Back to: Crowdsource and Share Your Community’s Stories
- Working with Nonprofits:
- Challenges: Nonprofits often involve multiple stakeholders, making decision-making lengthy and complex. Boards of directors or volunteers may delay approvals.
- Opportunities: Many nonprofits have significant budgets for marketing and websites, countering the assumption they lack funds. Strategic spending can amplify their impact, as seen with organizations like Charity: Water.
- Custom Post Types for Advocate Stories:
- Separating advocate stories into a custom post type ensures cleaner organization and better user access management.
- Plugins like Members help restrict access to specific roles, allowing nonprofits to delegate responsibilities effectively without risking broader site changes.
- Simplifying Approvals:
- The Public Post Preview plugin allows decision-makers to review content without logging into the site. This eliminates common approval barriers and speeds up the process.
Takeaway: Nonprofits offer valuable opportunities for freelancers and agencies willing to navigate stakeholder complexities. Tools like custom post types and plugins streamline collaboration, foster community engagement, and ensure efficient workflows.
Closing Note: Brian shared insights on working with nonprofits and practical tools to enhance their digital presence. More at briancords.com.
Part 5: Crowdsource and Share Your Community’s Stories
Matt: [00:00:00] That was awesome, Brian. Thanks so much. Uh, briancords. com is where you can find him. We’ll have everything linked up in the show notes, wherever you’re watching this, a couple of questions that I was jotting down, Brian, while you’re going through this, uh, fantastic example.
Working with Nonprofits: Insights and Tips
Matt: Um, the first thing I’m, I’m looking for maybe your, your take, your feedback as an experienced freelancer, and also somebody who works at an agency.
Sharing a sort of like if you can an extreme like positive and an extreme negative and I’ll and I’ll I’ll share my, you know, my point of view so you can so you can frame it up, um, working with nonprofits, you know, uh, It can be, you know, dealing with a board of stakeholders, right? We’re always, while we’re as freelancers and as small agency owners, it’s like you’re trying to really drill down to who’s really the stakeholder in this project, whether you’re negotiating the project or supporting the project long term, like you need to find out [00:01:00] who the stakeholders are and largely that I found nonprofits, well, sometimes it’s this board of directors.
Who are volunteering their time, so it becomes like this real challenging and lengthy process to get things done. Um, that’s the, you know, that’s the, that’s the negative side sometimes of, of working with nonprofits, but some of the more positive sides that I found is. Nonprofits doesn’t, it doesn’t mean that there’s no money in this space either.
It doesn’t mean that if you’re, you know, working on your craft as a WordPress freelancer or boutique agency, that you, you should stay away from nonprofits because immediately you think, well, oh man, they’re not going to have money. That’s not necessarily the case. Some of them are either well funded or have tons of donations coming in.
So it’s, it, it is, I don’t want to throw the term lucrative space to make it, you know, seem, you know, real, um, you know, commercialized, but. Non profits have money, you’re just finding the ones that you like working with and, um, that can still be profitable for you. Do you have any of those extremes that you’ve, that you’ve seen [00:02:00] through your years of, of being a freelancer and working with agencies and, and non profits?
Do you have anything you can share in that?
Brian: Yeah, I mean, I would say nonprofits are essentially the same as any larger organization, even when they’re small, which is like you said, there’s a lot of stakeholders. It’s very important early on to find out who’s, who’s making the final decisions because those are, um, Often not the people that are engaged in the process for most of it.
They, they kind of come in at the end once everyone else has done the work and give their opinions. So, you know, if you’re working with nonprofits, always think in terms of timelines, think in terms of, you know, I can deliver X. X amount of weeks after you sign this piece of paper, you know, that’s the way the timelines work.
I don’t make any calendar dates. Everything’s based on when can you give me that permission? When do you give me that signed off approval in writing? Definitely. But like you said, a lot of nonprofits nowadays, really in the last few years have started to learn that. You know, there’s this public perception that [00:03:00] nonprofits need to not spend a lot of money, need to have a really low overhead.
But the problem is that’s not how you get a lot of traction. That’s not how you get a lot of word out. That’s not, you know, so a lot of nonprofits nowadays are realizing, Hey, you know, we can spend a little more on our website, on our marketing, on our content, getting it out there because it’s going to pay.
It’s going to bring in more donations. It’s going to raise more awareness. It’s going to make, you know, get more, you know, advocates on our side for whatever cause we’re working on. So I think that’s shifting. I think we’re seeing, uh, there’s a lot of popular, you know, charity waters. One of those banner examples of a nonprofit that proved, Hey, with a solid marketing budget, you can actually, uh, make more of an impact.
Matt: I really like this example of the advocate stories as a custom post type for a variety of reasons. Um, Keeping that content separate from pages, we could spend a whole discussion, a whole hour long discussion talking about like educating people using WordPress in the nonprofit space, um, [00:04:00] which is, you know, similar to any other business.
It’s just getting people up to speed on how to use WordPress. I like that you separate that, um, And I’m curious if, if you’ve ever done anything, it made me start to think about like user access. And one of the things that I like about it is because maybe you’re working with somebody in the nonprofit and the only thing you want them to touch is the advocate stories, like touch nothing else, just advocate stories.
Do you have like a, a, a quick sort of formula for giving people access to just, uh, advocate stories or just the content you want them to touch on the website?
Brian: Yeah, once you make it a custom post type, that does make it a lot easier. Um, I didn’t show it, but in that wall of settings, there’s ways where you can kind of make these kind of custom capabilities.
And then I use a plugin, there’s a free plugin called members, I think that was from Justin Tadlock, maybe, um, that’s one example. So there are ways where you can take. You can, you know, without really writing code using plugins, you can say, [00:05:00] Hey, this post type has this kind of a cape permission role. And, and this, you know, user role can only touch that.
We do that a lot. We have, you know, user roles for the person who can handle the events, the person who can handle the donations and, and see all of the, the donation information, uh, There’s a few other kind of different roles, but yeah, that’s, that’s definitely a benefit of that.
Matt: I can tell you’re a veteran in the space because it’s sort of inside baseball, or it’s kind of in the weeds a little bit, like the public post preview, uh, example to show like the CEO or some other person who’s not in the website, the content that goes out because That right there is probably many lessons that you’ve learned when somebody is like, uh, we need to take a look at this.
Oh, but Bob doesn’t log into the website. Well, we need Bob in the website. Bob’s never going to log into the website. And then finally you were like, The public post preview, this will solve so many challenges. Uh, and you know, no, no real question there, but just an observation as somebody who’s been in the field.
Brian: Yeah. The last thing you want to do is put obstacles in the way [00:06:00] of getting things approved. So you want to make it as simple as click a link, tell me yes or no. Um, asking people to log into something is, is. Always a bit of a barrier.
Matt: Yeah. Fantastic stuff.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Matt: Brian, thanks so much for hanging out today and sharing this amazing content with the world.
Brian cords. com Brian cords everywhere on social media too. Do you have all those hands?
Brian: Yeah, I think so.
Matt: Fantastic. Brian. Thanks for hanging out.
Brian: Thanks Matt.