Jeremy Weisz 16:03
So we’re looking at your site, David, I figure we could go through a few things, because obviously you have meticulously planned out pieces, every piece of your website. So you can see, obviously, there’s a nice, clear headline, sub headline, book a free consult. And some of the things you’re talking about here, I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about that gives accessibility here. What other elements here, and you see the chat function. What other elements should we be looking at as of you know, based on how you structured this and what elements you included on your page?
David Pisarek 16:40
Yeah, before the show, we were talking about really clearly understanding your audience, right? And there’s three main pieces to that. There’s demographic, where you know, who are they, age, sex, income, education, that type of stuff. There’s geographic, right? Where are they located? And then there’s psychographics. So what are those things in their head that they care about, where is it that they spend their time, right? So if you want to connect with somebody, specifically, if they’re your ideal customer, if they’re, I don’t know, 40 to 50% of your buyers or the people that interact with your brand, where are they hanging out? You want to put time and effort there, right? So understanding those things, but more than that, understanding those, it gives you the clarity around, what are their pain points, right? And you know, when they come to your website, you want them to feel that they’re in the right spot, that this is where they need to be, right? So at the top of my site, instead of saying, we do websites for nonprofits and charities, that’s talking about us, nobody cares. So look at your website and ask yourself, so what right? I love saying that, like looking at something going so what? Like how does this actually make you feel? Instead, what I want to do is I want to create an emotional connection with them, right? And we advise our clients on this as well. And so saying, like you’re making the world a better place, will help you change more lives that really resonates with them. And then we hit them with not we do web design branding, but website design branding and marketing versus we do it. I want to try to keep the we and the I like the company out of it, and just speak to them, to try to resonate with them.
Jeremy Weisz 18:32
And then, obviously, there’s book a consult that you’ll do here, and then you have some testimonials of results as well, which are important?
David Pisarek 18:45
Yeah, what we need to do is build trust with the people that are coming to our site, right? And one of the easy ways to do that, you can have a logo wall, I have one further down the page. I don’t know there’s like, 30 logos or something there, but the testimonials are really clear. We can go on to anybody’s website, grab their logo and put it on our site and say, Yeah, okay, we worked for them. But the testimonials, there’s actually another human, presumably, they’re a real person from that like you could hire an actor, I guess, right? But you know it, it really speaks to the work that we’re doing, and builds that level of trust.
Jeremy Weisz 19:21
Yep, one thing that stuck out in my research, and I won’t make you divulge all of it, but you know the three simple words, right? You could see to increase donations by 20%. I don’t know if you want to share one. If you want to get it, you have to opt into his email list. But what is one thing that’d be interesting that we should share about this?
David Pisarek 19:50
All right, so secret sauce time here, one of the words, one of the three. So if you want to know the other two, go grab the ebook there, it’s saying thank you. Right. Connecting with the donors, either one on one a custom email. It could be an automated message that feels like it was custom. So what do I mean by that? If I’m on your website and I make a donation to charity, whatever, $20 let’s say I go on tonight at 10pm it is unreasonable for me to expect a human to thank me for that at 10pm. I’m not expecting anybody at that organization. What you can do is you can build automations that will send messages business days between the hours of 11am and 3pm right? And you can build these kinds of smart processes in the back end. But yeah, you want to say thank you. You also want to talk with that about the impact that those donations have, right? You want to create that emotional connection.
Jeremy Weisz 20:56
Yeah, and so you worked with CARE Canada,and I’d love to hear more about what you did with them, and maybe you could just describe maybe the before and after.
David Pisarek 21:16
Okay, so their website, it’s a WordPress site before or when they came to us. They were experiencing a number of problems on their website. They were using a really old page builder that was kind of half broken, and there was like coding displayed on the front end of the site. It wasn’t great, and it was hard for them to manipulate and manage the website. We ended up redesigning it, bringing it more in line with the global brand for CARE. We actually introduced some kind of design elements that were against the brand, but they said, No, we love it. We’re going to go with it anyways. So it’s always fun to kind of like push that branding a little bit there. And we redesigned their site. We cut out a ton of content. Their site was 18, 052 pages, and when we relaunched, we did a part of our process. We’ve got like, a 12 step process that we go through. I’m going like this because I have a graphic that is the Wow Digital roadmap for projects, but we did a full content audit of everything across the board and identified all the problems for them. And in doing that, we were able they’re getting a lot more traffic now to their site. It’s more SEO optimized. And then I think it was maybe six or seven months after we launched, they said, Hey, we want to do something to create a landing page for youth savings and loans associations. So we created this landing page for them. It was about four hours of work, and that brought in $25,000 in donations for them. They have their marketing, and they have all that. That they did. I can’t take the credit, but it just goes to show you the power of web and technology.
Jeremy Weisz 23:01
ParticipACTION, what did you do with them?
David Pisarek 23:07
We did the same thing. We took a website, their website, it was a sideways scrolling website on desktop. On mobile, it was up and down, but going sideways, left to right. It was a really difficult to navigate site, and they were using a couple different platforms, and they want to bring it all in house. So we redid it and brought it in to it’s a WordPress site. The new one now is actually a multi-site. We’ve built out a video player system right in their site. They didn’t want to use YouTube or Vimeo or Wistia or anything like that for their videos. So yeah, that’s what we did for them. And they actually just wrapped up what they call their community challenge, and we built out a whole section for their site around that. And there were over 2 million people that were involved in that project across the country. So many people were involved that actually our mission of helping 5000 organizations to impact 10 million lives, we’re going to be changing that to 20 million lives.
Jeremy Weisz 24:12
Talk about the community challenge for a second. You know, obviously gamification is really a strong way to get people to take action as well as accountability. What are some of the elements that worked, maybe in the community challenge, and maybe some that did not work that you thought would.
David Pisarek 24:30
Yeah, so the community challenge, it’s something that they’ve done for the last few years. So it’s not a new thing that we invented at all. What we did was we redeveloped all of it into the platform so that they could stop spending all kinds of money with a third party to actually run this stuff. And in doing so, we created scoreboards for province, it’s a Canadian organization, and then also by city and at the end of it, the city that won, they get $100,000 grand prize from it.
Jeremy Weisz 25:10
That’s pretty cool.
David Pisarek 25:11
Yeah, it worked really, really well. There were a couple little kinks in it, where they’re not on our server. They’re on an AWS environment, if anybody wants to get like, really geeky and techy about it. There were a couple little kinks in terms of firewall rules, but we got those sorted out. Like, super early.
Jeremy Weisz 25:32
You were saying, yeah, and this is interesting, just kind of how it’s laid out. And I could see that’s a pretty substantial grand prize, I’m sure it motivates people a bit. You know, as far as this challenge,are there other challenges that you’ve seen work? It could be ones you’ve worked on directly, or that you’ve just seen in some of the elements there.
David Pisarek 26:02
Yeah, I think it’s important to understand. Alright, so your audience that’s listening to this are probably not nonprofits, right? But I think there’s lots of opportunity for organizations, businesses, big, small, corporate, whatever, it doesn’t matter, to actually interact locally with a nonprofit. And I don’t know when this is actually going to air, but yesterday, I ran my workshop on how to get corporate sponsors for your nonprofit. And I think the opposite should be happening as well. Where businesses are going, How can I interact? How can we help a nonprofit? What are the nonprofits that we care about? Are they? Are there alignments? So there’s lots of opportunity in terms of marketing around that. So any organizations that have done anything with nonprofits, charities, community groups, local church, synagogue, whatever mosque, whatever that that you go, it’s not just an opportunity to help. But it’s all there is a little bit of a selfish opportunity there as well that you can get some marketing from it.
Jeremy Weisz 27:09
Yeah. I mean, that makes perfect sense. I love that you said that and connected the dots. Because, you know, there is a mission behind that, obviously nonprofit. So if you align with that mission, and you know, you kind of turn your business into, like, at least have a mission based project with them. How do you recommend, like businesses listening to this, like that sounds like a great idea. David, I love that idea. What have you seen work when they are interacting with a nonprofit as far as what they could do together?
David Pisarek 27:47
Yeah, you know, a lot of times, it doesn’t need to be money that you give, right? It could be volunteering. So maybe there’s a local soup kitchen. You can, once a month, or once a quarter, get your team to go down and help out. You can host an event at their facility, for example. So if you’re going to have a big gala or fundraising, a board of directors meetings or executive blah, blah, blah, whatever it happens to be, you can host those at your local community center, right and help support them in that kind of way. It could also be maybe your expertise boards, sorry, not boards. Nonprofits need people to sit on their boards of directors, right? So it’s really like at that point, it’s giving your time.There’s lots of opportunity.
Jeremy Weisz 28:34
No thanks for that. I like that in thinking of the kind of creative ways to help the community, but also give back and also kind of create a mission based movement within a company. You were talking about, before we hit record, which was surprising to me a little bit, not all these nonprofits just get funds through donations, but also to the government as well.
David Pisarek 29:04
Yeah, it’s, it’s surprising. A lot of our clients, they do accept donations. We’ve got donation functionality in their site with the CRM and tracking and this and that and all that kind of stuff. But majority of their funding, it’s strange, but majority of their funding comes from government and grants and that, or even from people’s estates, like when they pass away. There’s a huge amount of money, I think it’s called the silver tsunami, right? That’s going to be passed down from generation down to the next generation over the next 10 years. I think it’s something like $2 trillion worth of money or something. And I talk to our clients about like, Look, you need to connect with the youth so that they care about your organization, right? And at some point down the road, maybe they’ll volunteer, maybe they’ll donate money as they get it, that kind of thing. But, yeah, a lot of the organizations, they get government grants.
Jeremy Weisz 30:04
David, I have one last question. First of all, thanks for sharing your expertise, knowledge and walking us through some of the mistakes and even sharing, I think we at least myself, I could always use thank you more. So I appreciate that. So check out WowDigital.com. You can get the other two words and get the ebook. Let us question is resources? Some of your favorite resources, and this could be software, it could be tools, it could be books, it could be mentors. What are some of your favorite resources?
David Pisarek 30:43
Yeah, so one of my favorite books, I’ve keep this on this little table that I’ve got beside me here. It’s by Ian Harris. It’s called Hooked On You, and the title says, I guess the subtitle says it all: the genius way to make anybody read anything. It’s a super thin book. I think it’s maybe like 90 pages. I think maybe it took me, I read slow, I think it took me like an hour-ish, and it’s really about, you know, how can you use storytelling to help get the point across and engage people and kind of bring them in? Awesome, awesome, awesome book. The other one, which has helped me in my business, is by Phil Jones. It’s called Exactly What to Say. So it’s kind of like the How to Win Friends and Influence People type of idea, except in this book, it’s specifically like exactly what you need to say in certain situations. And this has been super helpful for me.
Jeremy Weisz 31:42
And then, obviously we have to mention your podcast, and then maybe a couple favorite guests that you’ve had on.
David Pisarek 31:50
Yeah, so my podcast, it’s called Non-Profit Digital Success. You can get it by going to WowDigital.com. We’ve got a podcast link in the navigation. Or you could go to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. It’ll bring you there. In terms of favorite guests I had on the show, Alex Charfen who is an entrepreneur, really, really awesome guy. And we were talking about entrepreneurial mindset. One of the things that I like to say a lot is you need to run your nonprofit like it’s a business. So we kind of like dug in on that a little bit, which was pretty cool and fun to do.
Jeremy Weisz 32:30
He’s a smart dude.
David Pisarek 32:32
He is, he is, I’m super lucky that I was able to have him on there. Another one was Anthony A. Dicks Jr, and we were talking about, like, how do you lead a team of creatives? Right? We kind of switched the conversation to talk about nonprofits, but there’s a lot of learnings in there, for sure, that you can apply to any business, any organization, any size.
Jeremy Weisz 32:59
Love it. Any favorite software?
David Pisarek 33:04
I guess there’s two. So if we’re talking about AI, there is one called Perplexity. It’s kind of like where, like ChatGPT had a baby with Google, and it’s absolutely, absolutely fantastic. Anybody that’s interested, go set up a free account and just do a search like, who is, and then put in your name and take a look at the power of this thing. So for example, you know, if we were going to have a guest on a podcast, we could put in their name and say, like, Who is this person? Give me some background on them, what’s their expertise, things like that. So we can build up a profile as podcast hosts, from host to host. We ask our guests, usually for a bio, so kind of like helps us in that way. But it’s really neat. If you’re going to have a prospect meeting with a business, a corporation, somebody there, you can use this to dig up some information on them, not not dig up dirt, right? But get a better understanding about who they are, who their business is, what they do, who they serve, that type of thing. So that’s the first one. The second one I’m going to say is ClickUp.
Jeremy Weisz 34:16
We love ClickUp, yeah.
David Pisarek 34:19
Oh my gosh, it’s so awesome. It’s like Asana. It’s like monday.com I think I haven’t used those, but for the last three years or so, we’ve been really, really heavily investing our time and effort into ClickUp. We use that for project management. We also use it for customer success. So we built out forms in there that we put into what we call a hub page, and our clients fill it in. It creates a task. It automatically assigns it to our account manager. And then we also include a Kanban board so they can see the status of all the tasks without actually needing to get into our project management software. So we can have all those kind of internal conversations without worrying that the client is seeing that.
Jeremy Weisz 35:00
Love it. David, first of all, thank you everyone. Check out WowDigital.com, and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, David.
David Pisarek 35:10
Thank you so much. Jeremy.
