Listen to The Executive Director and Pastor Guide to Sowing and Reaping Online Givers.

Most all “help” for digital strategies is aimed at the doers at the keyboard and cellphone but there is not a lot of help out there for those managing an organization’s Digital Strategies… from the Executive Director’s or Pastors chair. 

I’m Todd Turner and I am going to spend Episode 0 telling the genesis of the why, how, and when I help Christian organizations transform their online world into a funnel of New Names and Online Givers. Why do Executive Directors and Pastors need another podcast or tool in their tool belt?

Too many organizations assume that their web visitors want to click the donate button and that once they do, they will actually donate. If your web team would show you the abandonment reports of your donation pages, you might faint. They are most likely dismal.

But they don’t have to be.

After building and testing 100’s of donation pages, I give you the templates and the reasons behind the layouts of Donation Pages that WORK.

Download for free

Learn how a little kid from East Texas has been blessed to work with large international organizations and small non-profits and churches around the globe for over 25 years. And how listening to this podcast can help give Executive Leaders of Small to Mid-Sized Christian Organizations a leg up on managing the staff, volunteers, and vendors that help them tell their passion story and fund their God-sized mission.

Christian Non Profit Leaders, do you need help with your organization’s digital efforts but can’t afford a full time consultant? Tired of spinning your wheels and wasting valuable resources or continually questioning your ministiry’s digital efforts and ROI?

I have built an online master course to help the leadership teams of small to mid-sized Christian Organizations get their digital strategies on solid ground and move forward with increased new names and online donations.

Invest in Real Change

Transcript:

Welcome to the this is his story podcast the executive director and pastor guide to sewing and reaping online givers pastors and leaders at christian organizations wear many hats and let’s face it they all don’t fit perfectly while focusing on mission staff vendors finances and goals there’s the matter of digital strategies technology and trends move at breakneck speeds and managing your christian organization’s online efforts can seem like a full-time job todd turner has been in your shoes he spent his life helping faith-based organizations build solid ethical online fundraising strategies that work listen in and subscribe to grow your knowledge increase your ability to lead your digital efforts and be encouraged as you navigate your organization in the digital world of ministry and fundraising i’m todd turner creative digital guide and i’m going to spend episode zero tell you the genesis of the why and the how and the when i help christian organizations transform their online world into funnels of new names and online givers i want you to learn how this little kid from east texas has been blessed to work with large international organizations small nonprofits and churches around the globe for over 25 years and how listening to this podcast can help give executive leaders of small to mid-sized christian organizations a leg up on managing the staff volunteers vendors that help you tell your passion story and fund your god-sized mission so you know there’s a saying i think it’s zig ziglar right he says if you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need it’s your moral obligation to sell it i don’t know if that’s really true that he said that or not i like the concept you know i have been blessed to have a very unique career a ministry path if you will that has resulted in over two and a half decades of digital strategies for churches and non-profit christian organizations i’ve gained a wealth of knowledge on gaining new names and online donations and i feel grateful for my ability to share this knowledge with others let me tell you a little bit about my story how this you know poor kid from east texas has traveled the world and i’ve rubbed elbows with famous celebrities and pastors i’ve been blessed beyond measure i was a skinny little kid not so skinny anymore who never even owned a computer until i was you know in my 20s i’ve helped people like chuck swindoll and so many other christian organizations raise over probably 80 million dollars online by now and counting you know i was a english major with a writing minor a little political science minor for a while i only had one computer science class in college and i dropped it so my story is not that i’m this big tech savvy guy i definitely have become that a little bit over the years but that wasn’t my path i you know in it funny when you’re telling a story sometimes if you’re around a non-christian you just say the word lucky but i definitely consider my story a blessed story i worked at an electronics company in garland texas back in the mid 90s and to this day i’ll mention his name his name is john holleran and he was bleeding edge technical he got the internet before any of the rest of us did he really did he saw the power of it and was trying to transform a direct mail electronics conflict company into an internet savvy and strong company and he took me along for the ride he basically asked me if i wanted to run a the uh internet department and i’m like what’s an internet department he goes i don’t know let’s build one and i was blessed really with on the job training i mean there was no books out there there was nobody that knew how to do it and i i partnered with a couple other programmers and we won all kind of awards um but we we and i think it was lands in were like the first two websites that ever had custom content so if you came it looked one way if other people came it looked another we fired an email off your email was different than someone else’s and all that stuff was brand new it was it was fun to be on the front end of it well then i ended up getting into search engine optimization i started thinking other people are going to learn how to code but building websites aren’t going to do any good unless somebody visits them so i got really big into search engine manipulation of figuring out how to get people to the site which made me really get into marketing and then on the side i was helping churches and just taking all the stuff i knew well long long long story short i’ve made some companies and some people millionaires over the years and i spent time trying to make myself one for years as well and i did you know i did okay i was i bought domains and built up traffic and figured out ways to make income but i’m just going to tell you maybe one day we ever meet and have coffee i’ll tell you the longer story but i had my come to jesus moment i sat down in front of a church who named the church i was going to it was a first baptist church of gunner texas walked in like on a tuesday midday dark in the auditorium i found my way to the front with my eyes trying to get adjusted to the dark and they had like four or five steps on green carpet i remember because i had my face down right in it and i just sort of lost it i just said lord i’ve tried it the world’s way i’ve tried it my way you’ve clearly given me a unique gift and unique information and instead of just doing it to make a buck i’m going to give it to you yeah you’re the one who gave it to me i’m going to give it back and uh i just i bawled i was bawling and i just said i it’s yours just leave me where you want me to follow well i’m just telling you within that week i get a phone call from insight for living out of plano texas at the time and frisco now and they were looking for a web manager web and marketing manager and the pay was laughable compared to what i was making but when something like this happens you don’t question and i just said all right lord if this is from you you’ll take care of it and i made a commitment that i was not going to serve two masters an insight for living was going to be my only master and that i was going to just let the other stuff die naturally so i know you know if you don’t feed something it dies and over the ride of the 11 years i was an insight for living i got enough raises that the money became well and my money that i was making my mailbox money from my other websites and ventures all just went away to nothing and it balanced out perfectly i was never in want and it made me think insight for living on my commute to on my commute away in the shower traveling i lived and breathed it’s such a big organization it had international offices i had to learn the quote-unquote don’t like this word business of online giving i had to understand what made people give i i had to learn what giving was like in different cultures different languages i grew a lot in my knowledge they taught me a lot i taught them a lot we grew social media from zero followers to you know half a million um we i think the email list when i got there was nine thousand and when i left it was seven hundred thousand like we we took it from nothing to something chuck and cynthia were amazing too because what they encouraged me to do by the way chuck’s one doll’s wife cynthia she’s the ceo i guess if you will of insight for living but they were very big encouragers to help other organizations so not only was on a crash course of learning and teaching but i was actually helping smaller ministries learn things from us and i would you know i was on the board of directors and national religious broadcasters and i just i spread my knowledge well one day i decided it was time to step down i did not have another job it’s a long personal story but after three months of prayer i went to chuck and cynthia and said it’s time for me to leave i don’t even know where i’m going but it’s time for me to leave well the lord had some things that he was going to work on in my life and he just knew that it being an insight for living at the time i was going through that was probably not going to work for me and so he just removed me from that situation and a couple months later i was trying to figure out what i was going to do and i had a lot of people and people i trust and people i sought out the advice and they said you need to do what you’re doing right now but for everybody else you need to teach people what you have learned about online giving new name collection just digital strategies but stay in the bull’s-eye of christian ministries because it’s so unique i’ll tell you right now a lot of people who do what i do they’re probably better businessmen than me and they help all non-profits but i love the bullseye of christian nonprofits i believe there’s a big difference between how people give to kingdom work i believe there’s the x factor of the holy spirit leading people to give and so i’m not i’m a balance of best practices and trusting the lord we can talk about that later but i’m just trying to give you the story here i’m in the niche of helping small mid-sized christian organizations which means parrot church ministries nonprofits even churches it’s really the worst business plan ever the people who need me the most are the ones who put up the most resistance and it’s i’ve been there listen i know i i shunned vendors when i could you know it’s it’s familiar to me they’re not very technical normally the the people that would hire me and they don’t know what they can trust they don’t know how to manage their employees and their vendors you know how would i bring in a consultant this ministry i don’t feel good about spending ministry dollars on another vendor or consultant you know we don’t have the money right now we just don’t have the time right now well as soon as we get past this event or this year in or this busy season you know we’ll look into getting your help but you know their situations are all the same i hear the same things from each one of them tell me we’ve been doing the same things over and over and i just don’t feel like we’re doing things right you know we spend time and money i feel like we can be doing things so much better online you know as soon as we have this webmaster or this new director of marketing we’ll get our act together then you know maybe we’ll bring you in you know we hired a webmaster a year ago he made some changes but i don’t think he or she really knows as much about online donations as we thought or you know i’m not very technical i don’t know everything my team’s doing and these reports don’t tell me a lot you know what i think i need to know just just help me well once once an executive director or pastor finally decides to trust me generally by heading to my website or finally picking up the phone and calling me i always do the same thing i asked to meet with the founder and founder’s not around maybe the executive director or the pastor to i want to gather their god-sized story at breakfast it’s the favorite part of my job i love seeing maybe somebody who has their their guard up with me when they pick me up from the hotel or in the car and then we sit down for breakfast i start pulling from them their story and man it changes i love that passion i love watching grown grow men cry at breakfast because they remember what it was that what their back story was that drew them in to their mission to their passion and i i matter of fact that’s part of what you’re going to hear on this podcast i capture those stories now and i i let you listen to them i i love capturing people’s god side story the why behind their passion and their mission right so i’m going to give you a little uh secret sauce of what i do i take that stories those stories and i just go look at their website and their social media and their emails and everything and i just tell them where they’re where they’re missing it what they can do a better job telling their story i used to call myself a storyteller unfortunately that doesn’t resonate well like why would i hire a storyteller but that’s what i sort of been doing is i’m taking their story and i look and see how they tell their story and normally they’re missing it by a mile that passion i hear at breakfast i don’t see it on their website i don’t see it on their social media you know the little barrel had forgotten uh joseph the guy who’s running your web department the volunteer that’s doing the social media the secretary that’s sort of helping you with their digital strategies they didn’t come to breakfast i don’t think they know that story in that passion and if they do they forgot it too so i’ve got the fresh eyes to come in mixed with my experience that’s how i really help people as much as i enjoy what i do day to day when someone hires me i i the reason i’m creating this podcast is really twofold one i want to play some of those interviews that i get from time to time and just put them on this podcast but the other executive directors that are listening i really want to help you and what i found in my industry is a lot of people help through giving you technical information but what i found is the leaders they don’t it’s not that they need a crash course in technical they need a crash course in knowing how to manage the technical team that’s what people aren’t doing and that’s where i feel like this podcast is going to help you my content i put on social media is going to help you it’s because it is allowing you someone to talk to you and who understands where you’ve been what you think where your trouble sparks are and and how to manage teams and vendors so when you listen to this you’ll be hearing various episodes on the stories and also the frustration talking about the frustration of managing digital strategies and and helping you remember why you started and sacrifice for your organizations and then helping you grow in the ability to manage the people and to tell your stories right you know as much as every organization is unique and it has its own culture its own donor base you’re really all the same you all make the same mistakes you struggle in the same areas and you have the same online needs and frustration you know i tell people all the time this i’ve read it’s in my webinar it’s a very open oversimplification of the issue but imagine if you were the coach of a football team the fifth grade football team in your town and somebody said hey i have the playbook that tom brady and the buccaneers won the super bowl with do you want it what do you think grabbing that playbook is gonna make you win the fifth grade super bowl of course not the plays aren’t the issue it’s when do you run what plays based on the talent you have right you what you need is an offensive coordinator you need somebody to come in and say well your quarterback can’t run a fleet flicker let’s get rid of that flea flicker play or how can we run to the right when you’re the right side of your line doesn’t know how to block and so what i do is i don’t waste time necessarily with the tactics you’re not going to get that on this this podcast the tactics are just tactics you can go out to the internet and find them you can hire you know other people to give you tactics i’m trying to let executive directors and pastors understand how to be offensive coordinators so their teams can go run the plays i’m not digital consultant that that sells plays i sell offensive coordinator strategy to help you with your new names and increase online giving the details are for the people putting their fingers on the keyboard and that’s not me and that’s not you i help you find and plan your playbook you know i’ve been blessed and i’ve noticed a few things along the way on this you know there’s thousands of resources for plays conferences books video blogs you can find those all day long but there’s just that giant disconnect between executives executives and the technical staff and vendors a lot of people and organizations who need me the most can’t afford me i mean i am expensive if you hire me outright of course my clients keep hiring me over and over year after year after year so i know i’m still moving the needle for him so i know it works but i’m always looking to help small organizations for free and i do that on the side sometimes during the states sometimes they’re abroad and overseas at this recording i have a you know small nonprofit in india i’m actually talking to one this morning that i’ve offered my my master class to from poland and then i have like a ten-year-old old organization here in texas i know but they’re they’re all in two r and one’s gonna be in my master class and they meet with me weekly for zoom so let me tell you a little bit about this master class so it’s a solution for the problem i mentioned above remember you know as unique as we are i tell the same 80 to 90 of what i know to all my clients regardless of their size so what i did is i just decided to record it all of it i literally poured in i took probably six or eight months of my life putting in order what people need to hear to move the needle at their organizations and i teach organizations to find and plan their playbook with this master class and then what i realized is that that won’t get everybody all the way and so when you buy my master class i literally give you the ability to zoom in with me i do a community zoom meeting so you can learn from other people they can learn from you and i try to help you get that extra 10 percent you know hey we’re working on lesson three let me tell you a little bit about our our uniqueness and can you help me through it so we do a zoom meeting so you pay for an eight lesson master class and then you get the ability to meet with me once a week to help you through the rest of it so what you know what is this master class i’m talking about having to do with this podcast well everything you know my passion to help those in ministry with the most need not everybody can afford to hire me full-time not everybody will invest into every the low-cost masterclass i have but you know many of you are going to join my facebook group and this podcast and you’re going to find a community of people who can relate walk in the same shoes we’re going to encourage one another along as we work to fund our god science mission you know i’m excited to blend content and encouragement and teach you know how to look at your role as the boss of your organization’s digital strategy and fundraising so you know if you would subscribe to this podcast follow me on social media you can actually go to creativedigitalguy.com facebook and that’ll it’s an easy way into the facebook group i’m only allowing executives of christian organizations and churches no vendors no high pressure sales no gimmicks it’s a closed facebook group i have a soft spot in my heart for executive directors and pastors and i want to help lessen the load of managing digital oversight and give you more confidence and you know by those who are most likely more technical to you so i want you to join in the social media join in this podcast if you’re interested in the masterclass great there’s plenty of information on my website but this is not a sales job like i honestly want to talk to executive directors and pastors about digital in ways that i’m not seeing anybody else do it it falls directly in line with how i teach what my passion is and i just think this is going to be a blast thank you for listening and yeah we’ll check you out on the next episode thank you for listening to today’s episode of this is his story podcast overwhelmed at all the technical terms trends options cost invoice signings for your organization’s digital strategies join other leaders of christian organizations as we join hands in our closed facebook group go to creativedigitalguy.com facebook to register and apply for access i’m only allowing executives of christian organizations in no vendors no high pressure sales no gimmicks into this closed facebook group sign up today and be encouraged and informed as you lead your christian organization looking for a free resource to help your organization move the needle on new names and donors watch the five simple shifts to gain dedicated donors with your digital strategies webinar go to creativedigitalguy.com to register for this on-demand resource built exclusively for executive directors creativedigitalguy.com for more information of dating donors and telling stories that convert to new names and donations find your god size mission.