The Influential Nonprofit Episode 81: Elyse Wallnutt: How Privacy Laws Affect Donor Acquisition
Elyse Wallnutt is a senior marketing and tech leader with 16 years of experience driving results at the intersection of revenue, advocacy, brand, and policy objectives.
She has delivered $39M+ in net new revenue for organizations over the past five years.
She built the digital activation campaign for the clean future plan that powered the majority of President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
She’s grown acquisition programs to more than 9x their former size.
Her communications efforts have led to human rights victories such as the unconditional release of prisoners of conscience domestically and internationally. And she’s saved organizations an average of 18% of their annual marketing expenses with efficiencies gained in tech stack, targeting, and contractual enhancements.
Elyse has played leadership roles in supporting some of the largest nonprofit brands in the world — including Amnesty International, Heifer International, Feeding America, UNICEF USA, The Nature Conservancy, and World Food Program USA — in both client-side and agency settings. She also spent time leading GOTV efforts in consulting roles at Center for American Progress and Blue State during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles.
After nearly two decades working for nonprofits, she launched Agility Lab Consulting to support business leaders in reaching their audiences through smart strategies that stay ahead of shifts in technology, algorithms, consumer demand and rising demand for privacy. She specializes in assessing internal solutions portfolios – including current-state approach to financial projections, tech stack integration, media investments, and user experience design – and using findings to build an integrated vision that achieves KPI targets, breaks down channel silos, and pushes the limits of program growth.
There are new data privacy laws that are being pushed today and big tech companies are making moves that will show their users that they are being respected. Therefore, companies will have to be creative about our marketing because we won’t have insights provided by trackers by social media sights.
Set up your own baseline and start making your own measurement tools. Take stock of the data that you have available right now and ingest all that information in order to make good decisions. It would be a good idea not to rely on third party information in the future.
Relying too much into your social media page is like building a house on rented land, that’s why it’s our job to get people off of our social media pages and into our websites and email list. Websites are a more solid foundation than social media, a lot of people lose their social media pages and most are never able to recover it.
Don’t try to own the tree, instead, pick a leaf off the tree and own that. Find a specific area you intend to impact in the nonprofit space and commit to it. Make sure that you’re not in a space that’s going to be overly competitive.
We can't keep just moving money from digital channel to digital channel, we need to think long game. We need to think about the content strategies and the attribution vehicles that are going to help set us up so that we understand who our audiences are.
You need to take stock of the data that you have available to you right now and create as much of a first party internal understanding of who your audience is, that doesn't rely on all of these third parties to tell you, who cares about your mission.
The name of the game is first-party data acquisition.
You want to make sure that your brand name is very relevant and forward. And you also want to make sure that you are not in a space that's going to be overly competitive.
Reach out to Elyse Wallnutt at:
Website: https://www.agilitylab.io/
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