Tae: Today I’m interviewing John Lepp who founded and directs the marketing agency Agents of Good which specializes in helping non-profits with their strategies for fundraising campaigns. Hey John! How you been? Good?

How the Non-Profit World Is Changing

John: Okay. It’s been quite a ride. So yeah, hanging in there.

Tae: Is that because of travel or busyness, or…

John: Oh, just the changing landscape of the work that we do. It’s, you know, a lot of our clients still do work in mail and online, but when the Canada post service was on hold, like through the holidays last year, that really, really hurt a lot of charities. Especially the small and medium sized ones that are only mailing maybe once, twice a year, and so some some of them are sort of going, “Well digital did good enough.” and not using mail – which is a strategic mistake in a lot of ways, to make that decision, but I could see how people would make it. So it’s just changing. It’s forcing us to really rethink a few things around here, but yeah, and then all of a sudden, the US saying there’s just a whole lot of uncertainty in our sector has been very crippling for a lot of organizations. So yes, it’s a trying time right now, to be honest.

Tae: Yeah, I’m a little worried about this whole tariffs thing, you know, just making all organizations and companies want to spend less money. And then that kind of filters down to the smaller businesses.

John: Yeah, because everyone’s a bit uncertain, like how it’s going to actually impact in time, and just how far it’s going to go. So yeah, everyone seems to be kind of holding their breath right now, which as you said, does trickle down from us as consumers and people who live in Canada, but also from businesses that work, you know, across Canada or in the US, like we do too. So anyways, yeah, it’s bit of a strange time, isn’t it?

Origins

Tae: So let me just get right into it. Okay, how did you get to where you are at in your career?

John: The nutshell is, I basically worked in commercial advertising and marketing agencies, and also freelanced at a firm that did direct marketing for charities. I got asked to work there, and I just really loved it. It was different than selling like a pharmaceutical company’s newest and latest drug. And yeah, it just kind of spoke to me. So I’ve been in the sector for almost my whole career, which is about 25 years. And yeah, I just, like everyone else, just sort of stumbled and flailed my way here. But I know, right, that’s pretty good.

Tae: That’s pretty cool that you’ve been in the nonprofit sector for so long. Can you walk me through what it’s like to go through the process of developing a marketing campaign for a nonprofit through your company Agents of Good, and how does it differ from when you made campaigns for, you know, the regular, mainstream, retail sort of clients?

John: Well, I mean traditional direct marketing is the same whether doing some charities or for businesses, but a lot of the marketing that I was doing is more like mass marketing, whereas direct marketing is obviously me trying to talk specifically to you, and I did bits of it when I was working in marketing agencies. But with donors it’s different, because you’re not selling a product that will make my life better easier, blah, blah, blah. Really, all I’m kind of selling is a hope for a better future, you know, and it’s totally different. It’s a different kind of offer. So, in our case, the first thing I usually ask is what are we asking donors for? And so, I define donors as 60 to 90 year olds, women, mostly. And I know the channel I’m using is usually mail and it’s still a strong, strong channel for fundraising. I know everyone loves digital, talking about AI and all this jazz, but in Canada, most donors are giving through mail. So mail is still really, really important, you know, so in direct marketing the rules are the most important thing is your list. 40% of the success or failure comes down to the list: the people you’re trying to talk to. And that’s direct marketing, one on one. Again, whether you’re working commercially or charities doesn’t matter, or businesses doesn’t matter, the list people talk to is the most important thing, because if what you ask them for, they don’t care, then you’re dead in the water. So if you have the wrong list, you have, people who don’t really care about you or what you’re offering, then it’s over before it began. If you are donor who gives $50 a year to a charity, asking for a $5,000 gift isn’t gonna work. It’s just like going out to an audience that doesn’t understand the difference between an all clad pan versus a T-fal pan that you can buy for $30 at Canadian Tire. You offer me the all clad pan, it’s gonna fail. No one’s going to buy it, because you picked the wrong audience. So the offer is really, really important. And then creatively, how do we express that creative? Creative can affect 10 to 20% of the difference in what people engage with or don’t. So the first thing I asked when I start a campaign is what are we asking for? And then make sure we’re asking the right people for the thing. And then how can I develop that creatively? So again, if that donor gets something in her mailbox, or if she’s going through her emails, or, you know, looking at her grandchildren’s pictures on Facebook, she’ll stop to engage with the thing that I’ve created because I’ve put a lot of thought into that.

Targeting the Right Demographics

Tae: So I suppose the approach you choose to take often depends on the target audience, right? Creatively? I mean, like the messaging, or the way you want to go about drawing people into that experience.

John: Yeah, I’m always sort of going, “What has the donor been seeing in last year, or two years, or three years?” and I want to do the opposite of that. Because that’s about getting their attention. And getting attention isn’t enough. I need them actually to take action. So there’s a lot that kind of goes into that and getting attention is just only a small fraction of the bill. How do I make them engage with it? And so, in my work, even aside from the creative, how do I utilize decision science to make it easy for the donor or the consumer to make the decision I want them to make. That’s because people are lazy. So we make it as easy as possible, and we’re always looking for mental shortcuts. So how can I make sure those mental shortcuts exist so they can take the action I want them to take? Results like a click through rate means freaking nothing. I need someone to actually, like, open their wallet or get out their check book and give. And if they don’t, then I get fired.

ROI – Key Metrics

Tae: And I suppose that’s how you determine that the return on investment is people actually donating to specific organizations. It’s the ultimate metric.

John: Absolutely, nothing else, to me, really matters.

Tae: Perhaps that’s an easier thing to keep track of compared to some other organizations that are doing marketing where it’s a little bit more ambiguous as to whether you know the social media that they’re doing is actually making a difference. It’s nice that you have an actual direct way to distinguish whether your campaign is being successful or not. That’s fantastic!

John: Yes, it’s a key, key metric for success. So again, having worked with marketing agencies who are helping charities with their digital campaigns, I’m not interested in looking through 15 pages of spreadsheets like, give me the fucking key metrics here. Like, the rest is just, it’s fucking whatever. It’s magic!

Tae: Do you use any platforms to monitor how many people are giving or where they’re getting from.

John: Excel spreadsheet is a magical thing.

Tae: Excel spreadsheet? That’s it?

John: It provides you a simple calculator to measure your success or failure of your piece. It shows you the cost, shows you whatever you want. It shows you the cost to acquire. Shows you the ROI, shows you like what you’re netting, yeah, shows you the actual percentage of response rate, shows you everything you need. Which are the key metrics you would need to know. Again, the others, the other is just marketing fluff. Again, I do kind of like look at some of the stuff, and it seems like people have made it so complicated and cumbersome that you can prove success in anything. And so back to my original point, which was, I have some charities who eliminate mail and only do digital because it looks successful enough. Well, it’s not, though, it’s not, especially when you consider that mail was a major driver for this success that they’re seeing. If you take that out, you’re not going to to be successful. But now it’s less successful because you’re moving the key driver for people to actually get to it.

Inspiration for Design

Tae: How do you stay inspired? Whether it’s seeing other people’s work, or traveling, or meeting other people. Tell me what are some of the inspirations that funnel into your work.

John: A lot of it has to do with the people I choose to collaborate with. I love working with different creatives all the time because they get me to look at problems in a different way than I would have maybe approached it. I’m out here on the West Coast quite a lot these days, and between the mountains and the trails and the excessive amounts of oxygen that flow into my body, that’s inspiring and helps me just kind of get my brain into a different space and solve problems in a different environment. Also donors themselves. In my tiktoks I talk about Dale your donor, which is my mother in law. She inspires me because I look at her behaviour and what she looks at or doesn’t look at, and her reflections and how she feels in her role as an end user of this work. And yeah, I’ve been blessed to have a great community of people doing what I do around the world, and in looking at these challenges they have inspired me to do my work better. Because I’m like, Wow, that’s so good! Holy shit! I need to up my game. And I push my colleagues at charities to do that too. They deserve better than we’re giving them. So there’s no time for patting ourselves on the back or going off on long, long vacations and stuff when you think you’ve done your job. It never ends, never stops.

Tae: What are some of the challenges you encounter in your work, and what are some of your strategies dealing with them?

John: The biggest thing I hear all the time is, “How do I convince my boss to do this?” And I’m like, you know, every conference I go to, that’s what people say to me. And if I had an answer to that question, I would be on a beach in Mexico permanently. I wouldn’t be here talking to you. The problem is, and you know this Tae, that there are people who are making decisions based on their own bias, their own opinion, their own subjectivity, not actually from a place of objectivity or strategy. And I’m not interested in what they like or don’t like. It really has to come from a place of has this been tried and tested repeatedly over and over and over again, not just by me, but many different people. And these are the principles of how we make decisions. These are principles of what makes effective direct response, of great copywriting, and a fantastic design that performs. So when a client says, “I’m not sure I like it.” My answer is, “I don’t really care. It wasn’t part of my brief to figure out what you liked, and if it was, I wouldn’t have taken the project.” We have lots of people here who want to, like, just do good and give back. And they’re destroying our sector, actually, because they’re using their subjectivity to make decisions for charities and from a leadership position, not just from executional like day to day marketing position and it’s really deflating the fragile creative egos of some of our colleagues and even in some cases us. You know, it’s difficult some days, but that’d be a pretty big thing.

Workflow & Scope Creep Preventions

Tae: How do you manage workflow and scope creep with clients that might have limited budgets?

John: I spent a lot of time up front trying to establish a clear objective, define it as thoroughly as possible, and then make sure that everything we charge them is directed towards that thing, rather than what some of our colleagues do which is have an ongoing retainer fee. I don’t really like to have that, because I want to be sure there’s a straight line to a project all the time. And sometimes there will be things as you develop a project that come up that will change the brief, which means you tear it up and start over, or you define it as a separate brief, even if it co-exists alongside another one. But I’m always trying to make sure we have a clearly defined objective and timeline for what we’re trying to do here before we get going, and a budget before we proceed. Otherwise it just leads to too much, too many problems.

Work/Life Balance Strategies

Tae: All right, I got two last questions for you. How do you maintain balance between work and life? Or do you?

John: You know, I’m the most creative when I’m doing things like making a stock or jumping over a tree that fell over the trail up on Old Buck. I mean, that’s where I’m the best. I’m a creative. I don’t control my brain or my heart in terms of how I feel about what I’m working on, or what problems I’m trying to solve. And I love my work!

Tae: Me too.

John:  I’m always working and I’m always living. I’m doing both at the same time, doing like, yes, some days I’m like, I will take calls through the morning and then come lunch, we’ll have a nice lunch in the afternoon, we’re gonna go out and go drink some wine and do some wine tasting, or like, do an hour climb up something somewhere, and try to live and work at the same time. So I joke with people I’m semi retired, which is a real joke, because I’m not. I’m trying to live like I am. Do you know what I mean? And like, I’m not waiting until I’m quote, unquote retired. I will never retire, as much as I will never just have work and just have life, they’ll all be intertwined stuff. But I do feel like I’m fully living because I’m doing everything, not sitting here for 10 hours a day, like, you know?

Tae: No, I love that! I love that you have that sort of perspective on life, and that you have that adaptability and flexibility to be able to just do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and kind of make it all fit.

John: It’s a privilege, and I acknowledge my inherent privilege, in all of these things that I’m saying, and its not just because of who I am, but also partly because it was by design. I did build this for myself, knowing that there were lots of challenges that would come just like today, like we talked about, right now is a very trying time for my business as successful as I’ve been. And for all the things that I’ve ever done the world right now is making it very difficult to keep growing and flourishing as my own business. And that’s what comes with it. All that is just as prevalent as the rest but that’s what I signed up for. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Favourite Part of Job

Tae: Same here. What’s your absolute favourite part of your job? What do you really enjoy?

John: Probably one of the favourite parts of my job is when I go to conferences, and I have people come up to me and say, “I’ve heard you speak” or “I sat in on your training, or read your book, or blah, blah, blah, blah, and they’re like, “This is what I created from that, and this is what happened!” Which was amazing! I come by teaching quite naturally, and I think as a teacher there’s no greater reward than having a student come up and say “I listened to what you said. I felt empowered because I understood it, and I expressed myself by utilizing it. And an amazing thing happened that made me feel super connected to my work!” What else could you ever hope for?  So that definitely has to be the greatest reward.

Tae: Very good. I love it! Well, that’s pretty much all I have to ask you. Yeah, all right, John, thank you so much for your time for doing this.

John: Tae, that’s really good to show different parts of the business and the people you do business with, because it does say a lot about your own values as a business and yourself. And so that’s good.

Tae: Yeah, I love learning about other people and how they do work. It’s very interesting and very informative for me to grow as a person. 

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