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Joey Zumaya thinks about LinkedIn’s benefits for nonprofits

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Over the last two years, nonprofits have seen digital marketing and fundraising accelerate at lightning speed. In this season of Groupthinkers, we’re dedicating each episode to discussing digital advancement with some of the industry’s leading experts.

On this episode, we sit down with Joey Zumaya, Head of Nonprofit Enterprise Sales & Strategy at LinkedIn, to discuss LinkedIn’s role in digital fundraising. Tune as we talk about:

  • Where nonprofits fit in on LinkedIn (11:20)
  • The advantages LinkedIn offers for fundraising (16:10)
  • Examples of nonprofit success on LinkedIn (20:05)
  • Tips nonprofits can implement today (26:40)

Meet our guest

Joey Zumaya Headshot

Joey Zumaya

Head of Nonprofit Enterprise Sales & Strategy, LinkedIn

“Broadly speaking, the search filters and your access to executives and higher-income donors is extremely valuable, particularly on LinkedIn … This is a platform that is operating within a professional context. People are coming to LinkedIn to find jobs and coming to LinkedIn to be engaged by different professional tasks. Fundraising and philanthropic giving is by far one of those obvious tasks.”

Podcast transcript

Justin McCord: So, Ronnie, you wanted banter. You wanted me to have banter to start because you think that that's the way that I like to start, I'm just trying to get everything warmed up. I'm not the type of person that jumps into the pool. Now I don't like to take the slow staircase into the pool. It's somewhere in between. Like, I'll go fast, but not jump.

Ronnie Richard: Not a full cannonball?

Justin: No, no, I don't. I don't see the need at this point.

Joey Zumaya: So, you think you'll dip in backwards into the middle of the pool holding on to the curb?

Justin: Yeah, so maybe I'll go like two steps and then face plant into the pool. Right? Because then you're kind of getting into the water before the full submerge.

Ronnie: Really depends on how cold it is, though, you kind of pause at the waist.

Justin: What I've learned in my day about getting in the pool is the longer you allow the suspension of the coldness of the water, the worse it's going to be.

Ronnie: That's true.

Justin: So which is kind of conflicting with my, you know, cannonball approach because with the xannonball you would immediately just jump right in, right?

Joey: This is a profound analogy of a moderator for a podcast. Here's my take on public speaking that I got from a mentor of mine. You don't have to warm someone up who's on fire. So that's why practice and preparation are key. You should be ready to go when it starts.

Justin: I love that, Joey. Joey, likewise, I like even 'with practice and preparation.' I love that. Even the subtle, most visual picture in your mind can capture you and take you to a place that, you know, because as we're talking about that, we're all imagining the last time we were in a pool. Right? And so, I appreciate that visual picture that kind of can help us.

So, welcome everyone to not an episode of pool talk, but welcome to this episode of Groupthinkers, the podcast from RKD Group. I'm your host, Justin McCord. With me, as always, is cannonball expert Ronnie Richard, and on each and every episode we chat with an innovator in the nonprofit marketing space, someone who's doing something that's new or unique or innovative to help propel nonprofits forward.

And today, this is new and unique and innovative, what we're talking about. I'm thrilled that we've connected with Joey Zumaya. And Joey is not only a founding partner of the Zumaya Group, which he's going to talk a little bit about. He's not only a member of the National Board of Advisors for The Salvation Army, which he can talk a little bit about.

But he's also the Head of the Nonprofit Enterprise Sales and Strategy for LinkedIn, as our viewers will be able to tell from his T-shirt and our listeners will be able to imagine.

So Joey, I want to just start with your journey, and I want you to share with us your journey across your career, including your connection to The Salvation Army, all the way to LinkedIn for Nonprofits, and how that became a seed that has grown into a really unique solution set for nonprofits. If you would start there, and then we want to dive into some of the nuance and details specifically of LinkedIn.

Joey: Sure, well, thanks for having me, and it's good to be with you. I usually lead with where I'm at and then back into how I got there just for illustrative purposes on my career and my journey. But as you had mentioned, there are three primary roles that I have in life right now as it relates to supporting and working with nonprofits. The Zumaya Group is a company that I co-founded with my partner, Mariana.

We’re really focused on helping nonprofits become more capable to increase their impact really around helping them do things like develop their advisory boards, or increase their leadership capability all the way into community engagement against certain causes or campaigns.

Second one, very, very close relationship with the Salvation Army in terms of being one of its strategic advisors on a number of different levels, and I'll talk about how that came about shortly here.

But lastly, my role at LinkedIn, and which is why I feel I have my dream job, is to really lead the Enterprise Sales and Strategy for a part of LinkedIn called LinkedIn for Nonprofits. And it's an amazing group of people who work alongside thousands of nonprofits who use LinkedIn to do everything from hire for their positions all the way over to brand themselves and fundraise to corporate partners and to donors.

And LinkedIn, we’ll get into this in a bit, is increasingly becoming the go-to place for fundraisers to connect with the people and the organizations they need to execute their mission. And so, to be able to be a part of that work is something I'm so grateful for, and I'm really glad to get out of bed and do it every day. As I say, often the roles I have in life, people wish they got out of bed and had my problems. So, it keeps me humble, and it keeps me grateful.

Justin: Very well said and so appreciative of your time and your expertise. Let's start with the connection into the Salvation Army to, you know, to the extent that you're comfortable. Talk about how the Salvation Army has played a role in your life both, you know, with your current roles, but also throughout your life.

Joey: Sure, so the culmination of my journey and my career is the idea that you can do well and do good at the same time. You don't have to compromise between the two. Don't get me wrong, certain people have lots in life where they were called to do a specific thing that requires sacrifice. But in my experience, I have found a way, and I encourage others to consider doing the same in terms of trying to help create good and do good in the world, while also being able to succeed in your own career.

Because at an early age, the reality that I have today is very different from the one that I had before. So, my first introduction to The Salvation Army was by virtue of having to live in one of its homeless shelters as a teenager. My family had fell on some pretty hard times, and we needed a place to go for about four months to get back on our feet, figure out what our next moves were and ultimately get back to a place where we had normalcy. And The Salvation Army was such a welcoming, inclusive, helpful environment that I remember to this day the impact that it had on my life in terms of getting helping get me and my family what they needed to get a second chance and ultimately be able to move forward in their lives.

So, as I continued to succeed in my career and advance in my career, The Salvation Army was always an organization, because I was on the receiving end of its programs and services, that I committed to supporting. Because the reach and the impact of The Salvation Army is unlike anything that I have personally ever seen in the world, both anecdotally and firsthand. I mean, we serve about 30 million people a year in the United States alone. So, the fact that I had been a beneficiary of it, the fact that I'm a man of faith and the idea that we should help people and we should extend a hand to people who need it. On top of the fact that I am what I refer to as a competitive giver, someone who wants to drive the most amount of impact. I mean, that partnership with The Salvation Army makes it pretty hard to be against that criteria. But it all started with them helping me.

Justin: I think it's so important for our listeners and Ronnie, even for you and I to constantly reflect on and be renewed by stories, Joey, like what you just shared. And there's something about the giving spirit that is so powerful that we need to constantly reflect on, especially in the work that we do in serving nonprofits in various capacities. So thank you for sharing that part of your story. Thank you also for taking what you learned and what you experienced as a teen and translating it into giving back and what you do now. The two are clearly linked. So that always fills Ronnie and I up when we hear those stories of how people, they'll say, well, I didn't plan on getting into the nonprofit marketing space, and then they'll tell the story to where it's just such a clear line that, even if you didn't plan on it, that you were being guided and directed into it. So, thanks for sharing that.

Joey: Yeah, totally. If I may make another point. Increasingly, it's becoming important to humanize our efforts and to humanize our stories. People are so burned out on misinformation and the virtual aspect of how life works nowadays that they want to see a name and a face of their impact. They want to be inspired by actual people with actual stories. So, I'll tell that story every chance I get, because if there's one thing we need today in the work that we do it's inspiration. So, thanks for asking.

Justin: Absolutely And very well said. So, we're in the midst of a series of conversations about digital advancement. And the principle, Joey, is that we want to raise the level of discourse on how nonprofits can take a step forward. That's all we're looking for is like a single step forward in how they use digital. In that wide range of possibilities of what digital is, how they use digital assets to improve their connection with their donor base, help move their cause forward, whether or not that's internally or externally.

Which brings us to LinkedIn and the LinkedIn for Nonprofits team. People generally think of LinkedIn as a networking social media platform for white collar professionals. So how do nonprofits fit in? How did this thing even come to be?

Joey: Good question. I'll try to give you the short answer because there's a lot of goodness in the answer to this question. In order for you to really understand LinkedIn, there are a couple of house rules that I always encourage people to think about.

So, there's LinkedIn, the company, which is where I'm very fortunate to work as a leader, and then there's LinkedIn, the platform, which is its own living, breathing entity. And before you even get to LinkedIn as a platform, you need to understand what drives success on a platform that is social. There are two main things that determine a social media platform success, especially nowadays with everything that's happened.

Number one, value. What value am I getting from being on this platform, from engaging on this platform, irrespective of how you define value? And then the second one is trust. Do I trust this platform with my information? Do I trust the things that I'm consuming, and do I trust that the things that I'm sharing are going to accomplish what I intend for them to do?

Fortunately for us, because we have operated with a value called members-first [which] prioritizes the privacy, the needs and the value of members, we have become very successful as a platform in terms of those key areas. In fact, the Digital Trust Survey, has named LinkedIn the most trusted media platform, social media platform year after year after year because of that very reason.

So, LinkedIn has over 58 million companies and over 800 million professionals that are logging on to connect with each other, to look for jobs, to find purpose, to volunteer. And because we provide a lot of value and because we have a lot of trust, we are seeing every metric we use to determine successful engagement be broken right now in terms of records.

So, about 130 people create a new LinkedIn profile every minute. It's about three people a second create a LinkedIn profile at this point. And so, LinkedIn, as a platform, irrespective of use case, has become go to in terms of being a trusted, valuable place to engage, and nonprofits are no exception.

In fact, we actually feel, because of how we invested in this area, it's a particularly great place for nonprofits to engage. And I've been reading the latest stats that we got from the data team and sharing a lot of this lately. It's pretty ... it's pretty remarkable.

Here are a couple of nice data points just to quantify the value that a nonprofit would have in engaging on LinkedIn, because we really have about 700,000 nonprofits with the LinkedIn page 700,000 plus. Here's why: There's over a quarter of a billion volunteers on the platform as of 2020. That is a lot of people that want to volunteer their time and their talents to help do good in the world.

53% of LinkedIn members donate to nonprofits. Think about 53% of over 800 million people are givers to a nonprofit. And then lastly, 60% of LinkedIn members are interested in volunteering. And another subset underneath that is that over 50% of LinkedIn users are more likely to be philanthropic than the average internet user.

So, so to bring all of that goodness home in one kind of, like, one headline, if you're thinking about a place that you would want one of the biggest ROIs in terms of where you invest your branding, your time and your attention, irrefutably LinkedIn would be that place for those reasons.

Ronnie: So Joey, you talk about value, obviously, and trust being huge components to LinkedIn, obviously engaging with people, a huge part of LinkedIn. Bringing it specifically to fundraising, because you mentioned volunteers, fantastic for that as well. But if we were thinking about fundraising, specifically when people, nonprofit marketers, for example, think about social media and charitable giving, Facebook's usually top of the list. It's an easy platform directly for giving and donations. But where does LinkedIn play into that? How does, what does LinkedIn offer when we think about fundraising? How, what is kind of the best way nonprofits fit in there?

Joey: Well, sure, I’ll give an answer that's broad. And then I'll share a couple of use cases where I've seen this be really helpful in terms of different fundraising scenarios. So, so broadly speaking, the search filters and your access to executives and higher-income donors is extremely valuable, particularly on LinkedIn. Because number one, this is a platform that's operating within a professional context. People are coming to LinkedIn expecting to find jobs and are coming to LinkedIn, expecting to be engaged with different professional asks.

Fundraising and philanthropic giving is by far one of those obvious asks. So, if you think about where people are not only signing up in mass, but also coming to every day to learn about different causes and to learn about different economic opportunities, that in and of itself is a pretty compelling pitch in terms of why you would want to get on LinkedIn.

Two of the most tangible scenarios that I've seen because there's thousands of nonprofits who use our products and services. Most of them who are a little less small or less sophisticated use our free features. But we do have a lot of organizations who use our Sales Navigator platform, which is like your ability to search for companies and executives on steroids, and you can get live alerts on what they share or post to reach out to them in the right time, at the right time, in the right way.

Number one: if a nonprofit has a pipeline of corporate partners that they want to go after, your ability to get intel about who the decision makers are at those companies, right, who is in charge of social impact or who's in charge of giving, community development. You can find those people in those companies on LinkedIn. But more importantly, it's great that you can find them. Chances are you might, if your pitch is compelling, be able to also reach them and invite them into conversations to say, hey, here's what we're focused on in the community or in the country. We really think based on your mission and your vision, there's alignment between what you want to do and what we're doing. So, can we invite you into a conversation to talk about a partnership? That's one that's been very successful.

The second one is capital campaigns. A lot of nonprofits are running capital campaigns to build a center or to raise funds for a specific initiative. Your ability to find quality donor prospects all the way up to people who you need to chair a committee to execute something like a fundraising campaign or a capital campaign. LinkedIn has been very, very valuable for that. And because you have the ability to zoom in on a region where oftentimes a lot of these campaigns are happening. It's really quite powerful and valuable in terms of your ability to find those people, but more importantly, reach them.

Ronnie: It's a great platform for corporate giving, great platform for capital campaigns sort of on the high value donor and is where it kind of makes sense. Joey, putting you on the spot a little bit: Do you have a story? Is there a story you can share of a nonprofit who's seen LinkedIn be a successful platform who's seen this happen?

Joey: Yeah, I have a lot. And if you go to nonprofit.linkedin.com, we share a lot of success stories about nonprofits who are using LinkedIn and engaging LinkedIn. But for the sake of your question, I'm going to use The Salvation Army. Because one thing I didn't mention as a use case is really building a presence to a professional audience on LinkedIn. And then marketing accordingly, right? Like making yourself discoverable, telling your story on the platform, et cetera, is the foundation of all the work that you do from your company page.

Early on, when I joined the National Board of The Salvation Army, LinkedIn wasn't necessarily perceived as a go-to place for nonprofits to engage. But I knew back then that it was increasingly going to [be]. So, I spoke with the communications team at national headquarters. I said, hey, we need to invest some, some, some time here. Be really intentional about LinkedIn. And what we found, no surprise to me, is that if you think about the generations, Salvation Army is over 100 years old, the generations of people who have gone to its camps, who have maybe benefited from their programs and services and the multigenerational representation there was strong.

At the time, The Salvation Army's national page on LinkedIn was hovering at about 42,000 followers. This was, I think, about two maybe a year-and-a-half ago. And after they started being more intentional about posting and engaging, they're now sitting at 85,000 followers. They are adding users at about 200 new per week and just by engaging in the platform.

So, so that's probably an extreme example because The Salvation Army is a very recognizable name and people know who it is, and they want to follow it. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers are pretty compelling in terms of why it's important to engage and then commit to it and stick to it. Because LinkedIn, just like everything else or anything else, you're going to get out of it what you put into it. But that's one of my favorite stories. People are like, oh, they're on LinkedIn, let's go find out what's going on. And just to see that number grow and grow week over week.

Justin: Joey, you're referencing just the company page.

Joey: Yep.

Justin: And so, you know, earlier, Ronnie, you kind of recapped, you know, the corporate giving and the capital campaign space. And I don't want to undersell what's been a revelation for me, Joey, since we started having conversations ahead of today. And that's that there is this opportunity for nonprofit marketers to be a part of this community of trust.

So, as an individual. If you're a director of development, or if you're a major gift officer, like, your ability to build your personal brand and your ability to echo the brand of the organization that you're fundraising for seems to be so leverageable in LinkedIn. Target those donors, you know, you mentioned Sales Navigator. Peek behind the curtain, and I'll say that RKD has used Sales Navigator as a way to connect with marketers and decision makers. You know, your ability to identify and build connections and to echo the content that your organization is creating, the impact of the work that you're doing. There's not another place like LinkedIn to do that as a nonprofit marketer.

Joey: Great, great point. And to get even more practical here, if you think about a director of development or even a major donor relations person, just like a lot of salespeople, they have a book of business. They have a group of people that they either have to maintain or to go acquire. You can't go on any other platform to find and to learn about what this person is up to and what they care about within a professional context.

I don't know about, I'm not I'm not on Facebook or many other platforms, but I can guarantee you, if I had a random director of development reach on out on Facebook to talk, I'm not going to answer that. Whereas on LinkedIn, that's a norm, right? Economic development and connecting to economic opportunity.

So, to your point, if you think about it from a practical standpoint, if I'm a corporate relations person, I got to research my companies and find them there. If I'm a director of development, I have to understand what my local environment is, like, which companies are passionate about those things, or if I'm just a one-to-one donor relations person, I have a book of business that I have to maintain. And again, the argument is you have to not only find them, but you have to reach them. And because of that element, an environment of trust and value, you're more likely to be able to do it on this platform.

Justin: And that's so well said. Like I said, this is something that's been revelatory over the last couple of weeks since we started having these conversations. I've noticed organizations that I pay attention to more. I've noticed leaders from those organizations that are regularly sharing things that are happening within their organization in LinkedIn. And it, you know, it's a little bit of cognitive bias, but it's the reality that you can create valuable content and be proud of the work that your organization is doing and put it out there in a meaningful way.

We train our subject matter experts on some LinkedIn best practices and even proactively ask them things to share, because that way there's a prompting and a reminder and those sorts of things. And so, I have in my mind some of the things that we think of as best practices. But I would be curious from your standpoint, what are some of the tips and best practices that you regularly share with nonprofits on how they should engage on LinkedIn?

Joey: Sure well, one quick comment. I love what you said about the practical tips. Let's just even take a devil's advocate approach for just a quick minute. Even if you were speculative of the value of being on LinkedIn, you weren't bought in necessarily. The data also shows that when you're engaging people and trying to introduce yourself, guess where the most likely place for them to go look you up is. It's LinkedIn. Unless they're unless they're a little weird. They want to go deep and just research you everywhere in the world.

But LinkedIn is your digital representation of you as a professional. So, if you approach me, I invest a lot of LinkedIn's money into the community, different causes that we support to be a good citizen in the community. But if you approach me for some of that money, I'm going to go to your profile and I'm going to try to ascertain, what is this person about? Where are they from, and why do I care? And if you have a profile with just a silhouette, no picture, you haven't posted anything in 3 years, I'm going to guess that LinkedIn is not that important to you or online engagements, not that important to you, and I'm probably going to move on pretty quickly.

So, I always share that even if you don't want to, you really don't have the luxury of not doing it because this is just the way things work nowadays.

Justin: I'll tell you, as a B2B marketer, the ability to see how often someone engages does reveal something to you about the way that you can potentially reach them. So, there is this inherent value from a marketing aspect, but even to your point, even to the practical aspect, and you know, we consider LinkedIn to be just as valuable as being present at an industry event in the context of our subject matter experts.

Joey: That's a great way to frame it.

Justin: We want them to be ambassadors. We want them to represent who we are. We want them to be proud of the work that we do. And we want them to feel compelled to share that stuff. And so I've just never considered that nonprofits should do it as well, right?

Joey: Well, it's interesting, you frame it that way because, to make it even more concise, when I open up a lot of these sessions, I always tell people, if there's one thing you should take away from anything that I said today, if you're trying to raise funds, if you're trying to market, if you're trying to reach companies and professionals and executives, LinkedIn is not optional. It is not optional. Again, even if you didn't want to, you didn't like it. Doesn’t change the fact that it's a requirement.

To get back to your question about some tangible tips. There are three things that I often share in assuming people either haven't mastered their LinkedIn journey or they're just getting started. Number one is to commit to a content strategy and build the discipline of doing that first before you worry about anything else. So, whether you say, I'm going to post at least once a week, which is the minimum that you want to do, all the way up to the ideal, which is three to five times a week. Think about different sources of content. Maybe it's stuff that your nonprofit is doing. Maybe it's a story of a beneficiary. Just have a pipeline of stories and valuable pieces of information that are going to feed your content strategy and keep you proactively ahead of the curve. Because what you'll find is the platform and algorithms start to become very favorable to you if they see that you're posting consistently and getting increased engagement. That's number one.

The second thing is figure out whether the free or premium options are for you against what you're trying to accomplish. Two examples here, you can get a lot of juice out of the free versions, but there are two premium features that are really helpful. To your point, to have a sense of awareness on when people are sizing you up or engaging you. Number one is, the premium subscription lets you see who looked at your profile. Probably one of the most priceless features for me. Good and bad, right? I either want to run from someone or run to them based on that.

And then within the Sales Navigator platform, we have a capability called smart links where you can build many presentations of multiple forms of content. Send it to people in your LinkedIn messaging, and it will send you an email notification about not only that they read it, but how long they viewed each individual asset. That is huge in terms of your ability to get and maintain that awareness.

Lastly, and this is valuable for both nonprofit organizations and professionals, from your company page, you should build a content strategy that puts names and faces and numbers to the impact that you're making and the mission that you have. And you should work backwards from building posts that would make your employees want to share those posts and make you ambassadors of the mission that you have. Those are three very valuable, tangible things that you can start on today. And from my experience, the nonprofits that do them are very successful in the platform.

Justin: You know, we had an episode a few weeks back where we had a couple of our colleagues that are on the forefront of our digital practice. And they, you know, the advice that they gave in terms of digital advancement was, you know, we referred to it as 'What about Bob?' advice. Because it was just baby steps, right? Step by step. Baby steps, do something new today. Babies don't think of digital advancement as this huge, amorphous strategic initiative that you have to overhaul everything that you do all at once. It's just baby steps.

And Joey, what I really appreciate is the way that you and your team are taking what are best-in-class B2B practices and applying them in a very real way to nonprofits such that they can take baby steps. LinkedIn is no longer just a hiring tool; it's still a hiring tool and still something that if you've got someone that's applying to your nonprofit, of course you're going to go and look at them on there, right?

But there's an employee retention tool. There's an employee retention strategy to your point about how you're sharing what's happening inside your walls within your nonprofit.

There's a fundraising ... and then I love the idea that those that are taking multiple steps forward can apply the idea of marketing through LinkedIn, and we didn't even touch on that. The ability to promote content and target that content towards those potential donors, that there are multiple different use cases and applications for nonprofit marketers. And it's really cool stuff that you and your team are doing. It's very cool.

What is, what's coming down the pike? What should people be thinking about next in terms of what LinkedIn for Nonprofits is going to bring to the sector over the course of this calendar year?

Joey: So that's why I love the platform. The company is just the best place in the world to work at, but the platform, if I didn't work here, is just so valuable and only getting bigger in that area. One of my favorite features that's coming out pretty soon is, if you post from your company page, or your nonprofit’s page in this case, and you find that you're getting decent engagement, right, or promising engagement on the post, you can actually invest in targeting and scaling the reach of it after you posted it. Retroactively as opposed to, hey, we want to create something and then we want to push it out there to see how much it can do. That's a real-time thing that you can throttle up if and when you need to.

And an example of how we're continually investing in the platform and the fact that I refer to it as a living, breathing, evolving platform, I just think our product teams are so amazing. But the most important thing is, they approach the design of features and functions from a trust-first lens. And I think that's always going to win the day in terms of creating value in that environment.

So, that's the one feature I'm really fascinated to see how it impacts the ability for nonprofits to tell their stories. Other than that, you just see new things introduced in terms of features and functions, so so stay engaged and stay informed because they often come quickly.

Justin: And that's fantastic. And what a cool feature. You know, I'm trying to, I'm wearing both of my hats as we're having this conversation because of, you know, the extent that we invest in LinkedIn as a company and want to be a part of that community of trust within the nonprofit marketing sector, but also the business use cases for us. And so, I know our marketing team is going to be thrilled to be able to leverage that feature as well. So, let's see, so nonprofit.linkedin.com?

Joey: Yes, that is our, that is our site where we have, I think, one of the more amazing marketing teams that have built and maintain that site, which includes everything from blog posts on how to engage on LinkedIn. We do two or three a week of those, all the way up into our Better Together series where we talk with nonprofit leaders about how they're approaching, solving the problems and pursuing the opportunities in today's environment.

And then we also have downloadable free guides on how to create and optimize a company page, how to host events. There are a number of different resources that we make available to nonprofits. So yeah, nonprofit.linkedin.com. And I make it a point of advice for people to check that weekly because that's how often we post new content on that page.

Justin: Very cool. There's lots of great stuff on it. And so we would encourage folks to be sure and check that out. And then you can also connect in through that site to a member of Joey's team. Get, you know, more information about how you can move from, maybe, some of the basics to some of the premium features. And, you know, just as an aside for any listeners, if they're curious behind the scenes before they do that, feel free to reach out to our team as well. And we'll tell you where we’ve failed, we'll tell you where we've optimized; we'll tell you what we've learned along the way as well.

So, Joey, really appreciate you lending your expertise and talking about the efforts that you're doing. Also appreciate so much the work that you do and just giving to the nonprofit community. Thank you so much for your time today.

Joey: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Justin: Ronnie, that's a very compelling and interesting conversation with Joey, and you know, much better than talking about cannonballs and how to enter the pool appropriately.

Ronnie: Of course, I wish I had a great, like, combo of cannonballs to LinkedIn, but I can't think of anything. But I did really love, like Joey, you started off talking about the importance of engagement and getting in touch with people. And then, even in your tangible tips, you talked about, you know, it's important to share stories and people and faces. And it's just, a reminder that the social part of social media is so crucial when it comes to nonprofits and charitable giving. It's just it's just so a good reminder for all of us, I think.

Joey: Agreed.

Justin: Awesome. Well, thanks for checking out this episode of Groupthinkers. You can check out all of our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. And as always, we have tremendous amount of content on rkgroup.com on our Groupthinkers blog. So be sure to check that out. Throw us a follow on social media and definitely connect with us on LinkedIn. Joey, we would have failed today if we didn't say that. So everybody, thanks for checking this out, and we'll see you next time. We'll see you down the road.

Groupthinkers is a production of RKD Group. For more information, visit rkdgroup.com/podcast. Special thanks to our production team, including the talented Ryan Mellinger for his work on mixing every episode. Also, a shout out to the content team that helps pull together research and guests, puts the marketing efforts behind Groupthinkers, Suzanne, Ronnie and others for their work on this and every episode of Groupthinkers.

RKD Group

RKD Group is North America's leading fundraising and marketing services provider to hundreds of nonprofit organizations, including hospitals, social service, disease research, animal welfare, rescue missions, and faith-based charities. RKD Group’s omnichannel approach leverages technology, advanced data science and award-winning strategic and creative leadership to accelerate net revenue growth, build long-term donor relationships and drive online and offline engagements and donations. With a growing team of professionals, RKD Group creates breakthroughs never thought possible.

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