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My guest on the show today is Jeni Moncayo. Jeni Moncayo is the Marketing and Events Manager at Trees Atlanta. After a roundabout career path through teaching elementary school art, sales, and finally marketing, I’m happy to have found a home as Marketing and Events Manager at Trees Atlanta. I love marketing because it allows me to use data, psychology, and creativity. I love working at Trees Atlanta because I enjoy using my skills to help our organization grow and conserve our beautiful City in the Forest for generations to come.

Highlights from this Conversation

Focus Topic: Email segmentation increases open rates

Related to Digital Marketing

1. What has worked well for you?
   1. Not trying to do everything
   2. Email has been big for them
      1. Segmented their mail list
      2. Gave users options for what they want to hear about
   3. Shorter, specific emails to specific lists is working much better
2. What hasn’t worked well that we can learn from?
   1. Don’t just use the same message over and over again, segment, segment, segment
   2. Use lists to do look alike targeting
3. What are you excited about?
   1. Everything
   2. Be a lifelong learner
   3. Brand Refresh
   4. Trello

Interview Transcript

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

 

[00:00:30] My guest today is Jeni Moncayo. She is the Marketing and Events Manager at Trees Atlanta. After a roundabout career path through teaching elementary school art, sales and finally marketing, she says she’s happy to have found a home as Marketing and Events Manager at Trees Atlanta. She loves marketing because it allows her to use data, psychology and creativity. She also loves Trees Atlanta because she enjoys using her skills to help the organization grow and conserve our beautiful city in the forest and generations to come. And I agree, Atlanta is a beautiful city, a city of a ton of trees. So, Jeni, welcome to the podcast.

 

Jeni: [00:01:10] Thanks for having me, Adam.

 

Adam: [00:01:12] Anything you want to add to or pontificate on related to that intro?

 

Jeni: [00:01:17] Yes. So, I wanted to give a little bit of background about Trees Atlanta, if you guys aren’t familiar with the group.

 

Adam: [00:01:24] That would be great.

 

Jeni: [00:01:24] Like you said, Atlanta is full of trees and we actually have the largest urban canopy coverage in the country. So, we are a thirty-three-year-old nonprofit, based here in Atlanta, Georgia. We plant, protect and promote Atlanta’s urban canopy. So, we did that in a number of different ways. We started in 1985, basically as a tree planting organization, trying to beautify the downtown area. So, a bunch of civic leaders got together, realized that downtown needed more trees. So, we’re very much still like a tree planting organization at heart, but we’ve grown both our program scale and our geographic scale. So, nowadays we do plantings all over the city, pretty much every neighborhood in Atlanta, as well as outside of the perimeter, all the way to Alpharetta Sandy Springs. We’ve got a planting coming up in Commerce pretty soon, so spreading out that way. We also started a forest restoration program. So, essentially that’s an invasive species removal, which we try to protect and sustain the urban forest in addition just to planting it. So, the idea is that we can’t plant our way out of all these problems with all the trees getting cut down, so we actually have to preserve the existing canopy.

 

Adam: [00:02:31] Right.

 

Jeni: [00:02:32] Yeah. One of our biggest projects here in Atlanta is the Atlanta BeltLine Arboretum. So, if you’ve ever spent time on the Eastside or Westside Trails, I’m sure you guys noticed all the beautiful native grasses and trees that are planted out there, which is a huge function of what we do, is the planting and maintaining of the arboretum.

 

Adam: [00:02:50] Wow! That sounds like some fantastic work. I’m a big fan of trees in general, as I think most of us are, and I love being in the high-rises in downtown Atlanta, looking out and just seeing the amounts of green space throughout the city. For our listeners that have not been to Atlanta perhaps, there’s just a ton of green space and just lots of great views. So, I really love that. So, let’s dive in here, I’m excited to kind of get your perspective. So, related to nonprofit digital marketing, tell us something that’s worked well for you.

 

Jeni: [00:03:24] Yes. So, the biggest thing for me… We’re a pretty small team here, and as a nonprofit obviously the budget is not as large as being in some companies. So, one of the main things is not trying to do everything under the sun. The first few months when I was here I was really paying close attention to how different channels were performing. So, we spent a lot of time experimenting with different methods and analyzing the data, just to kind of see what would work best with our limited team.

 

Adam: [00:03:53] I love that, I love that. So, obviously then you’re not doing everything. Tell me what are you focused on? I’m curious.

 

Jeni: [00:04:01] Yeah, so, email has been a really big thing for us. When I got here we basically had just one or two very, very large lists that we sent everything to. Really long emails full of every type of information about the programs you could think of. So, I started segmenting that list. So, I took a list of our attendants and created different groups within our… We use MailChimp to do that.

 

Adam: [00:04:26] Right.

 

Jeni: [00:04:27] And after I segmented them myself, I sent out an email to everyone in the list letting them know that they had the option to choose what type of information they wanted to hear about, whether that be like volunteer events or adult or youth education, special events in tree sales, or more like news and things they could do in the advocacy world.

 

Adam: [00:04:48] Right.

 

Jeni: [00:04:48] So, I’m still pretty new here. I’ve been in Trees Atlanta since August, I did a lot of volunteering before that. So, like I said, we’re experimenting a lot with format, voice, personalization. Yes, it’s been really interesting to see the results. But it’s been really great making shorter emails, much more specific content to really specific lists. And with that we’ve seen the open and the click-through rates and the registration rates jump like two to three times what they were before.

 

Adam: [00:05:17] Wow! Yeah, I love that. You always hear, “build your list, build your list, build your list, build your list”, right? And that’s true, but you don’t want to build one list. You want to build a list that is composed of many lists that segments out your base, so that you understand like, “OK, this is my group of people that cares about events. This is my group of people that want to donate five dollars. This is my group of people that want to donate five hundred dollars.” Because there’s different messaging for all of them, and honestly there’s completely different ways of communicating with all of them, so you have to be aware of that and really connect with them on their level. I love that you did that first. That’s really, really smart. How was the response when you went to segment them out and gave them those options? It was a great response, I assume.

 

Jeni: [00:06:01] Oh, yeah, it was great. I mean, a lot of people just kind of… Some didn’t segment themselves at all, but as we go on, the more events they attend, we get a better picture of what they’re involved with. So, since I segmented the list too, all of the open rates have increased, because people are just more interested in reading them. Email marketing is so popular and common now that personally I get tons of inspiration in my own email box of companies that are doing it right. I think any time I’m kind of overwhelmed with getting too much email and I click “unsubscribe” and I have an option. Maybe I just want to hear less. I don’t care about all of this stuff, but I want to hear about these few things.

 

Adam: [00:06:43] Right.

 

Jeni: [00:06:44] So, I think it’s really important just to stay up to date with the latest, best practices and keep up to date with what other companies are doing as well.

 

Adam: [00:06:52] I love that, I love that. And I agree – segment your emails, be intentional about it, and then learn from other people. I mean, why not? You would sign up for an email list that you know is doing well and doing it right, and learn from what they’re doing and then emulate that and make it your own, tell your own story. That’s great. OK, so, question number two related to nonprofit digital marketing, tell us something that has not worked well, that we can learn from.

 

Jeni: [00:07:16] Yeah. Well, the biggest thing that I can think of, off the top of my head is, in the past we didn’t have… I’ve been really trying to build a more strategic plan for getting events promoted ahead of time, so we weren’t bombarding the audience with the same messaging over and over again. Again, going back to email and using those lists, rather than just doing social media, works pretty well. We’ve got a good presence on there, but at first we were just boosting ads, we weren’t really being that intentional with the actual strategy behind it. So, I started using those lists that we were using in email to do lookalike ads and more complicated targeting on Facebook, that’s been a lot more successful.

 

Adam: [00:08:03] I love that. For those listeners that might be listening, that aren’t aware of what a lookalike ad is, you can load up an email list into Facebook of, say, your perfect contacts, and then Facebook will say, “OK, now I understand what the profile of the person you’re looking for is”, and then you can choose to create a lookalike list that ultimately in many ways matches that person’s Facebook profile. You can match by all kinds of things. So, it’s a really helpful way to continue to target your ideal customer, without necessarily having their specific contact information. So, that’s great.

 

[00:08:38] So, I love that you’re doing that, I love that you’re not using the same messaging over and over again, that you’re speaking differently for each channel and that you’re using lists and lookalike lists in Facebook to target the right people. That’s fantastic and really, really smart. And I’m sure, because you’re segmenting out your email lists, you’re having a lot of success there. So, that’s great.

 

Jeni: [00:08:59] Yeah.

 

Adam: [00:08:59] Now, related to nonprofit digital marketing, can you tell me something that you’re excited about?

 

Jeni: [00:09:05] Everything. I mean, it’s such a fun industry to be in. I mean, marketing, I was a teacher when I first got out of college, so I think I just have that lifelong learner personality, but there’s always new things coming out, it’s really hard to keep up. Atlanta in particular is growing massively, so it’s super important with our mission that we’re being effective with our message. So, I’m very excited about our organization. Personally, we are undergoing the first major brand refresh since the organization’s started.

 

Adam: [00:09:38] Oh, nice!

 

Jeni: [00:09:39] So, heightening up our voice, making a strategic plan, really getting intentional, because we’re just so big. I mean, I didn’t even cover in the intro all the educational programming we do for adults and children. So, like we’re talking about the email segments, it’s so important that we’re not just using the same voice, everything is kind of custom-tailored to the audience. We’re doing the brand refresh, getting the logo and then we’re about to do a massive website overhaul. So, that’s just going to help make our site so much more user-friendly and easy to find events and volunteer sign-ups and combining databases. I come from a technology background, so I kind of have together all these little systems, using Trello and Zapier. I could talk about that for an hour.

 

Adam: [00:10:25] You get lost in the abyss of Trello and all the integrations there, for sure.

 

Jeni: [00:10:30] Yeah, but it’s great. I’m introducing these to our team, these tools. So, for Trello, for example, they can send me website updates. It just helps keep me out of my email and helps people working in different places, I have an intern that works remotely. So, it lets people get updates in real-time, without having to call me and check in or send me fifty emails or make sure people are copied on everything. I’m just excited about bringing more technology to the company to help us keep on growing.

 

Adam: [00:11:00] Yeah, I agree. I think Trello and a lot of other emerging technology is really helpful for staying on track, and I think whatever you can do to avoid internal email, definitely do that. I do that as well, all of my teams use Slack, I use Trello for several different reasons and different purposes. I use a lot of different tools. I probably use too many tools. I’m tool-obsessed really, if I’m being honest.

 

Jeni: [00:11:23] Callingly is a good one. I saw you were using that, it’s great.

 

Adam: [00:11:22] Oh, yeah. I love Callingly. Oh, man, it’s so great.

 

Jeni: [00:11:23] Yeah, I do that for event space.

 

Adam: [00:11:29] Yeah. I use it obviously to book stuff like this, which is amazing. It’s a really good tool for some specific purposes. I haven’t had as much success with Callingly in terms of actual booking other meetings, because a lot of times, if I email somebody and I’m asking them for their time, I don’t want to be like, “Hey, can I have your time? And by the way, go to this link and book it yourself.” It doesn’t work out quite as well, but I love it for the podcast stuff and for other stuff. So, it’s been really great.

 

Jeni: [00:11:57] Yeah.

 

Adam: [00:11:57] That’s fantastic. Well, let me see if I can recap what we’ve talked about so far, and then you can maybe share any additions or final thoughts here that you’ve got for our audience. So, for what has worked well you said not trying to do everything. So, focusing in on the channels that you can really have success in, and in particular that’s been email, which has been big for you. In particular segmenting your mailing list, so that you can email specific users with specific targeted messages for what they want to hear about, not just blasting out everything over and over and over again. And also, shorter specific emails are really working better to increase your open rate. For what hasn’t worked well that we can learn from, you said – just don’t use the same message over and over again, segment, segment, segment, and use lists and lookalike targeting on Facebook to really get in front of that correct audience. And I completely agree with you. The shotgun approach, where you just say the same thing in every space, does not work. You should never do it. It’s just not worth it. And then what are you excited about – everything, be a lifelong learner. You’re working on a brand refresh, you’re working on a new website for your nonprofit, which I think is fantastic, and you’re using Trello to keep yourself organized and other fun tools. Is there anything that I’ve missed in there?

 

Jeni: [00:13:13] I think you’ve got it. I will mention on the technology front, Zapier is really fantastic too, to connect a lot of those different tools. If you use too many tools, connect them all.

 

Adam: [00:13:24] That’s right, yeah, Zapier is fantastic, I totally agree. Also, If This, Then That you can do some cool stuff with as well. It’s definitely worth checking out either of those. That’s great.

 

[00:13:34] Well, Jeni, this was great. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

 

Jeni: [00:13:38] Yeah, you’re so welcome. Thanks for having me, this is fun.

 

Adam: [00:13:40] And thank you to all our listeners for listening to the Good People, Good Marketing podcast. To get more resources about nonprofit 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, Adam, your host, you can find me on Twitter – @AJWalker, and on my blog  at adamjwalker.com, where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit building and the craziness of having kids. Thanks for listening and tune in next time.

 

Photo by David Vig on Unsplash