.png)
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
Active Listening: The Secret Weapon for Nonprofits
What if the most powerful tool for strengthening donor relationships isn't your messaging strategy, but your ability to listen? In this illuminating conversation with Chris Barlow, Customer Happiness Director at Your Beeline, we explore how nonprofits can transform their digital communications from one-way broadcasts into meaningful two-way conversations. We often view our websites, social media accounts, and email campaigns as channels for pushing out information rather than opportunities for genuine engagement. Chris challenges this mindset by showing how active listening principles can be applied across all your digital touchpoints to deepen connection with supporters and dramatically improve results. Discover practical strategies that any organization can implement immediately: from adding simple surveys to your website's thank you pages. Perhaps most powerfully, you'll learn how asking donors about their vision for your mission can uncover hidden major gift prospects while honoring their role as stakeholders in your work.
As Founder and Customer Happiness Director, Chris Barlow is grateful to help nonprofits use digital marketing to multiply the reach of their mission and the growth of their donors. Most of all, he’s grateful to be the dad to seven kids, and to try to teach them how to live in a way that multiplies good in others.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
Drowning in spreadsheets and manual processes. Bonterra Apricot is the smarter, faster way for nonprofits to manage programs, track outcomes and actually show your impact. Find out how, at BonterraTechcom, slash Nonprofit Hub.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and along with me today is Chris Barlow from your Beeline. And, chris, I'm excited to have you here for lots of reasons. I think it's going to be a really good conversation. I've had a lot of folks on the podcast. I don't know that any of them have had the title of customer happiness director. So, as the customer happiness director of your Beeline, I am really excited to like dig into maybe a little bit of that and your background and the conversation that we have coming up today. So welcome in.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much. Yeah, well, I can answer the unstated question. One of my strengths is that I'm a people pleaser, and one of my weaknesses is that I'm a people pleaser.
Speaker 2:Oh, I feel that yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's why I'm always like so, so concerned about making sure that my clients and my partners anyone I'm working with is really happy and that I do a good job, and sometimes focusing on someone's happiness isn't actually the right thing to do. So, yeah, there's a balance there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, by way of introduction, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and maybe a little bit about your journey within the nonprofit space. What got you to where you are today?
Speaker 3:Awesome. Okay, well, I'm Chris, my company is Beeline and I started Beeline in 2015. But my journey with nonprofits the seeds were planted when I was a teenager or younger. I always watched my dad work in corporate America and and he had a job he really didn't like, was getting burned out from. It wasn't really a good fit for him, and so I just imagined that that would be the case for me, and so I was not interested in corporate America, traditional business job or whatever, and I just thought I'll do over, I'll do work overseas, I'll do some kind of ministry or something people related serving in some way. I didn't have the concept of nonprofit in my head at the time, but you know, that was kind of the direction. But then after college, I got married in my senior year. My wife had already graduated and was was working. I graduated and I was like, oh my God, I need to get a job and I interviewed with a company that came to the campus career fair and I got a
Speaker 3:job and I was doing cold calling in sales and I actually loved it. I believed in what we were doing and I guess I just liked sales and I didn't realize it. And so I did that for a long time, but I didn't expect to retire in it or to be my long-term career. I just, you know, I fell into it and so this idea of doing something more with more purpose still never left. And so in 2015, I'd been at the job for like eight years. At the time, I started Beeline as a side business and I took a course on Google ads and I reached out to a local nonprofit and I just asked them hey, can I just run your guys' Google ad grant to get some experience under my belt? I'll just volunteer. Yeah, Help me roll in the ropes on a real account with a real you know, with you. And they were like, yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:And every development director's dream call yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And after a while that developed into them saying like, maybe a year later they're like Chris, we want to pay you to do this because we want to do a lot more than what you're doing. We want to do some paid ads too. And they started referring me to other nonprofits and I found some more myself and it just kind of organically grew from there and I I come back full circle to that desire to do something meaningful and purposeful with my work. So yeah, I'm very thankful to be in this industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so we're digging in today to a topic I don't think we've discussed on the show before, and that is around the idea of active listening, and I feel like that's something that you know. We teach kids how to listen. It's a phrase that some of my teacher friends really love to use in their classroom. But talk to me a little bit from your perspective. What does active listening mean? What is it? And then let's dig into why it's so important in the context of nonprofit communication.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, I pulled out a definition. I've written a little bit about this, maybe a couple of years ago, on my blog, yeah, so I pulled out a definition from the American Psychology Association. So this definition is applied to like a therapist-client relationship. But really we get it. It's when a therapist listens closely, asks questions to understand both the content and the depth of the client's emotion. So it's active listening, is asking questions. Sometimes it's like rephrasing what the person said to ensure that this is what I'm hearing you say.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, and you know we we can use that in natural ways in our own relationships.
Speaker 3:So the reason I think this is so important is it goes back to really like there are so many things changing for nonprofit I mean for everyone all the time.
Speaker 3:Like technology and platforms, ai, like it's it changes so fast. It's hard even like for someone like me who's in does digital marketing and that's like what we are specialized in and always looking at it's hard for us to keep up with all the changes, and so even more so for you as a nonprofit. And so how can we like anchor ourselves in things that don't change so that we know how to adapt and aren't afraid of adapting? And to me, like there's a lot of principles, deeper principles that never change, that are always helpful, and active listening is just one of them, and I think it's really helpful and applicable in marketing and communication. So that's one reason I brought it up, or think about it a lot, and so like, yeah, there's so many different ways we can apply this in our marketing. But like listening closely, asking questions, restating and being donor centered that's kind of the high level. And then there's like, yeah, there's a lot of ways we can apply this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's. It's an interesting theory because I feel, like most marketers, we get stuck in the, the pushing out of messages, right, we almost look at it as a one-way communication channel. Here's my website. I'm just giving you a bunch of information. Here's their social media. I'm giving you a bunch of information. And I don't know that we necessarily think about those channels as ways that we can listen back as well, right, or we don't. We don't maybe even open the door for some of those channels, so let's talk about each of them. What does it look like to use your website in that way?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, and as you say, we get stuck in thinking of it as one way channel.
Speaker 2:I'm just way to continue to push this information out to you.
Speaker 3:Totally, yeah, yeah, and we forget, like we forget that there's like real people on the other end and we, I think, when we look at data, it's just numbers often, and so then we just we forget that those are real people's actual behavior, which is just a sign of body language, digital body language, right, and we can listen to that and remember like these are real people, this is their experience with us, whether it's on our website or email or social media. What are they doing? Are they clicking, are they going to this page and learning to listen to that as a form of this person is communicating with me and then, yeah, on our website. There's a lot of things we can do. One thing I love to do is and there's a number of different tools that you can use for this but to have a little mini survey that will pop up on the page, not like the big pop-ups that are on your Facebook, just like in the corner that says, hey, are you finding everything you're looking for, or do you understand our mission, or or what questions do you have, and making that like a non-opt-in. You can give people the option to give their email if they want to follow up or provide more information to you, but basically just like asking people questions that they can give you a little type in, a little response, to get feedback on a page or feedback on the site. And even more than just like quote, unquote their digital body language. It's like, okay, they bounce from the page. Why, well, if they write well, no, I don't understand or no, I'm looking for this you can get that real time feedback and start to gather that directly from your site. So that's definitely one of the best ways.
Speaker 3:Another way that I love is to you know, we all have a form where someone can contact us, when someone can opt into our email list or, of course, when someone can donate, and then we usually will send people to a page that says thanks, thanks for contacting us, thanks for signing up, thanks for donating, and watch for a receipt or whatever.
Speaker 3:Using that page that confirmation thank you page, as another opportunity to ask a question so why did you choose to donate today? Question, so why did you choose to donate today, or why did you choose to download this resource? Or asking the follow-up questions while they're still thinking about it in that very moment is so powerful because it allows you to uncover what's going on and allows them to share more, and you can use what they share to then refine, like, for example, if you ask them why did you choose to give today? Use that to refine your donation page, like you get enough people answering that question. Now you have the language and the words and the emotions and the most important things that your donors are saying are important to them, so that's what you should be putting on your page.
Speaker 2:That's so interesting. I actually was just in a conversation this week with an organization that had been helping do some work around digital strategy and fundraising strategy. One of the gentlemen in the room was trying to say that the Facebook ad campaign that we had been running wasn't working because they weren't seeing conversions on those things. And I'm realizing now that we had data that could have been speaking that we didn't pay attention to in that conversation, right, which was we were getting the click-throughs to the site. People just weren't actually giving once they got there.
Speaker 2:So what was that barrier, right? What was the thing that was causing them some sort of issue? Or was the page not working, or was it hard to navigate, whatever the case may be? Or was the page not working or was it hard to navigate, whatever the case may be? So the campaign itself was doing its job to drive traffic, but the page wasn't doing it, and so now it's interesting to kind of reframe that question after the fact, like, okay, well, what other data could we have captured? What do we have to hear from the data where people are not converting? So what's wrong with the page and digging into it from that side? And I would never, until this moment have thought of that as active listening, so that's a really interesting concept.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it can also make like this idea, like using this, using this title, data analyst, like that's a real thing, there's a real skill, there's a real skill behind it. But for the nonprofit that doesn't have a inter house data analyst or can't afford one, Just thinking of like, all right, how can I? If I see myself as just trying to actively listen to people, it suddenly becomes a little less scary and you might not know exactly what to do, but you could figure out like, okay, well, people are clicking on the ad. It wasn't like no one was clicking. Our click-through rate was pretty good or seems good. It wasn't super expensive to get those clicks. We're getting a lot of people, but they weren't converting.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, so maybe the ad is doing its job, but the page isn't okay. So what could we do? And you know there's multiple ways you can go about then listening Like one great way is just to do what everyone is very familiar with, just AB test. And the reason you do an AB test is in part because you can't ask every individual visitor what would you like to see, what's going to help communicate with you, but you can just say what would you like to see what's going to help communicate with you, but you can just say okay, what does the consensus see? Do people really respond because there's a video or because I wrote in several paragraphs why they should give and see which one works better? And so there's ways to like, enable your visitors essentially to vote with their actions what is speaking to them better.
Speaker 1:Ever feel like you're stuck managing programs in spreadsheets and scattered systems? Apricot by Bonterra is a smarter, faster way for nonprofits to track outcomes, simplify reporting and unlock more funding. With tools built for real nonprofit workflows and trusted by over 3,400 organizations, it helps your team grow your impact and better serve your community.
Speaker 2:You can meet us at bonterratechcom slash nonprofit hub today a soapbox that I have lived on like I've never I've literally never stepped off of this soapbox. I stepped on it a decade ago and I've never stopped. Um is that social media is meant to be social right? It's literally in the title, but we still going back to the point. We still view it as a one way communication channel. I'm just going to keep using it to broadcast out my messages. What does it look like to be actively engaged in listening to your audience and your constituents on social platforms instead?
Speaker 3:I love that you brought that up, because you're right. Like again, we get the stuck in this marketing mindset yes, got to get this message out. And instead of like wait, this is like a place where I can actually maybe not deeply, but initiate real connection with people. And so the first thing I would say is follow what people are saying online, like go to relevant hashtags, look at other organizations that do what you do, look at what your donors are interested in, like, listen to what they're talking about, what they're saying. So, instead of like just posting and seeing what response you get, actually comment and share and reply to other people or the organizations, to specific topics and to specific people, so you be engaged and respond to the other people and listen to them and get involved in their conversations. And then the other thing like to me is, like, before you create a post, like, what is your goal like? Is your goal like just likes or is it replies? Yeah, and so can you post in such a way that is like real and human and invites real replies?
Speaker 3:And, of course, not every post everyone's going to like want to take the time to reply to, but there's posts that are designed to like get likes. And then there's posts that are like real, that invite real conversation, and I think we just in valuing that more, like real responses, real conversations that get started. And then also like inviting people to send you messages in your posts, like send us a message. We love to talk through about this more. We'd love your feedback on this. What do you think about this? Yeah, one of the ads we ran for a little while was we are coming to year end and we've we've had a larger shortfall than usual and the team would love to hear your stories about how you've been impacted, just for some encouragement right now. And so many people responded with how they've been impacted and encouraged. Yeah, and of course, we engage with those. And so, yeah, just like, what is your goal before you post?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:I'm going to pick up on the one word that you used in there, and that is human.
Speaker 2:Right, because we are I mean, the people who work in your organization, yes, are humans, but you're also talking to them, and so we have to expect them to behave like humans.
Speaker 2:And one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to how we behave on social is like you would never go to a cocktail party or a networking meeting or whatever and walk in and just toss a fact or a like a statement on the thing, and as people start to respond back to you, you would never just like stare at them and not say anything. Do you know what I mean? We conversations are two ways, and so I think one of my biggest pet peeves in that concept is we put out a post, we ask people to leave a message in the comments, we ask them to you know whatever, and they do it, and then we do nothing, right, we don't even bother to like the comment that they've left, let alone respond to it in normal human behavior. It irks my soul when I watch organizations do this when people are commenting or they're leaving messages and nobody responds to them. Oh, it is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we know what to do generally, even if we're nervous or we're like not a super outgoing person. We know what to do in social situations. We reply to people. We respond, you know, and some people are more gifted at it than others. But the point is we have a sense of what to do and I think when we get into the digital realm we sometimes forget that, especially in professional and um and just taking off some of that professional fake burden.
Speaker 3:That's not real and that's not really part of what it means to, to engage with people and to be your organization and just be yourselves and and and respond to people and maybe you don't have a lot to say to someone's particular comment. I know I've had that situation. I'm like, what do I say? And sometimes it just means you need to take a little more time to think about your response and not just like respond quickly, like, come back to that, save that, come back to it, reply, do respond, like like it and then come back and respond. But yeah, again taking that seriously, like, yeah, these are real people.
Speaker 2:These are real people. Conversations happen in multiple layers of multiple responses, so help us visualize kind of the, because it's easy to say this is what you should do, right, help me figure out, or help me Maybe you have an example that you can share of an organization that you've seen do this really well and what some results were for it, like a more practical application for why this is important cool.
Speaker 3:I'll share two. The first one I will share is probably the easiest to implement. So again, we do the same thing that have the same kind of blockage in our mind about email marketing. We send emails one way and we measure email success based on opens and clicks, like did they click to go to the donation page? Did they click to go to the and watch the video? And instead, what if we aimed for replies? And what if we wrote our emails in a way that invited people and say, please hit reply, like Jim will respond to you. And what if we wrote our emails in a way that invited people and say, please hit reply Like Jim will respond to you, like he reads these emails and he actually really, really responds.
Speaker 3:And you know you, you might have a large email list and be afraid of asking people to reply, but I'm telling you, if you get a hundred replies, you have a good problem on your hands. That's exactly the problem you want to have. You, you create so much more connection with people when you invite a reply, they reply and you respond to them Like now you're actually talking to someone. Making that as a goal in your email. I'd say that's, that's a really quick and easy thing to do instead of like okay, with our newsletter we can share all these different things and all these different links and all these, you know, kind of overwhelm everyone with all the information. What if we just wrote about one of these topics and invited people to reply and give their feedback and thoughts on it? Suddenly your marketing email that did go out to your entire list feels very personal and one-to-one and creates relationship and cultivates that way more than just the generic information which might be all good information. So that'd be the first thing.
Speaker 3:A specific client of ours. They added a two question survey to the thank you page of every ebook download. They offer a bunch of different content to their audience. So after downloading one of their eBooks, the survey would ask which book did you download and then why did you download that? And we gathered responses over the course of maybe one or two months, took all of the language that their users were sharing about what they were dealing with, what they were feeling, and we wrote, rewrote their original landing page that was offering that book and basically the original page converted around 7.88% and the new page converted at 10%, which was an increase of about 30% Just by changing the language based on what users were saying. And yeah, again, that's just active listening. So I would say the other place I would put it is on your donation page.
Speaker 3:Ask people why they chose to give. That to me is the most powerful way to start listening to your donors, understanding their thought process, and you can ask more than that, I mean. Another great question is like what's your vision for this mission or how can we improve? Like, if someone just gave, ask me for their feedback and how you can improve what they see long-term. I mean you might open the door to someone who's like well, I just gave you a $50 gift because I don't know you very well or I'm only getting to know you a little bit, but I have this vision for your, for your mission, for your organization, and invite a conversation. Would you like to talk to someone on our fundraising team about your vision or how we can improve? Like you might discover some mid-level major donors by asking those kinds of questions and going deeper on people who just gave to you. So those are the two places I would say to start with your active listening.
Speaker 2:That's so important and I think, too, it's interesting because I my initial reaction when I was listening to you share that of like, invite people to give you their feedback on the vision, right? My initial feedback was like, oh, that feels really scary, right? Oh, like I was instantly cringing. So if you are listening and you're in that position, I get you, I hear you, but it's so important to really understand what your community is thinking. Like I guess, maybe my statement would be I need, I would need to get over myself in that instance, right? Or maybe we all need to get over ourselves, because feedback is not as scary as it might feel in this particular moment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the person just gave to you, so they're not interested in tearing you up, they're invested. That, to me, leads to another like principle, the principle of stewardship, and just remembering, like actually the owners of our mission are our donors. We are just stewards of that mission and if they are the owners, then obviously, like we're not going to cater to one individual donor to like shape everything, but what our donors say matters and those who are willing to not only give but then take the time to talk, to share, get on the phone with our team or write us their feedback. Those are people who are really really engaged, like they're thinking and following and taking the time. Like we want that feedback. We want to make sure that they know that this, the money they're giving, is doing what it says, where it's going to do what we say it's going to do, and that that we are taking in that feedback so that we can continue to grow, improve and maybe they cast a vision we hadn't even considered. That's actually really really a huge boost for us.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I'm going to set the example and set the standard. Are you ready?
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:Here we go. If you were listening to this podcast right now, I would love to hear from you. How about that? We'll just we'll start small. If you're listening to this podcast, go ahead and email us, it's just super easy. Info at nonprofit huborg. Let us know what you think of this episode of the podcast. In general. I'm going to put Chris Barlow's steps into practice and request that feedback. How does that, does that work for you?
Speaker 3:That's awesome, that's great. Please do, please, please, respond to Megan.
Speaker 2:Yes, respond back. Let me know what you're thinking, how you're enjoying the show, or if it's not helpful or whatever the case may be. Info at nonprofit huborg. We'd love to hear from you about your thoughts on the podcast. Very cool, um, chris. If somebody wanted to connect with you or learn more about beeline, what's the best way to find you?
Speaker 3:You can email me, chris, at yourbeelinecom. You can go to our website, yourbeelinecom and, if you are like I, need some more ideas on how to apply active listening or is there some other marketing ideas for digital fundraising? I have a little tool that is built to actively listen and create a custom resource for you. It is a little B in the bottom right corner of my homepage and it will say what is the biggest marketing challenge you're facing right now. What is the question you have? It is built on all of our content and thought leadership and it will create something custom for you. You can refine it and then you can email it to yourself.
Speaker 2:I love it Very, very cool. Okay, as we wrap up today, if you were going to, you know, understanding that our audience is primarily folks who are maybe the executive director, chief development officer, chief marketing officer or working in one of those marketing, communication, fundraising departments within nonprofits. If you were talking to those folks today, what is the one piece of advice that you would give them around this topic, like, what's the one key piece of wisdom that you would want to make sure they take away from this episode?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say, when you're starting to feel overwhelmed by all the things that, like the society and technology, is like throwing at you and trying to feel like you have to keep up with everything, just remember, like your donors are people just like you and they value real human connection just like you. And if you just listen to people and value them as people and then figure out how can I apply that to anything we're doing, you will be effective, no matter what you will, if you are coming from that approach.
Speaker 2:I love it, chris. Thank you so much. This has all been very interesting and, like I said, a topic that we haven't really delved into on the podcast yet, which is really always super fun for me. So thanks for joining us Awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, megan, good to be here.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Again. My guest has been Chris Barlow, who is the customer happiness director at Beeline. Thanks again, Chris, for joining us. My name is Megan Spear and we'll see you next time.