Social media is a modern-day jungle. If you don’t know who you are and what you want to say; the algorithms will eat you for breakfast. So what choice do non-profit folks have if we want to be heard above all the noise?
Please, don’t tell me I have to dance… PLEASE don’t tell me I have to dance…
Not even a little, my non-profit fam!
For your sake and mine, today I’m joined by the marvelous Tania Bhattacharyya, founder of Lumos Marketing Co and host of Campfire Circle Podcast. She’ll tell us all about her experience in the non-profit world and her unmatched storytelling prowess on LinkedIn. Tania teaches underrecognized social impact leaders – coaches, consultants, service providers, and nonprofit execs – to build top of mind trust and community by sharing their stories on LinkedIn.
“What’s beautiful about building a personal brand as a non-profit leader is you get to pick the audience that … lights you up and that you were put on this planet to make a difference for. And so often it is the person that you once were or still are. It’s the person that you can become a guide for because you have trudged through that journey yourself and now you have some nuggets of expertise and advice and wisdom to pass on.” – Tania Bhattacharyya
Tania champions the idea that you can be consistent and “lazy on LinkedIn” and still gain traction with people you want to meet. It’s all about resonance versus reach, and I can’t wait for you to soak it all in!
Get ready to hear practical tips for building your brand and cultivating legit relationships on LinkedIn through thought leadership–without doing a song and dance or an endless stream of meaningless content.
Important Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tania-bhattacharyya/
https://lumosmarketing.co/podcast
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
Episode Transcript
RHEA 0:00
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, podcast listeners Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m super psyched because today my guest is my friend Tania Bhattacharyya , who is the founder of Lumos Marketing, and we are gonna talk about LinkedIn as a vehicle for your nonprofit organization. And personally, LinkedIn is my main vehicle, so I’m excited for this.
Tania, welcome to the show.
TANIA 0:32
Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat. I’ve been like a longtime fan and so this is just awesome. Thank you for having me on the show. Oh my God.
RHEA 0:40
I have been a longtime fan of yours. So funny because we have so many friends in common. I was like, why are not already friends?
It’s so weird.
TANIA 0:47
I know. And then you were in Japan. My favorite place. Oh my God. And you were just doing all the things I like to do. I was like, we need to be besties.
RHEA 0:53
Besties. I know. And also I’ve been talking a lot about having a business bestie. So we’re in a little crew you, me, Brooke Richie-Babbage, I’m name checking everyone.
Jess Campbell. Cindy Wagman, Rachel Bearbower. And we’re like hanging and doing the thing, so Yay. Yep. Yay for friends.
TANIA 1:10
Yay for friends. We’re learning. We’re doing, we’re supporting each other. We’re acting as, each other’s little bubble wrap as we go out and do big things. It’s so helpful.
RHEA 1:18
Yeah, totally.
Okay, you are the only member of the crew who’s not been on the podcast. So here we are. Before we jump into the strategies, ’cause you are just such a genius at brand building and thought leadership on LinkedIn. Tell us about yourself. How did you get started? And I know you, like all of us were in the nonprofit world and figuring it out for the first time.
TANIA 1:39
Yeah, figuring it out is a great way of saying it. I was figuring it out on a daily basis and I fell into the nonprofit world by accident. I was still in, Undergrad student at uc, Irvine getting my degree in psychology. It was 2009. The economy was struggling around us and I was like, lemme go find a job.
And my first interview happened to be at this incredible organization where, spoiler alert, I ended up staying for 12 years and it was a woman’s addiction treatment center. Sounds familiar. Yeah, I know that sounds familiar, right? But I didn’t know a lot about I was like, Bambi.
I didn’t know much about anything. I was passionate, but I didn’t know how to harness that into fundraising. And so when I was there, one of the first things that I did was learn how to help folks tell their story in a, in an ethical way, in a supportive way. I would sit with our alumni. And I would work with them to rewrite their recovery narrative and , we’d work together and I’d ask them questions to move from a place where their story was still filled with a lot of trauma and shame and guilt to a story that was really more rooted in their resilience and their courage and their hopes for the future.
I saw how having this new story for themselves really influenced and changed the way they advocated for themselves in their lives, in their jobs, sometimes in the court system, with their families. And that really inspired me and that really showed me that the story that we have about ourselves is so deeply related to the story that other people see us around.
I grew in the company. I, eventually became the executive director of our foundation. And I realized I have a story too, like I am experiencing this. Nonprofit, I’m experiencing what it’s like to be a young woman, brown leader here in Orange County. And of course the stories that I get to experience just being at the facility.
It’s not up to me to tell our patient stories, but it is up to me to tell my stories, and so I challenge myself to tell one interesting story on LinkedIn each week and, it just became a habit. It was interesting ’cause I did this for a couple weeks and I felt like nothing was happening.
But I kept at it. I know that Rome wasn’t built in a day or whatever. So I kept going and before long, I’d say after about six weeks, and definitely after about a quarter, like for sure, after about a quarter I. People started reaching out to me to, ask about our fundraising breakfast.
I was invited to PR opportunities without pitching. We would get organic referrals from doctors and interventionists and therapists in terms of patients. Just through sharing our stories and top of mind awareness. And so even though we were a pretty small shop under $5 million organization, we grew a really large voice over time because, LinkedIn is where the movers and shakers are.
It’s where we can access these folks who otherwise are gate kept and unaccessible. That’s a little bit of my story of how I got into this. Yeah. Oh my gosh.
RHEA 4:23
I wanna unpack so many things that you just said. Okay. I do think that this notion of storytelling can be triggering for people because I do think a lot of us, especially nonprofits, have been.
Either the recipient of, or even the generator of, poverty porn of stories that kind of play on a lot of the tropes that tell stories that don’t put the people that we serve in the best light. How did you move folks from telling the story of trauma and shame and, pain to stories of hope and resilience and power.
TANIA 4:55
That’s a concept that I’m sensitive to, ’cause I worked in the mental health and substance use disorder space, and especially for women and especially for pregnant women, which was the community that we served. The stigma was so deep and entrenched and high, especially back in like 2009 and 2010 when I started working there.
And so I was very cognizant of making sure that this wasn’t a a, What did you call it? Pain porn or
RHEA 5:18
trauma Porn. Poverty porn. Like trauma poverty porn. Yeah. Traumatizing poverty porn. Yes. Yeah. Yes,
TANIA 5:24
Yes. Really, I think it’s about rooting our story.
Not so much in the drunk logs, not so much in the active addiction piece. Yes, that for a little bit needs to be mentioned, I think, to frame the story. But I think most of the story becomes about the transformation. It becomes about what they learned, what, societal pieces.
They unlearned how they’re helping each other. I think the most important thing is now how they’re supporting other people in the situations that they once were themselves, which is such an important piece of recovery. By helping others, we keep our own recovery. I think the story ends up becoming very much framed in transformation and what is my vision for the future?
What is it that my recovery allows me to do, help other people and be of service, so I think that was a big part of it.
RHEA 6:07
Yeah, I love that so much. I think about it in terms of challenge, choice, outcome and Erica, Carly, who I think, talked about how to use story as a gift back to people.
So I think that’s so powerful. And it’s interesting you say, because I think so much of our own success is about the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re capable of in the world. Okay, we’re gonna jump into the nitty gritty details. Let’s talk about LinkedIn as a platform versus the other ones.
’cause as an ed, I’m sure you were there too. You’re like, I’m super overwhelmed. I could do LinkedIn, I could do Facebook, I could do Instagram, I could do TikTok, I could do Twitter. There are so many possibilities. For a minute. There was Clubhouse. I don’t know what happened to Clubhouse,
So of all of the different platforms that we could do, why did you choose LinkedIn?
TANIA 6:52
It’s like Ariel says I wanna be where the people are, right? I wanna be where corporate sponsors and the program officers and the congress people, and the referral sources, are, , and I would never, reach out to a congressman on Instagram.
First of all, I know that it’s gonna be a team member of theirs if they do reach out at all. That’s not what Instagram in my opinion, is. For, whereas LinkedIn was actually designed and built and the algorithm was created for building deep business relationships. I also loved LinkedIn because still now today it’s still pretty unsaturated.
There’s this stat that, 3% of people of active users post their own content, and so that means that there’s a lot of. People on LinkedIn who are lurking, who are watching, who are building trust in your solutions and not necessarily ever saying anything about it. And so I think oftentimes people can get dissuaded from using LinkedIn ’cause it feels like nothing is happening.
But the reality is the people that you most wanna be in front of, like these people who can be so influential to your nonprofit as a donor, as a community builder, as a potential board member. There’s so many different categories that our LinkedIn people could become in our world. They’re there watching.
Another piece is that LinkedIn is actually a trusted site in and of itself. I knew as a young woman, ed, I wasn’t gonna have to sort through weird, funky, invitations to go on dates. It was just a professional safe. Civilized platform. It’s sustainable, like you said, like what happened to Clubhouse, right? Versus LinkedIn has, is actually older than MySpace. It is. I. Oh, for
RHEA 8:26
the babies out there who have no idea what MySpace is, it was like the free predecessor of Facebook.
TANIA 8:32
Yes. It’s old like us elder millennials and Up will remember it fondly but it just shows us like LinkedIn is reliable. It’s steady, Eddie. It’s gotta be there. The other part of that credibility too is I know if I make a connection with someone, let’s say I really vibe and connect with an ED of a similar organization.
We start to brainstorm ways to partner. If they end up leaving that business card that I got from her, I might as well just rip it up. those numbers, those emails don’t work anymore. But on LinkedIn, we’re creating this flexible Rolodex so that even as people move and, shift jobs, sometimes even shift
Sectors as they make total career shifts, as they become entrepreneurs, we can still have a direct line of contact with them just through a dm.
RHEA 9:14
Samesies. ’cause the other piece that I really liked about LinkedIn is if you look at the demographics of who uses LinkedIn versus the other platforms, it tends to be older and wealthier.
I noticed that you said you posted every week, even when you weren’t getting traction, even when you thought people weren’t looking.
And I think the mistake that a lot of folks make, both entrepreneurs and nonprofit marketing folks is that they quit too early or they’re not consistent, or they like. Post when they get inspired. So talk to me about the importance of consistency on LinkedIn.
TANIA 9:45
People worry sometimes that consistency will come at the expense of creativity, and I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I think that there’s a really beautiful dance between them. Because having a publishing cadence, let’s say it’s once per week, which is what I teach this thing called being lazy on LinkedIn
especially for nonprofit eds and fundraisers who are busy, you don’t really need to post more than once per week. Like you’re not trying to create a media company. You’re not trying to go viral and become LinkedIn famous. You’re just trying to stay top of mind and be consistent. I always think of this thing that many of us have heard about, which is this marketing rule of seven, your message needs to land seven times to be really heard by your audience.
That came out in the 1930s. That was a group of movie executives who were trying to figure out how to get people in to see their movies, and they realized they needed to show up seven times in people’s lives. In 2023, that number’s gonna be a lot higher. And so consistency is the ways that we do that.
And you’re right, it’s not gonna look like a lot in the beginning, but all of these efforts, Build on top of each other. And I’m a big James clear fan, and he says this quote no energy is ever wasted. It’s only stored. And that is what your content is gonna do. In those weeks where it feels like nothing is happening, that energy becomes stored in people’s minds and hearts.
And souls. And once that tipping point occurs and you don’t know when that post is gonna be, and maybe it’s not gonna be a LinkedIn thing, maybe they get your appeal letter and they have been seeing your LinkedIn content week after week, and they’re like, oh, I know this organization.
I know this Ed, I remember this story. They shared about X, Y, Z. And it was so incredible. it makes you stand out in the noise.
RHEA 11:18
it’s funny you mention it because like I post regularly on LinkedIn and I have no idea really who’s seeing, like you can see analytics, but like you don’t really know who they are.
And I actually got a pretty impressive keynote speaking engagement based on LinkedIn. They’re like, yeah, we found you on LinkedIn. We read your stuff and then we followed your podcast and we knew that we wanted to invite you. And I was like, wow. Okay, so here’s the power of LinkedIn. So even if you don’t know you, people are looking, they’re looking.
TANIA 11:42
Yes, they are looking and if you decide to go for a paid profile, which you absolutely don’t have to do, but you can actually see who is looking when you have that paid profile. And I think that can be really helpful because people are shy. Think about your own behavior. If you’re checking out this nonprofit, you really dig and you really like, and maybe you wanna join one of their committees or get involved somehow, you are a nonprofit change maker, kickass person, so maybe you’re just gonna reach out and be like, yeah, like I wanna get involved. But most people are gonna be a little coy and a little shy. But if they’re checking out your profile, that’s a signal of resonance. You can really see who’s scoping you out and start to build a relationship that way too.
RHEA 12:17
What are some of the tips that you have for building your brand on LinkedIn? Things that we should be aware of, things that we should look out for.
TANIA 12:24
I would say, the practice of honing your perspective and your voice is so key in not just building your personal brand, but being a leader.
Like I think that the things that help us build a personal brand also create embodied leadership. At our nonprofits as we lead, in the world, as we make movements happen. One of the things that you can really do to build your personal brand right away is really think about what is your unique perspective on some of the topics that come up in your field all the time.
In my field, in the mental health sector, stigma. Was a huge topic. Insurance reimbursement. Workforce development and making sure that we had a pipeline of young women diverse leaders coming up in the field because when we’d go to these conferences, we were not really showing up there. And so those were three big things that I knew that I was opinionated about. And so I could Create key brand messages around that. And over time, as I kept talking about that and talking about that, and here’s the thing, you’re gonna end up talking about these things and sharing your key brand messages.
So many times you’re gonna be like, people are gonna be so tired of me saying this. And when you think that people are finally just starting to hear you . And so that is one of the big things I would do. Think about what your perspectives are. Ideally, if you have a little a ahead of your time perspective or a perspective that gets at the status quo or a perspective that not everybody is going to just be like, I agree with that.
That is a sign and a signal that you’ve got a soapbox issue and it’s time to become known for that.
RHEA 13:51
I love that. Talk to us about how we can hone in on who we’re actually talking to. Because again, I like to say if we’re talking to everybody, we’re talking to nobody.
TANIA 14:00
As nonprofits as the larger nonprofit entity, we are talking to a lot of different audiences.
We have donors, we have referral sources, we have government folks, we have all these different types of people. And what’s beautiful about building a personal brand as a nonprofit leader is you get to pick the audience that you really wanna talk to and that lights you up and that you were put on this planet to make a difference for, and so often it is the person that.
You once were or still are. It’s the person that you can become a guide for because you have trudged through that journey yourself. And now you have some nuggets of expertise and advice and wisdom to pass on. I always think about the example of I. Remember when we went to college to check out what college we wanted to go to, or we went to some camp or some place and we were like, let me check out this place and see if it’s right for me.
It’s usually not the dean of that college that’s giving us the tour. It’s not the like head of the camp that’s giving us the tour. It’s the freshman or the kid who’s one year older than us who’s giving us a tour and and enrolling us into that experience. And that is the exact right person because they’re relatable
They know what we’re going through right now. And so similarly, as a nonprofit leader, building your personal brand think about that person who was you three years ago, five years ago, and start putting out the content that you wish you had and that is your mission as you build your brand.
That is who you’re speaking to. You’re speaking in a lot of ways to yourself.
RHEA 15:22
So should we not be using LinkedIn to speak to potential donors? ’cause the other thing I’m considering is, as I think about fundraising, it’s inviting people into a story. And the reason why donors might be interested is like they might learn something or they might feel something.
Those aren’t particularly people who are, me three years ago, how do we square that?
TANIA 15:41
Yeah, that’s a great question and clarification.
When I would fundraise, I would often tell the story of when I first stepped onto the campus of my organization and I had a very specific idea of what it was going to be like. It was an addiction treatment program for pregnant women. And I’m a little embarrassed to say, I had a lot of stigma in my mind around what that might look like and what I might find when I got there.
But when I stepped into the campus, I saw a beautiful facility. I literally saw butterflies flying around, and I sat in one of the rocking chairs as I waited to go back for my interview. There was a woman there who I knew from college. She was my classmate. Like we had psychology and women’s studies classes together, and
I was like, are you here for the interview? Are you interviewing for this position? And she’s no, I live here. Like I’m going through this program. And she totally opened up to me and shared her story. And in that moment it was like, Going up against a brick wall and realizing how much stigma that I had even had.
Like I thought I was a relatively enlightened individual, and I just had a certain framing in my mind of what somebody who struggled with substance use disorder looked like, talked like, felt like what a place like that would be like. And as I shared that story, of what I had thought in my previous journey, I saw a donor start to ugh.
Shift, like I saw their shoulders start to like change. I saw their bodies start to change as they too realized the stigma that they maybe have carried, and they realized that wasn’t a story that necessarily was true. And so that’s one example where I could use my own story and my own brand story.
That’s really what that is to relate to people who are having their own experience of the organization.
RHEA 17:18
That’s really helpful and when I think about story frameworks, the story of Self US and now, right? Yeah. Like I can connect with people with my own experience, connect it to how that might relate to us as a collective, and then what does that mean now?
I know you’re an expert in thought leadership, particularly for women, When I see people who are reluctant to call themselves as a thought leader, a lot of it has to do with fear, right?
Yeah. And the fear of being seen and the fear of offending, or the fear of saying something that people will disagree with. What are the first steps that we have to get through in order to establish ourselves as thought leaders?
TANIA 17:54
The first step before we even get into strategy is looking internally at, a lot of people call them self-limiting beliefs.
I like to call them systematically limited beliefs because they’re not ours innately. Imposter thoughts, perfectionism, people pleasing, urgency. All of these things that we face as we work towards becoming, go-to voices and practice guides in our field, are very real. Responses to living in systems that are trash in a lot of ways that are meant to be harmful, to folks that don’t belong to these dominant, categories.
The very first thing you need to do is start to really sit with that. Sometimes people call it an inner critic and I like to call it an inner chaperone because that part of ourselves has been created to protect us to be a protective response, and I have a lot of.
Love and gratitude for that part of myself. And I think that we can work together on the same team to do the scary thing of being a thought leader. It’s not our fault that it is scary and it’s very real, that there is fear involved. I also hold the fact that if we are called to create change and affect change in this issue that we are so passionate about, it is.
A responsibility that we have to get 1% more uncomfortable and stretch ourselves 1% more with every single action. And before long, you will be amazed. If I could look back at my gosh, I wanna say like 2013 and. 13 self and show her what I was today I wouldn’t even believe it.
What’s so cool about that is I know that if my 20, what year are we even in like my 2030 self was to look back at me now. Now I wouldn’t even believe what is to come in the future, but all of those changes come with just that 1% stretch. I love that.
Before you get to strategy. Yeah. Yeah. I thought you would like that. I thought
RHEA 19:37
you, I do like that. ’cause actually that 1% degree means the difference between. Flying to New York and flying to Boston.
TANIA 19:44
That’s a piece from Atomic Habits as I know, and I read that on a plane. I was reading that on a plane and I was like, oh God, I hope this pilot has this stuff put together. ’cause yeah, these 1% shifts create. Huge shift over time and we are playing a long game.
We are all about cathedral thinking as nonprofit leaders, like we are sometimes trying to build cathedrals that will never sit in ourselves. We have time.
RHEA 20:05
And I love that too because I think the impulse is to look at people on social media and you get this idea of oh, this happened for them overnight.
But you didn’t see all of the years of them. Consistently coming to the platform, doing their posts and I think that happens with fundraising. I think it happens with life. Like we’re always comparing our insides to people’s outsides, right?
TANIA 20:27
That’s so spot on. That’s so spot on. And that compare and despair concept is a quick pathway to quitting. We are only competing against ourselves. It’s I don’t know if you ever played Super Mario Kart. Yeah. When you would like, yeah.
Then you have the ghost level where you’re competing against yourself. That’s how I try to think of this work.
RHEA 20:43
That’s so funny. I. Played Mario Kart with my nephew this weekend and he was, he’s seven. And I was like, I haven’t played this in 20 years. And I was playing, he’s oh, you’re remembering.
I was like, thank you.
I love it. Thank you Lucas. Okay I wanna talk about tactically speaking. I know every platform has its own kind of style what would you characterize as the LinkedIn style?
TANIA 21:05
The LinkedIn style is professional, but it’s about community building. So I would say posts that do really well or content or just ways of showing up that do really well is showing up with stories of partnership.
And again, it’s because the algorithm is really designed to connect and build business relationships. And so as nonprofit leaders, We are so in community with each other we’re on boards, we’re on committees, we go to networking gatherings. We work together collaboratively. I remember back in the day when I was still in the trenches of nonprofit leadership, like I, this is a little embarrassing I use this app called Rent the Runway. And. Before the pandemic, at least I’d use it all the time like many change makers who are listening to this. I’d be out at gatherings and luncheons and fundraising breakfast here in Orange County, California.
There’d be photographers and stuff and these dresses would make me feel really confident and I would wanna get a picture of them because I’m like I rented this, let me get a picture.
And once I had the picture, I was like, okay, let me just memorialize this. This was back in the beginning when I was just figuring out how to create a personal brand. So I’d get this picture and I’d post it on LinkedIn with a little caption of what was going on, like who was in the picture, what we were working on, are we raising money for Planned Parenthood?
I talk about what was going on, how people could get involved. I tag people specifically for the expertise they brought to the table. And after a few months I realized that people would come up to me at these gatherings and be like, wow, you’re doing so much.
You’re so involved. And it was funny ’cause I was not, More involved than anybody else there. We were all involved, we were all doing a lot. And sometimes, like you shared earlier, they would invite me as a result of one of these posts to speak on a panel or invite me into one of these opportunities because they would see me out and about in community, in partnership, having built connective tissue with others in the nonprofit space.
To say what is the style of LinkedIn? I think it’s about sharing stories of community. It’s not about doing the things that we do behind the scenes or behind the curtain. It’s get loud about what the work that you do is, because you know nobody’s gonna speak up for your work.
You have to speak up for your work. And when you speak up for each other’s work and really come at it from this collective perspective, you all grow as a result because of the way LinkedIn algorithm is.. So if you and I are in a mastermind, if we’re working on something beautiful together and I post a picture about it and I tag you, the people that are in your network who aren’t in my network are gonna see it and they’re gonna be like, who’s this Tanya person?
I think this is pretty interesting and maybe they’re gonna follow me, they’re going to connect with me, and this works so beautifully for nonprofits because let’s say you’re doing something with your board members, you tag them, all their business colleagues are gonna start seeing your mission and your work start to show up in their feed.
And over time they’re gonna start to see your organization as an organization they should get to know.
RHEA 23:52
I actually think the other mistake that I see is that people. Do the post, but they don’t tag others. And they don’t use the hashtags.
Because the nature of it is social. You want more eyeballs on the thing. So you should tag people so that it gets into their feed. Tanya, let’s say I, I’m out here, I’m putting out the content. People are liking it, maybe they’re resharing it. What do I do then?
How do I get them to be in my community because it’s all well and good. And I think you say this a lot in Facebook, Instagram, like people like, but how does it translate to actual either donations or volunteers or board members?
TANIA 24:29
I’d say two things. Like two big chunks. The first thing is to really optimize your LinkedIn profile so that when somebody sees your content out in the wild, like they’re not necessarily friends with you yet, but they see it out in the wild, they go to your profile to get to know more about you ’cause they’re interested.
It’s really important to have an optimized LinkedIn profile that tells them exactly what it is that you do, how it’s unique, and how they can get involved. That might be a link to your, monthly giving page at the very top of your profile. That might be links in your featured section that have whatever it is that you would want somebody to see at that next level of their journey, whether it’s an annual report or a video that really tells the stories of what you all do, whatever that is.
Also I would say the last thing in terms of your LinkedIn profile is really look at your about section. Your about section is oftentimes where resumes go to die. It just looks like a resume that. Nobody wants to read, but you instead, you wanna be a resource in your about section. And you have a lot of characters to play with here.
This is where you can tell the story of, what brought you there, why do you stay, how can somebody get involved? You can include some social proof there if you want to. And just a call to action of what that person needs to do next if they wanna get more involved with your organization.
That’s the first big chunk. Of what I would do. The second we talked about content and the next Big C is community. If people say content is king . I really think community building is maybe even more important than content.
Usually this is the missing piece when people feel like they’re doing all the right things on LinkedIn, but they’re not. Getting traction, they’re usually not taking the action of building the community. What that might look like is if you see someone viewing your profile, if you see somebody liking your content over and over, if you see somebody commenting on your profile and again, like it’s hard because a lot of these things are invisible.
Like the people who end up becoming, donors to your organization or getting involved aren’t always gonna be the ones who are loudly liking your stuff. But at the same time, these people who are showing up, you wanna reach out to them and build a relationship.
You wanna reach out to them and look at their profile and say, oh, like I see you’re involved in a animal welfare organization. That’s so interesting. What is that? Just asking them questions about their work. How do they get there? What are they excited about? And as you build relationships in the dms Relationships begin to form.
And something that people don’t always know or use is you can send audio messages in the dms. You can send video messages natively in the dms, and nobody does this. And so this is something that will help you stand out and really begin to become known with your people.
RHEA 27:04
I love that so much. And I think the mistake I see a lot of people making on LinkedIn is that they connect and then they jump right to a solicitation. That’s the same as asking me to marry you on our first date. And so what I’ve seen people do is, I’m very active on LinkedIn, so I get a lot of random messages.
People being like, hi, I work for so and so organization, would you consider a donation? I’m like, I don’t know you like, and you don’t know me, and you don’t even know if I care about this particular cause. So I think using it as a way to start a conversation and start a relationship is key. Not jumping straight to a solicitation.
TANIA 27:41
A hundred percent. That is so important. And it’s, yeah, it’s just like real life, right? It’s just like real life.
RHEA 27:48
Should we be thinking about LinkedIn as a way to encourage people to take an off platform action? So one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot, ’cause I recently got my ad account restricted on Facebook, which is a whole other thing.
But when we’re doing LinkedIn or whatever social media we’re building on borrowed land. So how should we think about the relationship between LinkedIn and our email lists.
TANIA 28:10
So good. You are so good. This is super important and I should have probably said this earlier when I was talking about community building.
’cause yes, you are nurturing people in on LinkedIn in the dms, but then you do wanna take them offline. You do wanna take them off of LinkedIn eventually. And I think your email list is a great. Place to bring people because you do essentially own that list. And there’s a lot of different ways to do that from, literally inviting somebody into a valuable resource that they would want to know more about that then gets them on their list.
Or maybe once a month or once a quarter, you host some kind of really valuable event where your ed. Gives a, state of the union on the issue that, people are interested in, that is behind your mission and you invite people manually that you have been meeting on LinkedIn into this event so you get their email.
And don’t forget too if you are local, it’s great to meet up with people that you’ve met on LinkedIn. In real life in person. And you can do that. You can find who’s local by filtering down your list. So let’s say you search for a certain kind of person.
Let’s say you have a campaign coming up and you know that you need to work with a bunch of attorneys. ’cause you’re working on an advocacy campaign for your nonprofit, you can search for that on LinkedIn and then filter it by geography.
You can filter it by. Where they went to school. You can filter it by so many different kinds of things. And what’s so great for nonprofit folks is there is a checkbox that you can do to check if and filter it by people who have actively said, Hey, I wanna be on a board. Hey I see you nodding. I know, yeah, I wanna be on a board.
I wanna provide pro bono support. Like you can literally use LinkedIn to find those people. And that becomes your list of people that you like, go have coffee chats with,
RHEA 29:49
I know I, it’s like the hidden filter that I tell everyone about. I’m like, these are people who literally, have already raised their hand.
We could talk about this forever, but last question from me. I’m sitting here, I’m like, Tanya, this sounds great. Yes. All the things. I am one person. I do not have time to be all up on LinkedIn all of the time. Do you recommend automation and if so, what are some of the tools that you use?
TANIA 30:13
Yeah, LinkedIn and automation have a prickly relationship. There’s a lot of amazing tools for Instagram, like ManyChat and different things like that. LinkedIn has been very wary of allowing third party platforms to come in and partner with them, and I’ve seen people get kicked off the platform for using certain bots and things that send automatic messages that automatically connect with certain people, so I’d be very wary about that. You don’t. want your LinkedIn to get shut off. That being said, I think pre-scheduling posts is a great thing. You can definitely do that. You can use an external platform like Hootsuite, LinkedIn is fine with that, but LinkedIn actually has their own tool to natively schedule your posts.
And I have noticed people engage higher. I think the algorithm favors it , when you natively schedule posts on LinkedIn. So yes, you are one person. A lot of nonprofit leaders are small shops or are a team of one within their marketing team, within their development team.
You can only do what you can do and I think some ways you can organize your time. I’m a big fan of batching posts and because I really am a big fan of being, quote unquote lazy on LinkedIn and just posting once a week. If you can schedule a little creative time, a little artist date with yourself once a month, maybe at the top of the month and go to a coffee shop, go to the beach and think about what you are most passionate about.
Think about the things that your donors are telling you. The things that if you had a magic wand, you would change in your field and just start writing. At first, if you’re new to this, you can just treat it as a journal entry. You don’t have to post everything you write right away.
Give yourself the freedom and the grace to let what needs to come out. And over time yes, this is about. Building your brand and growing your nonprofits impact. But it’s also, and I can’t stress this enough, this is also about self-actualization and this is about becoming a leader in your own right.
And so just, put pen to paper and share what you care about and some of those things will end up becoming posts that you can then pre-schedule on LinkedIn a month at a time.
RHEA 32:12
I’ve been noticing on LinkedIn you can have the posts which are just like, Actual text. You can have posts with pictures, you can have carousels, which I’ve noticed people have started to do with this 10 page click through things. Yeah. You, which I know you’re a big fan of some of your stuff. Yeah.
You can have videos, you can have audio. So what’s performing well? What should we be thinking about as far as content creation?
TANIA 32:35
Great question on just a sustainability and consistency basis. I think a picture and some text does the best and it’s the easiest to do. And I have found, and we all know this as comms people and marketing people pictures, I.
Of you will do best pictures of your face, pictures of you, doing things with other people that will always get people’s attention because as humans, we’re programmed to build trust in people’s faces. That’s just how we are. So I would say if you’re just starting focus on a post.
Let’s text with a picture of you or that has something to do with what you’re talking about. What does really well from an algorithm perspective are those carousels , that you mentioned, LinkedIn just loves them for whatever reason. You can create them by going to Canva and essentially you’ve probably seen them it’s when people take a post almost and separate it out into little chunks.
It almost looks like a Twitter feed, but it’s a carousel. And you can create this in Canva. Download it as a P D F and then upload it as a document. And so that’s how that carousel gets created. Videos for whatever reason on LinkedIn, like I know videos are. Hot, they’re important for whatever reason on LinkedIn, they don’t get a ton of engagement, but I have found that the people who do watch it tend to take an action.
So they’re not great for tons of engagement and vanity metrics. But the people who watch it do get enrolled into your experience in a really beautiful way. So don’t be afraid of videos, but definitely post them natively in the platform. Don’t post a link to YouTube because the algorithm doesn’t like that.
It wants you to stay on the platform. And the last thing, I don’t know if you mentioned polls. Polls are actually one of my favorite things to do. You can do a poll and see how people vote, other people can’t see, so it’s anonymous, but you can see how people vote and then send them a message directly and follow up with them based on how they have voted in that poll.
So it’s a really great way to Just do market research, ask a sensitive question and get real time responses. And on my podcast, the Campfire Circle, I have a whole episode on exactly how to really maximize a poll.
RHEA 34:37
I love that. I hadn’t even considered that.
I did a poll just for fun. And it was about which of the Roy children would be the worst donor. I love that for some reason, like it blew up. But I was like, that was just a fun thing that I. Thought of after watching a succession. Oh God. So definitely it’s inspiring me to do more polls.
TANIA 34:56
Kendall would be the worst. The worst.
RHEA 35:13
We can get into that offline. Yeah. Shiv might be interesting. Anyway. Okay, last question. It’s so hard, to capture people’s attention. What are your thoughts about becoming micro famous as opposed to macro famous?
We’re not Bill Gates, we’re not gonna have a bajillion followers. We’re not even Tanya about Ataria. I dunno how many people you have, right? But I really think that you’re. I think about Kevin Kelly’s thousand true fans. Like really, when you think about it, most nonprofits don’t need to be the Bill Gates.
TANIA 35:41
Imagine going viral and being Bill Gates famous, what would we even do with that?
Like how would we even harness that? It would be overwhelming, and especially for our nervous systems. Because we’re talking about personal brands, I love this piece about being micro famous. And I’d like to think about this as resonance, like we’re trying to achieve resonance versus reach resonance is this, actually, it’s a physics term and it’s a physics term where the vibration of an object causes other objects around it to vibrate at a higher frequency.
And essentially that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to boil the entire ocean. We are just trying to, connect with the people right around us. If we can stop tracking vanity metrics and start tracking, okay, how many conversations am I having?
How many people am I moving from LinkedIn? Into a more fulsome relationship offline, into a, into maybe a monthly donor relationship into a coffee chat relationship. How many people are re-sharing my stuff? I think that’s a really great thing to look at because when people re-share your stuff, when your donors, when your board members, when your fans are re-sharing your stuff, that means they’re resonating with it and they want other people to see it too.
And that’s a little clue or a signal that the people who keep resharing your stuff. Maybe haven’t ever reached out to you, maybe reach out to them, what’s gonna happen over time? As you become micro famous, is you’re gonna go to these gatherings and go to these events in real life, these conferences, and people are gonna come up to you.
This happened to one of my clients who’s a nonprofit ed. They’re gonna come up to you and say, I really love what you’ve been sharing on LinkedIn. And they’ll have a conversation with you about it and maybe they’d never reached out on the platform, but they are listening, they’re resonating and they’re telling their friends about it.
I think that’s the most important thing about These relationships that we have as micro influencers is they are doing all these invisible things that create such a ripple effect.
It’s creating so much influence and changemaking capacity, and that’s the part of the magic of this work that we’re never gonna know the full extent of, but we have to trust the process in a lot of ways. Yeah, because it’s working.
RHEA 37:36
I love that. Okay. Wait, this is really the last question.
One thing that you said was how are we creating value to get people off of the platform? But I think there’s also something there about how are we creating value driven content, and so what do you mean by that? Because I think so often in nonprofits I think people talk a lot about themselves, right?
We’re doing this work and it’s, doing X, Y, Z. But how do we think about creating content that is valuable to our audience?
TANIA 38:06
It’s not always about providing all the info. Like sometimes I think people think it’s about providing all the information and the data and the statistics and like the reporting that might be valuable to you internally, but it can sometimes look, and feel like jargon to some of your audiences.
And so I. When we talk about value, I think we also have to talk about the other V word, which is vision. Value and vision are directly intertwined. So to show up with a lot of value, we have got to think about what is the common aligned vision that we have with our audience.
What is the beautiful, just inclusive changed world that they want to live in? And how do we. Share stories from that perspective. I knew that when I was at my organization, I.
The people who supported our mission were also very passionate about breaking down the stigma of addiction. ’cause either they or someone in their life probably struggled with addiction themselves. So I would share stories of, going to a screening of anonymous people, which is like a movie that, breaks down the stigma of addiction.
So I’d share a picture of us going to the screening. I’d share quotes of what we got out of it. I’d share all about that. It was valuable because it presented a different way of thinking. It presented a perspective that changed people’s hearts and minds. It showed what could be, and because of that value, it prompts people into action.
Like it makes them wanna roll up their sleeves and help you in the ways that they can. Create that vision for the future. I know that’s a little bit like it’s, I know that sounds a little airy fairy and not as concrete, but vision and value can be very concrete when we’re working within it,
RHEA 39:43
I think as you’re thinking about content, you have to think about. What do people want? So in your case, that would be they wanna be inspired. Yes. Some cases they might wanna be educated. If they wanna know more about the topic, in some cases they wanna be amused.
So I think about that. Roy Kid Poll, that wasn’t anything other than just Be amusing. You really have to think about how do you capture the attention in this very busy sphere. ’cause like we, we’ve all got eight seconds of attention span. We needed to really grab us or we’re just moving on.
Yeah. Again, putting yourself in the shoes of your donor or your audience, like what would be interesting or a value to them. Tanya, this has been so illuminating. Where can folks work with you? What do you got going on? If people want more Tanya about Ataria in their lives,
TANIA 40:23
If you want more about Aria in your lives, definitely come hang out with me on LinkedIn.
That is my playground, that is my spot. Come find me, connect with me let’s be friends. I also have a podcast called The Campfire Circle, which is all about breaking down the boardroom table as the ultimate space of leadership and replacing it with a campfire circle. ’cause that’s where we share our stories.
I love that. Yep. And I’d say those are the two big ways.
RHEA 40:45
Awesome. Tanya, this has been so fun. Let’s do it again ’cause there’s so much more we can talk
TANIA 40:50
about. Yes, a hundred percent. Let’s do it in live in person.
RHEA 40:53
That would be so fun. Yeah, the fact that I was in California, we didn’t hang out.
It
TANIA 40:56
is so silly. I know. So silly. I gotta come to New York and hang out with you and eat some good food. Yeah, come on.
RHEA 41:03
Mikasa Soup Casa. All right, Tanya. Thank you so much. It’s been so fun everyone. I will put tin info in the show notes. Connect with her. She is a LinkedIn genius.
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