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Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
From Events to Empathy: Transforming Nonprofit Communication Through Design and Innovation
How did Dani Vachon, once immersed in the vibrant world of music and events, become a trailblazer in the nonprofit sector? Join us as we uncover her inspiring journey from orchestrating grand events to founding Beacon Collective, driven by her unwavering passion for activism and environmentalism. Dani shares the pivotal moment that sparked her career transformation, along with the unique challenges she faced in rebranding and establishing her company in a new arena. We also explore the dynamic role of design in creating compelling nonprofit campaigns. From the intricate dance between visual language, content, and user experience, discover how these elements attract and engage supporters while staying true to organizational values. Listen in to learn how her innovative concept of empathy stimulation has led to meaningful collaborations with organizations like the City of Vancouver and Oxfam Canada, and find out how her team's approach is reshaping the way nonprofits connect with their audiences. Gain insights into identifying key audience personas and ensuring that content remains inclusive and impactful, ultimately driving the growth and success of nonprofit initiatives.
Dani Vachon's journey into activism began in high school when she joined the Green Club, diving deep into issues like climate change and waste management. The club's initiatives included creating a school garden and implementing a recycling program, driven by a desire to effect change in their community.
Raised in small towns across British Columbia by two hippies, Dani was immersed in a lifestyle of farmsteading, hunting, gathering, and a deep connection with nature. One parent, a musician and log home builder, instilled a love for music, craft and cultural heritage, while the other, a caring and artistic entrepreneur, nurtured Dani's creative spirit and entrepreneurial drive.
Simultaneously, Dani pursued her own passion for art and design, which culminated in opening her first business straight out of high school: a record store in Vernon, B.C. Though the venture proved a dire failure, it fueled Dani's entrepreneurial spirit and cemented her determination to follow her passions.
Dani’s foray into graphic design commenced in art school in 1999, where she discovered Photoshop. Encouraged by an instructor, Dani embarked on a career in graphic design, laying the foundation for her future endeavors.
Following design school, Dani spent a year at a small agency before transitioning to freelance graphic design, primarily serving clients within the music industry. This led to an unexpected 11-year career in music, during which Dani undertook various roles, including starting a record label, organizing and promoting hundreds concerts, managing bands, founding and directing an arts festival, and launching four live music venues. Throughout this period, Dani used her design skills to create impactful promotional materials, earning recognition within the music community.
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Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and joining me today is Dani Bichon, who is the CEO of Beacon Collective. So excited to hear from her and all the wisdom that she's going to bring. So, dani, welcome in, glad to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be here. Yeah, I'm very excited to dig into our topic for today, but before that, let's talk a little bit about you. Tell me, tell the audience, a little bit about yourself and kind of your journey in the nonprofit space and what got you to Beacon Collective.
Speaker 3:Sounds good. I'll start where chapter one of my life ends off, which was leaving the music business. I had been in events and to make money I had been taking bigger and bigger, more corporate events and I was planning things like the luxury and supercar weekend at Van Dusen Gardens and like the celebration of light I mean not the only planner but one of a team of planners for the celebration of light, which welcomes a quarter million people for a series of fireworks events. And I've always been a bit of an activist and like environmentalist myself and I realized I was doing this for money and I was on site for 18 hours long. I was the longest person on site at the the celebration of light and I watched a quarter million people leave the beach, uh, with like a seven or eight inches worth of plastic waste, uh, just all of it. We had a team of volunteers to clean it up, we had a recycling program in place and all of that stuff. But it kind of broke my heart and it kind of made me go. This isn't, this isn't what I should be doing with my life.
Speaker 3:So it was at that time that I started the Beacon Design Collective and basically at first we were really like muddling our way through things and not really sure what, like how to attract the right audience and, um, you know, my network was all music, business and events world.
Speaker 3:So I had to kind of reestablish myself and my network and so it took a took a lot of years to kind of get our foot in the door.
Speaker 3:I think I think it was 2015. When we secured a contract with the city of Vancouver working on the bright green city campaign, and that was our foot in the door with them for campaigns with them, and then from there we did the zero waste campaign and I was like, oh, this is it, it's happening, this is so like, how do I get more of these? And I and it took a lot of like experimentation with marketing and and positioning and rebranding ourselves and all of this stuff. So I kind of been through all of this as a for-profit organization to try to figure out, like, how to attract the right people to the business and so yeah, so eventually it was just a matter of continuing the networking, clarifying our Canada Oxfam Canada, bc Children's Hospital, the University of Vermont, like a lot of different organizations to in different capacities, and so, in short, you know this has been happening for 13 years, and the last, maybe 10 of those, has been with a focus on government organizations and non-profits.
Speaker 2:I love it. So then we jumped into chapter two. Here you are, you're doing it, crushing the game.
Speaker 2:Very exciting. One of the things that I've seen recently is a blog series that you guys put out around the idea of empathy stimulation, which really caught my attention because it's not a phrase that I think I've ever heard before, but some really interesting content around that. So, as a jumping off point, help us understand the idea of empathy stimulation. Let's kind of baseline, make sure we're on the same page moving forward, and help everybody kind of understand what that looks like and what that means to you all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, sure. So empathy stimulation kind of came about when we were workshopping some stuff internally around our positioning and who our clients were. And at this point we'd been working with nonprofits for a long time and we're like why is our work with our clients successful? Like, how are we getting them there? What makes it what we're doing different from your average creative offering? And so we sort of workshopped around that and what we realized is because we have strategists, designers, illustrators, web designers, copywriters, etc. So there's a bunch of us and we're all collaborating together on the work. And so we collaborated together on this exercise and realized that it's really three key components that work together and overlap to create empathy with the user.
Speaker 3:So those three categories are visual language. So when I say visual language, I'm talking about like attraction, desire and alignment with the target audience, and content, which is storytelling, results, evidence and transparency. And then user experience, which applies to more than just websites. It applies to annual reports and campaigns and everything. It's ease of use, a clear user journey. The user knows what their next step is meant to be. And then, of course, testing it to make sure it works.
Speaker 3:And accessibility, which is something we've been leaning heavily into, since 11% of the population are either visually or cognitively impaired or otherwise impaired. That affects the way that they consume digital media. So, yeah, so it's visual language, content and user experience, and those three pillars of work all overlap and work together to create relevance, drawing power and shared understanding, which ultimately leads to conversions. So usually the conversions that our clients are looking for is more money. We need more donations, and so we would then like the user that we would then design the process for would be a donor and we would kind of design the visual language, content and user experience to that donor to in order to increase the donation rate.
Speaker 2:I think and it's interesting we've had a series of folks on the podcast so far this season who are very focused on data as, like, use the data to tell your story, use the data to tell your story. But there is a whole group of people for whom, like, yeah, the data might be interesting, but I am going to be motivated by the empathy and compassion that I feel for your cause, for the work that you're doing, and so, to me personally, that would be my camp. So I find this whole conversation very refreshing, as opposed to, like, the just data side. So I'm very interested to dig into that. So talk to me a little bit about let's start with the visual language part. There was a quote in one of your blogs that said visual language is more than aesthetics.
Speaker 2:It's about meaningful connection, and I feel like sometimes, as non-profits, we have this tendency to like over design, all the things right, which is like we're vastly under designed or vastly under design it or we're and I'm not knocking but like or we're using a Canva template that 17 other nonprofits are also using for the exact same social media post right, sometimes the design is so it's just lacking one way or the other. But I love this idea that it's not about maybe, the aesthetic necessarily, but about the connection that that brings. I guess let's start with can you have meaningful connection with poor design, or do they have to go hand in hand, like visually? What's the goal there?
Speaker 3:Well, visual language does a few things to attract the right person, right they. It's kind of like when you are in high school and you are walking down the hallway and you see the goth group and you see the jocks and you know and you want to fit in with one of those groups and you decide which one you want to fit in with and you start presenting a little bit more like that person. So you can signal visually to whom your organization belongs or like to whom you want to attract by lining up your visual language with the values of that person and their preferences and so on. And then you also want to signal what your organization actually does with the visual language. So if you were distributing food, for example, you would have a different visual language than if you were in conservation. Probably you want to use some colors and textures and images and things to signal what you're doing, so that someone doesn't have to read every word in order to understand what you're doing. I feel like I'm veering way off track of what the original question was.
Speaker 2:No, I love it. Keep going, you're good.
Speaker 3:I think you were asking, like, can you attract people with bad design or a lack of design, or can your work be effective without good design?
Speaker 3:And I would say that I feel like, to a degree, you can have some level of success without good design, like with somebody your aunt put a website together. It's going to be limited right? People have been engaging with this young kid right out of high school who's just started his own business and he's got an AI receptionist that he was trying to sell me and he's got no website. He sent me a PDF that was completely undesigned and a legal document that hadn't been reviewed by a lawyer. And I'm not going to give you my money, no. So you know you want to demonstrate a certain level of success, and not necessarily success, but like competency through visual language, because competency, like demonstrating your competency, builds trust with people. They are more willing to give you their money if they know that you're going to use it well and you've been running your organization for a while and it's organized and that kind of thing. Yeah, so I think you have a ceiling if you don't do good design and then you can raise your ceiling once you have good design.
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Speaker 2:Let's say somebody is listening, who maybe runs marketing or comms for a non-profit. As we know a lot of times, especially on what marketing tends to fall in that overhead right that no non-profit wants to talk about, because that's a whole different, whole different fight. But I feel like what I see most often is that the organizational will be like yep, we already have a visual brand guide. Here's the three Pantone or Hexcode colors that we work with and here's our logo. That's our visual guide. If you are working with someone and you're saying, okay, let's say I'm new to this role, I'm marketing for this nonprofit. Okay, let's say you know, I'm new to this role, I'm marketing for this nonprofit. What elements do you guys think of when you think of a visual identity for a nonprofit? I'm assuming it goes beyond. Like you know, here's our three brand colors and here's five different versions of the logo that you can use in various manners.
Speaker 3:That would be a very bare bones visual language that sounds not very developed or well thought out to me. Usually I mean one of our clients brand guidelines, documents that we've been working on and iterating. We're on version 5.0 because we keep going oh, we need more rules. Granted, they're an organization, but it's got everything from like illustration style to certain characters that are illustrated and when they can be used and what poses they can be in, and there's like fonts for different audience types, because they have, like, some materials that are for children and some materials for that are for adults, and so there's rules on when you can use those different things.
Speaker 3:Photo treatments all of that stuff goes into visual language. We have textures. Each program within the organization that we work with has its own texture, its own dot pattern and its own color, so that way they all feel part of a family, while being distinguished from one another and giving a little bit of flexibility to or for the audience to be able to differentiate between oh, is this a resources program or is this the childcare program? And so so I mean it can it, it can be a little thing or it can be a big thing, but but I think that, more importantly, the work that should go into branding at the beginning, before visual language is brand strategy. So it's like who is the audience? Let's create some personas of who it is that we're trying to talk to.
Speaker 3:Usually there's the community member that you're serving, and then there's your big check donor, and then there's your grassroots donor and, while most of your money is going to come from your foundations or your big check donors, those grassroots donors are actually like, if you can get a good like system of monthly recurring donors going, that shows the big check donors and the foundations that people support what you're doing and it can really snowball into more big check donors. So, while the thing that we measure when we're doing work assuming we're doing a work that includes website for somebody and the branding the objective is to increase the online donation rate, but that's just because that's the thing that we can measure and attribute directly to our work Really what we see with a lot of our clients is it's not just those grassroots donors that increase. It's kind of like everyone's understanding of the organization improves, including, like, all of the staff and the volunteers and those big check donors increase as well. Holy, I veered off track again.
Speaker 2:It's so good. These are my favorite types of conversations. I love it. I want to zip back to something that you talked about, though, with the different pieces of all of conversations. I love it. I want to zip back to something that you talked about, though, with the different pieces of all of this, and that's around the accessibility piece, because the statistic that you used was 11% of the population, which is one that I don't think that I have heard before, but that is not an insignificant number of people who have some sort of limitation when it comes to engaging with that content, whether it's visually or the ability to access online sites that way. Talk to me a little bit about how you help folks think through some of those accessibility pieces of this.
Speaker 3:Well, a lot of it comes with, just like our experience, because we've all been in training for accessibility, design and writing. So there's considerations that go into it, just by simply working with an organization or an agency that knows how to do this stuff. But some things that we consider when we're, when we're building our materials, is contrast. There has to be a certain ratio of contrast between the background and the foreground. If there's text, all images need alt text, and that you know. In the past people would use alt text to just like load in a bunch of their keywords, but really what you need to be doing is describing what is in the image. Because what happens is what, if somebody needs a screen reader because they're visually impaired, it will read out the alt text in place of them seeing the image. And so if it's just like keywords, keywords, keywords, then it's offensive to somebody who's impaired. So, and then when it comes to web, there's you need to be able to tab through the website. So some people only have use of like one finger or like a stick or you know, like they can't, they can't mouse, for whatever reason, and so they have to be able to use the keyboard to tab through the menu items on a website, and yeah, so those are some considerations that we include in accessibility.
Speaker 3:But for what other people our clients need to know, is that once so this, this comes up the most with pdfs, but it also, uh, can become evident with websites as well it's like, once it's considered, done, like client approved, everybody's happy, the work is done. There's still more work to do. We have to go in and do accessibility testing and remediation. So we have to go in with a screen reader, make sure like nothing that's not supposed to read is read out and that everything there's no glitches and everything flows smoothly. And so we do find sometimes with our clients like we need this PDF out like right away, and we're like OK, we just need like one and a half more days to remediate the PDF.
Speaker 3:Otherwise it's not going to work properly for audiences with accessibility concerns.
Speaker 2:And that's such, I think, because I think a lot of our focus tends to be on those high check donors, thinking even about our grassroots constituents or the community members that we serve. Yeah, I would love to know the statistics on how many nonprofits who serve communities that need accessibility help in some way have not done the work to make sure that their resources are accessible in that manner. It's definitely something that I hadn't thought about before.
Speaker 3:I've seen a lot of nonprofit websites, as you can imagine, both for our clients and for non-clients and prospects that we're trying to do work with, and I have noticed that if the, if the communities that somebody is serving are an impaired audience, that usually they have that stuff figured out.
Speaker 3:Okay, fantastic, I'm actually very glad to hear that it's the everybody else that doesn't really know about it, because if you're not impaired yourself, you're not approaching things like how can I make sure that my kitchen works for someone in a wheelchair? You don't. You just don't think about it because you're not having anyone in a wheelchair there. But when you start talking about massive numbers of, like thousands of people right, if so, if it's 11, since it's 11 of of the Americans who are living with visual, cognitive or physical impairment that means that out of a thousand people, there's 111 or 110 people who could potentially be visiting your website and have an impairment, and if they get frustrated and leave, that's a potential donor that isn't going to be taking the user journey.
Speaker 2:Interesting, and so it's funny if you go back to the idea of empathy, right, it's not only that we want them to feel empathetic towards our cause and be moved by that content, but also that's a reciprocal relationship, right? If I want you to feel that, then I need to be empathetic to the situation in which you find yourself, right To begin that journey. So I think a lot of times it's so easy for us to sit in the non-profit seat and just think of, like, I'm blasting out these messages, it's a one-way piece and then I want someone to feel empathetic back. But this is an amazing way to think about it in a two-way, reciprocal kind of relationship with your constituents.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that feeds into some of the donor experience work that we do as well, which is like when somebody gives you some of their hard-earned money, it's like really important that they get thanked like sincerely and a number of times so before you ask them for money. I know I feel like a lot of people probably on this podcast know all of this already.
Speaker 2:It's amazing, though, like the idea, it doesn't always translate, because it's like yes, on some sort of level, I understand that I need to thank my donors and then, oh yeah, we don't really have a policy for that, we don't have a program for that. So it's oh yeah, we don't really have a policy for that, we don't have a program for that. So it's always worth repeating that donors are in fact humans, right and need to be treated as such, and that includes appreciation. So, yeah, that's a drum I will continue to beat.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and like empathy for them, right? So this donation that I made recently it was sizable by my budget and I gave it to an organization that didn't thank me at all, and then they closed the organization right afterwards.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I was just like where did my money go? Yeah, so like there's just so.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, there's a lot there, right. There's a lot to consider. When you're making big changes or whatever, keeping your donors in mind is a good idea.
Speaker 2:Because donors are human, yeah, they're not just ATM machines, right, and so, yeah, to start from a place of empathy, I think is fantastic. Okay, so we only have a couple minutes left, which is crazy. This went by so quickly because the conversation has been so fun. But if somebody wanted to connect with you, dani, or learn more about Beacon Collaborative, how do they find you? What's the best way to reach out?
Speaker 3:Yeah, how would they connect with you? Beacon Design Collective and you can find us at beaconcollectivecom. If you want to reach out to me specifically, you can email me. My first name is Dani D-A-N-I and this is Dani at beaconcollectivecom. I also have a great sales guy. If you're like, how do I hire Beacon John at beaconcollectivecom?
Speaker 2:Yes, he's fantastic, yeah, Fantastic, I love it. Okay, so, as we wrap up, if you were going to give somebody one piece of advice when it comes to this idea of kind of empathy stimulation, what is the one takeaway or one piece of wisdom that you would share, as, like, here's a place to start, or make sure this is the one thing you're keeping in mind as you are working on this visual identity? What is the piece that you would give to somebody?
Speaker 3:I think it's more than visual identity. It is the advice. Really, I think the big thing is around the content itself, and this is somewhere where, even if you were to engage Beacon, you need to be thinking about content, because one thing we find when we visit organizations, existing websites, before we help them, is like it can be very unclear what you do, who you're helping, why you're doing it. And then I also want to see success stories of, like, the people that you've effectively helped in the community. So a lot of people's websites are very just like here are our programs. You know and is missing that component of like that humanness to it, that here are the people behind it and here are the people we're helping. And it's all about the people really. All of us are nothing without each other. I love that. It's all about the people really.
Speaker 2:All of us are nothing without each other. I love that Definitely. Man, if you could come from a place where that is the filter by which we look at your website or your social content, I think we would have made great strides today.
Speaker 2:Awesome, dani. Thank you so much. This conversation has been so fun. I really appreciate your point of view and you taking the time to come on and share with us today. So thanks for being here. Yeah, point of view and you taking the time to come on and share with us today. So thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a blast. Thanks for listening Fantastic. Thank you so much. This has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and we'll see you next time.