Episode 89 – Data is fine, but keep the emotional hook.

My guest on the show today is Michael Schreiber. Michael is an experienced leader of mission driven organizations with a...

The post Episode 89 – Data is fine, but keep the emotional hook. appeared first on Sideways8.

My guest on the show today is Michael Schreiber. Michael is an experienced leader of mission driven organizations with a particular interest and capacity in organizational growth and strategic implementation. Over his twenty year career, Michael has served in leadership roles for Deloitte Consulting, United Way Worldwide, GBCHealth and Concern Worldwide. In each of these engagements, he has been responsible for identifying new relationships, building robust processes, formalizing new strategies, and ensuring staff development approaches to unlock additional organizational value.

Adam: [00:00:09] Hi. Welcome to the Good People, Good Marketing Podcast, a podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so the good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways8, a digital marketing agency and 48in48, a nonprofit dedicated to hosting events that builds forty-eight websites for forty-eight nonprofits in forty-eight hours.

[00:00:28] My guest on the show today is Michael Schreiber. Michael is an experienced leader of mission driven organizations with a particular interest and capacity in organizational growth and strategic implementation. Over his twenty year career, Michael has served in leadership roles for Deloitte Consulting, United Way Worldwide, GBCHealth and Concern Worldwide. In each of these engagements, he has been responsible for identifying new relationships, building robust processes, formalizing new strategies, and ensuring staff development approaches to unlock additional organizational value. Michael, thanks for joining me on the show.

Michael: [00:01:01] A pleasure, Adam. Thank you for having me on.

Adam: [00:01:04] You’ve been at some pretty amazing companies. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. This is fun. Do you have anything you want to add to that illustrious bio there?

Michael: [00:01:12] No, no, thank you, that was very comprehensive. Always nice to hear your twenty years put up in that nice thirty-second statement, but it was perfect.

Adam: [00:01:22] Your twenty-year elevator pitch is great. That’s what you want, right?

Michael: [00:01:24] Exactly.

Adam: [00:01:25] I like that. I like that. Okay. Well, we can just dive in then. First question, related to digital marketing, can you tell me something that has worked well for you?

Michael: [00:01:33] I think one of the things that’s worked well is really being able to capture some of the emotional appeal that works really well in a real world or in-person aspect, and translate it into a digital appeal. An example would be the outbreak of the Ebola crisis in West Africa and the team at Concern. Clearly, if you’re on the ground, you see how life-changing an outbreak like that is, and how scary and all of the emotional side of things that would really mobilize resources. It’s often tricky to find the balance for capturing that emotional reality and packaging it in a way that it can be delivered to a different audience in a different place in a different way. But I think that when it does work and when you’re able to recreate some of that urgency and feel, it translates into a really, really effective campaign that is both effective from raising awareness and funding, as well as creating an ongoing hook and engagement.

Adam: [00:02:47] I like that. I mean, marketing that engages people at an emotional level is always going to be better and more effective than marketing that’s just fluff and I feel like a lot of marketing is fluff, and I’ve probably been guilty of that myself if I’m being honest. But when people connect emotionally, things really happen and things move forward. I think that’s really, really, really smart.

Michael: [00:03:07] Yes. I would add to that that I think a lot of professionals in the area get a push around data and say, “Make this evidence-driven and data-driven.” I think that that’s important, but I think that that’s important without losing that emotional hook and sometimes people do it as an “either or” and see like, “I’m going to be data-driven, so I’m going to say 98% of people need X” and, “this doesn’t happen” and, “Y number of outcomes could be created,” and they take all of the emotive value of the conversation away and what you’re left with is a whole bunch of numbers that are hard to relate to.

Adam: [00:03:52] I feel like nonprofits in particular have a habit of wanting to push numbers, numbers, numbers. “We’ve done this and we’ve done this. We’ve brought up this much value and we’ve done this,” but in reality, I think most of our audiences and listeners really just want to know the anecdotal stories. What real world change have you made for this one person, for this one child, for this one organization, for this one whatever. I think that’s really where people can connect emotionally and really make a huge difference.

Michael: [00:04:21] I couldn’t agree more. I think you need the numbers to give people a sense of the scale, the credibility, effectiveness and all of that, but at the end of the day, the real engagement hook is about the one or is about that story. It’s like a doctor telling you, “You only have a one in a million chance of having this terrible disease.” It feels very different if you’re that one, so how do you get people engaged to be that immersed and not worry so much about the data that might be a backdrop.

Adam: [00:04:57] Right, that’s great. That’s great. Okay. Question number two, related to digital marketing, can you tell us something that has not worked well that we can learn from?

Michael: [00:05:06] One piece that has not worked for me on a repetitive basis has been where you get overly confident that because you have a lot of demographic knowledge and insight that you’ll be able to translate that into behavioral action. I’ll give you a very specific example of that. If at United Way we knew that the profile of people watching a halftime show in Thanksgiving was going to be a particular portfolio of people by age, by geography and all of this, we could then say, “Well, given that we have that population, we could expect this kind of appeal to have this kind of result.” We could flash up a message saying, “Volunteer in your community” and because these are people who are under age thirty-five and fit a profile of a volunteer that we could assume that this kind of behavioral hook will then happen. And I think this is somewhat of that false choice. I think if you really do know what demographics translate to what behavior and what messaging is going to trigger that call to action or that behavior to happen then— And I’m sure it works, but I think the problem is very, very few people will know all of that. You may believe that you know all of that and sometimes having all of this demographic data makes you feel more confident than you should. I think that applies to politics, that applies to purchase decision, that applies to mobilizing actions, and I think we’ve made mistakes or I’ve made mistakes in making a campaign that relied too heavily on what’s ultimately an unknowable of how is this demographic going to take this message and do what with it.

Adam: [00:06:58] Right. I read a book interestingly that illustrated part of your point well that I think I should share. I think it’s called “Thinking in Bets” by Annie Duke, if I remember correctly. It’s basically a world champion poker player talking about how you make decisions based on imperfect data, imperfect knowledge and making bets. One of the things she talked about was the surprise of the last presidential election and how everybody was like, “The pollsters were so wrong,” and, “They were so off,” and, “I can’t believe they were this wrong,” and blah, blah, blah. And she said, “No, that’s not true. If you looked at the polls, they said there was like a 70% like—” I’m making up numbers, I don’t know, “There’s a 70% likelihood that one was going to win and then the other candidate won.” And she said that it doesn’t mean they were wrong. It just means the 30% is what happened. With demographic knowledge, we make these assumptions. We say, “Okay well, X percentage of people that are under thirty-five are going to be more volunteer-prone.” Maybe we’re 60% sure of that, but that still means there’s a 40% chance that we’re completely off and we’re going to spend our money and get absolutely nothing for it. I think we need to recognize that when we’re making these types of data-driven decisions that we’re making decisions based on truly imperfect knowledge and we have to test and verify, and then move forward from there.

Michael: [00:08:15] I agree fully. I think the other part that I would add is in many cases, at least in a cause-based world, what you’re trying to incent is an action that’s not actually happening today, and so you can’t rely on a lot of data. I think that may illustrate an example for where something is happening. If you go back to that volunteering example, if you’re trying to ask people who give you money all the time to volunteer their time and your starting point is very limited in knowledge of what people will volunteer for what things in what way and why and you’re just overlaying what people give money to what things for what purpose, you’re really going into an uncharted area that you, because of the data you have, may feel like you’re really well-equipped for. But as it turns out, it’s fundamentally different.

[00:09:09] I’m not a military guy or from a military family, but I think you have enough examples of military planning where it’s, for all of the known elements in— Well, it should have been forecastable what being in a desert instead of jungle is, but it’s not forecastable because you don’t have a data set that allows you to adjust the old numbers and therefore a lot of the learning happens on the fly and that takes me to the nugget that comes out of this lesson-wise, is I think being able to do things in bite-sized tests and really being able to prototype and send something out and it’s not just an A/B message. It’s really thinking about what is the purpose of what we’re trying to get people to do and what are the things that lead us there. If you’re able to take bite-sized elements and test a lot of different things, you get the learning in place before you launch with the full campaign. And I think that’s been the counter-balance to those errors I referred to earlier, is as soon as you learn that the data that you have is not sufficient to inform what you should do, there are ways to adjust around.

Adam: [00:10:17] Absolutely. That’s fantastic. Okay. Now, question number three, related to digital marketing, can you tell me something you’re excited about?

Michael: [00:10:26] I’m excited that I’m currently with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and it’s an organization that’s about to hit its fiftieth anniversary. It’s a unique thing when you have this backdrop of a proud history that reaches pretty far back but still has a lot of the original participants in the world of 1968 there. And so I think the ability to take a cohort that is not native digital, that doesn’t engage in a digital way, but to try to scale their engagement through a much more current digital marketing campaign and getting people to participate with memories of 1968, with remembrances, with elements of the world that was there at that time but in a very modern way that can then have some montage and some impact that creates a digital footprint that we can use with the next generation. It’s really exciting for me, a really exciting challenge, somewhat unique, because I don’t think you’re going to have too many generations beyond the current one that will be non-native digital and it’s really one of these last opportunities to bridge two different cohorts and two different approaches together.

Adam: [00:11:49] Wow. That sounds like an exciting experience. I look forward to seeing how that all pans out. That’s great. Well, Michael, let me see if I can recap what we’ve talked about so far.

[00:12:00] For what has worked well for you, you said working to capture an emotional appeal that works well in person and translating that into a digital form. And you talked about as an example the Ebola outbreak, being able to see how life-changing it is to the community around us, but it’s tricky to capture that and then appealed to users in an emotional way that connects with them in a different context, in different place, in a different culture. You mentioned that data is fine, but as far as that goes, we still need to keep the emotional hook to what we’re doing because really, it’s not always about numbers, but it’s really about connection, and how that connection affects and applies to people and how that relates to how they affect, apply and collaborate in a sense with our organizations.

[00:12:46] For question number two, what has not worked well that we can learn from, you said having demographic knowledge does not necessarily transfer into behavioral action, that the data makes you feel confident, and maybe more competent than you should, but we can only still based on that data make assumptions, and because of that we need to do marketing in bite-sized tests to validate and verify what works before we roll out large campaigns.

[00:13:13] And then for question number three, what are you excited about, you said it’s your organization’s fiftieth anniversary and there are still a lot of original participants and so you are working with sort of that last generation of non-native digital people and connecting with them in a digital way to get involved with the anniversaries. That sounds pretty exciting. Did I miss anything from that recap?

Michael: [00:13:33] No, that was a great recap.

Adam: [00:13:36] Fantastic. Do you have any final thoughts you want to share with the audience?

Michael: [00:13:40] I think just maybe one that speaks to digital marketing in the cause-based sector, is it’s ultimately a trust-based world because the product is a little more aspirational and intrinsically non-tangible to most of its consumers and I think because of that dynamic, it’s important to always keep in mind, are there things that can reinforce the trust networks, the perception of trust for your organization, the messaging, the look and feel of, of what you do? I’m sure that’s important generally, but I think it’s of heightened importance for those of us who are not only trying to market our product but are fundamentally supporting a product that is extremely important but also at times extremely hard to verify its existence of. I would just end with that. Make sure that that is a thought that as you go through all of those other considerations that you’re keeping that trust quotient in mind.

Adam: [00:14:46] That’s fantastic. Michael, this was great, man. Thanks so much for being on the show. I’d love to have you back again sometime soon.

Michael: [00:14:53] Perfect. Thank you so much, Adam.

Adam: [00:14:57] Thanks for listening to the Good People, Good Marketing Podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me, your host, you can find me on Twitter at @ajwalker and on my blog at adamjwalker.com, where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit-building and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks and tune in next time.

The post Episode 89 – Data is fine, but keep the emotional hook. appeared first on Sideways8.