market that can be better organized into a digital platform.
MITCH 03:04
How much better would it be if this experience was travel or buying a car, the same as picking the vendors, and utilizing them to run your organization? Because today, it’s kind of a black box, and it’s really reliant on calling a friend.
MITCH 03:17
And we know that that leaves tons of room for poor decisions, and spending too much money. And just that lack of transparency. That definitely doesn’t benefit the nonprofits just trying to do the right thing and run their organizations well.
MITCH 03:29
And it certainly doesn’t benefit vendors that are trying to sell into the market. And it’s super, super challenging to go to market and kind of sell to this customer base. So that was the nugget, the idea, and the aspiration.
MITCH 03:42
I ended up deciding to leave my job after I’d pitched Goldman on a nonprofit banking product that they could build and actually got through this whole accelerator process. And I thought that was going to be my new life, my new job as a kind of product leader internally and an intrapreneur.
MITCH 04:00
And at the very last step, we didn’t get funded. And I was devastated, totally devastated because I had a taste of doing something really, really means that I was really excited about and then kind of had that taken away.
MITCH 04:11
And it was back to my pretty grueling job that I just started disliking more and more. And so I made a plan that was like, I’m gonna quit, and it’s gonna be in five months, and I’ll figure out the business. In the meantime. I know I can do something out there.
MITCH 04:11
People start companies all the time. Why couldn’t it be me? Of that naivete, I think you have to have as an entrepreneur. And so I put in my two weeks’ notice and I left and I had this whole plan.
MITCH 04:34
I had two partners lined up I was going to work with and beta test here in New York, and then the entire world shut down. There was this little thing that the pandemic that happened about five days after I’d left and so I ended up moving home with my parents in Indiana.
MITCH 04:48
I was supposed to be there for a few weeks. I was there for two years. I did the true startup in the parent’s garage slash childhood bedroom for a long time and am happy to go more into what we’re doing the fun and where we… But that’s the winding path that brought me to the nonprofits.
RHEA 05:04
Yeah, I’m so glad that you shared that because it’s never a straight line. And before we started recording, actually, I was telling Mitch that I had also thought about doing something similar, you know, starting a two-sided marketplace where vendors and nonprofits could find each other.
RHEA 05:20
And it’s really hard. I abandoned it. And I still think it’s a good idea. So I’m so glad, Mitch, that you’re doing it. And I wish we’d met earlier because then we could have chatted about it. But tell us really briefly about what Pond does. And then let’s talk about community building. So big picture, high level, what is Pond?
MITCH 05:36
Yeah, so it’s a lot like Angie’s List, but for all the business needs of a nonprofit. So just like you post a need for a handyman to mount your TV, we’re trying to create a similar environment where you can post a need for a new kind of software, a certain type of consultant, some training you need, and some part-time grant writer.
MITCH 05:55
Anything that I’ve just found the business investments in business needs that run the organization. So we work with bringing a whole host of those kinds of vendors over across a hundred different categories. We have several hundred vendors on the platform.
MITCH 06:08
And then nonprofits can come and post those projects. Vendors that aren’t in the relevant categories get alerted, so they can respond and tell you about what they do. And then you can send follow-up questions and bet them directly through the platform.
MITCH 06:20
So it gives us a super streamlined discovery and vetting process. And then we help along the way as people are meeting with folks. They give us feedback, who they’re liking, and who they’re not. If they need help pitching to the board or talking to another user of that product, or service.
MITCH 06:32
Those are all things that we kind of assist with to streamline the process. People also build up credits on the platform as they’re taking these meetings and giving us feedback that they just get as a cash rebate once they make a purchase decision.
MITCH 06:43
So really trying to streamline the process incentivize good engagement and feedback from everybody and make things cheaper for people on both sides of the market. Because like I said customer discovery is really hard and expensive for vendors too.
MITCH 06:57
And that’s the business model. When they win new business, we take a percentage of their new contract. This is kind of a standard referral or affiliate fee model that so many people in this space use. And then part of that is what we give as a rebate to the nonprofits to lower their costs for the service.
RHEA 17:13
Got it. So let’s talk a little bit deeper into this notion of community because one of the reasons why this model is really hard is that you’re building a two-sided marketplace. So as you’re thinking about how you’ve built Pond so far, what have you noticed are the specific characteristics of working or selling to nonprofits?
RHEA 07:35
Because I think you’re correct about this as my friends just Campbell and Cindy wagon, selected nonprofits is a different beast. So curious about your thoughts on that.
MITCH 07:43
Yeah. And it’s also so variable, right? And I mentioned this earlier about fragmentation. But people are also different in New York than they are in Indiana than they are in San Diego. And there are nuances about each of those markets, too, which are really interesting.
MITCH 07:56
But by and large, a lot of what I’ve learned and what we’ve learned as a team over the past two and a half years, and a lot of this, any kind of feedback or advice I’ll give in this conversation is just we’ve been experimenting, and learning and still learning.
MITCH 08:09
So definitely don’t have all the answers, but happy to share things we’ve observed or learned. I think there is an assumption from a lot of people that folks at nonprofits. They don’t know what they need, we need to we don’t have to tell them.
MITCH 08:24
We need to capacity build and tell them what they could use or tell them what they need. We’ve just always operated under the theory. And as we’ve talked with more people, most people know what they need, actually.
MITCH 08:34
And they know their problem. And that’s how we’ve tried to structure the platform where at the start, the starting point is you just share your problem. You don’t need to know exactly the type of vendor that you want. And you don’t need to know you don’t need to do all the work to go find them.
MITCH 08:49
But if we can lower that hurdle to just give people space to express the problem they’re experiencing and what they desire, we can bring relevant solutions to them. So that’s the first part that I think is a misunderstanding, is just needing to listen to people better and not assuming.
MITCH 09:02
Oh, they don’t know what it needs. Let me tell them that they need what I have, which I think is a trap that a lot of people trying to sell things fall into if they don’t start off listening. And I think nonprofits also get hounded by vendors.
MITCH 09:17
That was something we came up against really early on even though we were trying to be the solution to that and help them not have to engage with a million different issues that they get on LinkedIn or phone calls.
MITCH 09:29
I heard stories of people that disconnected their work phones because they got so many books, and lucidly got cold calls from vendors. And so that was one of the value props we thought we could provide.
MITCH 09:39
But we saw it was hard for us to not also seem like a vendor that was reaching out and grabbing their inbox or whatever. So I think that was part of why we landed on trust and community building as the most paramount thing we had to start out with not just because people would tell me, oh, just buying email lists and just start emailing people.
MITCH 09:59
And that’s how a lot of vendors go out in the space. And I knew we had to do things differently. So I think that desire for trust and that meeting to feel like my friend, or my peer is there too, and that the community is here, and that you’re a part of the community, you’re living into the values that we have as nonprofit staff, and leaders.
MITCH 10:20
And I think that that is so much more pronounced in the nonprofit space. They’ll trust me, and it’s why we’re talking about communities today because I need to feel like you’re in a community that really engages with you.
RHEA 10:32
It’s funny that as you’re talking, I’m getting PTSD, from my days as an ED and getting an inbox full of random cold emails and like, who are you? How did you get my information? You know, I was just like, delete, delete, delete, right?
RHEA 10:46
I was much more likely to filter on people that my friends had recommended than I was to ever open a random cold email. So let’s talk about this. Because actually, I think trust is the key here. When I think about nonprofits, it extends to so many things.
RHEA 11:04
It extends to the clients that we serve. It extends to our donors and our board members. And so it’s not surprising that we also operate that way with our vendors. How have you thought about or implemented trust as the centerpiece of your engagement with either your nonprofit partners or your vendors? Because it seems like you’ve done a great job of building that community. What are the tactics behind that?
MITCH 11:28
Yeah, I think first off was a recognition that even with your first question, how did you get here, because you didn’t come, you know, quote and quote, come from the nonprofit space.
MITCH 11:38
So a recognition that I had to be really careful and us as a team and be careful about coming in and being like, nonprofits need to do XYZ. Like a kind of preachy tone that I’ve seen a lot from other people or companies.
MITCH 11:52
And I think, you know, if you have worked in the nonprofit space for 20 years, then maybe you can do some of that call-out style content, which was never going to work for us. And so we started from a place of, again, listening and centering the nonprofit voice, and user in everything we did.
MITCH 12:11
And so all of our content was about lifting up the stories or struggles of real people that we spoke with, or real people I met with. And my role was more of a storyteller and sharing the challenges people have, and hopefully, how Pond is solving them.
MITCH 12:28
But then other people kind of see themselves in those experiences. And it’s not about us. It’s really about the community. And I think that’s a really big pillar of community building.
MITCH 12:38
It’s kind of mean to lose your, if you’re the host of that community, or you’re an organization or a company, you kind of wants to fade into that sort of like Homer Simpson into the bushes like fade into the background, to some extent.
MITCH 12:51
Because you really want to center the audience on what it’s all about. And so that’s, you know, we started a podcast series called the kid’s table. And that was because of all these conversations we’d have, it was this sense of people putting me at the kid’s table.
MITCH 13:07
This kind of chip on your shoulder, why am I less than if I work at a nonprofit? And just sort of naming that, and then empowering people to talk about it and acknowledge that, oh, wow, people are really missing out on all the value I bring to the table by putting me at the kid’s table.
MITCH 13:25
And that was really the tone of all the conversations we’d have. And we also did them by location. They started off in my hometown in Fort Wayne, where we interviewed 12 nonprofit leaders.
MITCH 13:36
And having that density within a certain area was really interesting because your listeners would span people that are in that community, as well as folks at nonprofits. But we would just hear from people that really changed how I thought about nonprofit work.
MITCH 13:50
I’m usually just getting solicited for donations. And it’s rare that I’m taking the time to understand the work from the inside and all the value they bring to it. And I think that humanizing helps lower misunderstandings or stereotypes that you may put about things.
MITCH 14:05
So all that work, I think, resonated with people to help us get over that hurdle of a baseline assumption. So you don’t know me, you don’t come from space. And so it had to be genuine and it wasn’t quick, and it’s still ongoing. I said earlier, I got that question this morning.
MITCH 14:20
So it still happens. But you just got to be consistent and keep showing up in that same way where your listener, like listening and then acting on what you hear and asking, you know how you can do better asking for feedback.
MITCH 14:33
I think, if you’re building community, especially if you’re starting as we did from scratch, I think that’s just the only way to be is you’ve just got to be super engaged in listening and acting on the feedback you get, and that that really builds trust for people.
RHEA 14:47
Okay, so you just said a lot there. I’m going to lift up a couple of things that I think are particularly important here. So number one is the value of being the guide.
RHEA 14:57
So within the nonprofit context, and I see this a lot is when nonprofits talk about themselves as the hero of the story. It’s very off-putting, I think we really need to position ourselves as the guide.
RHEA 15:11
And the hero is, can be our clients, the hero can be the donor, and the hero can be our volunteers. But the more that we can showcase the real stories of actual people where we are simply the Yoda, if you will, the more people trust us because we’re not out there talking about ourselves with an agenda.
RHEA 15:30
And the second thing that you said that was really powerful for me is the idea of value. Because I think so often in the world, nonprofits are not seen in the same way as the for-profit sector.
RHEA 15:42
And so and then we start to see ourselves that way, right? So one of the things I do a lot in training is talk about the value that our profits are bringing to the table. And I’m like, you’re not begging. You’re not a supplicant. You’re exchanging value for value.
RHEA 15:55
And once people actually realize that they do have value and be they’re allowed to claim that value, it just changes the whole paradigm, of course. You’re doing valuable things in the world. This doesn’t happen without money.
RHEA 16:07
But money doesn’t make the change without you. So that’s the second thing. And the third thing that I would love for you to talk about is this role as convener because I think at the end of the day, we all have to understand what value we’re bringing to the community.
RHEA 16:21
It sounds like your role values around convening people talk about how you’ve done that, and what the value you’ve seen has been for the community.
MITCH 16:30
Yeah, I think because things are so fragmented in the space, I also care about a lot of isolation. I think that people that generally are coming upon and seeking help on the projects, or they’re searching for. It’s because this thing probably landed in their lap that they had to solve.
MITCH 16:47
And most so many organizations are in that run-lean mentality. And so they end up being kind of on an island, even if they are in a larger organization, or they just are at a smaller one.
MITCH 16:58
And I think particularly during the pandemic, you just had a lot of people feel like they were dealing with really hard challenges, and they didn’t really have any help.
MITCH 17:07
Or that much like the oftentimes buy-in from their organization like these things just got put to the bottom of the list, but we’re really in high impact and important to them in their role.
MITCH 17:17
And so bringing that kind of audience together, you’re providing huge value by building bridges between isolated people that I just really love to start to see come alive.
MITCH 17:28
You know, we’ve done some of that through in-person events where we, you know, especially around podcast launch in that city, we’d like bringing the guests together, and then have other people come that kind of in their networks and each other. And we did one for our Philly season.
MITCH 17:44
And I remember there was like a table of four people that were like doing really similar work, one in West Philly, and one in North Philly, and like, they literally never met each other. And I’m like coming from out of town bringing these people together.
MITCH 17:57
And you see the power of that happening in person, we also see that happening on a local level. We’ve also seen that happening, you know, a series of at the beginning of the year, we started doing weekly panel discussions on LinkedIn.
MITCH 18:11
And you’d have people you know, the chats were just like lighting up every time we did one of those. And people would be meeting each other and starting to have conversations offline because they express a problem, and someone else would agree with it.
MITCH 18:23
And then they’d have a person to go talk to about it. So those micro connections that you’re seeing happening, really have butterfly effects in both expanding the value of your community and bringing more and more people into it.
MITCH 18:36
And you said the guide or kind of an anchor, you know, once you’ve met someone through another person, and it’s kind of always attached to that person or an organization. You always have an affiliation with that, which is positive. And I think that is huge and interest building and people just seeing the value that the community offers.
RHEA 18:56
You know, one thing that you said too, that I think really bears repeating is that trust does not happen overnight. And I think the mistake that people make, especially in fundraising, is that they rush to the transaction.
RHEA 19:10
They rush to the donation without having built trust and relationships. Talk a little bit about, like, how have you thought about the lead time in building trust.
RHEA 19:21
Because I think when we’re impatient when we’re in the transactional mindset, we just think like, I’ll put this thing up, I’ll like send out the letter and like all the people will give without having done the work. So talk a little bit about that.
MITCH 19:35
Yeah, I was chuckling because I’m thinking back to when April 2020, when I’m like trying to start this company. And kind of starting from scratch. I knew a few people in the sector, but definitely not a big network.
MITCH 19:49
And yeah, I can remember just getting frustrated, like things weren’t happening faster, and it felt like I was just having lots and lots of conversations and wasn’t going anywhere.
MITCH 19:58
But all that was building so much important groundwork by having like genuine conversations with people asking them what help they needed, like where their biggest challenges are, and then reacting to that, and the kinds of products you’re building just keeps people in your orbit and kind of expands it more and more.
MITCH 20:15
So it does happen really slowly. And I think, for anyone that’s starting from the ground up and community building, just like invest really heavily in those first couple relationships, because and then this is sort of just conventional startup wisdom like you would rather have 10 rabid fans that are just obsessed with everything you do than 1000 people that are like, oh, that’s cool.
MITCH 20:37
And so it’s tempting to think, okay, but I need 1000 people, but that’s just a few steps down the line. You really got to invest in those first few people that you connect with.
MITCH 20:48
And so that’s what I’ve always tried to do is, you know, especially when we were all just totally stuck remote and virtual, trying to keep that list of who are the people that have been engaged, been interested, keep giving them feedback.
MITCH 20:59
Keep trying to catch up with them, not in a pesky way. But just really investing in those relationships and seeing how I can help personally and that sort of translated to the company and the brand over time.
MITCH 21:11
So that is definitely one is to start small and invest in those people. And I just think that clarity of sort of your Northstar also really helps anchor people. So you know, if you’re just out there, I’m interested in nonprofit work.
MITCH 21:27
And so that’s just like when you’re new here. I want to pick your brain. So let’s hop on a call. Nobody ever wants to hear that. So the more specific you are, and sort of clear of like, I really want to solve this problem with how vendors connect how nonprofits connect their vendors.
MITCH 21:43
And I think there’s a marketplace solution. And I’m just trying to figure out how to do that. So anyone who’s lived that challenge, or that experience of like, the email full of spam, or the like building the Excel spreadsheet to compare a bunch of tools.
MITCH 21:55
They get that and it affects them on a visceral level. And so that they associate that with you. And they know that’s your thing. And so you’re being clear about that. That’s really, really powerful to be building trust with people. It’s not just because whenever someone reaches out to pick your brain, just even that offer sounds so transactional like I want to.
RHEA 22:15
Oh! And also like, I get these emails all the time. I’m like, that sounds painful, like having your brain picked, right? Because I think the thing that we want to think about is respecting my time, but also telling me what’s in it for me to offer some kind of value because my time is valuable.
MITCH 22:32
Yeah. And then the second thing, I always try to think about is just consistency. So it’s the clarity and consistency. And it doesn’t need to be like read and I don’t need to be trying. I don’t need to be trying to talk to you every week, or taking a bunch of your time.
MITCH 22:47
But things like LinkedIn or your newsletter, are just really powerful one too many ways to like and keep people up to date. Like we can talk more about LinkedIn because that’s just the specific channel where I’ve spent a ton of time and found a lot of interesting success.
MITCH 23:02
So many people read what you post, and even if they don’t like or comment on it, you will be shocked at how far-reaching it is because the content is pretty thin on the platform. So the more consistent you are, it really reaches a far audience than you think.
RHEA 23:16
Oh, you’re preaching to the choir. I think LinkedIn is the most underutilized platform. I tell everybody this and you know, all of my students are like, I don’t know. Like, it is a goldmine. So if you do not like money, stay off of LinkedIn.
MITCH 23:30
If you don’t like gold, then stay away from the goldmine. Yes, and the last piece that I would say, these are like the three pillars. To me, it’s clarity, consistency, and transparency or vulnerability. I think of that kind of interchangeable, and that’s different for everybody.
MITCH 23:43
And sometimes vulnerability is a privilege, right? People need to have the safety and security to be able to be vulnerable. And in a professional setting, you might wonder where the line is. So that’s a delicate thing. But the more people think the goal is proficiency as a human being.
MITCH 23:58
They want to have, they want to experience some empathy for what you’re doing or going through on a personal level, which is really important in like professional community building. And we can dig into that more, but I just think people have to see you as a human. If you want to trust, those are the three things you need are clarity, consistency, and transparency.
RHEA 24:52
Let’s talk about that. Because I think one of the things that I see again and again, with nonprofits is it’s almost like they’re scared to claim an edge or they’re scared to claim a strong personality or they’re scared to claim personal things are vulnerability.
RHEA 24:31
And I just think that’s what makes life interesting. So tell me a little bit about how you think about an authentic voice and being I mean, for lack of a better term, you know, a personal brand, right? I know it sounds so icky to say but you know.
MITCH 24:49
That is what it is and you know if you’re not in like a brand is happening. You can either be intentional about it or not, but the brand is the thing that’s happening.
MITCH 24:56
And I think that’s part of the challenge you pointed out in the nonprofit space, in particular, is it is hard for people, especially if you’re a founder, or an ED, or an executive of a nonprofit, I think it is really hard to establish personal brand outside of your cause and organization.
MITCH 25:14
It’s like, do I sound like I’m not 100% in on the mission if I’m talking about something else? And there’s sort of this anxiety about being a human outside of the job that, you know, you feel like people, that’s all they care about, especially in a space at LinkedIn.
MITCH 25:29
But you’re so right, I think, my approach, as I’ve always just been, even when I was in finance, I was probably like, always pushing the envelope a little bit on like, not, not adhering to all the norms or not, like, you know, I wasn’t interested in fitting into all the stereotypes and like, marching to the beat of my own drum.
MITCH 25:49
But even in a place like that, that’s what draws drew clients to you. And that’s what made people want to sit next to you at the dinner, right? Which is, that’s like how you succeed in that field and build relationships. So I think I got a hint of that when I even when I was working in banking in a relatively buttoned-up world. So I just felt once I was doing my own thing, and I was just out in the open and in the wild. I was like…
RHEA 26:11
On the while, I’m a free range, Mitch.
MITCH 26:15
Yeah, I was a free-range. Mitch. I had never used LinkedIn before. But all of a sudden, there was probably a specific post, I saw, I had a friend who started a nonprofit called Project Health of Healthy Minds.
MITCH 26:28
And it was all about mental health resources for the masses, like making it really clear what’s out there to help with different mental health challenges and structuring it as a nonprofit, but kind of operating like a tech company.
MITCH 26:40
And we just had a bunch of interesting conversations on mental health. And I was like, well, that’s a starting point for me. I’ve struggled with anxiety for most of my life, and I’ve been in therapy, and I’ve gone through a lot of hardships dealing with these things.
MITCH 26:52
And so I just got out there. And every Monday, I’m going to do a mental health Monday post. And this was still a pretty big pandemic. It was December 2020. And so I just think people were like, I feel the same way.
MITCH 27:04
I’ve never seen this in my work feed people talking about this, sharing real stories, and doing it in a thoughtful way. And it’s not like you’re not glamorizing trauma or things that rubbed people the wrong way. It’s just like a genuine real experience.
MITCH 27:19
And as people react to that, and gauge that. It’s sort of like kept extending my rope in a way where I was like, oh, cool, like, I sort of got bandwidth to talk about a lot of things. And I can be pretty upfront about, you know, what it’s experiences of discrimination I’ve had as a gay person in different settings.
MITCH 27:34
And that really resonates with people. And they want to hear more of that. And it invites other people to do the same. And so that is what’s been really interesting for me about honing in on my authentic, professional, yet authentic voice, which is an interesting balance to strike.
MITCH 27:51
And so what I do, just practically speaking, tactically, I love writing. So for me, writing is an outlet for some people that is a chore. And so the idea of posting on LinkedIn a bunch is really overwhelming to them.
MITCH 28:03
And that’s okay, you can find your own, either your own pace, or what you like to share what you like to do. Me, I love writing. And so what I’ll do is, I’ll just, I don’t overthink it. I’ll just start writing things out. And the concept of a LinkedIn post for me, it’s a good framework.
MITCH 28:18
It’s like the length and I know the pace of it, and how I like to write it. And so it’s just a good way for me to get thoughts down, and I try to just be nonjudgmental, and then I like let it sit for a minute and come back and be like, oh, that might be like, a little harsh.
MITCH 28:30
Like, what’s, who’s this benefiting? That’s a question I always ask. If you’re going to try to be like, a little spicy or aggressive, like, who is it serving? Is it really serving someone? Like, are you just trying to ruffle feathers for the sake of ruffling feathers?
MITCH 28:42
Like, that’s the kind of the second review, I’ll do. And then I just sort of structure when I want to post that or when it will be well received?
RHEA 28:50
Well, I just want to highlight this here too, because I say this a lot. If you’re unwilling to turn someone off, then you’re not turning anybody on. And I think so often, we can be fearful about, oh, what are they going to say, or people aren’t going to be offended?
RHEA 29:05
Or are my funders going to be offended that we pick this very sort of vanilla, middle-of-the-road thing? And actually, personally, I can speak about this. I wrote a piece. It was very personal after the post roe decision.
RHEA 29:18
I got some spicy email responses. But you know, to that end, first of all, you can unsubscribe, and that’s fine. But secondly, it was my personal story, right? If I wasn’t making any kind of comments about what other people should do or not do and the day, haters gonna hate. You just got to keep going.
MITCH 29:39
Yeah, someone’s that happened. I can’t remember the first time someone wrote a kind of nasty comment on a post I’d written or something. And someone was like, well, that’s when you know you’ve made it.
MITCH 29:50
Like once you get haters, that means you’re doing something worth disagreeing with, and I that just sort of stuck with me and it’s really important for community building, by the way, having a north star being clear, being vulnerable, that’s all related to like being authentic so that you’re drawing the people in that you want.
MITCH 30:06
And then they’re really engaged and feel seen. And you actually want the people that don’t fit out like it’s okay. You don’t want them in your orbit.
RHEA 30:14
Yeah! 100%. What do they say good marketing attracts great marketing repels? Like, if you’re not my people, I have to have a message and a vision that is very clear, like a beacon to my kind of people. And if you’re not my kind of people, then you know, right away. This is not for me.
MITCH 30:32
It’s hard. I think if you’ve been in a nonprofit, or you’ve been in a big company, there’s a lot of similarities of you don’t want to offend like you want to, like, you don’t want to upset a client or a donor or anything like that.
MITCH 30:43
I’ve been there. And you know, so many people I’ve talked to have been there. Someone who is described to me in a way that I’ve always loved is there like they call it the pink sherbert theory. And it was in relation to email marketing.
MITCH 30:57
And they were talking about how unsubscribes are a good thing. If you’re, like, unsubscribes are happening and your open rates are going up. It’s like, good. You’re like honing in on the right audience. But it’s hard because the first couple of times you’re like, you’re unsubscribed from me.
RHEA 31:09
I know. I know you can’t take it personally.
MITCH 31:12
I just had to stop looking at it. But the point was, if you’re vanilla, meaning people might not unsubscribe, but they stopped reading it, then it’s no point if you don’t want to be palatable to everybody. But if you’re a pink sherbert, some people are going to really not like that.
MITCH 31:27
And that’s totally fine. As long as you are like, finding those pink sherbert diehards, and it’s something you’ve seen in really successful community-building platforms, things like Reddit and discord. It is so cool to see the power of like, diehard fans around certain cause areas.
MITCH 31:47
But what people might not appreciate is they think just having the cause or just saying the thing means that the community comes to you. Someone I spoke with manages a pretty large Slack community for an HR tech company, but they’ve got 20,000 users.
MITCH 32:03
And they were like, what people get wrong is they don’t think about the community as its own product. That is its own line of business. And you need to give it the same kind of attention and think about it in the same way. What’s the pain point you’re solving?
MITCH 32:17
What’s the solution you’re offering, right? Like all the same ways you evaluate a new product or new business line, you need to have the same level of intentionality around your community and how you’re engaging.
RHEA 32:27
That’s so good. Let me ask you this. To go back to something that you said because I think, we think about early adopters as rabid fans. I talk a lot about your 1000 true fans, it’s important to nurture those relationships, but how do you nurture them at scale? Right? Because you’re a small shop, folks listening to this are all in small shops. What’s your solution?
MITCH 32:50
Yeah, there is no perfect answer, because you’d love to just clone yourself. And any advice needs to be weighed against like, also take care of yourself. You don’t want to be working 24/7. Then you’re not gonna be serving anyone.
MITCH 33:02
So I would give those caveats. But a couple of things that I’ve always tried to do is set some time, intentionally set some time aside, when people comment on my posts. This is just like, again, the LinkedIn example.
MITCH 33:16
You can translate that to your setting. But for me, if someone comments on my posts, I’ll set time aside to go through and like, and respond back to them. So it’s a light touch thing, but you’re still nurturing that relationship where someone feels engaged with, not to mention, it usually helps their host performance when there’s back and forth conversations happening.
MITCH 33:36
So it’s just good in general. But the same thing can happen with an email update that people respond to and respond back to them. Don’t let that just sit in your inbox. So I think some of those little things go really long. And if you do have, obviously, maybe not 1000 people.
MITCH 33:51
But if you’ve got a shortlist, I do think setting reminders of like, who are some of your closest advisors or just really meaningful members of your community, set some reminders every three to six months to make sure you check in with them.
MITCH 34:07
And you know, that’s not that big scale, but you can at least automate it so that you can do that with more people. So I just think that communication and personalization, wherever you can do it, it’s great. And just kind of an easy answer.
MITCH 34:18
But social media and I just don’t like social media and email newsletters as the way to do these things at scale. When you are being vulnerable and personal and human in those channels, it makes people feel like it’s more personal to even it helps.
MITCH 34:33
I think to keep and build that rapport, where they feel like I can’t tell you the people I’ve met that have been like, well, I feel like I already know you because I follow you on LinkedIn.
MITCH 34:41
What an amazing thing to hear from someone to know that you’re doing a really good job of communicating what you’re about and what you do, which that’s the personal brand piece is it’s not just what you do. It’s what you’re about as a person that you can really cultivate people over time, and that’s very scalable.
RHEA 35:00
Yeah, I’m gonna double click on all of it. And I’m going to add something that I tell all my clients, little notes. I have built my entire career off the back of a few notes. Do not underestimate the power of the handwritten note. Your mom was right.
RHEA 35:14
Because especially these days, all I get in the mail, it’s crap, right? I just get bills, and I get crap. What an amazing actually, someone wrote me a thank you note, a handwritten thank you note last week, and I was like, this is incredible.
RHEA 35:29
I’m really going to remember that. So it takes a little 10 minutes out of your day. But it’s worth doing. Two more questions for me. You’ve talked about experimentation. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by experimentation?
RHEA 35:41
What sort of things have you experimented with as far as community building? And how did you determine which things you double down on and which things were not going to be for you?
MITCH 35:51
Yeah! it’s so important because especially if you’re a social person, and extroverted, a lot of these things in the community building realm, you could just want to do because it’s fun. And at the end of the day, like, sure, do things that are fun in your own life.
MITCH 36:05
But when it comes to your business or your work, yeah, it’s great when things align with being fun, but that shouldn’t, that cannot be a reason for doing something. Your time is way too valuable. So it’s the same thing with like, oh, we’re gonna get into Tiktok.
MITCH 36:16
Because it’s fun. It’s like, okay, it can be fun and needs to have a business purpose. And otherwise, for what? You know, they always come back to that question.
MITCH 36:25
So I think the important thing is setting up a goal and a timeline of like, hey, we’re going to try this for X amount of weeks. And we want to see this kind of growth, or this level of participation, or this kind of sharing, or like, whatever your metric is, to what’s most important for you and your community building to see if you carry it forward.
MITCH 36:46
And be pretty vigilant about like, it’s tempting to think there’s a sunk cost like, oh, well, we’ve already spent a month like building up our Instagram presence, and we’re going to leave it behind. I mean, I think that’s oftentimes the smartest thing you can do.
MITCH 37:00
And so especially around marketing, and all of our marketing was basically in growing audience and engagement, we would have a month long. I can remember when that didn’t work we did we really wanted to build a YouTube presence there.
MITCH 37:12
Okay, this month, we’re gonna put a lot of time into taking some of our video content, and splicing together different segments around shared topics and making them super digestible.
MITCH 37:23
We’ll give people extra pawn credits for subscribing to our YouTube channel and these different ways to promote it, and we’ll share it across our different channels ever. We couldn’t we were like, as long as we get to 100 subscribers this month, then we’ll know what we hit success.
MITCH 37:37
And we got 44. It was just like, we weren’t seeing people watch the videos. And those things take time. Obviously, they take investment. But for us, it was sort of like, we didn’t hit an initial goal. It was time-consuming.
MITCH 37:51
And it doesn’t seem to be something that people are like jumping all over from our established audience. So we’ll move on. And I think that I always appreciated that willingness to experiment and then respond honestly to the results.
MITCH 38:03
One thing that did work really well was we hadn’t established a formal, weekly email newsletter, because we were like, what has something to say? I don’t want to just be, emailing people for the sake of emailing people.
MITCH 38:15
And so we started that in December because we’re like, we also want to try doing some webinars. We did a survey of our audience, literally one year ago, right now, and ask a lot of different questions. But one of them was, have you attended a nonmandatory professional webinar in the last six months?
MITCH 38:38
And 95% of our users had, we’re like, okay, this place these people like webinars. It doesn’t matter if I like them or not, it matters what the audience likes. And so we’re like, okay, well, we wanted to do a webinar. We need a way to market them.
MITCH 38:52
Let’s try to set up some email marketing initiatives first. And then one of the first things we can promote is our first webinar a month later. And so that was the sequence and it worked really well.
MITCH 39:03
And we were seeing open rates go up, subscribing rates go up, and attendance at our webinars go up, and we were doing them every week. We ended up continuing on for six months, weekly, until we decided to try just some different models.
MITCH 39:17
But over that time period, we set out a goal. We had reasons why right? It wasn’t just like a random guest. We got data that said this is important to our audience. We invested in it and we’re intentional. We didn’t rush into it. And then we continued to respond to what was working or what people like.
RHEA 39:36
And what you say is so important that I think a lot of nonprofits maybe forget that you have to be responsive to your community, right? Because I think so often, we get to think these ideas like oh, people are gonna love this.
RHEA 39:48
They might or might not but gathering the data and actually serving the audience. I say this a lot like I can’t buy something online without getting a survey in my face. Rarely does that happen with nonprofits? I think as nonprofits, we have to be willing to survey people and ask for opinions, maybe 10% of the people respond, but you’re getting data.
MITCH 40:10
Yeah, I think surveys are powerful. Nothing’s more powerful than like one on one conversations. And it can be so hard because you want to bother people who don’t want to bother a donor again.
MITCH 40:20
But combining data with anecdotal stories and evidence is really powerful because it just brings that human element in. And if you just get people talking, that is so valuable. And I think, on the art of how to ask, and I’m not an expert of this all, but I’ve tried to get better at it.
MITCH 40:40
The art of the user interview is really amazing when people do it well. And even when you try out some of the strategies, it’s really interesting to hear what people say. I mean, even recently, I’ve been trying to do some user interviews with funders, or people, major donors, people that are kind of on the funding side of this market.
MITCH 41:00
We sit between nonprofits and vendors, but we’ve had some conversations with funders that might be able to actually provide capital for projects people are seeking to fulfill on the platform.
MITCH 41:09
That would be interesting. But we want to make sure if we’re doing that or pursuing that, that we’re not just for one person that asked this one question.
MITCH 41:17
We want to make sure there’s some shared need or problem or pain point we can solve on the funder side that makes that transferable and scalable in the space of why they would come upon to do this thing.
MITCH 41:28
But through those conversations, it’s been fascinating to just not say that not like, hey, what you’re thinking we’re doing this thing? What do you think? And I did a lot of that when I first got started with a startup. I was just, you know, early on, where I would say, hey, I’m gonna build the Expedia for nonprofit vendors, like what do you think?
MITCH 41:45
And be, like, great, you know, and there’s a great book called the Mom Test that I send to everyone who I talked to about this. But it’s the whole premise is you don’t go to your mom and say, like, mom, I’ve got this great startup idea. What do you think?
MITCH 41:57
Because what is she gonna say? Like, oh, that sounds great. Sweetie, you can do anything. But you want to be like, hey, mom, like, I know, you cook dinner every night, how do you find your recipes? Oh, and like, when have you found the best recipes? When was the worst?
MITCH 42:09
When was the best? When was the easiest? Or, was it harvested to actually make the thing? Or you know, so you’re getting at, like an idea for a new recipe app or whatever. But it’s from her sharing her experience day to day, and you just want to get people talking.
MITCH 42:25
And I think you can do the same thing with donors, you can do the same thing with employees. mean the same thing with board members, like anyone where you’re trying to solve pain points, you can’t just ask. Well, tell me your pain point.
MITCH 42:37
The nuggets of information you get from people just like starting to talk, it’s so valuable. And you know, those conversations are going well. If I’m talking very little, that’s like should be the goal whenever you’re doing that kind of interview.
RHEA 42:51
I love that. I just think there’s an interesting creative tension through here too. Because yes, you want to be solving people’s real pain. And they also think about, you know, the Henry Ford thing, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
RHEA 43:04
Right? So I think there’s some art and science around really designing for people’s problems, but also seeing a bigger vision that they may not even know that they want or need.
MITCH 43:19
Yeah, and that is great. That is the exact reason why you can’t just say what’s your pain point. You got to like ask more contextual questions. The one with whom I loved asking donors what is it like Grade A donation experience, like for you. And like, when has it not been as good? And then I was interested to hear from so many people that they generally didn’t have great user experiences donating.
RHEA 43:44
Oh, my gosh! That is a whole other conversation. I 100% agree. And then people wonder why their retention rates suck?
MITCH 43:54
Yeah, that’s because again, it’s hard to do at scale. So it’s like all these the community building translates so directly both to like stakeholders or clients or people you’re serving with your work and your donors and sometimes together.
MITCH 44:06
But you can’t do it. It is a product in and of itself. So you need to identify who are you serving with this community, and then really get to the problems that we’re solving, and then be authentic, engaged, or in participant in the content around that community.
RHEA 44:21
All right, Mitch, we’re at a time. This has been such a helpful conversation. I’m going to make sure that we put up Jjoinpond.com in the show notes. Are you okay with folks connecting with you via LinkedIn?
MITCH 44:31
Please! I am generally very loud on there for the written platform. So love to love to chat with people and engage and feel free to connect there and look forward to seeing more of you.
RHEA 44;44
Great! And we’ll also make sure to put in a link to the Mom Test because actually, it’s very useful. So thank you so much. Mitch. Thanks for all you do. Good luck with Pond. I’ll see you on LinkedIn.
MITCH 44:55
Sounds great. Thanks for having me.
RHEA 44:57
Thanks!
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