Marketing with Purpose

Once, somebody broke into my house. We came back from vacation, and we walked into the house. My oldest daughter, who was two at the time, goes, “Mama, where TV go?” I look over, and sure enough, no TV there. You know what else was gone? All the beer in our fridge. Somebody stole our beer, our TV and my husband's Big 12 championship ring, which was a real stinking bummer. We felt gross, violated a...

We have had many, many interns over the last 17 years at MayeCreate. Some of them have been terrible, and others have been amazing. One of them still works for us to this day. They’re good, they’re bad, they’re everything in between… The only thing you can manage is how you manage them. So I’m going to give you 10 intern management tips from my former interns. Yep, that’s right – intern management...

All of us are trying to do our jobs on a budget and accomplish great things with our marketing.  There are always moments in your business where you think to yourself, “man, if I just had another set of hands, I could be much more successful.” This is why we hire interns. I have hired a lot of interns in the 17 years I have operated my company, MayeCreate Design. Some of them have been amazing. So...

I’m pretty excited today because I have my social media guru Elizabeth with me. Today, Elizabeth is going to take us through the 10 social posts that every fundraiser and event needs. This is coming directly out of an online offering that we have available online: https://mayecreate.com/10-social-posts-every-fundraiser-event-needs We tell you what to put in these types of posts, some examples, and...

It’s the biggest change Facebook has made to a core functionality in a really long time, but we don’t need to panic yet.  These changes are a slow and random rollout eventually coming for all Pages. You can hold out for a little while longer, but this change is definitely coming, and it’s not going to be optional for long. Here's what you need to know... For a fully-formatted article version of th...

Today I have a very special guest with me, Carol Bennis. Carol participated in our Year-End Giving Training activity workshop thing last year. During our breakout sessions, we talked about campaign planning. She really wowed me with her tactics and how she managed her volunteers. So I invited her to share how she does this so you can learn a thing or two and maybe also run an awesome year-end givi...

In the beginning when people first contact MayeCreate, we have a lot of conversations about how they’re going to build their website. Some of these people have decided they’re going with a professional agency like ours, but there are lots of different types of website developers out there.  Each one comes with different things to consider, let's go through each option and define the decision-makin...

We have been remodeling things in our office and homes for the last few years, and these experiences have made us acutely aware now of what is not included in a remodel bid.  We hadn’t remodeled anything before. No one gave us a checklist to follow…so imagine our surprise when we were presented with 1000s of dollars in “upgrades” that we thought were included in the original estimate. Luckily webs...

If your email marketing system isn’t doing what it needs to do for you and you’re considering switching to MailChimp or MailerLite – this review is for you. I was a huge MailChimp fan…until I had to use it regularly myself. It has some very positive features. I’m not saying MailChimp isn’t right for you though, I support over 60 clients who use the system and love it.  Last year we switched from M...

Since you are here I could probably assume that you already understand why it's important that your website loads quickly.  But, alas, a good teacher starts at the beginning--and we all know how great assumptions are--so let's take a quick second and talk about why it's so important to have a fast loading website. For a fully-formatted article version of this podcast, head over to our website:  ht...

Join us to learn how the 2021 CoMoGives campaign was promoted, what worked, what didn't and how we'll adjust to make it even better next year. John Baker, director of Community Foundation of Central Missouri (the foundation that powers CoMoGives), will talk through the ins and outs of planning and supporting our community's $1.8M with MayeCreate's Monica Pitts and Stacy Brockmeier. For a fully-for...

Today we are going to talk about solving problems.  At MayeCreate, we love solving problems. One we solve day after day for our clients is helping their businesses run smoother by leveraging their website to take some of the day to day heavy lifting off of their staff.  We’re gonna go through six cool website integrations that help boost workflow and efficency (with maybe some bonuses thrown in fo...

I'm super excited to have Cheryl Unterschutz on this podcast.  Cheryl is the public relations manager and the marketing manager for Central Missouri Community Action. Between those two roles, she wears numerous hats and handles more responsibilities for her organization than I even dare to think about – yet she does them all well. This team of one is here to tell us all about her marketing journey...

When it comes to marketing we all start where we are. And that’s OK. What’s not OK is when we do all the work to move forward and build marketing assets but don’t use them because we never took the next step. Then those hard earned assets are about as useful for growing your business as the change sitting under your couch cushions is for buying Starbucks. I have personally forgotten every single o...

This is for those of you marketers who have to design – and even for you marketers who love to design. Because maybe you get stuck. Maybe it takes longer than you want it to. If you're designing things from scratch, it’s time consuming. At MayeCreate, we design things from scratch so we're always looking for ways to speed up the process, but still create beautiful, functional Websites. These are j...

Whether you’re looking to start a new venture or grow an existing one to the next level, it all starts with an idea.  From there, a decision must be made and actions must be taken. If you’re an ideas person, you LOVE to come up with ideas… but too many ideas can make it hard to take action.  You’re excited by ideas and you want to be a success, so picking an idea can feel very limiting.  It’s kind...

Marketers are always pressed for time (especially because you’re either selling your time OR you’re wearing multiple hats). While I’m not always the fastest draw in the west, I like to think I have a solid process to produce quality work with a reliable turnaround time. Finding ways to improve processes without sacrificing quality is etched into our company culture. The team is always slacking abo...

The most common way to suck at your marketing is to just straight up not do your marketing. And I hear all the excuses. Heck I’ve made those same excuses myself. So one of the easiest ways to start succeeding in your marketing is to actually GET IT DONE consistently. But back to those excuses again, right? Seems like all revolve around the big bad four letter “T” word…time. Well let's blow up the...

Who really knows what they’re doing with their social media, really?  I’ll tell you who. Those amazing data loving people who follow their social data like they’re stalking a junior high crush. (Oh common you know you hid in the bushes and watched those cuties play ball every now and again! No? I’m a stalker of lots of types of data, but when it comes to social media I also have to rely on a team...

The best marketing is informed marketing. And I wanted to give you the best possible advice to succeed in 2022. Over the next series of posts look at nonprofit marketing benchmarks for Email Marketing, Social Media and Websites. I’m going to break the benchmarks and my takeaways into the different digital marketing mediums, explain what I found and what it actually means to you, a nonprofit market...

Some sites are like mean girls. There are some sites that totally stink, but many of them are quite lovely on the outside and a bit like mean girls on the inside. Basically they’re shallow. They lack the things they need to be compliant and well-rounded.  I'm going to tell you how to take that mean girl website and turn it into the girl the audience is rooting for...    For a fully-formatted artic...

A thermometer in the shape of CAL, social post templates for volunteers, pre-written & prescheduled newsletters, redefining success, and never losing sight of what matters most… These are some of the ways Kelsey Hammond organizes giving campaigns for Columbia Art League and grows them a little more each year. And she wants you to know; regardless of your organization’s cause, size or experienc...

How many emails do I send? How should I send them? How do I segment my recipient lists? For that matter, what does segmenting even  mean ??   If any of these are questions you've pondered when preparing for your year-end giving campaign, you're not alone! These are the email centric questions I hear most often. So, I did a live Q&A session to answer these questions and any other questions the...

MayeCreate Design experts Monica Pitts (Owner, Chief Creative Officer) and Elizabeth Alexander (Social Media expert, copywriter) throw down the gauntlet and dare a live Facebook audience to try and stump them with their deepest, darkest Facebook questions!*  *As it pertains to Year-End Giving...or just normal business stuff...not like dancing parrots or weird viral makeup videos...Monica and Eliza...

I interviewed two special guests recently: Jan Meese with the Columbia Audubon Society and Jacky Gingrich - treasurer of The Wardrobe. Both ladies did an amazing job of running year-end giving campaigns for their nonprofit organizations and reaching their goals through ComoGives. So I invited these two to share their stories about how they ran their campaigns. They don’t have huge organizations wi...