Mallory Erickson  01:44

Welcome, everyone, I am so excited to be here today with Rafi Norberg. Rafi Welcome to What The Fundraising.

Rafi Norberg  01:51

Hello. It’s great to be here. Excited to be chatting today.

Mallory Erickson  01:54

Yes, I loved our first conversation so much and have loved learning about Nexus Marketing. So why don’t we start with you just talking a little bit about yourself and your journey into the business that you’re running today. And what brings you to this conversation?

Rafi Norberg  02:06

I would love to. So I am the president of Nexus Marketing. We are a digital agency that specializes in content marketing and organic search engine optimization for businesses that sell into mission driven markets. So companies that are selling to nonprofits schools, faith based groups associations, I’ve been running the agency for around eight years at this point, which is really exciting. I think we recently just had the eight year anniversary of signing our first client, which is crazy to think about, I can’t believe it’s already been eight years. And what brought me here, originally, my first job out of college, I was a consultant, I did a management consulting job with Deloitte. And at that job, I was always very interested in social enterprise work. So a lot of the work that we were doing in the community with various nonprofits. And also on the side, I experimented with some digital marketing. So the way I got involved in the sector is one of my roommates at the time actually introduced me to a business within the sector and just started helping consult with them on some of their digital marketing and found out there was a need, and it was aligned with my interests in social enterprise. So jumped in and started the agency when it was just me. And now here we are today, eight years later with a larger team and a lot more clients. So it’s been a fun journey.

Mallory Erickson  03:19

Wow, I’m really excited to talk to you about partnerships today, in particular, because I think you have a really unique and wonderful way of bringing people together. But before we jump into that, can we talk a little bit about SEO, because that is a big part of the marketing work that you do for folks. And as you know, it is something I am very, at my very infancy stages and exploring and even in our short conversation at the beginning you were so helpful for me. And I feel like SEO is something that a lot of nonprofits don’t understand what it is, the value that it provides, and how they could even take a first toe baby step into figuring that out for their nonprofit. So can you just talk us through that a little bit?

Rafi Norberg  03:59

Absolutely. So I’ll give you the critical things that I think every organization should know about SEO. So just starting from the outset, SEO stands for search engine optimization. So the thing to understand about it is that when people search something in Google, you’ve got paid advertisements at the top, which have promotion next to them. And underneath that you’ve got the organic results, which is what Google deems to be the best answer for what’s going to answer the search intent of what the user is looking for. So the practice of SEO when people say they’re doing SEO, it’s this practice of trying to figure out how you take your website and modify things about how Google interprets your website so that Google views your website as a that’s going to answer the intention of what people are looking for. So when you think about what you need to do to have good SEO for most nonprofits, I really think it breaks down to three things I would recommend. The first is having a website that is set up to be helpful and easy for users to use. So this idea of when someone arrives at a website, does it load quickly, are all the links going to where they are supposed to go? Are the images set up in a way where they are accessible. So regardless of who’s on your website, they can understand what the website’s about. 

These are things that Google prioritizes, and if sites do them, Google is more likely to show you because what you’re doing as a website is you’re providing a better experience to a wider array of website users who are going to be on your site. And especially for nonprofits, especially nonprofits that are providing some type of service for the community. Having websites where people can access them without the fastest possible internet connection, I think is something that is just a good practice, but also something that will ultimately really help your success. So having a website that is very usable is important. So how do you do that? I think there are a lot of free tools out there that have or tools with a free trial that have the nonprofit discounts associated with them, I would say the two that I would recommend for most nonprofits would be try a seven day trial of SEMrush and do a crawl of your website. And they’ve got some great documentation for how to solve a lot of the common issues and like, elevate what are the most important issues versus others. And the other piece would be, there’s a tool called Google Lighthouse tool, which is actually embedded in every chrome browser. It’s totally free. There’s great documentation around it. And I think those two tools are enough for most organizations to get started with the technical aspect of SEO. I’m sure some organizations as some businesses probably say, but I don’t have a technical person like I am not a technical person. I don’t have a web developer on staff. How am I even supposed to get started with this? And that’s such a good question. 

It’s such a valid point of concern, because it’s common, and it’s one of the things that I think holds people back from taking action. What’s really cool about a lot of the things that you can do to improve your website is that you don’t need to be technical. If your website is built on a common CMS provider. So let’s say your websites on WordPress, or Squarespace or Wix, or one of the other common providers, a lot of the suggestions are not inherently technical. So my recommendation is go sign up for an SEMrush account, go through the technical process of doing the crawl, and then make the determination if you can make some of those changes yourself, because I think that’s going to be the easiest thing to do with to get started. From an onset content standpoint so I’m going to pivot to kind of element two here. The other piece is making sure that you understand to a certain extent, what people would be searching for when they’re looking for your organization. And then make sure you have a page that’s about that on your website. So again, with your free trial, to any of the SEO tools, you can search, what are common keywords, what I would recommend is just kind of looking up how you think people search about you, and then look to see, okay, what are the terms that people that this tool says are commonly used when people are searching. 

And then what I recommend is just making sure that there’s a page set up on your website that really answers what you think someone be looking for, if they’re searching for that term. That’s what we talked about when we say on site content and kind of answering user intent. And then the last piece is off site SEO. So this is really how Google views your site in comparison to other websites that talk about similar topics. The recommendation on that front is really to just make sure that when your nonprofit is doing things in the community, that would lead to people mentioning you or you getting referenced that you’re just asking people to link back to your nonprofit. So when they talk about the organization just linked to the organization’s website, don’t have to do anything fancy there. That’s just something you can do to start showing Google that the impact that you’re having in the community is also translating to how people are talking about you online. And if you can do those three things, make sure your site’s set up well, from a technical standpoint, make sure you’ve given some thought to how people are going to find you. And there’s a page on your website that talks to that. And also make sure that when people are talking about you in the broader community that they’re pointing back to your website, if you can do those three things, just like in the background, I think when you look at your SEO in 12 months’ time, you’ll be in a totally different place. And despite making those very small, incremental changes. So that’s kind of my 101 of SEO and how I think about it for most nonprofits.

Mallory Erickson  08:48

I really appreciate that breakdown. And I want to highlight for folks, that piece around having like blog content or content that’s answering the questions that folks might be searching for related to your organization is such a powerful fundraising mechanism as well, because a lot of people, I talk a lot about how to not have that sort of cringy urgent clickbait type of fundraising. And relevance is something that’s talked a lot about in marketing and not a lot about in fundraising. The urgency is also created through relevance. And I think those types of blogs, that type of content can often show the relevance of supporting an organization like yours right now. So what they’re searching for is what’s happening in their community related to blank, blank, blank. And that leads to a blog where you are presenting as a subject matter expert on that, sharing some of those details and then you have that donation pop up on your site, you’re creating some relevance around why it matters right now, for them to be investing in work like yours. And so I think we often think about or I see a lot of blogs in the nonprofit sector that are almost like newsletter content, and not actually answering the questions that are going to lead folks to the work that the organization is doing, it’s really has the organization centered instead of the problem and problem awareness. So I really appreciate that advice.

Rafi Norberg  10:09

Absolutely, I think that is a really good way to think about it is like if people are searching for your and certainly how it relates to search. So if people are searching for your organization like they’re likely going to find your organization, that’s what we would call branded search. It’s like it’s your organization’s name. So when people search it, your organization is probably going to show up for most websites, you don’t really need to worry about that. I think where it comes in, when people talk about SEO is a driver of donations or a driver of new volunteers or new interest, I think it’s people finding you who wouldn’t normally hear about you otherwise. And by talking about the problems that you’re solving, that’s exactly how you get in front of those people. So I think that’s a really good piece of advice, Mallory, I appreciate you sharing that.

Mallory Erickson  10:46

Yeah. Okay. So we could probably talk about SEO for a long time. But I actually love that we’re going to keep that piece short so that folks have some real takeaways on like, what they can do and not get too overwhelmed with that. 

And I’ll also say, for folks who are having trouble getting over the action line, because they’re like, I don’t even want to log into the backend of my WordPress site, I haven’t touched it since it was developed, you can go on Fiverr or Upwork and you can contract have a very short contract for someone to do this for you. Like you help to identify some of the keywords and the speed test, things like that. And so I just want to give people like a low entry option, if for some reason, it still feels technical, because I think sometimes the feeling of something being technical can be bigger than how technical it actually is. And so I know sometimes I hear that related to SEO. But let’s talk about partnerships. Because one of the things that just blew me away about not only the incredible work that you do, but just how you work with partners, is how intentional you are about bringing people together and really trying to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem with partner companies. And I think we share a lot of alignment in terms of how we think about the ways that people can work together and the benefit to everyone to the ecosystem, to nonprofits, to businesses, when we are working well together. So can you just talk to me about your mindset around partnership first, and how you think about that?

Rafi Norberg  12:10

Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the interesting parts about our business is that the partnership model that we’re operating with today is very different than the partnership model that we started with eight years ago. So maybe let me talk about like how we got to here, and then what underpins it now. So when we first started, the traditional way that I think businesses achieve SEO, and every person who owns a website has probably experienced this is they’ll get solicitations, basically, from different people saying, Hey, can I update your webpage? Or can I contribute an article to your website that I’ve already written that isn’t about anything that you’re actually talking about? And these are like the common things. And I think for a while, I don’t think we were doing that. But I do think that we were doing things that fall into a similar universe of that like reaching out, not really putting a face to a name, not really engaging in the relationship, but just saying, Hey, can we coordinate a blog post on behalf of a client basically. And I think that what we ended up finding out is really two things. One, for the person who is doing that job on the Nexus side, that was not a really fun and engaging job for that person to be doing. So I don’t think it was like the right fit for our agency from that standpoint, by itself is that it’s not a job that people were excited to do at the agency, then I think we just need to take a step back and ask if there’s something we need to change. But then the other piece of it is that for our partners, here, we are doing something that’s so focused on this ecosystem, and we’re not actually engaging in the ecosystem. So for a couple of reasons, it wasn’t really like value aligned. So where we pivoted things, as we said, Let’s sort of change this, instead of just having a very transactional relationship with the industry, let’s try to actually create real authentic partnerships where we are creating long term relationships with people in the industry, where we’re trying to figure out here Nexus is representing a lot of different brands in the nonprofit sector. And here, all these different people, they’re looking to do different types of collaboration with brands, can we be a connector in that, where it’s more focused on actually talking to people, them knowing who we are, and then us presenting a variety of different options for how we can partner. And of the things that we’ve changed about the business in the last few years I think that’s been one of the most impactful where by actually focusing on the creation of the relationship and a creation of a long term partnership, that bridges a couple of different things, content being one of them, I think it’s allowed us to just uncover a lot of new ideas of how we can partner with people that we didn’t know about. And also just talk to a lot more people and solve the problems of our clients. 

And also some of the problems that people in the industry have, who are just time strapped and don’t have time to create their own content and don’t have time to go source webinars and stuff. So I think that the way that we got here is just trying to think about how we can do it better. But now when we look at like, where do we want to go forward with the partnership network? I think it really comes down to this idea of in the nonprofit sector. One of the things that I think is really unique about it is people who create businesses and people who serve nonprofits and people who are just like embedded in the sector, like former fundraisers who are now just supporting the sector as consultants, I think everyone really cares about what they’re doing. And also just is not purely, like financially motivated, they actually care about like doing good and spreading good information and spreading good advice and helping people achieve their missions in a more impactful way. When I think about partnership, it’s really trying to amplify, what each of these individual parties do is trying to talk about to a wider array of nonprofit organizations in different channels that people are really focused on digitally. So I think what we found is that just by being helpful, and trying to expose people to different marketing opportunities that they wouldn’t have the exposure to otherwise, we’ve been able to, I think people really like it. And I also think we’ve just been able to get a lot in front of a much larger number of nonprofit organizations than we ever would have following the old model. So it was a bit of a rambling answer of different ideas around it. But I think just this idea of like being helpful, trying to show people opportunities, they wouldn’t get access to otherwise, and just be a force for good in the sense that we’re trying to spread like very high quality information. 

I think that’s probably the other piece of this is fundamentally, my belief is that in order to perform well, in search, you need to provide information that is the best about the topic that you’re talking about. So I think that basing every relationship in a place where at the exchange of ideas and information is going to be at a very, very high level of quality, that is going to be really useful and custom to what that partner needs, I think is the piece that makes it work. Because I think even if we had great intentions, and even if we were doing this thing that we’re like, Oh, if we just expose people to different marketing ideas, I think without actually providing people things that they deem as useful and impactful. I don’t think you’d get there. So I think by having what I talked about before, but also adding this piece of really high quality content around it, I think it’s just, it allows us to act in a way where the partners will look at it and find it valuable. There’s my rambling answer. Be curious on your thoughts on it.

Mallory Erickson  16:47

There’s so much that you said in there that I think is important, but I actually I want to double click on something you said at the very beginning of your story when you said that people weren’t enjoying what they were doing. And if it’s not something that people want to do, we need to take a step back and see if there’s a way to do it differently. That might be some of the most important advice for fundraising shops that I’ve ever heard. I mean, we watch fundraisers, burning out all the time, miserable in their job, disembodied and feeling disingenuous. And I think for organizations to take a step back and say, What about our process is not working for our fundraisers? Like how are we doing this in a way that is not working for people to stay in the role, we’ve just accepted these high turnover rates. But for people to stay in the role, and to feel good doing what they’re doing, it doesn’t mean they’re never going to be uncomfortable, but to feel aligned with what they’re doing, to believe in what they’re doing, to reduce some of that resistance. I think that’s some really important advice for nonprofits to sit and think about, because I think there are ways just like what you’ve demonstrated here with fundraising to build your fundraising mechanism this way. I mean, my entire business is based on that hypothesis. And I’ve seen some tremendous results that it’s true. And so I think there is a way to do things like you’re saying, in really mutually beneficial, valuable ways. We’re just often taught these like very surface level Silver Bullet tricks, or they’re claiming to be some silver bullet tricks, instead of really talking about what does it mean to build long term sustainable partnership? What’s going to make people want to come back. What’s going to make people believe that their relationship with you is something real and valuable and important and connected to the mission. And I think you demonstrate that with your Partnership Program. And it’s a really important way to think about it for nonprofits too.

Rafi Norberg  18:36

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the values we talked a lot about is this idea of the status quo being unacceptable, because even if you’re doing something, okay, there’s always room for improvement, everyone can always improve. And I think when we run into those challenges, where there’s just like something about the business that and this is true with any organization, right, it doesn’t feel right, or it’s not working. And we’re seeing a recurring challenge. I think one of the things we tried to do, not always successfully, but we try is to make improvements where we can and try and make 1 or 2% better. And I think that has been helpful to our growth over the long term. And it’s not always successful, but I think it’s an important practice to be in.

Mallory Erickson  19:09

And it’s a lot more successful than saying, well, it’s always been that way.

Rafi Norberg  19:14

Yeah, 100% 

Mallory Erickson  19:18

This is the alternative. So I think continuous improvement in that like iteration and trying. It’s like, sometimes we don’t get all the way to what we want, but we get a heck of a lot better than where we are. And so I think that’s just also really important piece. I’m curious, one of my last questions about that is one of the things that struck me, as you were talking about the partnership model, and looking at different folks that you work with is that you work with a lot of quote unquote, competitors. And sometimes you might perhaps, I don’t know but be linking to blogs or things like that with folks who in a larger ecosystem might consider themselves competitors. I think you do a great job of like making sure that they’re core markets are different. But I also think what you’re demonstrating, actually, is this underlying belief that we can all do better together. I’m curious if you get pushback around that, or how your partners feel about that. And what you see there?

Rafi Norberg  20:15

That’s a really good question. So you know, as an agency, there’s a couple of things we do. One, I think, is just underpinning this idea that in most cases, everyone would be better off and reach a larger audience and also grow probably quicker if they did more collaboration with others, even if there’s some hypothetical or perceived overlap. So some of the time, it’s like, you’ve got two businesses where like, as part of their company, they both process donations in some way. And it’s like, is that an overlap? Like, absolutely. But the fact is, one is processing donations via donation tool, the other is processing donations via events, like they are different. And both businesses would be much better off, if they said, we’re just going to work together and try and market ourselves. And even if there’s a little bit of market confusion, we’ll both reach more people than maybe we would otherwise. I think that just fundamentally like we have this belief that through collaboration, you reach a larger audience than you do individually. And not everyone agrees with that, like some people are staunchly against that idea, which is their prerogative. But that’s certainly, I think, an underlying belief of the agency, and certainly our approach to SEO. And I think one of the reasons why we’re successful, because if you refuse to collaborate, or you’re overly exclusive in how you’re collaborating, it actually makes the process of building that digital brand very difficult. 

I think if people are willing to put themselves in places where it’s slightly awkward, they feel uncomfortable, they’ll end up just building a better digital brand, and just a better brand overall. And it’s actually maybe good for you that competitors willing to feature you in some sort of way, that is a ideally positive way that talks about something you’re doing differently than what they’re doing, and then helping to get that reference from them that you wouldn’t get otherwise. I think from like a tactical level, it is one of the things that we’re conscious of. So like, we don’t work with more than one or two businesses that do any single thing, like we try to separate the types of like specific businesses that we work at. Because there is issues if you do too much of that. What we’ve been able to do is because we set up the guardrails around kind of a limit of number per clients that do a specific thing, and then separating out how we think about clients versus how we think about partners, I think it’s allowed us to find ways to collaborate with a lot of different people, even if there’s different types of overlap. And the weird part is, it’s like, the thing that people come to us to is the fact that we have this big partnership network. So if we artificially put walls up on a single side, that would make the partnership network so much less effective for everyone. I think, in some way, like it’s part of our goal, to be able to have some connection with every single provider and brand in the sector and figure out some type of Win-Win partnership that’s going to be useful to them even if it’s not like a paid partnership. Even if they’re doing a webinar, right, we may know that some of the consultants that we work with might want to be introduced to them to do a webinar. And that’s just a kind of a helpful thing that we can do. So I think it’s one of these areas that is both core to the business and always just somewhat of a consistent challenge with how we manage it successfully. But our goal is to really be intentional about who we take honest, like true blue clients, and then also just try and find Win-Win ways, even if it’s someone who we can’t work with formally, that’s generally worked out well for us.

Mallory Erickson  23:08

Wow, I love that. And I think I’m probably even more on the why I provide very different types of services than you. But I think I work with a lot of companies that consider themselves direct competitors, actually. But I feel like nonprofits are looking for different strengths, sometimes in their systems, and they need different things. And so I mean, I totally agree with everything that you said. And I’m thinking about for nonprofits, like if they were to apply that methodology, I think there’s two ways to apply that methodology to how they think about collaboration and their work. One is finding the nonprofits that are aligned with what they do, but sort of at different points of the conveyor belt of services, and trying to build referral relationships through that, or even content relationships through that I think could be huge. I think that’s one way to really think about that. And that requires a nonprofit to really understand like who they are and what they uniquely provide and the service, the problem that uniquely solve, but then I think figuring out who in the ecosystem around them are doing tangential work and figuring out ways to partner could be huge. And then I think for sponsors, it also provides like a unique way of thinking about sort of how do you bring in sponsors who are adjacent or have some overlap, and especially if you’re building out particularly large strategic partnerships, how to be intentional about ensuring that you can stand in that partnership in true integrity, and where is it okay that there’s more overlap between what your partners do and where their spaces where it needs to be a little bit more, like have some of the guardrails that you mentioned around only a few sponsors in a certain category based on benefits, perhaps that relates specifically to what you’re offering them. So I think that there’s just so much in there for nonprofits to take away.

Rafi Norberg  24:55

Awesome. Yeah, I think the partnerships have been the key to kind of our success and from what we’ve heard from clients and partners, I mean, they found it ultimately helpful, the connections that they’ve been able to receive from kind of just like being open to where different conversations can lead. And I think it is one of these things that whether you’re a for-profit or nonprofit or individual just within the mission driven sector, I just think being open to more conversations generally leads to just different opportunities that you wouldn’t stumble across without having those conversations.

Mallory Erickson  25:22

Yeah. I love that. Thank you so much for this conversation today. Where can folks find you and where should they go to learn more about Nexus marketing?

Rafi Norberg  25:31

Thank you, this is really fun. As far as Nexus, I recommend checking out our LinkedIn or our website, just www.nexusmarketing.com. If you are a for profit business in the sector, that’s where you’ll find us. And if you are a nonprofit professional, we have a whole program dedicated to the education of nonprofit professionals called NX Unite. So www.nxunite.com. And there you’ll find just different educational resources, panels, webinars, everything’s free, dedicated to educating nonprofit professionals on different things related to the sector. So if you’re a nonprofit or for profit, we’ve got things for you. So I hope you get the chance to check us out and Mallory thanks for just inviting us on this or inviting me on to speak today. I appreciate it.

Mallory Erickson  26:08

Yeah, I love this conversation. Thank you for joining me.

Mallory Erickson  26:17

Wow, there are so many tips inside this episode for nonprofits. Here are some of my favorite takeaways. Number one, high quality impactful content is the secret sauce when it comes to SEO, and broadening reach among partners, donors and volunteers. Number two, to avoid the click bait trap, generate urgency for your fundraising campaign by promoting truly relevant content and resources. This is a much more compelling long term strategy. 

Number three, if you feel overwhelmed by the thought of logging into your website back end, it’s okay there are great and very affordable outsource options on freelance platforms. Number four, when you create a relationship, you create an avenue for long term connection and mutual branding opportunity with partners. Number five, if you’re seeing something broken or experiencing high burnout, it’s time to take a step back and wonder how can we be doing this work in a more human centric sustainable way. Okay, there are so many more takeaways and tips inside this episode, as well as resources to help you start your SEO journey. So head on over to www.malloryerickson.com/podcast to grab the full show notes and resources now. You’ll also find more information there about Rafi and Nexus marketing. 

Thank you for spending this time with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you would give it a rating and review and share it with a friend. I’m so grateful for all of my listeners and the good hard work you’re doing to make our world a better place. And if you miss me between episodes, stop by and say hello on Instagram @whatthefundraising_. Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow for our next episode of The People Behind The Products.