Building Compassionate Teams and Impactful Marketing

About the Guest(s):

Peter Genuardi is a seasoned entrepreneur and leader in the tech space, renowned for his contributions to social good initiatives and direct-response fundraising. As the founder of See the Stars, Peter brings advanced technology solutions to organizations aiming to drive social impact and compassionate service delivery. His previous roles at Convio and Strengthen Members underscored his commitment to melding technology with nonprofit objectives to enhance fundraising and advocacy efforts. Peter's efforts are now channeled into creating innovative lead generation strategies that focus on delivering social services to underserved communities.

Episode Summary:

In this enlightening episode of Talking Shizzle, host Taylor Shanklin talks with Peter Genuardi, a pioneering entrepreneur in the field of technology-enabled social impact. The duo catch up after reconnecting at a conference and jump into topics close to Peter's expertise: compassionate work environments, leveraging technology to drive social change, and fostering more compassionate teams.

Peter shares his captivating journey from software and fundraising to founding See the Stars, an organization that marries technology and compassion. The episode focuses on how using commercial tools can help connect vulnerable populations with essential social services, marking a pivot from fundraising to a more direct engagement approach. The conversation highlights how success metrics in this realm extend beyond traditional monetary outcomes, instead focusing on personal growth in the lives of individuals served. Peter emphasizes human-centered outcomes as a measure of success, which he believes bring added depth to typical numeric benchmarks.

The dialogue naturally shifts to a broader discussion on cultivating a compassionate work environment. Peter shares leadership insights, honed through years of experience, regarding the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment and how he's employed it to build high-performing teams. He stresses the importance of recognizing employees' strengths and providing the necessary support structures, even in resource-constrained settings. Ultimately, this episode is a rich, explorative dive into the profound ways empathy and compassion can transform not only workplaces but also the wider world through thoughtful implementation of technology.

Key Takeaways:

• Compassionate Technology: Peter's company, See the Stars, uses advanced tech tools to drive impactful social service programs, moving beyond traditional fundraising.
• Human-Centric Metrics: Success is defined by the positive changes in individuals' lives, challenging the conventional emphasis on monetary outcomes.
• Strength-Based Leadership: Building high-performing and motivated teams by focusing on employees' strengths through tools like the Clifton StrengthsFinder.
• Email Deliverability Focus: Issues in email deliverability could be impacting digital marketing outcomes, and Peter’s Fastest Planet focuses solely on improving these metrics.
• Emphasis on Real-life Reconnection: Personal interactions, even brief ones like conferences, are markedly valuable for both personal and professional reconnection and growth.

Resources:

Creative Shizzle: https://www.creativeshizzle.com/
Peter's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petergenuardi/
Website: https://againseethestars.com/

Transcript

Transcript

0:00:02 Taylor Shanklin: Hey, hey, all you lovely people out there, you’ve got a lot going on in your day with big dreams and big goals for your world. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from leading entrepreneurs, change makers, coaches, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Shanklin, CEO and founder of Creative Shizzle, and I am stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today.

0:00:32 Taylor Shanklin: This show is all about helping you think differently so that you can grow. Talking Shizzle is brought to you by our team at Creative Shizzle, where we help businesses, entrepreneurs, and social good innovators make amazing marketing shizzle happen. Check us out on the web@creativeshizzle.com. now let’s talk some shizzle.

0:01:01 Taylor Shanklin: All right, hello. Hello, everyone. We are back for a, a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle podcast here with a really good friend of mine, Peter Ginuwarti, who I got to see in person last week at the Integrated fundraising and marketing conference. And we haven’t seen each other in years. I mean, we, like, talk online and stuff like that, but it was so good to see you in person and, like, get some time together with old, particularly old convio people.

0:01:28 Taylor Shanklin: Peter, how you doing today?

0:01:30 Peter Genuardi: I’m doing great. It’s nice to be back in the saddle here. After a week of travel for that conference, I realized I couldn’t actually put my finger on the last time I’d seen you in person. I feel like we’ve probably talked a dozen times on video and on the phone, but, gosh, it was just so nice to see you and meet your team and really just get reconnected. I feel like the date I can put my finger on is that I haven’t been to Washington, DC in almost four years. It was the end of 2019.

0:01:54 Peter Genuardi: It was really almost an emotional visit for me because I used to live in the district before I moved here to Colorado, and I haven’t been back in years. So it was nice to see you and to catch up with all of those folks that we used to work with and meet a lot of people who had come into the industry since the last time I was at the conference. So, yeah, it was great to see you.

0:02:11 Taylor Shanklin: It’s funny, like, a lot of us, you know, lost touch in person for so long, but then, as we’ve been getting back into, like, honestly, within the last couple of years, like, the regular cycle of seeing people online and then actually in real life again, I don’t know, I just walk away from those things now realizing, like, how much it matters be the in person connection and how much I crave that. So it’s always a good time and then I always feel like I’m like coming down from like a high from that.

0:02:43 Taylor Shanklin: Well, I want to talk today with you about, you know, a little bit about your founder story. We see the stars and some of the other work that you’re doing with your team. But really dig into this broader topic of creating a more compassionate world and we can get into the nitty gritty of how you and your team do it through technology with social impact. And then also, like, I want to get into your philosophies on creating more compassionate teams and work environments. So just kick us off. Give us a little bit of a rundown on who you are, what you’re about, and why we’re going to talk about this topic of compassion so much today.

0:03:22 Peter Genuardi: Well, that’s great. I will keep my intro short and make sure we have maximum time to talk about compassion, both in the technology and in our teams. I started my career working in direct service. So originally I worked with anti hunger, poverty reduction, economic development organizations, both at the community level and then in Washington, DC. I spent a long time after that working for companies like Convio and get active. The ones that you and I have worked together on really focused on how we use the best technology possible to help nonprofits do very important things.

0:03:54 Peter Genuardi: And in a lot of that time I spent working on technology, it was focused on that piece that was really related to raising money, also getting people to donate and also getting people to write letters to Congress and volunteer and that sort of thing. About a dozen years ago, though, I left the software world to start direct response fundraising agency. That company was called strengthen Members. And we focused on two things. One was really trying to develop high performing fundraising programs that took advantage of advertising, email, social content, really great, creative.

0:04:24 Peter Genuardi: And the second thing we did was we built a bunch of applications for organizations like Sierra Club and Human Rights Campaign, AARP foundation, and some of those organizations that were really trying to deliver a service to support people in need. Fast forward. I sold strength and members about five years ago and started this company called See the Stars. I call it see the stars because I don’t know, I’m just going to get a little literary for a second here, but you’ve probably read the Inferno by Dante, or at least most people on this call or listening right now have heard about it.

0:04:54 Peter Genuardi: It’s really the story about these people who go through the worst parts of hell. They go on this journey under the earth. And when they came up at the end of this journey, you know, after seeing the worst of the worst of the worst of what we all believe as humans, you know, that hell might be. If you believe in hell, you know, they came outside and they looked up and they saw the stars. And during COVID I heard this great story by this editor who put together a bunch of very hopeful poems and short stories about our experience collectively during the COVID pandemic and lockdown and just related to how much loss people had experienced. And it really resonated with me. And so when I get up every day, I don’t want to go to work and just do a boring job. I want to come out and I want to look up and I want to see the stars. I want to get excited to do amazing things that make a difference. And so see the stars as a company that focuses on using all of the best technology that exists in the commercial world to help organizations do better.

0:05:45 Peter Genuardi: We don’t do direct response fundraising anymore. Instead of, we use all of these really cutting edge tools to go out and find people and drive them towards supportive social services. So we will go out and find people who are perhaps older, perhaps female, perhaps not banked, perhaps lower education, and we’ll use these tools to find them and steer them towards programs that can help them find a job, find better health care and that sort of thing. And so we work with a bunch of larger organizations today to help them with that.

0:06:13 Peter Genuardi: We also help a number of agencies with their technical services. So as they develop great creative and great campaigns for their clients, see, the stars will also do a bunch of work to help them manage things like email and websites and stuff like that. But really, we’re out of the fundraising game because we’re focused so much more on driving people into these direct service programs.

0:06:33 Taylor Shanklin: That’s awesome. What’s one of the coolest stories that you’ve come across in that kind of work and, like, making that kind of a pivot, being really close to direct service and us talking about compassion, there’s clearly a lot of compassion that goes into that line of work. Is there anything? And by the way, I love to see the stars and the name and the story behind that. Is there any, like, I don’t know, just thing that’s happened maybe with a client or, you know, something where you just did that work and then saw this outcome that just really has, like, stuck with you, maybe even early on, and founded the company that stuck with you. That’s helped to, like, fuel the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

0:07:14 Peter Genuardi: I think a lot of the time, whether we’re running a fundraising program or one of these lead gen programs, we focus too often on just looking at the numbers, right? How many dollars did someone spend to get this many people into the funnel? How many people did we squeeze out the bottom of the funnel? And I feel like that really eliminates the human aspect of this kind of marketing. And so one of the things that I make sure that I, and I totally forgot that I did this until I received this one email is that, like, when we set up a new system for someone, I’ll make sure that I’m personally copied on all the emails that come back to us when somebody’s emailing their audience.

0:07:48 Peter Genuardi: And a couple of years ago, we had this opportunity with the AARP foundation to work on this great program called Connect to effect. And it was really a terrific initiative that tried to reduce social isolation by helping people stay better connected to their families, to their friends, to their postal carrier, you know, anybody around them that could really help improve their quality of life. And as part of that program, I would read all the emails that came back to us. So sometimes they were just emails that bounced or somebody forwarded something to us that said, hey, you got the wrong address.

0:08:18 Peter Genuardi: But it was really touching for me to read a handful of these stories where people were writing back to, you know, an info ad address, but they were writing back this personal note that just talked about how touched they were, that these resources were available and that they were able to make a difference in their own lives by reaching out to their neighbors or helping their parents or someone close to them just stay connected.

0:08:42 Peter Genuardi: You know, I think the other piece, to be perfectly honest, that helps me stay in touch with the humanity of it all was that we got plenty of emails where people had a very sad story to share. And, you know, on the one hand, like, I probably, you probably didn’t expect me to say that. That’s what was inspiring to me. But inspiring might not be the right word, but reading, like, people sharing their very tender stories of, you know, how they’re isolated and how they try to make contact with others, really is one of those things that let me stay connected to the human aspect of what we’re doing and not just focus on the spreadsheets and the lead gen reports and all of those things that as marketers, sometimes we lose sight of the humanity for.

0:09:18 Taylor Shanklin: I love that you said that. I literally just posted an article on LinkedIn this morning about, like, it’s not just about the spreadsheets. They said something similar. I was like, there’s this other thing that, like, affects, like, sustainability and, like, your growth. And, you know, so on that topic, is there, let’s talk about maybe metrics that are not the common funnel metrics. Is there something that you and your team are usually looking for as kind of like a metric of success that is more human that you are trying to track and understand as you continue to build help organizations with programs like that?

0:10:00 Peter Genuardi: That’s a really good question. I think that as somebody who runs fundraising programs and legion programs, you know, that we typically look at, you know, dollars in and dollars out. If we invest $10 or a million dollars or $10 million, how many new donors will we get? How many dollars will they donate? And it’s the same thing on the retail side, right? So if we’re trying to sell products or if we’re working in CPG and trying to get people to shop at stores, the mechanics are largely the same. They’re all monetary outcomes that we’re looking for, and monetary from the company’s perspective or the organization’s perspective.

0:10:31 Peter Genuardi: When we build these lead gen programs, we really focus on numbers like the cost to acquire a new person who gets into a job training program. We are constantly adapting our expectations for what it costs to acquire a donor. Two, what is the cost to acquire a new job training workshop participant? What is the cost to acquire somebody who gets into the coaching program afterward? And so we’ve established lots of great benchmarks that are social service related. Right? It’s not even like we work for, you know, addiction recovery centers or organizations or companies like that because they’re still looking at the dollars and the bottom line as much as they’re helping people. The indicators that we look at are similar to the cost to acquire anybody that we would for consumer focused program.

0:11:12 Peter Genuardi: But the other thing we look at is outcomes. And so if I want to acquire someone to get into a job training workshop, I still want to measure after the fact. How much money did Peter make after he came through our job training program? Can he report to us that he has increased his salary, his earnings, bye. 200, $501,000 a month? Those become the really important ones that, again, take it to a human level, because we just see so many things that are collinear with people’s income.

0:11:39 Peter Genuardi: It’s America. We live in a capitalist economy. And so being able to measure not the financial outcome for a company or an organization, but rather the financial outcomes for an individual really is that piece that lets us bring it back full circle. And again, we use all of those technical tools, but also the kind of the frameworks for understanding, but we adapt them to really try to make that impact in people’s lives.

0:12:03 Taylor Shanklin: I love this idea of, like, talking about compassion centric work with, you know, and looking at, you know, not the typical things that we’re trying to measure and levels of looking at impact in terms of, like, transactions or ROI or revenue, but it’s like ROI on compassion in terms of, like, how did we, at the end of the day, actually create a real change in someone’s life and, like, with the programs that we’re doing. And, yeah, you can apply this to, like, how am I changing someone’s life with my product that I’m selling?

0:12:33 Taylor Shanklin: I think it’s really interesting to take is kind of compassion centric approach and lens, and that gets me into the next kind of the second half of this conversation I want to have is around your take on developing compassion centric teams. So you have built several companies now. You successfully sold one. I love getting founder stories. You know, as a fellow founder, you know, we get a lot of bumps and bruises and scrapes, and we also have a lot of fun.

0:13:02 Taylor Shanklin: So talk to me a little bit about kind of your leadership approach and maybe some things that you’ve learned over the years from one company to the next on building more compassionate teams.

0:13:11 Peter Genuardi: Yeah, I love that topic. I think my dad wasn’t any kind of, like, management expert, but he gave me one piece of advice and that was, hey, as you’re building teams, figure out what people need, give it to them and let them be successful. You’ll find out very quickly whether or not they’re going to succeed or fail in the role that they are put in. And if they need more support, they need to be able to come to you and ask for it, but you need to be able to give them what they need and get out of the way.

0:13:35 Peter Genuardi: As a small business owner, I’m sure you struggle with this notion that we would love to provide tons of really great support to our teams, all kinds of team development, maybe coaching services, that sort of thing. And it’s pretty expensive for a small company to invest in that. But I feel like every time I’ve invested in my coach who’s worked with me and my coach who’s worked with my teams, the results really are huge. And I think those results largely come from us being able to see someone for who they are, making them feel seen and really validating who they are with a strong level of support.

0:14:10 Peter Genuardi: To get really specific, though, for half a second. For the last 15 years, my coach has used the Clifton strengths strength finder profile with me to help me build my own development plan. And I use that when I manage people on my team, when I work with other agency leaders to help them develop their executive teams. The strength Finder profile, unlike every other book in the self help section, which is focused on telling you what’s wrong with you and saying and promising that they can fix it, the strength finder profile tells us, here are the five things that are your top strengths. Use those to be successful, and the results are really something because it’s positive, it’s tremendously accurate. So people are so validated when we do these early exercises that just by doing the exercises to get someone to see what their strengths are and to help them focus on those, to solve problems both for themselves, but also, as we build well rounded teams, really lets us create this compassionate workplace where people can see themselves and see others and be able to work together with a real simple framework.

0:15:07 Peter Genuardi: It’s really hard to invest in that because there are so many competing priorities for us and our businesses. It seems to me that this is one that is both validating positive and doesn’t require advanced degrees in industrial psychology to be able to use and apply with our teams.

0:15:21 Taylor Shanklin: I love that assessment that out of all of the ones that I’ve done over the years, that’s my favorite one, too. I think it feels the most practical in terms of applying and understanding yourself, or maybe validating yourself a little bit, and then also, like, just kind of, like, applying it to how you lead. Like, tapping into understanding, you know, like, not everyone’s going to be good at everything. Hey, guess what that is. Okay.

0:15:50 Taylor Shanklin: That’s normal. Like, focus on what someone is good at and, like, really help them be supported there.

0:15:59 Peter Genuardi: Yeah, I’ll tell you, you know, I just wanted to share one more thing on that regard. In that regard, and that is, you know, look, we really try to create a good workplace here. Our team is entirely remote. Lots of people are contractors. Some people are full time with us. And so the investments we can make there really go a long way. I recently hired two new engineers, and the two people that I ended up selecting out of hundreds of resumes that we got were part of this handful of probably ten of the resumes that we received where people wrote us a very thoughtful cover letter, where they looked at a lot of our philosophy about how we run the company. And how we want to support people.

0:16:35 Peter Genuardi: And so not only do I think it helps with retention and us being able to deliver better for our clients, I was really touched and surprised, to be honest, to see that so many people came to me asking to work for see the stars because one, they were qualified, of course, but two, they were impressed with what we were trying to do and how we wanted to support our team. So that kind of stuff goes a long way now. I haven’t looked at the glass door reviews of see the stars lately.

0:17:00 Peter Genuardi: I feel like we’d get pretty good reviews on how we just recognize and support our team.

0:17:05 Taylor Shanklin: Yeah, I imagine you do. What are your top strengths finders? Do you remember?

0:17:11 Peter Genuardi: My top are strategic achiever, individualization, input and belief.

0:17:17 Taylor Shanklin: I’m trying to remember mine. I was actually looking to see if I can find it because it’s been a while since I did it, but I do remember like two of mine were futuristic and beta or something like that. And then there are a couple more that kind of fit in with that. Right away I was like, that sounds about right.

0:17:35 Peter Genuardi: Sometimes I’ll play the game with people that I’ve known for a while and I’ll try and guess like their top five. I probably looked at about 100 of these and so it’s usually a pretty good exercise and I can get pretty close. But yes, those two sound really, really important to yours. I bet learner is in your top. So, you know, learner is one of the, one of these skills where, or one of these talents where, you know, you think it’s about consuming information.

0:17:57 Peter Genuardi: Right. There’s one that they have called input for people like me who are a little more selfish and try to hoard more of that information to make good decisions. Someone with learner and someone like you, I think, really is good at taking in a ton of information but is then able to, in a more social way. Right. Communicate that information to their team or to their clients or to their kids. And I bet Lerner is in your top five if not in your top ten.

0:18:19 Taylor Shanklin: I’ll go find it. It’s somewhere like in the drudges of my, like, old, you know, files. I’ll find it. I’ll let you know. And yeah, maybe we’ll post it in the show notes. We can post what our two are and a link to eclipta strains. Finder. No, I loved it. I first learned about it. I went to a conference that was more, it was like a self help type conference put on by a friend of ours and the social impact sector. Dave Land, I don’t know if you know Dave Lynn, and it was called congruence and he did a few of these.

0:18:49 Taylor Shanklin: And we got to do the strengths finders and learn all about it then and learn all about John Clifton and why he developed it because of his theory. In our society, we focus so much on getting better at our weaknesses. But if you focus on the strengths instead, you’ll kind of get better results, and I think you’ll have happier people. So I think all of that leads to a more productive company overall and, like, better results at the end of the day in the spreadsheets.

0:19:19 Taylor Shanklin: So let’s, we got just a couple minutes left. Let’s talk really quickly about. Tell me in like 60 seconds. The fastest planet email studio. It’s part of see the stars. What are you doing there? Because that’s an area where you’re really innovating right now.

0:19:33 Peter Genuardi: I appreciate it. Yes. This year we launched the fastest planet. It’s an email studio. We focus primarily on production, though. If people need help with creative, we can provide it. Or we refer people to great teams like yours and some of the other copywriters and creatives that we work with. You know, we really focus on delivering email for people. So we help with that production, the management of technology, helping people make sure that their deliverability is set up correctly to maximize the impact that they’re trying to make, whether that’s in the fundraising or advocacy realm or trying to recruit people into a job training program.

0:20:06 Peter Genuardi: I saw this, and I would love when we have more time to talk to you about it. Recently we saw the response rates in a lot of the industry research just plummet as it relates to people getting emails and making donations. I have a feeling that in a couple of years we are going to discover that those issues were caused by deliverability. And so the response rates have plummeted because deliverability of emails and inbox placement has become so much more challenging in the last couple of years that we see the response rates from email go through the floor, which we could correct if we can help get an organization’s deliverability really high. So the fastest planet is just kind of like a very narrow studio, focuses on email and really seeks to support organizations and their agencies without trying to do much more than what’s related to email and what’s in our swim lane.

0:20:49 Taylor Shanklin: Didn’t you just do a webinar on that topic, or is it coming up?

0:20:52 Peter Genuardi: We did. No, thank you. We did a webinar a couple of weeks ago specifically for fundraisers. I will share with you a link. We’re going to just the presentation and the recording available. So I’d love to share that in the show notes, if I could, in there.

0:21:04 Taylor Shanklin: Absolutely, yeah. Email deliverability, once you have it online and on demand, people can watch that because, I mean, I could not join because I was in the mix of travel, but I actually really wanted to listen in because that’s one of those things, like, that’s not my lane of genius whatsoever. But I know it’s really important and you got to know something about it. And I agree with you. I imagine that deliverability is, like a big part of that. You know, kind of like, decline.

0:21:28 Taylor Shanklin: I think it’s interesting in the world of digital marketing where we’re seeing declines right now and, like, you know, like, search and deliverability and, like, the world around us is changing with AI and tools and the way platforms change their algorithms all the time. So I think it’s really good that you guys are keeping kind of, like, top of mind ways to work around those things. Like, they can be fixed and.

0:21:54 Taylor Shanklin: All right, well, Peter, let’s close out with, tell me something that you’re really excited about. Anything you’ve done recently, personally, professionally, or what’s on your mind.

0:22:06 Peter Genuardi: I appreciate that you probably did a little research on me before today. I did a little bit of research on you, and I realized that we do have something else in common, and that is that we’ve both done TEDx talks. I really love your presentation about minimizing to maximize. I think it’s a, it’s a terrific concept, and it’s always one of those things that I think is important, especially related to design, whether it’s brand design or product design, that, like, when we pair things away to get to the, like, most useful, beautifully minimal, minimally viable product, like, we come up with some stellar results. And so I’d love to see that.

0:22:39 Peter Genuardi: I was also impressed that you. About ten times the views mine had. So I was gonna brag that I got 30,000 views. Yours has probably close to a half million, if not more at this point. So that was super impressive to see.

0:22:51 Taylor Shanklin: Yeah, I don’t know. The Internet’s weird. Yours will get there. Yours is newer. Mine’s been out a little bit longer. It takes some time. But I watched your TED talk. I thought it was really awesome. You were really vulnerable. It was a talk that I really resonated with as well, just personally. And I thought it was great that you shared your story around that. So, yeah, we’re little TEDx buddies.

0:23:10 Peter Genuardi: That’s great. Hey, thank you for the conversation today. It’s always great catch up and I’m excited to work with you some more. So thanks for inviting me to come today.

0:23:18 Taylor Shanklin: You too. Thanks everyone for listening today. I hope this was helpful as we talked about, like maybe just even opening up our minds towards thinking a little bit more about compassion centered, you know, marketing or program building, and then compassion and strength centered leadership. We’ll put Peter’s contact information in the show notes as well. If you want to reach out to him, get help from see the stars or the fastest planet, email.

0:23:46 Taylor Shanklin: He’s a great guy. I’ve known him for a long time and it’s just wonderful to work with. So thanks everyone for listening. We will see you next time.

0:23:56 Taylor Shanklin: Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast play so that you don’t miss a beat of the talking shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review.

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