Bridget Willard | SaaS Marketing Agency

Author: Bridget Willard

  • Valuing Volunteerism: A Cost Perspective

    Valuing volunteerism is a two-sided coin. It’s always nice to be appreciated by the nonprofit we serve, but we also need to understand the cost. Volunteerism isn’t without a cost or a value. So in our effort to not just recruit but retain and manage volunteers, how can we have a proper respect?

    It really starts with ourselves. We need to understand our personal costs and values.

    Do is the new give.

    “Do something great.”
    “Do something.”
    “Do.”

    Many of us believe in nonprofits and we donate both time and money to support the causes closest to our hearts.

    I believe in supporting nonprofits financially and with my time and I’m public with this donation that appears in my sidebar. As a business, I want my clients to know that I also use funds to make this world a better place.

    I am a recurring donor to 4Ocean, Oxfam, and freeCodeCamp. I also support Aspen Camp with Amazon Smile purchases.

    I also volunteer with Make WordPress, WordCamp Orange County, WordCamp Los Angeles, and Women Who WP.

    It’s good for our souls to give back to the world, to the things that gave us a start, as it gives us a healthy perspective and stimulates gratitude.

    Why do we volunteer?

    Volunteering is good for our souls. Volunteering is a way to align our values with the world.

    I’ve volunteered for all of my adult life with many kinds of nonprofits. I’ve gone through burnout, elation, and everything in between.

    As a freelancer, business owner, or even employee, it’s important to understand both the cost and value of volunteerism.

    What is the cost of volunteering?

    One of the costs of volunteering besides our time is burnout. It’s a real thing.

    Why do we burnout?

    There are many reasons but one is that we don’t understand how much time we spend.

    [bctt tweet=”We burn out from volunteering because we don’t understand the value of our time.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

    (This is partly why I rant so much about job costing and sample time tracking if you’ve ever spoken to me in person.)

    If we don’t understand how we spend our time, it’s too easy to say yes to everything. But at some point, there will be a cost. That could be suffering client work, personal relationships, or health.

    Another very easily solved reason is a lack of appreciation. But that’s on the “managing volunteers” side of this conversation.

    So, what if our volunteerism had an invoice?

    Time is one of the only unsustainable resources we truly have. Our time has both a cost and a value.

    Sometimes to gain perspective is to tie our time to a dollar amount. Though it doesn’t speak to all of the value, it’s one way to show others and ourselves that our work, though unpaid, matters.

    Maybe if we treated our volunteer work like it was a client, it would give other people a perspective of the worth. To gain a perspective for myself, I ran the numbers on just one of my volunteer efforts.

    What if WordCamp Orange County was my client? This would be the invoice based upon my current pricing.

    • Five months of weekly 1/2 hour meeting:
      • 20 meetings at 1/2 of my rate $75 = $1500
    • Social media management:
      • Facebook: $350/mo x 5 = $1750
      • Twitter basic: $350 x 5 = $1750
    • Total in kind donation $5,000

    Volunteerism Matters

    Besides all of the people I’ve met, relationships I’ve formed, valuable conversations that changed my life, clients I’ve gained, and people I’ve encouraged, there is a monetary value on your time.

    Spend it well. Remember your why.

    As I told a friend this past weekend at WordCamp Europe,

    “If we ever forget that this is about the people, we’ve completely lost our way.”

    Go serve, do it for others, but take care of yourself.

    Clark Tibbs

  • Why Small Business Owners Should Read Self-Help Books

    Small business owners wear a lot of hats: founder, CEO, sometimes office manager and janitor. So why do I advocate reading self-help books? There’s a few reasons but they all boil down to leadership — soft skills.

    Firstly, I “self-help” has a negative connotation. I call it nonfiction, research, and personal development. Whatever way you look at it, if you have a small business, you have challenges that often lie on the outside of your primary skillset: the reason you built the business.

    [bctt tweet=”Soft skills are the social glue that brings together all aspects of any successful business.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

    As a small business owner, you are a leader. Leaders create a company culture that works for everyone. Leaders model psychological safety. Leaders understand their own limitations.

    How can you possibly be a successful business without first understanding yourself and secondly understanding your team? We haven’t even started talking about understanding your audience, customers, and potential market.

    Leaders Model Company Culture

    Company culture is created whether you intend to or not. Intentional company culture provides a path to success. Your small business depends upon you to create culture. It’s almost impossible to create it bottom-up. It comes from the top.

    One of the aspects of a small business company culture that is important is vulnerability. Small businesses are a small team. Your team has to look up to you. As a culture, we view vulnerability as weakness. It’s not weak; it’s the opposite. True vulnerability is strength. That strength not only encourages your team to trust you, but it inspires them to try (and fail) as well.

    The more vulnerable I have been, the more encouraged I have been to continue to do so — through business connections, mentorship opportunities, and the growth of my own empathy.

    “The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common.

    First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.

    Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception.

    And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.” Brené Brown, Rising Strong

    [bctt tweet=”True vulnerability is strength — it encourages your team to trust you and inspires them to try (and fail) as part of the learning process.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

    Leaders Create Psychological Safety

    The vulnerability that you express creates a safe space. Small business owner, I ask you these questions:

    1. Do you feel safe to fail?
    2. Does your team?
    3. What are the implied or strict consequences of failure?
    4. How is that treated in your company culture?
    5. What kind of atmosphere exists in your stand-up meetings or staff meetings?
    6. Do your employees come to you with ideas or concerns?

    I can’t answer those questions for you. These are questions that require self-reflection and thought.  It may require observation over time and meetings with your management. Successful teams need to feel safe. If your team isn’t bonding, how can that be fixed?

    “In Edmondson’s hospital studies, the teams with the highest levels of psychological safety were also the ones with leaders most likely to model listening and social sensitivity. They invited people to speak up. They talked about their own emotions. They didn’t interrupt other people. When someone was concerned or upset, they showed the group that it was okay to intervene. They tried to anticipate how people would react and then worked to accommodate those reactions. This is how teams encourage people to disagree while still being honest with one another and occasionally clashing. This is how psychological safety emerges: by giving everyone an equal voice and encouraging social sensitivity among teammates.” Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better

    [bctt tweet=”The best benefit you can offer your company’s employees is the freedom to fail.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

    Leaders Understand Their Own Limitations

    There is nothing worse than a person who can’t see their own limitations. This is the moral of the story in the Emperor’s New Clothes. We delude ourselves with our own pride and often forget to look at the whole context.

    This is another reason why leaders and small business owners should meet and mastermind with people outside of their own industry. Thought diversity is an important component of innovation. What can a manufacturer of tile learn from a computer programmer? How can a battery business learn from solar? The connections we make foster ideas. Confirmation bias is a danger and the first step to protecting yourself is to recognize its existence.

    “A modern name for Smith’s insights about self-deception is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias happens when we filter reality through our biases, ignoring evidence that challenges or refutes what we believe and eagerly accepting evidence that confirms what we believe.” Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

    [bctt tweet=”Do you dismiss alternative theories and ideas as negative or are you thankful for a differing view?” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

    What are you reading?

    If leaders understand their own limitations, create an intentional company culture with psychological safety, then understanding yourself, your team, and your customers will follow. And with that internal success, external (financial) success is bound to follow.

    So, what are you reading? What inspires you?

  • You Can’t Market in a Vacuum – Lessons About Observation

    So many businesses get tunnel vision, blinders, or myopic in their marketing. They learned what works in 1989 and kept doing it. Observe. Who are your customers — really?

    What is a vacuum?

    According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

    “Vacuum, Space in which there is no matter or in which the pressure is so low that any particles in the space do not affect any processes being carried on there.”

    Do we market in a vacuum? Not literally. No. But when we look at data without the context, we are not allowing ourselves to be exposed to alternative data.

    What do you mean?

    Let’s talk about lunch on a Monday.

    I recently had a late lunch / early dinner with my friend Rachel at Jimmy’s Famous American Tavern (and had an awesome margarita). During our lunch we were talking ideas and brainstorming in tornado fashion, as we do.

    The topic of data came up. So, I was quoting that saying “lies, damned lies, and statistics” and I added “AND DATA!” I was discussing the idea of context when it comes to data. (more…)

  • Keynote at WordCamp Raleigh: Let’s Talk about Whole Health

    If you’re to volunteer in the Open Source Movement or the WordPress Project, your whole health — physical, emotional, and financial — need to be a priority. I was honored to be the keynote at WordCamp Raleigh in 2018 on this subject. Special thanks to Pressable for sending me. They were also my client at the time.

    Watch the Keynote: You Can’t Have a Thriving Codebase without a Thriving Community

    (Timestamps are at the bottom of this post.)

    What does code have to do with community?

    Free and Open Source Software depends upon the community who builds, creates, maintains, supports, translates, and markets it. That means any Open Source project depends upon a volunteer-based workforce.

    We all recognize that our livelihoods are somewhat attributed to the ability to use Free and Open Source Software — like WordPress — so we volunteer, contribute, to give back.

    What about burnout?

    It’s real.

    We’ve addressed it before in many ways. So let’s talk about how what a thriving community looks like.

    What is a thriving community?

    A thriving community realizes they can ebb and flow in and out of a project. They can contribute for months or years, take a break, maybe even mentor others, and come back — or not.

    A thriving community recruits volunteers based upon inclusion, not guilt.

    A thriving community isn’t burnt out or bitter.

    A thriving community is healthy — physically, emotionally, and financially.

    A Word About Perfection

    I spent 14 years in construction accounting and my job demanded perfection. I spent hours looking for a penny if my bank reconcilation was off. Job costing had to be accurate. Contracts had to be perfect. I get it.

    The problem with perfectionism is when we take a marketable skill from our career and apply it to our personal lives.

    Progress is better than perfection. Done is better than perfect. Something is better than nothing.

    Let’s Talk about Whole Health

    Health comes in many forms: physical, emotional, and financial. And there are quite a few overlaps in these three distint areas, too.

    It’s fine to talk about the abstract. In the conceptual, we all agree we should be physically, emotionally, and financially healthy. But are we?

    And do we stop from iterating in our personal lives because we haven’t created the perfect meal or exercise plan, because we haven’t felt emotionally ready or because we have financial goals that haven’t been met? Maybe. But let’s take some actionalble steps toward progress.

    The -er approach

    Better. Faster. Thinner. Healthier. Happier. They all end in -er. This suffix communicates progress — not completion.

    I’m going to talk about some of the things I’ve done in my life to be -er.

    It doesn’t matter if we don’t collaborate together.

    We are a community who understands iteration by collaboration. I put this on GitHub. Let’s iterate together.

    Physical Health

    1. My doctor wanted me to walk 60 minutes every day.

    That was overwhelming and impossible. So, I walked some. I walked more. I walked longer.

    First it was just 20 minutes once or twice a week. Taking photos to bribe myself.

    Then it was 30 minutes. Now I do 1.5 to 2 miles three to four times a week. It used to be impossible.

    2. I realized I felt better eating more protein.

    I decided to subscribe to Special K protein drinks on Amazon Prime. Now I drink one every morning.

    Sometimes, I forget to eat protein and then I remember. If you’re plant based or have other issues, find out what works for you. I’m not a nutritionist, just giving examples.

    Actionable goals with incremental progress is the key.

    What can you start doing today that will move your physical health in that direction?

    3. Take a 15 minute nap at 2:30 pm.

    The circadian rhythm is no joke. Set the timer on your phone and lay down – floor, bed, couch, wherever.

    Close your eyes. Relax. Allow yourself to just be. You don’t have to sleep, you just need to rest.

    If you want to level it up, drink coffee and by the time your alarm goes off the caffeine will have taken effect.

    Emotional Health

    Emotional health is tricky and often it intertwines and weaves along with physical health.

    My giant disclaimer is to follow professional medical advice.

    Here are some things I’ve done to help promote my mental health.

    1. Trust your soul with a friend.

    I’m not a private person. So I need a team of people I trust. I call them SEAL Team 7. They know everything about me. I have to have people who I can brainstorm life choices with who will have empathy and constructive suggestions.

    Opening your soul and being vulnerable takes great strength and courage. It also gives courage to your circle to do the same.

    No one has it all together. That’s an urban legend.

    2. If you feel pain, feel it. If you need to cry, cry.

    I’m no longer suppressing my emotions, talking myself out of them, or allowing anyone else to do so.

    No one can feel your pain for you. It’s okay. Cry. Wash your face. Take a nap. Get up and start the rest of your day.

    3. Lexapro

    After my husband passed, I was deeply thrown into grief. After time passed, it wasn’t lessening. In fact, my anxiety increased to the point that I felt like I was constantly outrunning an avalance.

    I saw my doctor and she prescribed an antidepressant.

    I remember clearly waking up last year on March 8 with ideas. For the first time in ten years my brain worked.

    Financial Health

    Financial health is also important to a thriving community. You can’t keep giving back when you’re so broke, you’re stressed and overwhelmed.

    In my career journey that ended up with me as a freelancer, this is what I’ve learned.

    1. Believe you are worthy.

    If you don’t believe you’re worth $150 an hour, you won’t charge it.

    2. Understand what you cost.

    If you don’t know how much time you spend on a project, you don’t know if you’re profitable. This also means taking into account your expenses. See this blog post about job costing.

    3. Explore other business ideas.

    This is where failure is a great teacher. Sometimes the ideas we have come from iterating on our own ventures that aren’t working. Be open and agile to new ideas.

    Keynote Timestamps

    00:02:27 There’s no way you can have a thriving codebase without a thriving community.

    00:05:38 I don’t want to get fired from my volunteer job.

    00:06:45 Even your own volunteer work doesn’t all have to be you.

    00:07:20 When you do things for WordPress, you are a volunteer. And when it’s not fun anymore, don’t do it.

    00:09:07 You forgot the joy of why you’re giving back.

    00:10:19 Those kinds of skills that make us conscientious that make us excel in our careers and our paths are really bad for our personal lives.

    00:12:30 Progress is better than perfection. Something is better than nothing. Done is better than perfect.

    00:13:08 Your website shouldn’t be like the Money Pit.

    00:15:01 I have a personal working theory, that more than 50% of the people drawn to the people working with computers come from dysfunctional backgrounds based upon my own social science data.

    00:16:30 I have an -er approach.

    00:19:00 A/B Test your life.

    00:21:06 Our physical health matters.

    00:22:06 I don’t take a selfie when I’m crying in the corner.

    00:22:37 It’s okay to feel sad. It really is. (Kerri Strug Story)

    00:28:53 My own pride kept me from telling my doctor what I really needed.

    00:29:10 I want everybody to stop undercharging for your hourly rate. Please & thank you.

    00:29:53 People do not know how long it takes them to do things. Just because it’s easy to make a website doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take time.

    00:33:01 Your body is connected. It’s a big, giant ecosystem.

    00:34:20 Guess how hard it is to tweet for those people who don’t write. If you don’t write stuff for your blog, it’s pretty hard to tweet stuff from your blog.

    00:36:20 It’s good to have a niche.

    00:36:40 “You belong in the room. Your client came to you because you’re the expert.” @TheChrisDo

    00:36:15 We are a community that understands iteration by collaboration.

    00:37:30 Contribute to the GitHub Repo. Keep the conversation going.

  • Communication is a Science – We Read Live Data

    Communication is a science. I’m frankly tired of seeing it categorized as a soft skill as though it’s less important. Of course communication includes data. The trick with communication professionals is that we read and respond to data live.

    Are soft skills “hot air?”

    I saw this Venn Diagram and was offended at best. (By the way, did you know that you can create Venn Diagrams on Canva?) Business people (marketing, sales, finance) are not inferior to software developers, engineers, and/or front-end designers. Every specialty has its training and technical side. Let’s respect expertise for what it is — expertise.

    I commented on the blog. The author replied:

    Thanks for commenting, Bridget. I did not create the Venn diagram, nor do I endorse it or its labels. It is used as a counterexample for classifying data science in an over-exclusive way.

    Firstly, the fact that one didn’t create an image doesn’t remove one’s responsibility for it. What if it were hate speech? Why is it acceptable in the tech community to demean soft skills?

    To be fair, this diagram and discussion brought something to the surface that I’ve been encountering since I began marketing as a career.

    Data Requires Context

    Sure. Pour over the data you have in Google Analytics. Make charts. Create ratios. Create forecasting models. That’s needed. I’m not against data.

    But data alone isn’t the whole picture. Recently, a client noticed a drop in leads from Yelp. Is it because Yelp isn’t effective? That was the conclusion all too easy to jump to. Yet, what has changed? Quite a lot, actually. We began advertising on Facebook, we launched a new website with regular blog posts, and we started an Instagram account. Yelp isn’t less effective, it’s simply no longer the only star in the sky of data.

    Context, a story, matters when interpreting data. That comes with soft skills. Anyone can collect data. But can you ask the right questions to interpret the data?

    Brené Brown is now famous for saying, “Maybe stories are just data with a soul” in her TED talk. Stories give context to data. This is what makes data powerful. Otherwise, any data can be manipulated for any purpose.

    “Figures often beguile me particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’” Mark Twain

    Are soft skills scientific?

    They are. This is why behaviorism is a part of psychology. There are plenty of studies that look at inflection, tone, word choice, gestures, facial ticks, and body language. All of this is data. It’s being streamed through our senses and interpreted in real-time by our brains.

    Soft skills are scientific. We call them soft because it’s hard for us to define.

    Those with business, marketing, sales, and communication skills read a different kind of data: it’s human data. It’s behavior and behavior patterns. We analyze body language, inflection, and tone. We decipher patterns and predict behavior in real-time in order to adjust the conversation for affinity.

    Whether online or in-person affinity is key. Affinity leads to loyalty. Loyalty leads to sales. Of course, data is important, but it’s good to be reminded that data is a look at the past, not in the moment. Collected data is the autopsy. Soft skills are preventive medicine.

    “I’ve concluded that that data has the most impact when it’s wrapped in a story. …Data won’t get you standing ovation; stories will. Stories inform, illuminate, and inspire. Tell more of them.” Carmine Gallo, Harvard Business Review

    Inspired by:

    Engineering Data Science at Automattic

    Kari Shea