Nonprofit Boards and the Tech World: Nina Butler Explains the Surprising Parallels

Everyday Boston marks Nina’s first foray into the world of nonprofit board duties. Prior to joining in 2017, she had advised a couple of tech companies but considered herself a nonprofit novice. 

That’s why she was skeptical when Cara Solomon, her friend and Everyday Boston’s founder, asked her to join.  

“I remember asking, ‘Are you sure you want me?’ Then when we talked about what she was hoping I’d be able to bring to the table, I said, ‘Oh. This is what I do every day,’” Nina says. 

Go to Market 

The first parallel Nina identified was the idea of taking a product or service to market.

In the SaaS world, you activate your offering with a go-to-market strategy. In the nonprofit world, you activate your offering with your programming.

For both SaaS and nonprofits, the goal is to get visibility for your offering to build up a strong customer base and a good reputation. Ultimately, a SaaS company hopes to increase revenue, while a nonprofit aims to increase funding. 

“It’s all about getting eyeballs on the program that you’re building, so you become eligible to receive more grant funding or you become more enticing to get sustained donorship,” Nina says.

As the board’s marketing guru, Nina’s job is to think about things like:

• What is the competitive landscape? 
• Who are the groups we want to partner with? 
• What channels do we want to market on?
• How do we message appropriately?

The terminology may vary between the SaaS and nonprofit worlds–e.g. go-to-market strategy versus programming–but the end goals are the same. 

Engage Your Audience

Once you think through various go-to-market factors, you’ll begin to get a firm grasp on your organization’s target audiences and the best channels to reach them. Next, you need to determine how to market to those groups effectively. 

Everyday Boston’s mission is to break down stereotypes and increase connections by surfacing the stories of real Bostonians. Nina considers what storyline is going to resonate best with groups like program participants and corporate workshop clients. The aim is similar to her B2B SaaS goals.

“How do you craft a newsletter that will have a high open rate and high engagement? How do you create a social campaign that will 2x your following? It’s about trying to get more exposure,” Nina says.

When you create a story that resonates with the right audiences in the right ways, you set yourself up for more visibility and more momentum. 

For Everyday Boston, more publicity can result in valuable co-marketing and partnership opportunities that drive the organization forward. 

Optimize for Growth

Partners are to the nonprofit world what customers are to the for-profit world. 

In a tech setting, customers are the key to growth, and all activities center around optimizing for website transactions.

But for a nonprofit like Everyday Boston, there’s more to growth optimization than securing partners. It’s also about growing the entire nonprofit “engine” as a whole. 

“How do you increase not just your donor base, but get more people to be part of the entire engine? The more stories you capture, the more you have to say, and the more people take notice,” Nina says.  

At Everyday Boston, Nina thinks differently about the audience she is marketing to and the behaviors she wants to drive. Instead of only optimizing for donor “transactions,” she is also optimizing for getting more community participation. 

While all these marketing skills don’t seem transferable on paper, Nina has found they are remarkably transferable in practice.