My purpose in life is to partner with people who see the world differently and help that vision come to life. - Alexandra Lustig  

Retention Secrets: Building a 70% Year-Two Retention Rate in Your Consulting Program with Alexandra Lustig  

Today, we're diving into the world of client retention with Alex Lustig, co-founder of the Global Grant Writers Collective. Their business is teaching people how to build careers as grant writers, but the real magic? They're keeping 70% of their members for a second year.

Alex shared insights on how they've built this success. It's not just about teaching grant writing - they've created a program that's part skill-building, part business training, and a whole lot of community. Their members aren't just learning a new skill; they're reimagining their lives.

While Alex's focus is grant writing, the strategies we discussed apply to any consulting business. We explored client retention, community building, and creative ways to make your clients feel valued and supported.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize onboarding. Get your clients taking action and seeing results from day one.

• Use surprise and delight tactics. Keep your clients engaged with unexpected perks and milestone celebrations.

• Build a strong community. Facilitate connections between your clients to boost retention and satisfaction.

• Focus on one marketing channel at a time. Master it before moving on to others.

• Play to your strengths. You don't need to be an expert in everything - build a team or network that complements your skills.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up your consulting business, this episode offers practical strategies to boost your retention rates and create a business that truly serves both you and your clients.

[00:01:31] Introduction of Alex Lustig, co-founder of Global Grant Writers Collective.

[00:03:17] Alex explains their business model: teaching women (and some men) how to build careers as grant writers through a program that's part grant writing training, part mini-MBA.

[00:04:26] Discussion of Alex's role as the "integrator" in the business, complementing her co-founder's visionary role.

[00:07:21] Breakdown of day-to-day operations in their business, including client management and team leadership.

[00:15:54] Overview of their program structure: 12-month commitment, online courses, live events, and community support.

[00:17:34] Discussion of their impressive 70% retention rate for members staying into year two.

[00:19:01] Alex emphasizes the critical importance of onboarding for retention success.

[00:21:15] Conversation about surprise and delight tactics, including sending custom pottery for milestone achievements.

[00:25:53] Exploration of their ideal customer profile: not necessarily someone from the nonprofit sector, but individuals seeking flexibility and meaningful work.

[00:28:14] Discussion of their marketing strategies, focusing on SEO and more recently, Instagram advertising.

[00:35:05] Alex shares insights on which marketing channels (website, YouTube, book) have been most effective for them.

[00:38:10] Alex's confession: she has never actually written a full grant herself, despite running a grant writing training business.

[00:39:13] Wrap-up and contact information for Alex and the Global Grant Writers Collective.

Connect with Alexandra:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-edwards-lustig-09220644 

Instagram: @learngrantwriting

Find Us Online:  https://www.confessionswithjessandcindy.com

Connect with Cindy:

Cindy Wagman Coaching: cindywagman.com

Fractional Fundraising Network: fractionalfundraising.co/

LinkedIn: ca.linkedin.com/in/cindywagman

Connect with Jess:

Out In the Boons: outintheboons.me

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jesscampbelloutintheboons/

Transcript:

[00:01:31] Jess: Hey, Jess. Hello. Backstreet's back, all right. That's what happens when we see each other multiple days in a row.

[00:01:42] Cindy: I know, and it’s funny that we’re recording this. Actually, this is going to air soon after we record it. It’s the end of the summer. I feel like everyone’s just feeling a little loopy. I don’t know about you, but I feel like everyone’s had a really busy summer. Like, a lot of people I know have just been feeling busy—not just work busy, but just general busyness.

[00:02:02] Jess: Oh yeah, the world is like...open, right? I actually just had this thought the other day. I’m curious if everyone on this call has had this too. Yes, busy, but I feel like just this week, people are coming back. Yes, refocusing on work, refocusing on the next couple of quarters in the year. People have been busy with travel and fun, but not professionally, if that makes sense.

[00:02:28] But I feel like just this week, people are starting to re-engage, so to speak.

[00:02:34] Cindy: Yeah, exactly. Same, which is why it’s a great time for this conversation. Today’s guest is Alex Lustig—I... you already told me how to pronounce it.

[00:02:45] Alexandra: You can say it either way. It depends on which country you’re in, so we’re good.

[00:02:48] Cindy: Fair enough. Alex is the co-founder of Global Grant Writers Collective, and you’re one half. We had Meredith on the podcast before—it was such a good interview. He is fun. So excited to chat with you today. Welcome.

[00:03:03] Alexandra: Yeah, thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

[00:03:06] Cindy: Okay, for those who haven’t listened to Meredith’s episode, please give us a little rundown of what your business is.

[00:03:17] Alexandra: So yeah, I’m Alex. I’m the co-founder and integrator. If people are familiar with the visionary-integrator duo, I identify as the integrator in that duo. We started Learn Grant Writing, home of the Global Grant Writers Collective, where we teach women (and some cool men—not just women) how to build careers as grant writers.

[00:03:36] So we like to think of ourselves as a grant writing training meets a mini-MBA. They got together, had a baby, and formed the Global Grant Writers Collective. We talk a lot because most of our people would like to become grant writing consultants, so we spend a lot of time in the business area of freelancing and consulting.

[00:03:55] Cindy: Awesome. You teach people—you have a group program teaching people how to write grants and then also how to become consulting, consulting student grant writers. I love it. Okay, you mentioned integrator. I think a lot of people don’t know what that means. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about your role and how that differs from what we might think of as someone running a business? Because there’s two of you, so you get to divide and conquer.

[00:04:26] Alexandra: Yeah, absolutely. The book that kind of sparked it is Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman. Definitely, a little corporate, but it is a great book. It was the first book that I read and really saw myself in a job description. The integrator is like Walt Disney’s brother, Roy Disney, who built Disneyland and Disney World, especially after Walt died. He just had all of the visuals for Disney World, and Roy really stepped in and built Walt’s dream. There are so many examples in that book, and if you Google it, there are a bajillion examples. Really, it is the second half to this visionary, where visionaries have these giant, big dreams, and so many of them have operator skills enough to get far enough. Then, an integrator can really come in and make those dreams a reality. That’s how I see my purpose in life: to partner with people who see the world differently and help that vision come to life.

[00:05:23] Cindy: Okay, before Jess asks her question, how do we clone you? Because I think this is—although you’re a builder, I was going to ask you, like Cindy! I am a builder, but also, yeah, I can do the things, but it doesn’t bring me the same level of satisfaction. There’s some satisfaction, but I feel like it’s secondary to me, whereas where you live in that situation... Oh, it’s such an amazing skill set. I feel like there are many people who are visionaries but can’t do what you do, and every business needs what you do.

[00:06:11] Alexandra: It’s easier to find the visionaries—they’re louder, right?

[00:06:13] Cindy: Exactly.

[00:06:15] Alexandra: Yeah. My secret hypothesis is that there are a lot of integrators who are actually EAs—really good project managers that don’t stay in the box of project management. They’re creative project managers, but they’re EAs. There are a lot of people out there serving in administrative roles that, given some other tasks, given the ability to be a thought partner with the leader they’re supporting, I think could actually make incredible visionary-integrator duos.

[00:06:39] Jess: Yes. I would love to hear just a little bit about what being an integrator looks like on a day-to-day basis. Like if you could even break up, like, this is what the visionary does, and then this is how I come in, and this is what I look like. Clearly, Cindy and I are over here, salivating over the prospect and ability of having a partner like you in our business because we both—it just makes so much sense. And takes off so many parts of the things that, like you said, you’re just not great at but do anyway. So, I would love to just hear what that looks like on a day-to-day basis, especially knowing how many clients you all serve on an annual basis and the programs you run. It’s a level of complication.

[00:07:21] Alexandra: Yeah, for sure. So, I think—let me approach it from two different angles. From the consulting angle, which is where I started: Meredith was consulting and running the business as a side hustle, and I know she talks about that in her episode, so you can go revisit that. I came in when COVID hit, and grants came pouring out of the woodwork. Every client Meredith had ever had came running, and luckily, she had just launched the first version of this online course. We cherry-picked a bunch of different grant writers from that cohort who had promise, and she needed a project manager. So, I came in as the client lead and client project manager in the consulting sense, where I was running all of the projects. I really was editing, maybe collecting some supporting documents, but I wasn’t touching the grant. I was managing the team of grant writers. In that case, I really was her partner in managing all of the daily operations of the consulting business. Then, I think the integrator part that is on top of that, maybe as a director of operations or as an extra really great project manager, is the thought partner element. So, in the consulting realm, it looks like: Do we want to take on this client? Is this in support of the vision? How do we make sure that we’re recruiting and actively getting clients that we want, projects that we want to work on? When we switched, I was having so much fun that I wanted to quit the consulting job, and so I came to her, and I was like, “I want in.” She was like, “Okay, we’re building the course.” When we switched to the course building, it really, at the beginning, was just: How do we make this vision happen? I was wearing every hat in the business. I have done receipt reconciliation. I have done email management. I have done all of it. I’ve managed our marketing. I’ve managed our operations. I’ve managed the customers—all of those hats. As we’ve grown—now we serve about 600 members and have a full-time team of seven—as we’ve grown, I now manage a lot of HR, like people management. I’m mainly on the retention side of the house, but I get pulled in creatively to marketing when support is needed when something’s going wrong. So, I’m a firefighter a little bit, problem solver, builder, SOP queen. We make all the systems work. Asana is my second home, project management love of my life. And then, as the thought partner part, Meredith and I are in constant communication about where our business is going and what vision we want to achieve. I support her in getting that vision further. So, director of operations, but that vision piece with the co-founder, I think, is where the integrator differs.

[00:10:11] Cindy: 100% agree. I think that’s what makes you exceptional. I love that. And oh my god, I just set up—I just sent, actually, my whole mastermind a video of my new Airtable systems.

[00:10:24] Jess: I see that.

[00:10:26] Cindy: It’s going to be gorgeous.

[00:10:28] Jess: Sure, because I would literally never—I don’t even know. I wouldn’t even know.

[00:10:32] Cindy: I definitely had help doing it. Like, I brought in the experts, but I can geek out in there, and it is—like Asana, Cindy, Asana.

[00:10:50] Jess: No, I know, but like, I thought it was all about Asana, and now I’m all in for Airtable. It’s next level. Alex, I will send you the video.

[00:11:05] Alexandra: Yeah, please send me the video.

[00:11:06] Jess: Yes, it manages all of my group program backend.

[00:11:09] Cindy: Yeah.

[00:11:11] Alexandra: And it’s so cool. I love it. That’s separate.

[00:11:12] Jess: I know, and I heard about Motion. I had a member yesterday talk to me about Motion, and I am—I’m really feeling Motion for maybe the solopreneur who’s still managing her whole mom life or still managing her whole other business. Like, Motion is integrating various calendars if you’re working a full-time job elsewhere. So, I am going to look at Motion for that purpose alone.

[00:11:28] Cindy: My fractional fundraisers in the network that I run love Motion because they do have multiple calendars with different clients. I don’t need it for what I do, but they love it.

[00:11:39] Jess: And I’ve never even heard of Motion.

[00:11:44] Cindy: Not to be confused with Notion.

[00:11:47] Jess: I’m like, people love Notion as well, which I haven’t gotten into yet, but I probably won’t even try because I’m happy with the way things are now. Anyways, we could talk for a long time about systems and totally geek out.

[00:12:03] Cindy: Jess is like, what are you two saying?

[00:12:06] Jess: But I would love to talk about this because the operations side—I feel like sometimes in our world, we like glamorize that visionary role, but actually, the part that makes a business successful is the integrator. That’s where you—and you mentioned retention. To me, the operations of your business are what give it longevity, scalability, growth, all of those things. So, tell us a little bit about how you took the business—like, how you went from, okay, I’m all in for this group, this training program, to now we’re sustaining this multi-million dollar business.

[00:12:56] Alexandra: Yeah, trial by fire. There are so many steps that went into that. I think one of the guiding values that has always been with Meredith and then became my guiding value is providing the seven-star experience. One of my favorite books that I think lends to a fantastic project manager is The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. She talks about the purpose of gathering, and I think bringing that into your meetings, into your scope of work for your job descriptions, into your Asana project management boards—what is the purpose behind anything that we’re doing? And then that informs the experience that you get to create. Yeah, that’s a very high-level way to answer that question, but everything we’ve done, from growing into retention, has been: How do we create this experience to allow our members to have success? The operations come from that, right? This is how we need them to receive our documents. So, for example, one of the things we did when we were scaling was we had everything in a personal Google Drive. Everything was on Meredith’s personal Google Drive. I knew this was a problem, but I also wasn’t quite ready to dive into a whole shared drive migration of all our files until we had this random lead, who was not even on our email list yet, randomly message us on LinkedIn, somehow find an HR-adjacent file, and request access. I have no idea how. I’ve searched everything from any direction. We have no email communications with her. How this person got this particular link is near impossible. I knew that was our moment to switch to the shared drive. The shared drive then became this way, operationally, for us to protect assets, but also to provide the experience of making sure that everything that needed to be publicly available for our members and our customers coming in—our potential members—was really easily found and easily protected. That’s a minor example of how this bigger gathering, this bigger purpose of the seven-star experience, can feed operationally into very boring things like Google Drive migrations.

[00:15:14] Jess: Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. Thank goodness you figured that all out, but I can see how scratching that one thing reveals this whole cave underneath of a project. I’m sitting here thinking—we had the conversation with Meredith, but it was some time ago, and I don’t want to make any assumptions that anyone listening to this has heard that episode. Could you just restate what the business is specifically, how much of it is based on new clients versus retained clients? I do want to ask about the retention side of the business a bit, so I think if we could just context that, that would be helpful.

[00:15:54] Alexandra: Yeah. So, we have an online course and membership. We are a 12-month commitment that then goes month-to-month. We know that it takes about a year for significant progress to be made if you are starting literally from zero because we recruit a lot of people who have no experience grant writing and no experience consulting. So, you’re learning the skill set of becoming a grant writer and maybe becoming a freelancer or consultant or running your own side hustle for the first time, or you’re searching for a new job. These skill sets take a while to manifest, and the work takes a while to get into the habit of. That’s why we’ve structured our program as a 12-month program. It’s all online. Everything is evergreen content, pre-recorded. We are on our favorite platform, Circle, which is an incredible community platform. All our courses are in there, and we have a lot of pathways to make it easy for people coming in to easily navigate the courses and content. We also have live events. We’ll do quarterly bonus trainings, and we have two times a month coaching calls as well as various other programming like book clubs. Our customer support experience coordinator does co-working hours where you can literally just come and work and have the accountability of working. We do a lot of peripheral activities, but the main core content is pre-recorded videos that walk you through that journey. Our goal is to get you to 15K in revenue for the first year, and then we’ll support you as you scale or as you land a job.

[00:17:34] Jess: What percentage of the folks that you’re serving, like in a 12-month period, are retained clients or retained students versus a new cohort of folks that are coming in?

[00:17:47] Alexandra: So, we have about 70 percent of our people stay with us into year two, and then depending on where they go, a lot of those people come with us into year three because they’ve now established that this is what they want to do. The majority of people who drop off realize grant writing isn’t for them. It turns out it was too much, either financially or because it didn’t align with the passion they were bringing to it. Lots of them leave to go do something else. If they get an in-house job and the organization doesn’t want to support that, and they feel like they got the training, they’ll leave for those reasons too. But around 70 percent stay so that we can continue supporting them as they scale.

[00:18:26] Jess: 70 percent is amazing. I’m thinking about this a lot for my business as we try and clear the last four months of the year. How do you put offers in front of people who have already been your customers versus finding someone new? Whether it’s a donor or a customer, it’s always a faster route to go back to people who have already made purchases from you. So, I’m just curious about what you all do to really work to retain those 70 percent of students who have come through the program.

[00:19:01] Alexandra: Yeah, onboarding is critical. I’m also newly the board president of a local nonprofit, and so I’m seeing a lot of things from another angle as well. They have membership too, and we’re looking at their retention rate. Onboarding is really quite critical, and so identifying what people need to succeed so that they stay often happens in the beginning of the year. If you’re getting to month 11 in our case (but if you’re a six-month program, month four) or your client is 80 percent of the way through the project and you don’t have something else lined up, it really all depends on how it went in the beginning—how everything went smoothly in the beginning to set them up for success. So, if anyone is struggling with retention, whether it’s retention of clients, employees, or a membership program like ours, it 80 percent boils down to onboarding.

[00:20:00] Cindy: Love that. I think it’s such an important thing that everyone can do, whether you have a community or even one-on-one clients. There’s a bunch of research around client experience and how it results in increased likelihood of them continuing, increasing their spend with you, and sending referrals. Some of the ways that I think about onboarding—I’d love to hear what you think—are: How do we get you taking action right away so that there’s this feeling of avoiding things like buyer’s remorse, like that feeling of, “Oh my God, what did I just do?” You want to avoid that and make them feel like, “Oof, I made the right decision.” So, it’s taking action, moving in the right direction, and early wins. But then, it’s also a little surprise and delight—things that I love geeking out about and so does Jess because she’s such a caregiver. So, tell us about some examples of ways that you both encourage people either to take action or keep moving forward so that they build momentum, but also how you surprise and delight and reward them with fun things.

[00:21:15] Jess: All right, Alex, we’re back for another round of rapid-fire questions. You ready?

[00:21:20] Alexandra: Yes.

[00:21:21] Jess: Okay, great. What is your morning routine?

[00:21:28] Alexandra: I meditate for at least five minutes to set the bar really low so that I can accomplish it. I love the book called The Book of Awakening, and I’ll link that too. It’s a really nice meditation to read.

[00:21:42] Jess: Oh my gosh, you’re like the thing that people aspire to. First thing in the morning with the meditation, you probably drink lemon water too.

[00:21:47] Alexandra: Yeah, lemon water, go on a walk.

[00:21:54] Jess: Oh my gosh.

[00:21:55] Alexandra: That’s not every morning. I’m not perfect. It just is the thing that grounds me if I do it.

[00:21:58] Jess: Yeah, you mentioned a few in our episode, but what would you say is your hands-down favorite tool that you use in the business?

[00:22:08] Alexandra: Probably Asana. It just is the thing that keeps everyone together.

[00:22:15] Jess: And this is a question I got asked in college and I think about it constantly. Would you consider yourself a piler or a filer as far as your organization?

[00:22:27] Alexandra: In business, a filer, and in my personal life, increasingly a piler.

[00:22:31] Jess: Interesting. That’s so fascinating that you split.

[00:22:33] Alexandra: Yeah. I think my brain gets tired, and then my personal life gets really stacked up.

[00:22:43] Cindy: Okay, cool. Thanks for playing.

[00:22:45] Alexandra: Yeah.

[00:22:50] Cindy: So, because my heart lies a lot in employee retention, I’m going to share an employee retention example first, and then I’ll share what we do for our members. We had this giant federal grant due when we were consulting, and our employee went to submit four days early, which is a little too close but okay. She goes to submit, and the entire federal website crashes. Like, nothing. And there is no communication. You can imagine—trying to get in touch with the federal government about submitting a grant. No, this isn’t happening. Luckily, we had extra time, but she spent countless hours talking, figuring out this problem, and trying to get the grant submitted. One of my favorite ways to surprise and delight is ice cream delivery. So, we ordered ice cream delivery to be sent to her house to thank her for all her hard work. I think you can do that in client relationships, with your members, and with your employees. There are so many cool ways to do that. It really helped—she stayed with us until she chose to be a full-time mom, and her husband was able to take over the full financial load of the family. It was one of the very early things we did that I think helped with retention. Inside our program, when you hit different milestones or take different actions, you get cool swag. One of my favorite swag items is when you either land a job or earn your first 50K in revenue. We work with a local pottery artist, and our brand is unicorns, so she has a unicorn stamp and makes a homemade pottery cup with a unicorn on it that we send to everyone when they hit 50K. So, yeah, we love the surprise and delight factor.

[00:24:39] Jess: Awesome. I love that you gamify it, but then you also have these ways, like, out of the blue. It’s clearly awesome, so congratulations.

[00:24:51] Alexandra: It’s so fun. I owe a lot of our retention to the community itself. Our community supports each other like no other community I’ve ever seen. They show up in really vulnerable times. I was talking to a member yesterday, and she said, “It often takes me a while to remember that I’m out of the Circle.” Some people call our community literally “the Circle” because that’s the platform we’re on, but I love the visual of that. We have a really safe space to do really hard things. You’re reinventing your career. She was like, “I often forget that when I leave the Circle, I need to be a little bit more—I need to vet more, I need to use a little bit more discernment because we have created such a safe space.” I owe a lot of the reason that our people stay to the people who are in our community.

[00:25:38] Jess: I want to switch directions a little bit because I didn’t know this about your program until more recently. Meredith and I follow each other on Instagram, and I think we were DMing about it. Your ideal customer is actually not someone in the nonprofit sector. Is that fair to say?

[00:25:53] Alexandra: Yeah, our ideal customer is a woman who is looking to live a life she loves and wants the flexibility of a career to be able to do that.

[00:26:04] Jess: Nonprofit experience isn’t a prerequisite?

[00:26:07] Alexandra: No.

[00:26:08] Jess: Okay, fascinating. I’m so curious about how you all think about outreach, recruitment, and acquisition because it’s quite different. For example, in my business, I would say that my ideal customer very much wears the hat of a fundraiser, and I’m a former fundraiser, so I have this kind of lived experience that translates to my ideal customer. Yours, well, maybe it’s not different because actually, you said you’re on a board, but I don’t know that you worked in a nonprofit.

[00:26:47] Alexandra: No, and I’ll share this in my confession later, so I won’t give it away yet. But my background is not grant writing. I’ve come from the education space, so I’ve actually done more charitable organization work than Meredith has. Meredith worked for a for-profit that was grant writing for mainly tribal organizations, so very municipal, very infrastructure, very different than a social services nonprofit, for example. Our ideal target woman or man—we’re increasingly having more cool men join us—is someone who wants to make a difference in the world. So, our branding and marketing really do collect people who have a lot in common. We all love the outdoors pretty much. We all love serving our community in one way or another. A lot of people who come to us want to make a difference. Maybe they were in architecture and were hoping to do X with architecture, or they’ve been in some other space where they were hoping to make a difference in that space, and it just isn’t happening. So, they’ve pivoted into the nonprofit space. Our branding definitely attracts those types of people. Where they are, we don’t really know top of funnel. But when they find us, we have very similar characteristics.

[00:28:04] Cindy: I was going to ask, what is your outbound-type marketing, or where do you put yourself as a business so that those people find you?

[00:28:14] Alexandra: Yeah, so one of our core beliefs is that you pick one marketing channel to be excellent at a time. That could apply if you’re a consultant or doing a different business outside of consulting. What we picked was SEO. For a long time, all we focused on was SEO, which obviously meant website work, YouTube because YouTube is also a search engine, and Amazon, so the book. We focused a lot on the book and how it ranks because that’s a great lead magnet into our business. That honestly required someone to at least have heard the term “grant writing” to be able to search it. We were getting people who were at least familiar enough with grant writing to find us. Now that we’ve optimized the SEO channel, we’ve been playing, because this isn’t business, just playing for the last year in what true top-of-funnel marketing looks like. We very recently started doing more of a paid ads strategy and not putting any targeting on it at all. So, you really get narrow in your ads, creative and copy, and target everyone. It’ll self-select in the whole of Facebook, like all of Facebook, all of Instagram. I think we are just doing Instagram DM ads right now, so also Instagram likes us because we are staying on platform.

[00:29:41] Cindy: So, there’s no targeting—you’re just letting, you’re just saying target all your users and let the algorithm figure out where your people are.

[00:29:49] Alexandra: Yep.

[00:29:50] Cindy: Okay, is this finding a lower cost per lead, or have you seen any results yet?

[00:30:00] Alexandra: Yeah, the cost per lead is definitely low because, again, Instagram and Facebook are rewarding us for staying in-app. Because we find most of our people on Instagram—they’re not so much on Facebook, which is different, right? Because nonprofits, there are a lot of nonprofits on Facebook. So, I’m running book ads to Facebook because there are a lot of people who want a grant writing book, but who wouldn’t necessarily be our ideal target audience for our membership on Facebook. But Instagram is definitely where they’re at. To play that system, we did the DM ads specifically so that it would only show on Instagram.

[00:30:37] Cindy: Okay, so your DM ads are basically asking people to engage with you in your DMs. What’s the call to action? What does that look like?

[00:30:48] Alexandra: We’re offering a blueprint to building a career.

[00:30:50] Cindy: So it’s still a lead, but in order—do you have a mini-chat? What’s the tool?

[00:30:56] Alexandra: I decided not to do ManyChat, and we’re experimenting with—so ManyChat, what I found the kind of issue with what we wanted to do was, if you’ve been on Instagram, you’ve seen a post and it says, “Comment here, blank word to receive,” and you comment and get the link right away. That’s ManyChat that’s powering that. What we wanted them to do was send us a DM back. So, I just set it up actually in Instagram, where if they say yes, this happens; if they say no, I think we have another question that gets sent; and if they say anything else, they just have to wait for us.

[00:31:22] Cindy: Okay, cool.

[00:31:24] Alexandra: Then we respond. We’ve been spending a lot of time in Instagram, and so definitely working out kinks. This is why we’re so much a fan of optimizing that first marketing channel, because if you are playing around in five different marketing channels at a time, you’re spreading yourself so thin. It’s taking a lot of our team’s energy, Meredith’s brain energy, every week to do this one marketing task, which is literally talking to people in the DMs. So, if we didn’t have this other thing optimized, we wouldn’t be able to experiment the way that we’re experimenting right now.

[00:32:14] Cindy: That’s so fun. I do not have—first of all, I don’t think my people are on Instagram as much. I think they’re more on Facebook. But just that—I mean, that sounds horrible to me. I don’t spend a lot of time on Instagram. I would not want to be personally in the DMs, but I think as a strategy, it’s really cool, and you can actually have conversations with people, which is awesome. I remember recently someone—I respond to things, not in the apps, but I have lots of different ways I do that. Someone was like, “Oh, this is a really good bot.” I was like, “It’s really me.” I think, you know what I do when people apply for my program? I have their LinkedIn URL, and I go and send a connection request, and I say, “Thanks for your submission.” Someone said, “Wow, that was really great.” And I was like, “Oh no, it’s actually me.”

[00:33:08] Alexandra: I love that. Yeah, LinkedIn is where we have a ton of people too. It’s where we encourage our people to find others. This, to me, all boils down to one thing, which is relationship building. Inside our program, we call them “curious conversations,” and we want you to have three curious conversations a day. That could be with your post office person, your neighbor, an actual informational interview, or a discovery call. It can be so many different things. Or it could literally be a conversation on LinkedIn or a conversation on Instagram. So, pick those places where you can build relationships and incorporate that into your routine.

[00:33:46] Cindy: I love that. If you ask any of my community members, curiosity is the number one quality that I think makes people great at running a business or fundraising or all that.

[00:34:08] Alexandra: Absolutely. Fundraising, talking to funders—our whole process is based on relationship building. It is the one key skill to build if you’re running a business or doing your job—any of it.

[00:34:22] Cindy: All right, I feel like we need to get together. I feel like we could talk forever and geek out.

[00:34:26] Jess: What are you two talking about? I don’t understand it.

[00:34:37] Cindy: You understand it, but you’re like, “This is not...”

[00:34:39] Jess: No, no. Well, I just know specifically paid ad strategy is for such a select group of nonprofit consultants.

[00:34:53] Alexandra: That’s true, and I also want to have that caveat. My one question I had, just really quick before we go into confessions, is between the SEO channels that you did choose—website, YouTube, and the book—which of those three levers did you see pull the hardest?

[00:35:05] Alexandra: YouTube, probably. I will caveat this—all of this is...right? We have to acknowledge a lot of privilege in business, and I will be the first one to acknowledge that. One of our privileges was that at the time we launched a new website, Meredith was dating a software engineer who knew how to build websites in Golang, which is Google’s language. He built our website. Our SEO ranked keywords went from five to—I don’t remember the number—but a lot, instantaneously because Google was now reading our website like it was native. There are problems with that—they eventually split up, and we needed to find a way to put the website on a different platform. I just want to acknowledge that the privilege was there of us building a website that was really ranking high in SEO. However, YouTube is the lever that we’ve pulled the hardest on second to the website. We’ve spent a ton of work on the website. It’s fabulous because one of the things for us that’s important is the people who are learning from us on YouTube know how we’re teaching. So, when they come into our program, they’re familiar with our faces, our teaching styles, and our energy, and that helps us also with retention. Everyone is familiar with everything. I find that YouTube is fabulous—my aunt is running it to talk about aging. She’s in the aging advocacy space and is lobbying and working with associations in that space, and she’s doing a lot of education on YouTube for aging. It works for her demographic. It can be applied to the consulting model for sure, depending on what kind of consulting you’re doing in this space.

[00:36:48] Cindy: I think that goes back to what you said: do one thing and nail it before you start playing around. Find your audience, find where they are. To Jess’s point, I played around with a lot of Facebook ads targeting nonprofits with a lot of failure.

[00:37:07] Alexandra: I think they’re really hard to—I think the scarcity mindset comes out in Facebook a lot in the nonprofit space. Our main advice to our consultants is to focus on one main channel, which is informational interviews. Go to your network, whether cold or warm, and figure out how to talk to them, figure out their pain points, and offer something that speaks to those pain points. Then you have a client—that’s way easier than running Facebook ads.

[00:37:34] Cindy: Way easier. Yeah, speaking Cindy’s language. We just had...mine too. Yesterday, we recorded a podcast with one of my clients, Kel Haney, where we talked about what she thought business development was at the beginning, which was writing a book, being a host of podcasts, blah blah blah. No, it’s relationships. It’s talking to the people you know, being curious—all that. So, I couldn’t agree with you more on that. All right, before we run out of time, we definitely need a confession. You hinted at it before, so Alex, what is your confession?

[00:38:10] Alexandra: My confession is that I have not actually ever written a grant head-to-toe. So, I am in this space without actually knowing or having the physical experience of writing a grant. I’ve edited a ton, and I’ve submitted a couple of proposals, random things to Walmart in an earlier career, but I have never written the extent and the beauty of the grants that our community writes.

[00:38:33] Jess: Hearing it here first. I don’t know what that says about a lot of stuff, but no. Again, you’re the integrator too—you have a very different role, but that is fascinating that you now oversee so many folks.

[00:38:50] Alexandra: I think it speaks to—you can pivot into anything, right? You can all learn these skills. The beauty is finding out what your skill set is and how you can apply that to what you want to do.

[00:39:05] Jess: Alex, tell our listeners if they want to get in touch, if they’re curious about the program, if they want to connect with you, what’s the best way to do that?

[00:39:13] Alexandra: Yeah, so you can find us on Instagram at Learn Grant Writing. We promise that there are real people responding to those DMs. You can find me on LinkedIn. I think it’s Alexandra, then my maiden name, Edwards Lustig. We can put the link somewhere—that’s way easier. Yeah, DM me. I’m happy to chat on any platform.

[00:39:32] Jess: Thank you for being here.

[00:39:35] Alexandra: Yeah, thank you.