Do you want to raise more money and connect with more supporters this Giving Tuesday, and throughout the entire giving season? Then check out Givebutter! Givebutter is ranked as the #1 software for fundraising, donor management, and auctions on G2, the largest independent software review site. And the best part? Givebutter's all-in-one fundraising platform is completely free to use—forever! Just go to jcsocialmarketing.com/givebutter to create your account and you could win a free campaign marketing review session with me and the Givebutter team!
Building a culture of philanthropy is crucial for the success and sustainability of a nonprofit organization.
With an impressive 14 years in campaign development, brand awareness, and data analysis, Maria Shanley shares invaluable insights about building a culture of philanthropy, teamwork, marketing and fundraising, and donor communications in the pursuit of campaign success.
Maria reflects on her journey from starting as a social media manager to leading two teams at Second Harvest Food Bank. She shares her experiences dealing with unexpected disasters and their impact on fundraising, debunking the myth of donor fatigue, and success stories from the "This is Food" campaign.
Connect with Maria Shanley on LinkedIn
Featured article: Maria Shanley of Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida On The Book That Changed Her Life
Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts
Do you want to raise more money and connect with more supporters this Giving Tuesday, and throughout the entire giving season? Then check out Givebutter! Givebutter is ranked as the #1 software for fundraising, donor management, and auctions on G2, the largest independent software review site. And the best part? Givebutter's all-in-one fundraising platform is completely free to use—forever! Just go to jcsocialmarketing.com/givebutter to create your account and you could win a free campaign marketing review session with me and the Givebutter team!
Building a culture of philanthropy is crucial for the success and sustainability of a nonprofit organization.
With an impressive 14 years in campaign development, brand awareness, and data analysis, Maria Shanley shares invaluable insights about building a culture of philanthropy, teamwork, marketing and fundraising, and donor communications in the pursuit of campaign success.
Maria reflects on her journey from starting as a social media manager to leading two teams at Second Harvest Food Bank. She shares her experiences dealing with unexpected disasters and their impact on fundraising, debunking the myth of donor fatigue, and success stories from the "This is Food" campaign.
Connect with Maria Shanley on LinkedIn
Featured article: Maria Shanley of Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida On The Book That Changed Her Life
Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts
Do you want to raise more money and connect with more supporters this giving Tuesday and throughout the entire giving season? Then check out Givebutter. Givebutter is ranked as the number one software for fundraising, donor management, and auctions by G Two, the largest independent software review site, and the best part, Givebutter's all in one fundraising platform is completely free to use forever. So just go to Givebutter to create your account and you could win a free campaign marketing review session with me and the Givebutter team. So go to jcsocialmarketing.com Givebutter. I can't wait to see you raising more money online. On with the show. Hello and welcome to NonproFit NATion. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit Nation Podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to NonproFit NATion. Happy to be here with you today, wherever you are. I'm your host, Julia Campbell. And today we have an actual nonprofit professional from the trenches to share all of her war stories, successes, tips, and tricks on how she built and continues to build a culture of philanthropy and gratitude at her organization. So we have Maria Shanley. She's the Director of Marketing and Data Management at Second Harvest Food bank of Central Florida. She's a creative and analytical fundraiser with 14 years of experience in campaign development, brand awareness, and data analysis. Maria sits on panels and speaks at local and national conferences. And we'll both be speaking at Planet PhilAnthropy in Orlando. Excited about that. She also speaks about fundraising best practices and when she's not fighting to end hunger in Central Florida. I love this. You can find her rooting for the Red Sox. That's who I root for. With her husband, reading with her eight year old, and relaxing with her two tuxedo cats. Maria, welcome. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here today. What are tuxedo cats? I don't know what they are. Are they like black and white? Yes. They have the white down their chest so they look like they're wearing tuxedos. That's what we call them, tuxedo cats. I don't know if that's an actual name for those cats, but that's why I've always called them. I love it. I'm going to look it up on Instagram. I'm sure there's like a whole community around that. But I love rooting for the Red Sox. And as of this recording, we are getting into spring training, second day of spring here. And people that know me know I'm a Red Sox fan, so I think that's great. So, Maria, we have known each other online. We've known each other for several years now. And I'm just interested. I want to hear more about your background and how you got into nonprofit marketing. I think people would be very interested in that. Yes. But first, I also want to just thank you for having this podcast and getting all these great speakers and all the knowledge that you put out there on there. Because my team soaks it all in and I soak it all in. So it's something that I really like to listen to when I do my walks. Oh, great. Thank you. And you always email me and it really helps me. It inspires me to let me know that this is really helpful. So thank you. And I'm always sharing it with people. I'm like, you have to listen to this. You have to listen to. Great, great. Thank you. Yeah. So as far as my journey goes, I came to the United States when I was seven. I spoke maybe five words of English coming. I'm sharing that because for me, learning has always been a big part of my journey, whether it's through life or through work. And so school was always easy for me. So I jumped in and got a scholarship at UCF Go nights. I've been in Orlando for over probably 20 years. Really like those in college. I was a marketing major, and I did a minor in management information systems because I really loved data back, even in college when I wasn't even sure where I was going to end up or if I even wanted to work in nonprofit. But I just wanted to have those marketing business skills, right. And my parents always pushed that on me. But then the last two years of college, I actually spent it traveling to conferences and going to protest huge animal right activists in college. And then I actually ended up organizing a conference by last year, and we had a protest at SeaWorld, and 18 of us got arrested at it. Good for you. I mean, not that I'm advocating getting arrested, but good for you for protesting SeaWorld. Yes, but it wasn't on purpose. It kind of also pushed me away from the philanthropy sector because of the experience I had. So then I was like, I'm going to go work for an architecture company. And at that company I got to learn more about website building and email marketing. And then I realized I want to go back into philanthropy. And so I applied for a job at a local NPR PBS affiliate in. I love NPR. I learned about membership fundraising, which was so interesting and new to me. And I was fascinated by the data and the emails doing that, and also continued my growth and learning more about web design. And then from there, I was recruited by Second Harvest Food bank of Central Florida. So I can't share that. I've had multiple jobs and experiences, but I can share that. When I first started at Second Harvest, I started our social media channels that first week I was here. And this month I'll be 14 years at the Seas Bank. Oh, my gosh. I think we need to take a moment because that's amazing. That's truly amazing. There's so much turmoil in the sector and there's so much transition and turnover is what I was trying to say. And a lot of people do not stay in development and marketing jobs for three years, let alone 14 years. Fabulous. Yeah. And I think one of the things, and one of the reasons that I love my job is because every year is different and it's really cool when you can grow as your organization grows as well. So when I started, we were a team of four in development. We're a team of 24 now. I know what it's like to work in a small team, being part of a team. And now I lead two teams at the same bank. So I've had the opportunity to learn and to grow at this organization. And it's been interesting, right? Because we're in Florida, there's always hurricanes. We have recession, we experience government shutdown. Like everybody, we went through COVID and then there's more hurricanes. Right? And so just learning how to fundraise, doing all these events that happen have just taught me so much about fundraising and stewardship and gratitude messaging. And I think that also helps or drives me to speak at conferences, because if you were to talk to me, like, eight years ago, I would be so scared to speak at a conference. I'd be like, no way. No, thank you. I think a lot of us are. Yeah. And so I want to just give a shout out to Mark Becker because he kind of pushed me to speak at. I think it was like n Ten was the first conference I spoke at and we spoke about our virtual food drive and since then, I love just sharing the knowledge and hoping that I can help other nonprofits who are doing similar work, whether it's a food bank or an animal organization. I like to talk about email marketing, our monthly donor program and the growth of it. Talked about our branding campaigns. I talk about our digital ads that we do. So we do a lot of things at the food bank and it's grown in the past 14 years and I love to be able to share that information. So I think that's, for me, that's how I kind of got into the nonprofit marketing. It's just really fun and it's always changing. So it sounds like second harvest has really been kind of on the cusp of innovation and using technology for new things. So something we could talk about everything. Give me Tuesday telethons, monthly donors, gratitude campaigns, branding campaigns. I'd love for you to tell us about the virtual food drive tool. That sounds really neat. I've never heard of anything like that. Oh, yeah. So we basically have. It's a peer to peer tool where companies or individuals can fundraise and they set up a virtual food drive and they basically ask their friends to give to it. A lot of our virtual food drive participants are companies. And especially in the fall, when we have our messaging out where the need is greater and people want, everyone deserves to enjoy the holidays. Right. And so when we have our messaging out, we encourage our donors, our volunteers, to sign up for a virtual food drive. So it's a visual representation of what your gift can provide. And at the food bank, every dollar that you donate provides four meals. That's right. And for those of you that don't know, I know a coworker of Maria's. She's in my social media for Social Good Academy, and she was telling me that, and I think that's absolutely fantastic, that $1 can translate into four meals. Because what we were saying is, let's tie this into grocery bills for a family of four. Grocery bills have, of course, quadrupled in the past few months. And how unsustainable that is, but yet how incredible. Like, how you can stretch a dollar at Second harvest. I think that's amazing. Yeah. And I think the really cool thing about virtual food drives is we've learned what works with them and what doesn't. And then we've also learned that people, and I think we all know this, right? People want to fundraise how they want to fundraise. Yes, they do. You don't want to box them into a virtual food drive. So we're looking to set up, like, a DIY fundraiser in the next year because we want to take that peer to peer experience that we give with the virtual food drive and translate it into something that's more open and bigger for someone to be able to give back in the Way that they want to give back. Wow. So you lead two teams. You lead the marketing and fundraising team and the data management and analysis team. How do you balance that? So I balance, like, mentally. I go for a walk every morning. I do yoga once a week, and I meditate. I think COVID really brought meditation into my life. And it works. It's the weirdest thing, but it can calm you. It can shut that voice in your brain off. It just really works. And I don't even know how to explain it, but it just does for me, as far as balancing my two teams, it's hard, but it's still very rewarding. And I say it's hard because in order to work with your team, you have to really be vulnerable. Right. You have to share your mistakes. You have to share your experiences. You have to create an environment where people, where you build trust. And when you create that type of environment, you see your team transform, and they almost end up giving each other feedback. Whereas before, they were kind of not scared, but kind of afraid to hurt each other's feelings. Right. But now we're more open with feedback. We all listen to each other. We communicate with each other. And I think once you have that groundwork of that trust and what it creates, then the work is actually kind of like the easy part, because then you have a team that really gels and knows how to communicate with each other. And the work is. I feel like that's easy for us now. And really all the ideas, all the photography, all the stories, that's the team. They're doing it all. I'm just there to help make sure that they have what they need to get their jobs done and that I'm also cautiously looking for burnout. Right. If I see somebody struggling or somebody who is overwhelmed, I work really hard to kind of sense that and kind of help and see how can I help you with this? How do we work together to move forward? With my whole team, it's never on one person's shoulder. It is. Our whole team will help each other with projects. Well, that leads me to another question that I can hear people listening to this saying, my entire organization is siloed. What I see in a lot of my work with my clients is the marketing director is over here. And then maybe there's a social media volunteer, and maybe there's a development person. Maybe that's all one person. But still the work is very siloed, away from the programs, away from the leadership team, away from the actual workings of the organization. So how do you fight that silo effect, and how do you really bring people together? Meetings with agendas? Yes. Sounds good to me. And then just making time to get to know each other, get to know different departments. And I think that not just my team, but the other half of our development team, who handles stewardship and major gifts and volunteers within the team. We really work together on campaigns throughout the year. We do a lot of team building together as a development team. We've done strength finders training, we've done feedback training together as a team so that we understand what criticism is versus what feedback is. How do we work together to create a stronger team? Just our own development team of 24. But then on top of that, how do we build these relationships with our programs department, or even our finance department, especially working with my data team, you don't realize how much data and finance integrate with each other, and so that communication is so important. And I think it helps that we like each other at the food bank, because anybody you talk to at the food bank, they just help each other. And my husband always tells me, I work in this bubble that doesn't exist anywhere else when I come home and. Tell them stories, but you built it. You built it. And I'm thankful for the leadership that we have here. They really continue those communications. They pursue professional development for the organization. They create events that we can all come together to celebrate milestones or during COVID our kitchen team was also helping provide lunch for staff who were here during COVID because half our team went remote and the other half stayed. And so I guess it's just building that culture of working with each other. And helping each other. Communication is such an easy word to say, but it's really a very complicated thing to do. Building this culture of philanthropy, culture of teamwork, where everyone's working on the campaign together, is the reason for success. Because I've had a lot of clients and I've had a lot of students in my courses that come to me, and they say, I want to do this campaign, but there's really no buy in from the top, or it seems like I'm just another thing on this long list of to Dos for the marketing team, or I feel like it's just being shoehorned in with other responsibilities and putting out fires. So I love what you're saying, that everyone is working on this campaign together and everyone's invested in the success of the campaign, and it's not on one person's shoulders. I think that's really important. And, Julia, so I listened to your podcast, and I heard you talk about marketing and fundraising under the same umbrella. Right. And I was talking with Lacey about this yesterday as well, because we like to talk about all these things, and it is under one umbrella. But I do have two different positions devoted. One is to marketing and one is fundraising. Because they understand each section. Could they understand the work that the other one is doing and how they work together with it? I think that's why for us, that marketing calendar that we have includes so many different types of messaging and we're not competing with each other. Yes, exactly. There are a lot of conversations that have to happen, right. Because everybody wants to talk about their program or have their stuff in the spotlight. But we work together as a team to make sure that it's a balanced message out and we have all these channels that we can use, and how do we make sure that we're sharing that story to all the different types of donors and supporters that we have? So this brings me to talking about donor communications, because I know that second harvest focuses a lot on incorporating gratitude and impact, like you infuse it in your yearly messaging. So tell me about this and how it comes about. And also, can gratitude be systemized? Yes. And so for us, and I always tell my team this. And one day, stuck in my head, I was like, well, you know what? There are only 365 days in a year and there are only twelve months, and there are only three or four weeks every month. Right? And so when I first started laying out my yearly calendar with my messaging, I just saw all our fundraising messages on there, and it just looked very one sided. And I was like, we need to change this. We have to share gratitude and impact. And so what my calendar now has is within each of our. I have an Excel spreadsheet with all the months and all my channels, right. And within each channel, most of the channels, I have three different sections. I have a section for cultivation, stewardship, and engagement. Cultivation is a match campaign where we're driving gifts for a specific reason. Stewardship is a thank you story or a message about impact, of maybe how many meals were provided this summer to kids or how many school markets, which is a pantry at middle schools, how many kids were fed that year. And then I have engagement. Engagement are those the messages that include ways that someone can get involved? Or just like stories of the food bank, of donors that have raised money for us or donors that set up like a virtual food drive or our super volunteers that we have? We have brand ambassadors at the food bank. They go out into the community and they table for us and talk about us. They go through a training. We have a young professional group that also does fundraising for us. So we have all these really great stories that we can put in these engagement, engagement messaging that we have out that really inspire others to give back and to give. And so I think when I look at my calendar and when I look at the different types of messages that we include, then I work with my team to map it all out. In Asana, we love Asana. I use Monday. But yes, I love Asana, too. And it's nice because then we can look back at previous years and see what we did those years. But it really helps us integrate and make sure that our messaging is balanced out. And when we meet as a team every Monday, we can kind of look and see what it comes up and making sure that we always include gratitude in there. And then something that I think a lot of nonprofits worry about is, I don't have time to write, like a gratitude story. Right? Where am I going to find another story? And so we are big proponents of reusing content. Yes, reusing content. I love it. Let's not reinvent the wheel every time. Exactly. And so that's what we do. We talk about a story. We talk about what are the different ways we can use this story? How can we use it in direct mail, social media, email? What parts of the story can we use? Because every channel that you're on is going to have a different part of the story. You're not necessarily going to tell the whole story. And then, most importantly, when we do a fundraising campaign and we use a story because we're segmenting some of our donors out of those asks, especially like our monthly donors, we take that story and we use it as a thank you story. And so every month, our monthly donors get a thank you story because it's a story that we used in an ask that we had for that campaign that month. I just think this is so helpful. So to review, the three categories which most people I think would lump together, but I love that you spell them out, stewardship, cultivation and engagement, and you go from there. So it's sort of like looking at your communications plan and your calendar, not from the nitty gritty of the blocks and like, oh, this event, this event, this event. It's what do we want to accomplish this year? What are our themes and how do we want people to feel and how do we want them to get these communications and what goal of the donor journey? Like which piece of the donor journey are we hitting? It's just so strategic. I think a lot of us just sort of react. How did you get into this proactive mode and what tips do you have for other development or marketing? People that really want to be this proactive but maybe are facing some roadblocks? I think you have to start saying no to some things. You really have to look at your schedule and look at your plan and take that time or make the space to really sit down and think about it. A lot of times, you're right. We are being reactive and we don't take the time and the space we need to really plan out. And a lot of times, I think a lot of nonprofits don't have that capacity to try to do everything they want to do. And that's where you have to step back and start saying no to some things and really come up with a plan. It's helped me immensely. Coming up with that yearly plan wasn't always like that for me. I was probably reactive. The first probably eight years I started at the food bank because I didn't have the team I needed to be able to get. I was very ambitious. I didn't have the team I needed to get the work done, and I burned myself out several times. And it's just learning and understanding that if I don't make the time to look at the numbers, to look at the data, to see what's working, it's almost like you're throwing like spaghetti at the wall and trying to see what's going to work. Right now, we are more strategic in all our messaging and all our channels, and I encouraged my team to tell me that when they're not able to do anything else and it's okay because I'm going to support them with that. And let's figure out what can we do and how do we do it. And I think having a year plan, when you do this is super helpful because you've mapped out that work already. And we know things come up right, disasters come up, hurricanes come up right. And now that we've had experience as a team, maybe two or three hurricanes together, for us, it's like we already know all the things that have to happen, all the things that we need to do. We have plans in place already. We're not being as reactive, but we also want to take time to take care of yourself, especially with a hurricane come. If you don't have power, you don't work. Not everything has to go out and just give yourself that grace to not be perfect. I think that this would be a fabulous speaking topic. Creating a yearly communications calendar in a noisy, crazy world. How do we create this yearly calendar? How do we use content? I think that'd be fantastic. I think a lot of people would want to learn about that. So you have survived global pandemics, and like you said, hurricanes, a lot of natural disasters, government shutdowns, all those things. And I know just based on the data that donors came out in record numbers to support food pantries during the pandemic. What are you seeing and how are you navigating fundraising post pandemic? So I asked my data guide to pull this number for me because I think that sometimes I block out COVID because of how stressful it was for myself and my team. In that first year of COVID we acquired 42,000 new donors. So it's a staggering number. So a big focus on stewardship started once we were able to be proactive. I think we spent two. COVID was a disaster. It was a hurricane that lasted for two years for us, our world. One day we left the food bank and we weren't allowed to come back. We had to figure out how to work remotely with each other. And then people were scared. It was kids were home, my team trying to work with little ones at home. And so I always get a little PTSD from when I hear COVID. But now we are able to be more proactive. And thankfully, because of the growth that the organization has had, because of the generosity of our community, we've been able to grow our programs and help more people in so many different ways. But on the fundraising part, we've also been able to invest in positions and to really focus on the stewardship part of the work that we do, whether it's through gratitude, messAging, or newsletters. But also on the major donor side, where we added some major gift officers, we have a Phoenix Hope Society, which is like a society that thanks a specific level of donors. That's what they do, and they create events for them. We do thank you calls every week to donors as well. So stewardship is a huge part of retaining these new COVID donors. We definitely had seen it's going down, but now it's starting to balance out. And so it was kind of not funny. But you would just send an email out and it would just raise so much money. And we were just like, what is happening? Because people just really wanted to help and they wanted to give. And I think that's why it's so important. Not just during COVID but every month. Your nonprofit is doing amazing work. And you don't need to put together this crazy brochure or some really long story, but it's so important to share your mission and to share the work that you're doing, because whether you're thinking someone or asking someone for money, you're really just sharing information about what's happening in real time with your supporters. And so that's what we continue to do. I want to get into marketing campaigns, but I want to talk more about fundraising while we're on this topic because I know that you loved what Stephen Screen had to share on Nonprofit Nation. That was one of my most popular. So he's just so phenomenal. Everything he said, I just wrote down and was, like, clapping. But the myth of donor fatigue. So are you seeing this? How do you fight this myth in your own work? So I was on a walk when I heard that podcast, and I was just kind of put my hands up in the air every time you mentioned something new. So thankfully, because I do oversee the data team, I'm able to work with our data manager to look at data and numbers and we ask every single month. We run a camp fundraising campaign every month. And what I'm seeing is our donors are giving between two and three times a year. Our monthly donors are giving when we ask them for additional gifts. What else am I seeing? I'm seeing, like, our virtual food drive. Donors who just start a virtual food drive will continue and stay as donors. And so for me, I'm able to fight that because I'm seeing the things that we're doing are working. I look at our emails, I look at our unsubscribe rate, I look at how much they're raising. We started testing out impact emails and removing donate buttons from them, and I'm finding that they're raising just as much money as if you were to put a donate button on them. But the unsubscribe rate is lower because some people see that as an ask, but others don't. And so we're just kind of testing that out to see what happens. I do like to incorporate, especially during end of year, when we are running like four different campaigns in like two or three months, that impact messaging is always in there. That story is always in there because especially in the fall, I've seen some of those gratitude emails with no donate buttons raise more than some of our ask emails. That's just so interesting. I love this. It's very data driven. You are head of data analysis, so this is helpful. People should not stop asking, but they should test, like you just said, put a donate button, don't put a donate button. Put a link, don't put a link. Send more emails, send fewer emails. I think that's just so important that you test things out, but you're not afraid to share your impact and ask for support when you need it. So I think that's really interesting. And beyond fundraising, what I love, the second harvest does the educational multichannel campaigns, and I've seen that this is food campaign, but you tell us a little bit about how you choose what to focus on and how you organize these sort of education campaigns. Yes, we first started with like a spark campaign. It was like a what's your Spark campaign? Because we got a grant from Walmart where we had to kind of go around and share people's whys at the food banks. I think that's where we first started with some educational campaigns. But this is food was a really big campaign for us because we actually went through a brand study where we were trying to figure out, should we change our name? Because anytime somebody came to the food bank, they always leave saying, you're more than a food bank. Our food bank, we work with 625 nonprofit partners, and that's how we're able to get food out to 300,000 people every day. We also have a culinary training program at the food bank that teaches adults to cooking skills and life skills. We also push nutrition at the food bank. Any food that we're distributing, we like to add recipes. We have cooking classes. We do advocacy work at the food bank, where we're talking to officials. We're encouraging our community to engage and reach out to the officials as well. And so after this brand study, we found that our name is really powerful. And people know, even though our name has food bank in it, people know some of the work that we're doing. So then we're like, well, how do we educate our community about the work that we do? And that's where this is food camp came from. And so for us, it had different pillars. It was like, food is change, food is medicine, which ties into the nutrition part of the work that we do. Food is success that ties into the culinary training program. Food is learning, ties into the kids that kids grow and learn, and food is change. That's the big one, right? Because food is change. One action can create a ripple effect and help so many in our community. And the cool thing about this campaign, it was all story based. So every theme we had had a story tied to it. So we were able to launch this campaign in August, September. We had digital ads, we did print ads in our community. We did a brochure, we added it to our speaking engagements that we had. And now we are going to continue this campaign every year, but modify it a little. So this year we're celebrating our 40 year anniversary, and so we're going to incorporate the different pillars of this campaign to celebrate 40 years of work. So we're still trying to figure that out. That's amazing. But it's so important to educate and to share the work that you're doing. And sometimes people get confused when they come to the food bank because they don't realize everything that we're doing. I know a lot of the people listening can completely relate to that statement. They're known for one thing, but it's so much more, and it translates into so much more, and it means so much more. So storytelling is a huge topic of importance for my audience, something that I'm very interested in. So how do you collect, craft, share the stories about the food bank in such an organized way? So I don't know if we're trying to get organized. It seems organized. Well, that's all due to Erica Spence. We hired a storyteller position five years ago, and when she started, we got a hurricane two months later. Wow. Jeez. And she's just been such a huge part of storytelling at the food bank. And thankfully, because of her, she's also helped train other people on our team, like our multimedia specialist who takes videos and photos and goes out in the field. She's learning how to collect story. Our community kitchen marketing manager who works with our culinary students, he's also learning to collect stories. And so it's hard to just have one person at the organization collect and write all the stories. It's really about training your program team, letting them know what to look for and what questions to ask, and then being able to follow up with some of those stories. Yes. Oh, it's creating that culture that you have successfully created where everyone is willing to help and pitch in towards the fundraising, marketing, storytelling, impact, sharing efforts. So kudos to you. I think that's fantastic. Also, hiring a storyteller, that's like a dream come true. I think a lot of organizations would love to do that. So that should be something that I think even small nonprofits should aspire to, because it's the person that is the champion. It's the person that's coordinating everything. So it doesn't always fall on the development director, the marketing director. But I think that's fantastic. I know we could talk for another 5 hours. I'll have to have you on again, but just to wrap it up, where can people find you, connect with you, and learn more about Second Harvest. Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. Just look up my name, Maria Shanley. I like to share all things leadership, fundraising, as well as second harvest campaigns that we're running and just impact of things that we do. I'm so thankful. I work for an organization that just helps so many in our community and does it in a really smart and innovative way, and that's really inspiring. I just love sharing all the work that we do. But you can also learn about Second Harvest if you go to feedhopenow.org as well on our website. Okay. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your expertise and just being so willing and generous to share your time. Thank you. I love doing this. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell 77. Keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn, you Sam.