← Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell
Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell
How Micro Influencer Marketing is Changing Outreach with Ryan Davis
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- [00:00]
Unknown Speaker 1
What if we named things for what they're not? We'd give teachers non oranges and fly non cars.
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Julia Campbell
That sounds ridiculous, right?
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Unknown Speaker 1
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Julia Campbell
Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, market, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started.
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Hello. Hi, everyone, this is Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell. The question we're answering today, how do you get real people, especially those deeply embedded in their communities, to amplify your cause in a meaningful way? Traditional influencer marketing often focuses on celebrities, but micro influencers, everyday people with strong, trusted networks, are proving to be far more effective for building lasting engagement. And this week, I'm joined by Ryan Davis, co founder and COO of People First, a company that identifies, recruits, and manages content from diverse communities by blending technology with human organizing. And today, Ryan's going to share how nonprofits, advocacy groups, and mission driven brands can tap into micro influencer marketing at scale to reach the right audiences with the right message. So, Ryan, welcome to the podcast.
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Ryan Davis
Hi. Thanks so much for having me on, Julia.
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Julia Campbell
That's amazing. So you started out on the Howard Dean campaign. I really like Howard Dean.
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Ryan Davis
I did. I was.
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Julia Campbell
What was that like?
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Ryan Davis
You know, it was. It was a super cool experience. I mean, it was obviously Very early social Internet. So, you know, a lot of groups and kind of communities like that. And then meetup.com was a big one and obviously email and the blog. So it was cool. I definitely learned more in that year than I have in other decades.
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Julia Campbell
That's amazing. And then you founded People first. So what inspired you to co found People first and what gap in the marketing world were you looking to fill?
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, so I had, you know, after the Dean campaign and Obama, I went to Blue State, started the social media media department over there. So spent a lot of time working at non profit and other sort of advocacy social media. And then, you know, in about 2019, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and was talking to a friend of mine, Curtis Hoagland, and we were, you know, we thought it was really interesting that there wasn't a influencer marketing company dedicated to, you know, advocacy and politics. And we looked around and you know, it seemed like the commercial sector was really engaged with influencers and starting to do a lot of interesting things. But there wasn't somebody doing that specifically in the social impact space. And so we started People first and you know, primarily focused at that point on Democratic politics. And then the pandemic happened and we expanded pretty quickly into public health and other sort of social impact.
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Julia Campbell
So can you define precision micro influencer marketing for those of us that don't understand what it is?
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Ryan Davis
Sure. So I think when you picture an influencer in your head, you might picture somebody who is, you know, into beauty or travel or some sort of lifestyle. Maybe they live on the coast, they're young, they're beautiful, you know, and certainly that represents like a lot of creators that we work with. But we think that sort of everybody has influence. So we are looking for people who, you know, match the affinities and demographics and geographies of the people that an organization is looking, is looking to reach. So, you know, when we work with the Democratic Attorney General association in Montana and they want to talk about the importance of public lands and work with Native Americans, you know, Native American creators in Montana are not sort of available on these, you know, commercially available platforms. You've got to go out and actually find and recruit these people. So by precision, you know, we mean the ability to be very targeted in the types of folks that you're collaborating with.
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Julia Campbell
And this is different from traditional influencer marketing which people might be familiar with.
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's related, but it is, it is definitely much more focused on getting the Exact right messenger, you know, when you go out and you make that piece of content.
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Julia Campbell
So why do you think that micro influencers often have a stronger impact on engagement and action?
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Ryan Davis
People are more likely when they're following a micro influencer. And we think of that as somebody with between 2 and 20,000, you know, followers on their, their main social platform. And you know, that that person, you know, has a much stronger connection with their followers. They, they're probably in the same community, maybe they have the same profession. You know, they, they share a lot of affinities. So you've got a much closer bond than you know, somebody who's got a million followers. So when we look at these smaller creators, these micro influencers, they tend to have higher engagement rates, more comments, and generate sort of more authentic engagement than these, these larger creators.
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Julia Campbell
I think the big question for a lot of nonprofits, a lot of organizations, how do we identify and recruit the right micro influencers? And I know that's something that your platform does, so how do you do that?
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, so I think, you know, we're looking for certain keywords, certain bio words, certain locations. So, you know, we, there are definitely tools out there that are available to kind of search and look around for creators. But we have a technology that identifies people and then we have an organizing team, digital relational organizers who go out into the Internet and onboard and collaborate and vet these folks to work with. So when an organization works with people, first you might get a few creators that we've worked with before, and then you might get a few creators that are, you know, have never done a project before, but were just perfect fits for this campaign. And so this is going to be their first sort of paid collaboration.
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Julia Campbell
What makes this kind of influencer driven campaign successful? What are some of the most essential elements needed?
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Ryan Davis
It's a great question. So, you know, I always say try to give the creator as much creative space as possible. You know, when we collaborate with a creator, we've worked on a creative brief with the organization that is sponsoring the campaign. So, you know, that's got the general creative direction, the messaging, the call to action, you know, the really important stuff. But we're leaving as much creative space as we can for the creator. You're going to get much better content that way, I think, not just focusing on follower count, you know, really making sure that the creators you're working with are the right people to tell your story, that they're going to be, reinforce sort of your message and then sort of setting realistic expectations. You know, if your Goal is to raise a million dollars and you partner with five micro influencers, you're probably going to be disappointed. But if your goal is to communicate with people who live in a specific place about something your nonprofit is doing or something you want to get out into the world, you know, you're going to have a lot of luck working with these smaller creators. And another thing I want to touch on, Julia, is sort of the paid media element of this because what's really powerful is not just the content that goes live on the creator's profile, but it's taking that content and then repurposing it in your brand, social, your paid media, maybe in a newsletter. But you can, you know, use this as sort of bottom up creative approach.
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Julia Campbell
I love that. Yeah. Talk more about how we can use this content or actually let's start with, let's go back to the beginning. How do we approach an influencer? And the word that I'm thinking of that it's probably not the right word is convince them to partner with us. So I know it shouldn't be like twisting someone's arm because that doesn't sound, that doesn't sound right. But how do we make our advocacy campaign or our mission or our goal, how do we make it sort of like a win win for them? Sort of like a no brainer that they would, they would help us amplify this message.
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Ryan Davis
Yeah. So I think you've got to make sure you're approaching creators who are, you know, valued, aligned with your organization. So you have a reason to think they're going to be interested. You know, the campaign should be on brand for that creator. So it should make sense for that creator to be, to be a part of it. You know, if it's a creator who only makes content for children and you want them to do an educational video about a war, you know, maybe it's not, it's not a good fit for that creator. So they're rather going to say no. And then, you know, we, we pay our creators, you know, depending on the type of content they're creating and how many followers they have and what platform. But we find that that really helps make sure the content is professional, make sure you have that ability to give feedback, make sure things are timely. But like anything, it's asking a lot more people than you need. So we might have to ask a hundred people to find the 10 that we end up using on a campaign. So it's not always like everybody says, yes, that's true.
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Julia Campbell
And it's not a Good fit. And the way I see it and the way I try to explain to my clients is it's a lot like grant writing. You have to probably send out more grants than you want, but you want the grant, the grantor to be aligned with your organization. Just because the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has billions of dollars doesn't mean they're necessarily aligned with your mission. So just because there is someone out there that has an audience that you know you want to reach doesn't mean that they will necessarily be aligned with you and with your mission. And I think that's the key here, is finding someone that has that audience that you want to reach. It's not just sort of, okay, they have a random audience of random people and we just want to kind of spray out our message everywhere. It has to be really focused and targeted. So what are some of the sort of biggest mistakes that nonprofits make when they're trying to kind of run these campaigns and work with influencers?
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Ryan Davis
I think the, the first mistake is to, is to over script the influencer. You know, we've seen.
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Julia Campbell
Oh, I know, we like to do that. We like complete control.
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, we've seen campaigns where they've basically given the creator a 45 second script to read. And, you know, you don't get the most compelling performances that way. So that's definitely the biggest mistake. I think focusing on only video is, is something I think is a mistake. We've seen campaign. You know, we just ran a big fundraising campaign for a big health nonprofit. And, you know, what we found was the highest converting piece of content wasn't one of the videos. It was actually a carousel of still images on Instagram. So, you know, while video is awesome, we make a lot of video. I think, you know, having campaigns where you've got a variety of content types can really benefit your performance.
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Julia Campbell
Which platforms should we be looking at in terms of finding. Finding these influencers, but also leveraging their content and sharing it out on our channels?
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Ryan Davis
We think it's really important to be basically platform agnostic. So, you know, if you're going after young people, you know, you want to be on, on TikTok and Snapchat and YouTube. If you're looking to reach, you know, baby boomers, you're probably going to be on, on Facebook and LinkedIn. So it's really about where is your audience? And then, you know, where are the creators who have built, who have built those audiences? Because all these platforms have, you know, creators who are doing really interesting things and have built audiences and you know, often speak in very platform specific ways.
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Julia Campbell
Yes, absolutely. I, I think so too. And I also think it really depends on first of all, where the creator is, where the influencer is and where they have their platform, but also where your non profit might want to grow and might want to, you know, experiment and you know, have some more engagement and build a following and, and see what happens. So yeah, if you don't, if you've never used Instagram before, maybe that's not the best place to start. But it might be something to, to explore later.
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Ryan Davis
We helped an organization actually launch their TikTok by recruiting a bunch of creators to stitch with their launch video. So.
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Julia Campbell
Oh my gosh, tell me more about that. That's a fantastic idea.
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, so you know, the, they were, they were, they were going to be new to TikTok. They didn't have any followers. So they went out and found creators who, you know, spoke to their audience, which was like, you know, young, young folks in big cities. And so we found some of those creators and when they posted the video, the creators basically did a stitch which tags, you know, connects you to that other video and talked about the importance of the organization and why they, why, why it was so exciting. They were on TikTok. So you know, things like that can be really fun way to bring attention to a certain piece of content.
- [15:26]
Julia Campbell
Exactly. I love that and I want nonprofits listening to know you don't really have to have that tech savvy. You don't know how to do it. No need to know how to do a stitch yourself. It's just giving access to that video and encouraging other people to use these features on their channels, I think is so important. And I also think it's important to recognize that right now we can't just be talking into the void. We can't just be emailing our list and talking on our Facebook page and continually talking to our own audience. We really need a plan to expand our audience and to get in front of new people. I think this is so interesting. So one challenge I know a lot of groups face, how can advocacy groups just ensure that they stay kind of on their brand voice when they're working with influencers at scale? Like, how can we get more comfortable giving up control and giving up that script?
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Ryan Davis
Yeah. I think one of the things that I try to work with clients on is not to prejudge an influencer before or a creator before you've seen the content. So we actually find it really effective to, instead of giving a client a big lookbook with 100 creators and say you pick the 20 you want to work with that. We go out and we find people we think are a great fit based on the conversations that we've had. And we bring not just the creator, but the content as well. So when they're looking at both, it makes sense because often they'll say, well, I don't know how this creator is going to plug in. But then they see the content and they're like, oh, wow, that's amazing. Of course, it makes so much sense. So, you know, being able to show those things at one time, I think makes it easier to get through a lot of approval processes. That said, we work with creators, we give them very specific calls to action. We have a do's and a don'ts section of the creative brief, which makes it really easy for them to understand what they can't say and what we encourage them to say. And then there's a round of feedback. So nothing goes live without the approval of the client. So you do have that. You do feel good about what actually goes out there.
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Julia Campbell
So are there any specific cause areas or issues where this kind of micro influencer marketing has been especially effective?
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Ryan Davis
You know, we just ran this big fundraising campaign for end of year, which was really interesting. It was, you know, in the healthcare advocacy space. And we got a bunch of creators on Instagram reels to talk about, you know, how they were affected by cancer and, you know, whether it be them or somebody in their family. And then we took those pieces of content and we put them up against lookalikes of the donors to the organization. And we achieved a 315% return on ad spend from this campaign because we were showing, really telling the stories of how people are affected in a really personal way with this call to action to this organization. And they were blown away by the return on ad spend. So I think, you know, in 2025, fundraising is something that creators can really be a part of, you know, especially when you're blending it with paid media. You know, I think some of the work we're doing we've done with our friends at Science Moms, where we've worked with people in very specific locations to talk about extreme weather in their area. You know, I think having people report about what they're seeing, how their areas have changed, is really, you know, a powerful way to kind of personalize that climate change message. You know, it's not just about, you know, what's happening in California. There's evidence of this happening all over the Country. So I think, you know, I think there's just lots of ways that you can bring this authentic, more people driven kind of storytelling to really any vertical that is looking to sort of accomplish, whether they be, you know, programmatic goals, you know, or. Or just, you know, fundraising and advocacy.
- [19:31]
Julia Campbell
That campaign example is so interesting because nonprofits tend to be so focused on their own storytelling and collecting stories, impact stories from clients, and sharing those out on social media. And that's what they do for fundraising, and that's what they've always done. But tell me more about this campaign. So you said these were creators that were raising money for a cancer organization, just talking about their own experiences?
- [19:59]
Ryan Davis
Yeah, talking about their own experiences and tying it into the organization and giving very specific examples for what the money could accomplish. You know, $200 can help somebody get to an appointment or, you know, X amount of dollars can feed someone, you know, dinner, hot, hot meals for a week. So it's like, what is the tangible thing that the money that people donate kind of can actually help, you know, these folks who are, who are dealing with this. So it was having those people who have either themselves been affected or cared for, a family member be able to talk about that, which I thought was really powerful. Right.
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Julia Campbell
Because it makes it more about the cause and less about the specific organization.
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Ryan Davis
Right.
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Julia Campbell
I think that's the shift that nonprofits need to make, is that people are talking about the implications of the issue and the implications of the cause in general, not your specific organization that's been around for 60 years.
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Ryan Davis
Right, right. And I mean, even the paid media. Right. We're boosting it from the creator's profile, so it's coming from Julia as opposed to at organization. And that gives it like an extra layer of authenticity.
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Julia Campbell
I know. I mean, people, people love to listen to people and they do trust. They do trust influencers. I read a statistic, something like 80% of people on Instagram have either looked at a product or purchased something from an influencer that they trust. And I know that I have as well, and I know my daughter has on TikTok as well. But that's a place to what other. What people should also understand is these platforms are really great for discovery.
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Ryan Davis
Oh, definitely.
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Julia Campbell
They're fantastic places for you to be discovered by people that don't know you and for you to discover people that you haven't found. It's not really like a bubble where you know everyone and you're friends with everyone and collaborate with everyone. It's really sort of brand new perspectives and opinions. Something that I think is really interesting.
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Ryan Davis
And I think, you know, folks who are, especially folks under 30, you know, for them social is search. So they're searching on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram for topics for videos that they're going to watch. So, you know, if you're not producing content on these platforms, then you're not getting your message out in the same way that if you didn't have a website, you wouldn't be reaching, you know, folks over 30.
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Julia Campbell
How do you measure success? I know every campaign is different, but what are some sort of KPIs and some measurement of success for these campaigns?
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, so, you know, you get The Standard Digital KPIs when you work on a campaign with us. So you're going to see your engagement and your impressions and your share rate. And we do comment sentiment analysis, which can be very cool. But we have, we've had the opportunity to run sort of bigger studies with some of our partners. So we ran a study in Virginia where we worked with a candidate and we had content go live in support of that candidate. And then we worked with a bunch of creators who didn't publish anything. And we were able to ingest all their followers from both the control group and from the posters and see that users who followed the posters had a much higher recall of Democratic messaging than users who didn't. So that showed that like, you know, people who were on Instagram were just much more likely to remember hearing about our candidate if they followed one of the creators that worked with us. And, you know, that's, it was a pretty big bump, something like 40, 40% boost in recall. So it was statistically significant, you know, and then, you know, obviously when we're doing fundraising campaigns, you know, we're focused on convergence, you know, we're focused on return on ad spend, you know, the sort of bread and butter numbers.
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Julia Campbell
Wow, that's really great. I think that is so interesting, especially considering the times we're living in right now when there's so much information coming at us and it's hard to know what's misinformation, what's true, what's real. And we trust the organizations that we follow and support, and we trust the influencers that we follow and support. So it seems like combining the two, especially right now, to get your message, to cut through the clutter is really an effective strategy. So I think that's really interesting. How can small organizations use this? Should they be using micro influencer marketing? Like, I'm thinking like a small Food bank or a small library, a small arts organization.
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Ryan Davis
I think, you know, if you're a small organization like that and you have supporters who are active online, you know, giving them more ways to support you, you know, reaching out to them with, with materials to share, you know, having calls and zooms and meetings where you invite them to learn more and get more involved, all those can be really effective ways. In the same way that you would, you would, you know, invite local media. You know, nowadays you should be inviting the, the local folks who, who write a substack on your, on your town.
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Julia Campbell
I love that. I think that's a great way to reframe it. We used to have local reporters and local papers, at least where I live, but we don't anymore. But we certainly have people that do write blogs or are influential in the community either on social media or like you said, substack or, or maybe they have a blog on WordPress or they have a YouTube channel or something like that. So looking for these non traditional methods of media, rather than putting out a press release and hoping that some kind of, you know, media outlet picks it up, looking at creators as the, not even the future, but the present media.
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Ryan Davis
And a lot of people get their.
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Julia Campbell
News from social media too.
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Ryan Davis
Most definitely. You know, there's research out just a few months ago from Pew showing just, you know, more and more groups of people getting their news from these news influencers. And you know, in my, in my hometown of Salisbury, Maryland, you know, we have the local paper which has been around for, for a while and has far fewer people working there than it did when I was a kid. But we've also got a handful of local blogs and you know, YouTube channels where people make like independent media about what's going on in town. And you'd want to be as much probably more nowadays. You'd want to make sure you were getting talked about there.
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Julia Campbell
Absolutely. Oh, I love that. So we have to talk about AI. I don't know if AI features into this at all, but with AI generated content sort of becoming more prevalent, how do you see the future of influencer marketing evolving?
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Ryan Davis
Yeah, so I think, you know, we, we're building some, some AI into our platform, but we do, I really think that in a world of, of a lot of artificial content, having a real person with a real backstory, with a real life who talk to talk about your organization is going to be even more important. You know, I think there's going to be a lot of AI content. Some of it will be good, A lot of it will not be good. I think that the platforms will. You already see this even with meta. While they're doing a lot of things wrong, they are like making sure to label AI content because it's like, you know, it's a brand safety issue with them, frankly, they don't want to get sued. So they're labeling AI content. And I think people will start to see that labeled content and sort of glaze over it in a way. So having a video with a real person is going to matter even more.
- [27:39]
Julia Campbell
Authentic content always works. And what I've been seeing more with my clients in terms of social media marketing, that perfect, polished content that you've been creating and putting out for so long is not going to perform as well as you sitting with your phone and just sharing an Instagram story about what's going on today. Like, what do the headlines mean? What is the relevancy of all of this? What can we do? What are three steps we can take today to end food insecurity, whatever it might be. And that kind of authentic content from a person. I agree. Is the way that we're going to really cut through this AI sludge and cut through a lot of the cookie cutter content that's out there.
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Ryan Davis
Most, most definitely.
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Julia Campbell
If a non profit is listening right now and they're thinking, you know, this all sounds great, but where do I start? What's your advice?
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Ryan Davis
You know, as you're doing your communications planning, you know, it's, it's time to start thinking about how to integrate Influencer, you know, into your, into your digital comms program. And you can start really small with just having a creator or two come to an event or reaching out to a creator or two to talk about something specifically that you'd like to promote and then, you know, you can go from there. You know, we, we've worked on, you know, really small campaigns that were impactful and then we worked on campaigns where we've gotten, you know, 700 creators to make, to make pro vaccine content. So I think it's, you should feel safe and feel good about starting small, dipping your toes in the water, getting comfortable with the process and then going from there.
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Unknown Speaker 1
Wonderful.
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Julia Campbell
And where can people find out about you and people first and more about the kind of services that you offer?
- [29:24]
Ryan Davis
Yes, you can find us at PeopleFirst CC. You know, I'll drop you the link for the show notes and then you can also find me on LinkedIn. And I publish a monthly newsletter called this Month in Digital where I just talk about all the stuff you might have missed in the last month in digital strategy.
- [29:43]
Julia Campbell
Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing. I need to be subscribing to that. Okay. So Ryan, thank you so much. I will put the links to all of that in the show notes so everyone can check it and get connected and sign up for that newsletter and learn more about micro influencer marketing. But I really appreciate you being here today, sharing your expertise. Just thank you so much.
- [30:06]
Ryan Davis
Thanks so much for having me. It's a lot of fun.
- [30:14]
Julia Campbell
Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening.
- [30:19]
Unknown Speaker 1
All the way to the end.
- [30:21]
Julia Campbell
If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then you can find me on Instagram juliacampbell77 Keep changing the world you non profit unic.