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Marcia Beckner
Welcome back to Nonprofit CEO SPARK Podcast. I’m your host Marcia Beckner, and today we are talking about a problem in the nonprofit world that runs constantly.
It may not be like the biggest emergency, but there’s a lot of problems in the area we’re going to discuss around digital marketing, digital transformation. How are people finding you?
Because if you’re a nonprofit leader, I bet you didn’t wake up this morning thinking first about your website necessarily. You may have woken up thinking about some things-the same things the rest of us do.
Which is, why aren’t more people finding us? Why are donations flat? Our button isn’t getting pushed enough on that website.
Why does my marketing team seem so frustrated or behind or chaotic some of the time? And here’s the uncomfortable part I want you to think about: your website may be quietly answering all three of those questions, and not in your favor.
It might be turning donors away without anyone on your team even realizing it. And so I’m so excited about my guest today, Randy Apuzzo.
He is the CEO of Content One and Cost Circle, and I want to be upfront that this is not a technology episode.
Even though Randy has 25 years of experience building digital platforms and websites, we’re not going to talk about platforms or plugins or search algorithms.
Technology is just the mechanism. What we’re talking about is the strategic leadership and what executive directors and CEOs should really be thinking about when it comes to digital strategy.
How do we remove the friction from people finding your mission, and how do we turn them into diehard supporters and donors?
Because the real question every CEO should be asking isn’t, “Is your website nice? It’s, “Is our website serving the mission or holding it back?
So let’s get into it. Randy, welcome to the show.
Randy Apuzzo
Thanks for having me, Marcia.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, I’m so glad you’re here. Give me a little bit of some background about how you came to be with your company today, and why you’re passionate about helping nonprofits?
Randy Apuzzo
Yeah, absolutely. So, 1996 I built my first website, which was a very exciting time back in the day of AOL logins and all that.
In the early early 2000s, I started implementing websites for any type of business that was local that I knew locally through just the network that was in like the Providence, Rhode Island area, and it was really frustrating to get emails saying, “Hey, we need this thing updated on our website.
So this was before there were easy ways to edit websites, and I didn’t want to handle all these emails, so I started building software to let people log in and edit their own websites.
20 years from that point, having worked with Sony, Epic Games, Salvation Army, some of the big ones we’ve worked with, but a number of small businesses to Fortune 500 publicly traded companies.
We’re here now with a you know large enterprise scale, large organization scale, what’s called a content management system, which ends up being the the heart, the beating heart behind every digital foundation, because it’s what’s needed to connect all the dots to make everything sing together and work really well.
So that’s a little bit of the genesis and a little summary there.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, and I want to ask you about your experience helping the Salvation Army and other clients, so that people listening can really kind of think about their own web presence, their own online presence, on a more strategic level.
And not you know just you know the digital marketing on social media, but like really, like when you walk into a new organization and they want you to do an audit, like what are some what are the hidden operational costs that you almost always discover?
Randy Apuzzo
Yeah, so that’s a million dollar question. We’ll try to answer it as succinctly as possible.
I’d say, well, when we first engage with an organization, when we have a background of working first within the commercial sector, right, and handling things in this much faster-paced environment where it’s make or break, and when we work with an organization, they aren’t tech companies, right?
They don’t typically have the same. I’m not saying they’re not sophisticated on the marketing front, but it’s very different.
You look at a Sony or an Epic Games or Acorns, and you compare that to a nonprofit. It’s a very different caliber and different style of marketing and communication.
So when we work with an organization, we first just start to learn how their organization functions because no organization is alike.
You’ve met one organization, you’ve met one organization. They have a different hierarchy and structure and how things work and if there’s autonomy at the local level depending on the size of the organization.
So we come in and we we try the not try we audit and take inventory of what’s the size of organization what are the different departments what are the different locations how do they work together what is the mission in general where how does content flow if I mean that would come later but we just first by learning about the organization and like we call it discovery architectural discovery, and we like to map out what the organization looks like on paper and more visually, so you can see how those connections work.
So really, understanding how the behavior and the structure of an organization would be the very first thing we do before even talking about strategy or anything of the sorts.
And from there, that then lends itself to okay. Well, this is how it’s built. How do we then apply a digital foundation to it?
And then obviously there’s lots of things I can do from there. But that would be the very first thing we do.
Transforming the Digital Foundation
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, I really want it to be concrete. Can you kind of share an example about the Salvation Army and how like why they came to you?
What problems did they know that they have? And then, with you knowing your process of doing an audit, what problems did you uncover and solutions?
Randy Apuzzo
Right. So, from an organizational structure, they have roughly just over a million volunteers a year.
There’s about 60,000 members in the organization, right? Functioning across. I mean, it’s give or take.
They have a national presence. They have a territory for East, Central, West, and South, right?
So they have four major territories and national, and they work kind of in tandem, kind of separately, and then each one of those territories then has divisions and sublocations that they have different vernacular for.
But then you look at it that way; it’s like, wow, there’s this huge organization. They don’t all necessarily work together with each other, right?
So one of the first things we do is once we find out the organization structure, as I said before, then it’s like, all right, well, coming up with a team.
How are we going to communicate across the whole entire organization? And that’s a large organization, right? It’s a very large organization.
But it’d be similar even for a small organization. It’s like, who are the working players in the team?
In this case, there was pretty much a roundtable, like almost like the Knights of the Roundtable, that people from different territories and different creeds of each territory, whether on the tech side, the communication side, on the donation or donor fundraising side, they came together.
So it was like three to five people per territory plus national representation, and that became the task force, the team that would help make decisions.
And then from there, we started talking about what goals are and looking at where they were.
So why did they come to us? They went out into a process and they interviewed a lot of different tech companies, right?
And we were happy that we were the ones, and we did an awesome job for them.
Great solution, but we did it because we worked with them from an organizational level. It’s not just because hey, here’s your problem.
We go away for a year and come back and say here’s your solution. That’s not. It was very much their involvement working with us that made an awesome outcome.
So from there in that foundation we look at their old what their technology was. So an organization that large, they actually did have one technology, but it was implemented in a lot of different ways, and each of the territories and their different divisions used it differently.
And it was to the point where it was so tricky to use, and it was older that just they weren’t getting content they needed.
They weren’t able to make changes quickly. It just got to the point where it’s very slow.
So if they wanted something done, they would be lucky to have that change happen in three weeks, right? Or and you know, usually two months.
So they would just be in this tough cycle. So from a digital movement at an organization that large, that’s I mean maybe that’s fast depending on who you talk to, right?
All orgs are different, but we got them to a place where they’re making changes, you know, in a couple days, and they can do it without developers being involved, and they also have developers that can work in tandem with them too to get everything going and moving in the direction they want.
So moving from this huge siloed legacy implementation into a more structured new digital foundation, that was a lot of hand-wavy things that happened there, but that’s what we did.
And in that process, there is the organizational discovery, the data discovery.
What are we moving? What is the content we want to focus on that’s going to be on the forefront?
What’s going to tell the story of the mission? What’s going on? Empower little local communities all the way up to national, right in that chain, and how we bring that together and tell a full story.
Marcia Beckner
That sounds like an enormous project too. Yeah, it was very long.
Randy Apuzzo
Yeah, I think it was cool to know it from the first meeting in person to it was a year and three months for us to launch 3000 locations on the system, which is very fast.
So that’s you know that’s commercial speed being applied to the organization.
We couldn’t have done it without them working with us, but it takes time when an organization is at large to start working with each other too, when they’re not used to talking about architectural content diagrams and things like that, right?
So it takes a little bit of time to get up to speed, but they did a great job working with us to get there.
Marcia Beckner
So I think you know what’s on everyone’s mind these days is AI, and how do you see AI as a tech expert being applied, and what do nonprofits need to do to make sure that they’re not falling behind or they’re being found, searched for, and found on AI?
Like, where are we right now with that?
Randy Apuzzo
There’s a couple fronts. So there’s AI, like discoverability, right? So being discovered by AI, and that would be more on a marketing front.
That’s one. Another one is how to use AI within your organization, and the other is say using AI with your towards your beneficiaries, towards your members, your volunteers, so using it as an internal tool, using it operationally, and then using it to make sure you’re found and discovered.
All right. So there, I’d say three major different ways to look at it.
I think the way you’re talking is that how do you make sure you’re on a path discovered by AI, right?
So, study just came out. It’s like probably in the last week, where a company did x amount of queries to do discoverability for different business types and industries, and essentially what they found you probably read some of this.
Is that AI depending on whether it’s ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity? They’re going to look at different sources and favor sources a specific way, and for different types of organizations, whether it’s a commercial organization selling a product or foundation versus tech consultancy or a tech software like ourselves, AI is actually giving different results and giving different weight towards specific things.
And I give an example of a tech software like ours. They’re going to weigh review websites that pre-existing and actual conversations, so stuff from like Quora or Reddit, or and you know on our end it’d be like g2 or Captera, Forrester, things that would have tech reviews, and they weigh the response based upon a combination of that, and maybe like 5% is weighted towards the website, which is really interesting.
Where that used to be a 100% website when it was Google search, right?
So it’s really about making sure you know that you are being talked about not just from your website, but within these social networks that are public for something like an organizational base, right?
That is not necessarily selling a service or not selling a product. It’s going to be based upon, say, a Wikipedia page.
Some Reddit won’t be weighted as high, but the actual organization’s website is weighted higher because they trust that the organization is the source of truth.
Whereas somebody selling something, so to speak, they can sell whatever they want, say whatever they want on their website, and Google or AI doesn’t know if that’s true.
So they are leveraging, you know, actual social conversations, say on Reddit or Quora, to actually know that it is true.
So if you’re searching for something where people sell you something, they’re going to weigh human conversations, what they perceive as human conversations, which Reddit was one of the first data sources that was like trained against.
But when it comes to organizations, they’re going to heavily rely on the website and you know things like Wikipedia, things where there’s actually like hard ref are hard.
They’re all digital references, but references to that organization and what speaks the truth of it?
When it comes to the website, how you format your content and deliver it is very.
There’s different strategies to put content on a website, and that’s just going to be more prepared for AI to read it and conversational content, references, quotes.
Case studies like volunteer quotes of how they participated or beneficiary quotes of how they got helped those types of things that are quoted by you know I know some of these need to be anonymous depending on you know the privacy in the organization and the type but it’s going the way that type of information higher as okay.
This is what they do, even versus even saying. I mean, obviously you can state what the mission is, but if you keep repeating the same thing over and over again, it doesn’t do you good.
You need this social proof, and if you can get that social proof on your website, it’s helpful because people aren’t necessarily on Reddit talking about how they got helped by the Salvation Army, maybe right.
There might be some of that, right? That’s not really an avenue or an outlet where people go to speak about that stuff.
So the website’s really important to start collecting these stories from the people who help and those who help, right?
And getting that narrative together, which really forms the truth of the mission.
You can state what your mission is out loud in a sentence, maybe if you’re really good at it.
But really, it’s what the people in your organization, what they’re doing for others, and what that impact is, and being able to tell that story in a natural human way.
Whereas most websites are brochureware still, and it’s just literally like you might. It’s very stale, and it’s telling you what they do, but it’s not very exciting.
Whereas today, with the information overload that we all have, seeing a picture of something with a two-sentence line of what it is and who did it, way more impactful than reading a very manicured full page of text explaining what the process is and what the organization does.
Yeah, I can picture a million words, right? And seeing a picture in a sentence, it goes a lot further, right?
And it proves it’s that social proof.
Turning Stories Into Social Proof
Marcia Beckner
Well, I think that that’s what we can really dive into, which is social proof, and helping leaders like CEOs or executive directors think about where the social proof for our mission.
Where are volunteers talking about why they’re volunteering here? Where are the beneficiaries talking about how we help them?
And that leads me to how you and I kind of met at a conference called the AFP Icon Conference in the spring of this year in San Diego, and that’s the Association for Fundraising Professionals.
There were at least two to 3000 people there. And Randy, I met you because you had a booth in the vendor-like room and up for Cost Circle.
And so I want you to. I was really fascinated by this because, and I want everyone to listen really closely about what Cause Circle is because it’s a free tool that you can use to get social proof, which is what’s so important for AI to find you.
So, Randy, tell us about Cause Circle and why you started it.
Randy Apuzzo
Right. So Cause Circle is a free story collection app for nonprofits.
Right, just very simply, you create an organization page, and then from there you get a QR code or a link where people can then share the story related to your organization, whether they’re a volunteer or a beneficiary or a donor, and they can share their interaction, upload a video or an image, or just write write a story too, right?
It’s not necessary. You can also do mixed media, mobile apps for it. It’s very easy to do.
So that’s what the application is. Where it came from, the genesis was we’re talking about story collection and story collection in mass when you have a million volunteers and who knows the amount you know 500,000 beneficiaries right that is a very tricky thing.
And it’s not something you want the organization to be responsible for in terms of say user management, user growth and or how many stories are stuck in somebody’s Gmail account that never made it to the website or never made it to the marketing coordinator?
So, the genesis was how do we open up? Like one thing, solving a problem, say for the Salvation Army, and we’re building very simple tools for them to generate content all the way from the local level to the national level, right?
But there, that system isn’t going to be opened up to a random volunteer because imagine the vetting and all that that needs to go into collecting a story.
So, because of the nuance of the you know just the operational governance of not being able to hey go create an account on Salvation Army’s website, stranger, right?
And they’re not strangers; they’re being helped. But still, this is technology, and there, there’s a lot of you reading the news every day, and there’s always a data issue.
It’s the last thing you want to deal with. Long winded say.
So the genesis was to create a system for nonprofits that they can. Just very easily let anybody sign up, and initially it was just Facebook.
So we knew you had to have a Facebook account, right? So, okay, you’re logging in through Facebook, and Facebook is a bit of a way of verifying who that person is, right?
So at least you can get their full name and an image, so that way they’re vetted. So it’s not just a random anonymous person posting a story, right?
You have to have some vetting, and then we open it up to other logins, right?
So you can log in with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or you can now just do your email with the magic link, and it’s a way to then capture that story from anybody, whether it’s a volunteer or a beneficiary or a donor, and that collects that collects the story.
It’s a simple app. Collects the story, then the story gets sent to the admin of the cause circle page, which would be an organization admin, and they get to approve, reject, or request changes to that story, which is a huge part of that way.
You’re just not letting stories fly out in the open that you may not be vetted.
We also use AI to catch content so the content is appropriate. You know, we make sure it’s clear of any political past.
There’s nothing political or nothing like inappropriate content. We scan the images too, right?
So people just can’t start uploading bad stuff or stuff that’s not appropriate, and then then it goes to the admin to say approve or reject right and if they approve it they now have consent to use that story you know in within their mission for their marketing for their storytelling for donor retention whatever they want that becomes their story to use.
There’s a permanent place for it on the internet which then becomes referenceable by you know AI or just Google search, and then at any time they can go download that story, and you can download it in file formats, and then you can bring it into your organization and do as you please with it.
So a long way to explain the whole process, but a very simple way to collect stories without having any technical issues.
That’s the that’s what Cause Circle is,
Marcia Beckner
and it’s a free tool that you created for any nonprofit to use. Where would they find that?
Randy Apuzzo
So it’s just CostCircle.org.
Marcia Beckner
CostCircle.org. Yeah. Okay.
Randy Apuzzo
CostCircle.org. Yep.
Marcia Beckner
Okay.
Randy Apuzzo
Check it out there. We’re in both the app stores.
So there’s, you know, in the iOS or Android store, the Play Store or the iOS App Store, so you can find us there.
Just search Cause Circle. You can create. You can request to create an account, and then we vet that, and we’ll reach out to you.
Also, if you see us, we’re going to be at AFP Lead in New Orleans coming up. I don’t. What’s the exact October 21?
Marcia Beckner
October 22, 23rd, around there. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So AMF is having another conference. Yes.
Randy Apuzzo
Correct. We’ll have a booth there, and if you meet us there, we’ll set up the account on the spot and vet you right away.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah.
Randy Apuzzo
So, and that’s the process.
Marcia Beckner
Is there any catch, or is there no catch right now? Our goal
Randy Apuzzo
is to make a we. I mean, as a, I mean, we are a for-profit business, but we make our money doing these large digital transformations, and we wanted to provide free software.
So it’s a nice way that it just opens the door for nonprofits. If your nonprofit needs more, which some do, we can actually do custom implementations of that, and there’s money involved there.
But the base level of what you have right now is free-to-use software.
Down the road, we may add premium features, but right now, everything that’s there is free-to-use, and that’s the way it’s going to remain.
Marcia Beckner
Amazing! Thank you for doing that.
Marcia Beckner
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Connecting Data, Stories, and Human Impact
Marcia Beckner
Did you know we talk a lot about stories and data. Like what is the connection there from your perspective?
Randy Apuzzo
So you think yeah if you have if you look at like an annual report at the end of the year, the orgs the big orgs I’ve talked to, they have different tracking.
They have a lot of custom tracking mechanisms, like who you helped, for example, like or there’s systems I’ve seen like case management systems.
Now I’ll be very loose about this because. But imagine knowing, okay, we helped these six people, and we helped with I don’t know some sort of financial assistance, and did $600 here and $1,200 there, and whatever.
So you stack all that up, and then you know at the end of the year, you can use that data, so to speak.
It’s not necessarily content. It’s not like public-facing content, but you use that to create your, you know, annual report.
But annual reports are just that, right? They’re numbers and data.
It’s like, oh wow, we helped, you know, 500,000 people, 1000 people, and we spent this much money and raised this much money doing it, and you know, this is the distribution of the money and spend.
It’s pretty dry, right? And I think it’s important.
If I am a donor, you know, it’s good to see that information. But really, there’s nothing.
This can feel good, but it’s just data at the end of the day.
But if you pack that with, you know, five micro stories that were images from five different events of people who had made the impact were involved in the impact or receiving the impact.
That will have more impact. Magic word of the conversation.
That’ll have more impact on your donor if you share that.
It’s like you put 100 bucks, $10,000, a billion dollars, whatever it is, and like this is the impact.
It’s real. Those are real humans we’re affecting, or animals, depending, right?
I don’t want to just relate to humans or plants. That’s the real impact, right?
Numbers are good because it; those are facts, but they’re not stories. They don’t have emotion attached to them, right?
Whereas just just being able to see something real, and I go back, and then we’re over inundated now with so much information.
My email box is a disaster. I just can’t escape.
I get text messages every day being solicited for this or that. I can’t go anywhere without being advertised to, right?
And if you can walk in the woods, and as long as you don’t bring your phone, that’s the only safe place you can go, right?
So, just seeing a real story is so refreshing, and not like a two-page-I don’t know-I call it manicured stories where somebody spent a lot of time over manufacturing a story and no one’s gonna read it, right?
If it has a great photo. Somebody’s gonna look at the photo, read the headline, and be like, “Oh, that’s great!
But no one’s gonna read a two-page story or one-page story, right?
But they would read a stream. Think about Instagram in a way, right?
When Instagram was pure back in the day, when you could look at Instagram and actually look at somebody’s profile and see their content, but now you can’t.
Now you get ads every time, every two things you scroll, you’re seeing an ad, and you can go down a rabbit hole and forget what you’re looking at.
It’s awful.
So coming, getting back to that, that telling that actual like sharing the mission through visuals and through micro stories has a real impact, and that’s that’s in this day and age.
I think it’s so important.
So blending the data, the annual report, and adding real visuals and stories to that is going to just empower it and make it so much more powerful.
It’s going to help with donor retention. It’s going to help get new donors and then show existing donors how they made an impact.
So that’s my take on the blend between what a story is and how data works, right?
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, that’s why I loved the like the cause circle demo that I got was you know with the software that you produced, it’s you know really bringing the human out in in the AI era, and people are going to get more and more skeptical, I think, because of AI kind of infiltrating every piece of our world, that the more like human guaranteed human is what I’ve heard.
I’ve heard that term. Like the more you can guarantee that humans are on the other side of you. It helps. It really does. It
Randy Apuzzo
that is
Marcia Beckner
what will stand out in the noise more than anything. So
Randy Apuzzo
yeah, it does. I try to send as short of email as possible because otherwise, just
Marcia Beckner
yeah.
Randy Apuzzo
It looks like AI no matter what.
Yeah, I spend an hour writing a one-hour email or a one-paragraph email.
So, yeah, I think short, concise messaging backed by real people, real visuals is to me.
I I believe that’s the future because it’s so easy to create lots of good content. I’m throwing air quotes in there.
You can’t see me, but good content is really easy to make now.
I can go on AI and I can say fake stories about the mission or this event that didn’t happen.
And but that’s where having pictures and like if it’s attached to somebody that’s from social.
I know some things we can post anonymously as well because I know that some topics are very sensitive and we’re very conscious of that.
But still, having a real story from a real person, it just speaks volumes.
And I look like it’s crazy when I’ll go back to the Salvation Army.
I had no clue the amount they did. Like you, you, and probably for the listeners out there, if you think of Salvation Army, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind, Marcia?
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind if I say Salvation Army?
Marcia Beckner
Ding ding ding! The bell in front of the grocery store.
Randy Apuzzo
Kettlebells. yeah, and the kettlebells is definitely what people think.
Or thrift stores, right? I think a lot of people associate it with thrift stores.
So the kettlebell and thrift stores, and those are two things they do of hundreds, you know, of great impact from disaster services to just food drives, adult rehab.
It can go on and on and on. There’s not a thing they don’t do to help, right?
And I didn’t know that full story.
I know it now because I intimately worked with them now for over three years, which has been great.
But you know, being able to get that story out there isn’t easy, especially when your org’s that big and there’s you know tension so short.
But you know, it’s just it just goes to show like it’s that storytelling needs to happen, right?
Marcia Beckner
Yeah.
Randy Apuzzo
And it’s not easy to do. It’s easy for me to say these are the things you do, but let’s do that at scale, right?
And make sure that people do that, and that’s why we tried to just make it an app that made it as easy as possible to do it while you’re in the field.
Right, you don’t have to be at a computer.
We made it so the app there’s a QR code you can put and you can paint and print it on a poster at your event, and if whoever scans that will just go right to your cause circle page and sign up following you, and then they can share a story right there on the spot, right?
So we make it easier than taking a picture and sending it in your Gmail to the event organizer, which is usually what happens.
And that was just the goal with that. So
Marcia Beckner
yeah, well, you really that’s talk that is removing friction from helping organizations sell stories.
So Randy, I have a little before we go, like a lightning round of questions I want to ask you.
So we’ll see how this goes. Okay, this is my first time trying this. Okay, are you ready?
Randy Apuzzo
Yeah. Answer
Marcia Beckner
as fast as you
Randy Apuzzo
can. I’ll close my eyes.
Practical Website Advice for Nonprofit Leaders
Marcia Beckner
Okay. All right. Biggest website mistake you see?
Randy Apuzzo
Oh man, my biggest pet peeve is sliders.
I think the first thing on every website is a slider, and nobody’s gonna wait to see that thing slide.
And everybody assumes that oh yeah, I’ve got my content that’s on the slider, and sometimes those are the first thing, the easiest things to update, but like they’re so common, I think sliders are a huge mistake.
Marcia Beckner
Okay, SEO or social media, which matters more? SEO being search engine optimization.
Randy Apuzzo
It’s going to be dependent on how you want the channel, or how you want to get found.
So I’d say that it’s dependent. I’m not going to say one or the other.
They’re both very important depending on what the goal is.
Marcia Beckner
Okay.
Randy Apuzzo
Sorry, not a great answer, but it’s the right answer.
Marcia Beckner
No, we just want the right answer. One inexpensive improvement every nonprofit can make this month.
Randy Apuzzo
I would say if you’re not tracking, if you’re a nonprofit, you likely have a donation button, right?
And if just being able to get tracking on that donation button, if you don’t know how much it’s clicked and what the difference is from when that donation’s clicked to success failure from the form that either pops up or sends you to a new page, just just that metric.
There’s a way I could go on and on about how you can improve a lot of things, right?
But just if you don’t know how many people click to see how many people donate, and that conversion rate from click, that is the most important thing.
I think you can start by trying to find out, and it’s not going to be.
You could definitely figure out if that’s your goal to do one thing this month is find out the conversion rate from click to donation being complete.
Marcia Beckner
Good advice.
Randy Apuzzo
Then look to improve that, and then you can look to move.
Once you know that number, then you can experiment by moving the donation button or changing the words on the donation button to see how that improvement starts to work.
Anyway, so we can go on and on, but that would be the first thing I’d say people should
Marcia Beckner
know. Okay, one website you think nonprofits should learn from.
Randy Apuzzo
Oh man, I, I’m with AI now.
I would just call out ChatGPT or Grok or Claude.
So I’d be if you’re not using, if you’re not querying, like even what I just said, don’t Google that.
Go to one like Claude. Or Gemini or ChatGPT, and ask how to do what Randy just said on the podcast.
That’s where that’s where you should be learning.
The other one, if you want to know a website, I’d say YouTube.
I think YouTube has the most valuable content in the world for learning, and if you use YouTube Premium, which is the only one of the only subscriptions I pay for.
You don’t get ads, so you can actually watch something, you know, not tainted.
Marcia Beckner
Yes, it’s worth it. Okay, last last one.
Finish this sentence. A great nonprofit or social impact website should make people feel blank.
Randy Apuzzo
They should make people feel like you’re making an impact and feel good about being involved with your organization.
Marcia Beckner
Yes, thank you so much, Randy. It was so good talking to you about all of this.
I’m really excited to see you at the conference in October. AFP lead. It’s called.
You should all go. I’ll be there. Randy will be there, and let me know.
I’ll schedule a meetup for all of us if you decide to go. It’s in New Orleans.
And oh, go to afplead.org. I bet if you want to register. AFP lead.
Marcia Beckner
I believe so. And then Randy, though, where can they find you?
Where should they go to learn more about Content One and Cause Circle?
Randy Apuzzo
Yeah, so our Content One is just content.one.
That’s what you put in your browser, and you will go to our website.
We have a instead of a .com, we’re a .one.
So content.one to learn about Cause Circle and create a free account there, it’s just CostCircle.org.
One word, CostCircle.org. So content.one and CostCircle.org.
Marcia Beckner
Okay, great. And if they want, they can set up maybe an an audit with you to if they’re not sure where they’re at right now, and yeah, if they need help,
Randy Apuzzo
If you’re looking for help with digital transformation or looking for a way to make your mission have more impact digitally, happy to chat.
We know we can jump on a phone call and chat.
There won’t be any calls. We do just short discovery calls where we learn about the organization if there’s a fit, and then yeah, we can go from there.
And that’s for content one from the cause circle angle.
That is an open tool, free to use.
If you do want to reach out to us with questions, you can find us at content.one, and then contact us from there.
Marcia Beckner
Perfect. Thank you so much.
All of this will be in the show notes, so go check that out to get the direct links.
Randy, thanks again for being on the podcast.
Randy Apuzzo
Yeah, thanks for having me, Marcia.
It was a fun time. Time flies, right? It’s already over.
Marcia Beckner
Yes, it’s already over.
Randy Apuzzo
See you in New Orleans.
Marcia Beckner
We’ll see you in New Orleans.
And always remember, you are meant for great things, and you don’t have to burn out to prove it.
Marcia Beckner
Before you go, I want to remind you that you don’t have to leave empty-handed today.
I created a free guide for nonprofit leaders like you, covering four things: how to stop spinning out, the number one behavior you can use to lead with more conviction, the secret to building a more inclusive culture starting this week, and a simple weekly ritual that unifies your team.
It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s built to help you lead with more confidence starting today.
Grab it now at culturecares.com forward slash guide.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of Nonprofit CEO SPARK.
If you’re ready to turn burnout into boundaries and build a healthy, happy culture where everyone, including you, can thrive, visit culturecares.com to learn how I support nonprofit organizations like yours.
If this episode brought you value, share it with a fellow leader navigating stress and overwhelm.
And remember, you are meant for great things, and you don’t have to burn out to prove it.
Until next time, keep leading with courage and confidence.