The Art and Science of Digital Marketing for Nonprofits

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay, here. And today we have John, who is the founder and MD of Uprise Up and Digital Benchmark with us. Hey, John, how’s it going?

Hi, Ranmay. Really good. Yeah, thank you. Delighted to be here.

Lovely. John, before we move any forward and pick your reins, why don’t you talk us through your journey? How was John growing up and how did you start venturing to the digital marketing space? Let’s get to know the human behind the mic, and then we take it from there.

Okay, thank you very much. So, yeah, growing up, reasonably normal childhood. My father was in marketing, which is probably what sparked the interest there for me. I’m not a huge techie. We had the first I had a computer in the UK, a Commodore Fick 20, which had three and a half K, and that’s when I was about five. So I got quite into that at a young age. And then moving on, as I got older, I was using things like an Amiga. Often it was around marketing That was my real interest. I was creating like fake hands and fake promotion materials for football clubs and companies and things like that as a kid. So quite geeky still, but more in a marketing way. At school, I like business studies, so I would take that. The most interesting component of business studies for me was marketing. Back then, they used to talk about four aspects of marketing: price, place, products, and promotion. Promotion was by far the most exciting of all those. I did I do a computer-related course, but with business studies at that degree, and then I really wanted to jump on media, so advertising and media as a career.

Then when I did that, I was buying mainly press, but also TV and out-of-home ads. Gradually, that moved across online, which is a very comfortable space for me.

Lovely. John, you have been in the space for quite some time. Your work has deeply rooted in using digital for the good. What drives your passion for making a positive impact through the technology?

It’s so good to be doing work which has a positive benefit, and there’s so much in technology and media that can really help drive results. So when I was at media agencies before, it was across a portfolio of clients. And then I got made with London just after we bought a flat in London, my wife and I, so in 2008. And then to be busy at the beginning, I was for a mental health charity called Rent Mind. That was fantastic. I was working with beneficiaries and doing sporting activities. It felt really good to be doing something where you could see the benefit and it was having a positive impact. Then when I was searching for jobs, I was looking for charities. I worked in-house at a charity. That’s where I found before that in my marketing career, I hadn’t been in search engine marketing. I saw the huge difference search engine marketing could make to that charity, and it expanded from there. I love the sector. I love doing something that has a lot of meaning behind it. Then that gives me the motivation to work really hard and find new strategies and to improve results.

Lovely. What were those initial challenges, John? Starting an agency, keeping the lights on, the early days are never really that easy, right? Give us more about when you started out, how did it it looked like? I mean, those initial clients coming over, what were those initial challenges?

Yeah, thank you. Well, I was really lucky. When I was working for this charity, it was an international charity, and that’s where I really fell in love with Google Ads. For charities, they do $10,000 grants. Then Google organized an event in London to support charities through the Google Ad grant. It’s $10,000 each month that they would give to charities. They operate a little bit differently from standard Google Ads. They were doing a talk about how they work and you could reask questions. I reasked a lot of questions, and then at this talk, they kept reading my questions out. It became a bit like a conversation between me and Google on stage. But then in the break, I had lots of charities coming to me and asking me how it worked. I think that’s really where something fired in my head. Actually, I’ve got a good amount of expertise there, and I can really help a lot of organizations by doing this as a consultancy. Then when my contract with that charity came to an end, I recently got married in, like I said, bought the house, but I just started in my front room. I was so lucky I’ve made some other charity contacts by that time, but I was pretty much in full calling for half a day. I had spoken, so I’d actually organized a meeting with three charities: Water Aid, Merlin, a Children’s Charity, and St. Ambulance, met with all of them the following week, and all of them became clients. I was really fortunate, and I was away from the beginning. That’s how it started.

Great. What gap in the digital space you see for charities that is there because you specialize in the nonprofit in the charity space, right?

Yes, I do. With charities, it’s very important obviously, to be highly cost-effective with the media they’re doing and being able to understand how it impacts and benefits that organization. The Google Ad Grants, these are only offered to charities. When I first started, that was a really obvious quick way of making it work. But then the way that charities can communicate with their audiences is different from other organizations. A lot of people are more sympathetic. There’s been a number of sessions and techniques that we found over time that would help with that. For example, charities have the opportunity of getting a lot of very powerful links through to their websites, which can really boost their SEO, and they can present themselves as a very authoritative site which Google likes. In organic search, there’s lots of opportunities there, too. We can get some brilliant results on social media, for example, things like Facebook. We’ve had very, very successful campaigns with charities of much, much more made the plaque on the investment that they’ve put in. It’s bossing what works and what doesn’t, and then having experience across all sorts of different organizations for similar type of campaigns.

It gives us a lot of experience, combined with being very data-centric to understand what works and then be able to support other organizations in achieving the same success.

Absolutely. And talking about success, what motivated you to transition from a digital marketing consultancy, which is doing really good, to founding Uprise Up, and then moving on to digital benchmark? Give us that journey there.

So with I think a benchmark has been quite recent. Uprise Up as an agency has been running for about 12 years, and I was maybe as a consultant a couple of years before that. I think it was wanting to do more. I mentioned I was always interested in business as a child, so even Playing with friends, I like to play make believe, setting up a business, games. It was always something that I was interested in and felt like a natural progression. But I think it was partly down to the drive to want to do more. My time was getting filled up. There’s lots of other charities out there that could do with support. I think it started from that place of being able to train other people and grow what we were doing. Now, the expansion is more about how other people with much more expertise than I have in different areas, whether it’s programmatic display or more social media or SEO. I think now I’m surrounded by people that know a lot more than I do on these individual channels so we can be better as an agency together with a lot of shared experience.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do is replicate. A couple of times in my career, I felt this. My wife has felt the same, where sometimes you’re just in a very special group with people who are really into what you’re doing. Then when people meet socially, they’re still talking about work and work concept. You have that real energy of enthusiasm for your arts, your craft. I think my main drive has been to build, to replicate that field. I think we’ve more than done it of people really focused on what they do, really focused on their art, and learning from each other. I think they could get that if it was just me in the front room still.

Right. And then talking about your EATC, everyone has their own niche or speciality or something that they want to talk about in front of the clients. So position them as someone who’s doing different from all the stuff that has been done by the other agencies, right? So what is the differentiator for Uprise Up for you?

Okay, thank you. So when we started, the name Uprise Up was meant to indicate our revolutionary intent, so to uprise or to rise up, both of those have a revolutionary feel. I wasn’t sure which one to call it. Then a good friend of mine who was in branding suggested I called it uprise up. He said that final up. It would be that bit annoying that people would remember it. But yeah, it was about very much doing things differently. And that started with being really focused on the data and being really transparent in the way that we operate. And these days, I think there’s a lot of digital agencies actually which are very good and operate in a very transparent way and focus on data. But back then, I was working for large global media agencies who wouldn’t, for example, even ask clients for access to their analytics, who weren’t that into demonstrating how accountable their work is. I still see it sometimes when we’re working with other agencies, and they’ll report to clients. Even today, on a number of impressions that ads have had, but then keep very quiet the actual return on investment for what they’re doing.

It’s very much to break that system, be very data-focused, make sure that everything that we do, we really understand the clients and their objectives, and then we take that down to technical being able to track on their website and support them, check on the website so that everything can be accountable. The next step for us is setting up reports which are really clear against the client’s KPIs and targets, how well I think it’s focused. Then beyond that, it’s about developing strategy and optimizing to that. We call it our spine, because when you have real clear focus down that line from clients’ needs to the work that’s being delivered. It’s very clear for ours and for clients and for everybody how well we’re doing. It really sharpens the focus to deliver good campaigns. So, yeah, With that, also for me makes it so much more fun. That’s very much the way that we like to work and where we started.

Lovely. You also touched upon the importance of having good men or good team around you, right? What is your hiring strategy? How have you been able to first get the right set of people and then ensure that they stick around with your agency or company?

Yeah, thank you. Good men, and we got many good women as well. We are a data-focused team, and we’re very good at analyzing what’s happening and being able to understand the story that the numbers are telling us, and therefore, know where to make improvement. I learned quite early on, really, that people who are good with data and data management would fit into that quite well, as well as people are very much aligned with our values. Actually, one of our values is data. I’ll start there. We have a test. If it’s a grad, we have a data analysis test check that they can do that and they can see the story. Then the rest of the interview and the maybe activities we do are very much aligned with that and the other values. They include leader charge for transparent effective data. Oh, sorry, bear me a second. Ranmay, can it cut?

Sure. I’ll let it this one, don’t worry.

Okay, thank you very much. I’ve just gone blank, and it’s just something I talk about all the time. It’s a bit more interesting. Yeah, our values, it’s champion heartfelt camaraderie. All of these have that revolutionary language that I was talking about, that names of It’s all about the champion. The champion, heartfelt camaraderie is the way that we treat each other, the way that we support each other, the way that we interact with clients as well and suppliers. It has to be everybody. Then, this is a really important one for us, bravely grab the standard and bone. If you can imagine, you pitch up the banner. If you see anything that’s loose or dropping, pitch it up and make sure it has a home, it has a place that we’re dealing with things well and that we’re pitching innovation as well. It’s very much wrapped up with that. Then continuous improvement has always been something we’re talking about. We never want to rest on our goals. Let’s have a look at the data and see how else we cut it. If it’s a 5% improvement that can be made by changing the targeting or by changing the copy against different audiences or the landing page we’re taking people through to we’re always looking for opportunities to make 5% maybe improving here and there or somewhere else. But that all adds up to be something quite powerful. Leave the charge for effective, transparent data, I mentioned before. Then finally for us, and this is really important, is make the world better. Again, if we all have that same energy of wanting to do brilliant work for fantastic organizations, then that helps us all with our alignment. Very much that’s what I look for with people who join. Because if they’ve got that, they can learn everything from us.

Right. Depending on the culture at your agency, you then jot down your must haves and then look for the right set of people. So for that also, it’s important to understand what work culture do you want to have in your setup. So that is, again, quite And talking about that from a founder and managing director perspective, how does your typical day look like, John? I mean, typical, let’s not talk about Monday. It’s almost like time meetings, all be used up. But a normal day, how does it look like for you?

So I try and set aside up to a day per week on the strategy and looking at what we’re doing, how we can maybe change and evolve and develop. So that’s really important. Also, I’ve got a team who really do lead the charge when it comes through to innovation, but keeping on top of that for me is also important. Most of my day is then comprising with me either being involved in certain client campaigns, if more senior hand is needed, or dealing with the overall operations. It could be the finance and the recruitment and all the little bits and pieces that come in. I’ve got to make the only person in my agency that doesn’t keep a time sheet. That’s normally because there’s lots of little things that come in throughout the working day. To track that all, then we take up a lot of time in tracking. But it keeps me busy. It’s quite intense, but it’s a lot of good fun. Again, it’s working with a lot of people that I really enjoy working with. It’s a quick, fast day, quite a lot of work, but it feels good at the end of it.

Right. Lovely. Give us your favorite client story, John, the one that is close to your heart.

Client story? We’ve got a There is one well voluntary service, it used to be Women’s World Voluntary Service, and we helped them over 12 years ago. I think it must be about 13 years ago, and we’re still working with them and supporting them through their evolution. When we took over their Google Ad Grants at the beginning, They weren’t making much in terms of traffic there. Then we got them to maximizing on $10,000. At the time, we could then increase that to the $40,000, which we were able to do for most of our clients. Then we ran some very good separate campaigns. Also, we had a real focus, especially towards the end of volunteers, and supported them as they were supporting the NHS, which became hugely important over COVID, and our VSA have retained that relationship since Again, it’s nice to be on campaigns to be a really benefit society. In this one, it’s not so much about the donations, but supporting people like myself. We’re looking to volunteer, and they’re now doing a huge amount of good by doing it with a great organization that helps people do that. We’ve also run campaigns like, for example, the Crisis, Homewise Charity.

They do a big crisis at Christmas campaign. Year on year, for three years, we significantly improve the donation amounts that they were making from before, from completely redoing how they were running their social media ads, from introducing clever programmatics, and not like you get black box programmatic systems where you can’t see too much about what’s going on. We took it to something I think, much more transparent where we had more manual control, and then the paid search and search support that we were giving them as well, really honed in on what was working for them. Again, by continuous improvement year on year, we by more than 10 times increased the results that they were previously getting to when we first took it over. When you got the numerical data to back it up, those types of campaigns can be really satisfying.

Lovely. Great. Great. Finally, John, can you share one piece of advice or mantra that guides you in your professional journey so far? This is for our listeners who are starting out or trying to make a mark in the space.

Okay. If you’re starting off, and it’s before you get to the point where you’re recruiting people, I think it’s got to be make sure you’re doing something that you have a passion for because you need that, I think, to carry you through, especially when you start, you can be looking at long hours, you can be looking at a lot of stress, and you need to understand that you have some growth that needs to happen to be able to continue doing the work. Having a real question for what you’re doing, both in terms of the nature of what it is, and like I say, for me, it’s the industry that we’re in, and that will drive you through. When you get beyond that and you start recruiting people, surrounding yourself with the right people is so important. Whatever it is you’re doing, again, certainly people will have a passion for that. We’ll help message me.

Lovely. Gideon, John, thank you so much for the insight you shared with us today. For our listeners, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Thanks. Our website, Upriseup. We also, for charities, we run, we have a separate company called the Charity Digital Benchmark. I mentioned that I was really data-focused. The benchmark is brilliant. It was started by a charity called Charity Comes, and they asked us to… We could support them with it, and now they’ve asked us to take it over. Though we’re not making money from it, but the tool itself is amazing. It pulls in Google Analytics data from all the members, and we store that on Google BigQuery. Then we’ve created a dashboard where people can see their online media results against the overall dashboard. If they want, they can look at their health charity, they can look at their other health charities’ data and see what sources are driving traffic, what people are doing when they get to their website, how well the different pages are performing, things like that. It could be their social media, what channels are performing best. That digital benchmark is charitydigitalbenchmark. Co.Uk

Lovely. Great, John. Once again, thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. We really appreciate it. Cheers.

Very My pleasure. Thanks, Ranmay. Thank you.