How Amaan Giga Is Helping Nonprofits Simplify Digital Strategy

Tasha: [00:00:00] Good afternoon. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your nonprofit origin story?

Amaan: Yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Amaan Giga.

I guess my origin story in the nonprofit space started after high school and I didn’t go to university for a few years and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

So I was working and traveling and my mom’s like, why don’t you volunteer? And so I started volunteering every week. At the, like the hospital and children’s hospital here in Edmonton. And then I continued to do that when I went to school in Ottawa and then for a year in Toronto. And so really giving my time back to causes became a part of, I.

Like who I am. Yeah. And then after I started to work, I was like, I mean, I I was getting experiences like, but I don’t think I could just do this and not contribute to society. So then I worked at a couple agencies that did digital marketing for nonprofits. And then the beginning of Covid I was looking for work and started [00:01:00] consulting and I was just looking to do it part-time initially, and then it kind of just grew into full-time.

And yeah, now I’m a. Nonprofit consultant. And I know there’s a lot of people out there who do that, and it’s great to see so many passionate people doing what they love and helping nonprofits.

Tasha: Absolutely. Absolutely. And what is the focused area of the work? Oh

Amaan: yeah, of course.

Tasha: No, that’s okay.

Amaan: Well, it’s a funny that you say that because I should have known to market myself as a digital marketing consultant.

Tasha: They’re the worst. I’m gonna tell you right now, digital marketing consultants. The worst for marketing themselves. Hilarious.

Amaan: It’s funny it’s funny, I always, I’m always thinking about branding, like my branding and positioning.

Like on the call the other day with the hive partners I mentioned can we get a, like a badge or something to put so we can market ourselves as a trusted eye partners. But yeah I think talking about myself is the thing. Yeah.

Tasha: That’s okay. That’s okay. Yeah. And yeah. So what are the things that you know Yeah.

Would you say don’t have genius? What do you love doing? What’s your, [00:02:00] yeah.

Amaan: So my, what I specialized in when I started was what I was doing on the agency side, which was like strategy and managing ad campaigns. And then with that always comes like conversion tracking ’cause you need to set that up for an ad campaign.

And then just best practices for landing pages. ’cause that’s like the end stage of a good campaign is a good landing page. Yeah, as soon as I started to do consulting, every nonprofit that I connected with and worked with needed more services. So I do now, I do a little bit of everything other than like email marketing and I don’t really specialize in.

Fundraising specifically. Like I know enough about like best practices in fundraising, but I’m not I wouldn’t call myself a fundraising specialist or consultant. Okay. But I say that as like not to be, ’cause I’m not a jack of all trades. I’m never gonna be a jack of all trades, especially in the digital marketing space.

I don’t think you can be on like, really good at everything. Especially nowadays with things changing so much so because of my [00:03:00] agency experience, I value and see the value in people who just do what they do and specialize in doing what they do. Yeah. So I often collaborate with people who do that as well.

Awesome. Yeah, so I’m not trying to be like, yeah, I can do these, all these things by myself. Like I wanna do good work. And so I work with people who do things really well and then I know I have my areas that I know well and I know enough about other areas where I can say I’m gonna work with this person who can help me create a better product or service for a client.

Tasha: I think that’s really smart. I think that’s really smart. And like we thank you right before we started into this interview today. I am, I love relational marketing. I love like pulling in and figuring out how to get that organic, like really meaningful, authentic connections. How that flows in to like donor conversations or potential donor conversations.

But, I almost hesitate to own. The title digital marketer at all. Sometimes, because it covers so many things now. Yeah. There’s [00:04:00] so many pieces and I know we emailed just the other day about connected tv, which yeah, the majority of nonprofits have never even heard those words before, right?

Yeah. It’s so far beyond Yeah. Anything you’re gonna do by yourself in house, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. But it is a part of what’s out there. And when you see those bigger nonprofits that have this intense brand awareness within a city, within a state, country, whatever level you can bet they’re doing all of the digital marketing, they’re doing all of it.

It’s always hard. I always have big feels for small nonprofits who look at it and go, well, we should be doing all these things too. And it’s well, they gotta. The engine behind this is massive. It’s huge,

Amaan: yeah, I think nonprofits like the smaller ones just need to do what they can.

Because if you start to spread yourself too, and saying we should be doing all these things because that’s what we’re told we should be doing in marketing, then you’re not necessarily gonna do all of them well.

Tasha: Yeah.

Amaan: So like you don’t need to write a [00:05:00] blog post every like month. If you can just do one even once a quarter and you’re like, if you’re a one person team, that’s okay.

Like as long as you’re doing it effectively. Because if your goal of writing, and I see this so often with nonprofits, if your goal of writing a blog post is to get people out there to come across it on Google, then you need to do the keyword research for it and optimize it and somebody. Stone or don’t even think about that side of it.

It’s usually like an update for the organization. And then who’s reading that? What’s your goal of spending the time and doing that?

Tasha: And I feel like this is gonna lead perfectly. ’cause my second, question always kind of flows into this what are some of the challenges, you see about nonprofit and in this case, we can keep it right into the marketing realm because I feel like there’s enough challenges.

In nonprofit marketing all by itself. But what are, what are some of the big things you see just nonprofits struggling with in this work?

Amaan: Yeah, so I learned this in, the first agency I worked at was we did a lot of donor journey mapping projects, and so nonprofits would come [00:06:00] to us with, usually the issue was that.

They’re having internal issues in like organizationally, and usually it’s their, that their donor base is shrinking and they need help to like, because that’s a big, that’s a scary idea that could, if they’re, if you’re donor based for a nonprofit, is shrinking, like what do you have? After that.

Yeah.

Amaan: And so they come to us and we assess everything that’s going on with not just their donor journey, but internally, like how they’re structured, how they collaborate how much time, and they put into marketing and usually, and I’ve come across that since then, is that. A lot of nonprofits don’t value marketing.

They put a lot of time and effort into fundraising and programming, which are o obviously very important. But your email list is your strongest fundraising tool. And if you’re not growing that list and it’s just shrinking, then you’re not gonna be able to continue to raise more money and grow the nonprofit.

And if other organizations are doing it, then you’re falling behind. Yeah. [00:07:00] And to grow your email, you have to do marketing.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And even, the marketing doesn’t necessarily always have to look the same nonprofit by nonprofit, right? Yeah. If you’re a great, if you’re a nonprofit who’s still out there, getting out in the community, doing events, has a real

physical

Tasha: location, you actually have a lot of different angles you can come at, right?

Yeah. It is shocking. I find, I’m always super surprised at how many nonprofits who have pretty strong Facebook followings, maybe they’ve been around for a while or they’ve really invested in that at some point. They’re never asking people to join their newsletter. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just not even on the radar.

So once someone has donated, they’re on the newsletter. Yeah. But it’s like there’s actually a whole piece where there might be people who are not ready to donate for whatever reason. Yeah. But you’re missing out on that more regular communication by not getting them onto your newsletter.

Amaan: Yeah. Yeah, they’re happy to talk about what they’re doing and sometimes even ask for donations, [00:08:00] especially around fundraisers or year end of course.

Tasha: Yeah.

Amaan: But the two things is one other nonprofits, so you’re competing with every other nonprofit out there. Of course. I mean, not every other, but at least the ones that are in causes similar to yours. So you have to be providing value because other nonprofits are doing it because people are on social media for two reasons, right?

To learn or to be educated. So provide them value and then when they see that value, tell them to that they can learn, get more of this value by getting on your email list.

Tasha: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And what’s your favorite part about doing this work? There’s lots of challenges, but there’s so many opportunities I feel like in nonprofit that

Amaan: yeah,

Tasha: you could just clutch at and grab.

What’s your favorite part for you?

Amaan: I think it’s helping nonprofits do better at marketing themselves. And what the, I guess the favorite part of what I do specifically is I often come across a lot of nonprofits aren’t measuring their impact of their efforts. So [00:09:00] they’ll they’ll look at like page visits and how many people have come to their website, for example.

But they’re not looking like deeper into their website to see. Like analytics to see okay, when people are signing up to our email list, like where are they coming from? What efforts did we like from which, whichever efforts, was it from our social content, was it from our blog posts? Was it from some other like website that brought us here?

Is it like where. Where do our efforts generate the most impact? Because you’re gonna, they’re putting in the same efforts either way. They know that they’re posting X amount of blog posts, they know that they’re posting X amount of social media content. But if you can measure, then, what’s working and what you can start to change and optimize.

So I love helping them see that, see the numbers and the stories behind those numbers.

Tasha: It’s really nice. Marketing feels like a throwaway for those people who are, don’t totally understand it, don’t see like that path. It’s so useful to go back and maybe. It can’t [00:10:00] be done, monthly, even like even maybe every month.

Yeah. It’s too much to go back and reflect on. Yeah. But it was even, even myself recently, I went and took a look backwards at, what has happened in the last six months. Yeah. It’s very clear of what was working right. Yeah. And it is so useful to go, oh, this is really serving me in a big way.

Yeah. Here are a lot of things that are not serving us. And that’s okay too, right? Yeah. Like they don’t, it doesn’t. Everything. Marketing is one of my favorite things about marketing is there’s such an exploratory curiosity component to marketing in the best way. It should be like that to go, Hey, our audience is gonna be different than this other nonprofits over here.

What works for us and what’s our audience, excited about learning more about and you have to be tracking those efforts in some capacity, which I know can be like the last thing on a never ending list of

Amaan: Yeah. And it, yeah, it doesn’t take long, like there’s an initial, a bit of [00:11:00] time to set it up, but you can just, if you set it up in the right way, you can just glance at.

The data afterwards. Yeah. And you’d have to spend a lot of time looking at it, but at least you’ll know because not everything is gonna work well, so at least you’ll know what was and what wasn’t. And then you can change up whatever you feel you need to change up or try something new.

Tasha: I love that.

 Okay, one of my other questions I always like to ask and you’ve got, had a journey to get where you are as a consultant as well, but how has peer support kind of factored into getting to where you’re at professionally at this point in the nonprofit sector?

Amaan: It’s been a big part of how, where I’m at.

I have like a. Like a business coach that I work with who’s who I know who used to own and run an agency. And I have like just a network of people that I’ve connected with over time where like I can pull in and ask what do you think of this? Or they can connect me with other people.

I. Where I’m, I don’t feel like I’m working alone and I’m never gonna, like if someone asks me like about connected TV for example, I don’t have [00:12:00] to say to my client, oh, I have no idea. I can’t help you. And then I feel like I’m not being of value to them. Yeah, so I think the peer support has been amazing.

I think come a community like The Hive is, it’s great to connect with other consultants who like are in similar positions and I’ve. I think rarely connect with other marketing consultants, which I think is great because then I’m connecting with people who do like a lot of other things, a lot of like fundraising consultants and just to hear what they do and hear like similar challenges.

And so even though it’s virtual, it’s, it does feel like you’re not alone, even though I’m maybe not working with them. It’s nice to have that community, especially when you do work alone. But technically, yeah,

Tasha: I, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve started to get a little smart and I joined some communities for community builders, which sounds ridiculous.

Oh, nice. Yeah. But even same thing for me, because it’s such a, it is really useful to. Just [00:13:00] kind of explore some of the conversations, right? Like you have all these ideas in your head and you’re like, is this a thing? Does this work? Yeah. What are, what have other people seen out in the world?

Yeah. That is, it is resonating and yeah. I don’t, I think for most of us who are in small shops, whether we’re in non-profit or we’re consultants or whatever we’re doing, it feels like time. Is precious and we only have so much of it. Yeah. We only have so much of it to play with like that play time.

Yeah. So sometimes that peer support piece means that I find other people who I’m like, yeah, okay, they’ve clearly been here, they’ve done this kind of stuff before. What worked for them? Do I feel similarities in what they’re saying and what I’m saying Because even books like I’m getting to the spot where if someone who I like really jive with goes, you’re gonna love this book, it’s gonna be a big game changer. Yeah. Well that’s different for me than just, Instagram or that, like you said earlier, lots of people go to learn on social media and I think that was a great source of [00:14:00] learning and it still can be once you shift through all the noise. But getting a chance to talk with someone else that goes, Hey, you should check this out.

That’s where I think it’s been cool to watch that there’s real learning happening at a peer level. Yeah. Now,

Amaan: and everyone’s so I mean, if everyone is, if the other people that you’re connecting with have a similar mindset of wanting to connect and look for support, then they’re gonna also wanna offer that to

Tasha: Yeah.

Amaan: So yeah, like most of the hive chats I’ve met with it’s just people who are. Like looking for the same. And so like I’ll go almost every week. And it’s not from a business perspective ’cause I’m rarely meeting nonprofits, which is totally fine. I’m very happy to meet consultants and I’ve even connected with people in the Hive community outside of Hive Chats just to chat with them, get to know them.

Just one, I think it helps to build your network, but two, I think it’s more just to talk to people and see like what they’re up to and what they do. And. And yeah, like you mentioned, I think on in it works in both ways where we’re sharing like, oh, you should [00:15:00] look into this or try this and yeah.

Tasha: Yeah. Okay. And so I’m gonna throw this out here because anybody who listens in, I have a feeling favorite place. To go and do some new marketing learning, and I may steal this for myself. But like where do you go? Do you, is there a website? Are there people who you’re like, oh yeah, whenever they drop a course, this person is one of the people.

Like, how do you go about absorbing this constantly shifting marketing landscape?

Amaan: There’s so many areas, like there are people who just talk Facebook ads and Google ads on YouTube. Like I’m a big YouTube person,

okay? So there are

Amaan: people who put out like videos all the time. In terms of like overall marketing and business growing, there’s a channel called the Future without the e at the end.

I dunno if you’ve heard of it.

Tasha: Okay. No, I’m not sure if we have, I’ll have to check the

Amaan: F-U-T-U-R future. And it’s a, it’s this guy it’s targeted more towards creatives, but they talk about just if you’re a consultant in general or like an a solo entrepreneur. And he talks a lot about like [00:16:00] selling and pitching and pricing and positioning and he’s had people who talk about LinkedIn on there.

So it’s really interesting and there’s like a whole course. That he does courses and stuff, but the video con, like everyone who does marketing well, he puts out a ton of free content.

Tasha: Amazing. So

Amaan: a ton of like free video content and he is really good. Like he is got a huge following. Yeah.

Tasha: Alright. I’ll have to go and check this guy out. Yeah. Okay. And these interviews always kind of focus in on people who’ve been longtime members of the Hive community. And you were right in. Very close to the very beginning. I was looking

Amaan: at that actually. Yeah. I was like, we connected in like October, November or something of 2023.

Yeah. And then I joined like soon after that was, and I think you started around November. I was, you are

Tasha: very close to Yeah, right when we first started. And can I get you to guess how many conversations you’ve done outta curiosity? How many times do you think we’ve set you up for a match?

Amaan: [00:17:00] Oh, I don’t know. I know I took a bit of a break, but it’s probably ’cause 20, 24, 25. I dunno. It’s probably like in the 50 to 50 ish.

Tasha: Yeah. You great. Good job. So you have completed, we’ve, there’s been 78 weeks of chat since we started. Okay. Actually that’s not true ’cause we missed one. So we’re at 77 I think is this week.

You’ve done 55, which is like one of the. Very top number of like users, which is amazing. I love it. I love, thank you. I love the people who have just really doubled in and just jumped in with both feet. I think it’s amazing. And what have you gotten out of being just a member of this community over the past 18 months?

Amaan: I think it’s just become a part of, well, it’s been a part of my daily or sorry, weekly rituals. ’cause I just have a hard like calendar invite on a weekly basis for it, even though I only book it obviously once a week, every one whenever you send [00:18:00] it out. But I think just knowing that there’s so many people out there looking for a community and connection.

Is nice just knowing that there’s so many people who face similar challenges. Both, I guess, good and bad things. That’s been nice. Everyone is I. Everyone is looking to connect and it’s, they’re not like being selfish about like it being for them. They just wanna connect and find community and find ways to help each other or help others, do better in what they do.

And I think that’s, I mean, I can’t speak about other communities in like other sectors, but for the nonprofit sector that kind of aligns with the values of people who generally work in the nonprofit sector, which is just. Helping others do good or helping others to be better. Yeah.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s attracting beautiful group of humans.

Yeah. You’re self included, where there are people who are just out there being like, yeah, no resources are tight. I don’t have enough staff, all this stuff. But they’re still going and they’re trying to [00:19:00] find groups of like-minded people that they can come and share a moment with and yeah. The works. I don’t think the work is gonna get any easier right now. Yeah. Despite we’re both Canadians watching our many Yeah. American friends and getting stressed out and concerned. So I don’t think it’s gonna get easier, but I think it just takes a little bit of the weight off when we invest in it together.

Amaan: Yeah. Are you excited to go to icon? Is it your first time going there?

Tasha: I went last year in Toronto. Okay. Was my fir was my first time going. I’m excited. I’ve never been to Seattle.

, Centering myself and having that moment to. Find some space with a couple other community members is really exciting and yeah, I, that’s what I’m excited for. The next evolution of the Hive, as we start to have more and more people in specific cities, are there opportunities?

I’ve had one of our members in Rochester send me a message being like, I. Hey, do we, do you know if there’s any vers in Dallas? I’m there for a conference and if you know anybody I should meet, [00:20:00] can you put us in touch? And so I just put them in touch over LinkedIn and then they took off and did their own thing.

And then they just send me pictures, right of the two of them together. It’s so great. And so I hope’s there’s more opportunities for those who, wanna embrace the in real life moments. Yeah. That’s what I’d like to see people start doing. And just lastly obviously thank you for being such a long time member. Yeah. Huge support, trusted Hive partner now and everything. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you and follow up, if they’re interested from listening in?

Amaan: My website of course, which I know you’ll link in the, it’s my first name, last name, Dotie, which they see here.

It’s you. I know you’ll or I’ll ask you to link it to the article.

Yeah. But on

Amaan: LinkedIn, find me a LinkedIn, I’m posting now. Yeah, LinkedIn or article. LinkedIn or website or Edmonton. You can come and we can have coffee, but no one comes to Edmonton. So

Tasha: you know, maybe they’ll decide to, who knows, right?

Yeah, who knows. You have any Edmonton [00:21:00] listeners? I have no idea, but Well, thank you so much for doing this with me. Obviously deeply appreciate.

Amaan: Yeah,

Tasha: deeply appreciate it. I’m glad I’ve, I feel like I’ve just, totally benefited from meeting so many amazing humans across the sector, across the world at large.

I think it’s been very cool.

Amaan: Yeah. I’m, I hope you’re proud. I’m sure you are. For the amount of people you brought together from so many places. It’s amazing. Thank

Tasha: you. You’re lovely.

Amaan: Yeah.