We recently connected with Tasha Van Vlack and have shared our conversation below.
Tasha, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
So The Nonprofit Hive began as an attempt on my part to fill a void I was seeing in the nonprofit space. Social impact professionals, who I was helping serve in a variety of nonprofit consulting roles over the past 7 years, were incredibly lonely. There was a distinct lack of opportunities for networking unless you worked at a wealthy nonprofit. There was very little work comradery post covid as many people were still working remote. Nonprofit jobs were often under-appreciated financially and in terms of growth opportunities. And so, often I would be conducting initial discovery calls surrounding marketing,CRM implementation or fundraising and instead find 20 minutes was spent providing some sort of non-profit therapy. There was a psychological safety for these individuals in talking to a complete stranger about how hard the work was.
After over 5 years working in the industry at a variety of jobs last April I kind of got thinking to myself “what kind of networking calls had I loved from my time being a member of lunch Club as well as SalesHook Up?” And my favourite calls always surrounded meeting people who were in the nonprofit space and who I had a depth of immediate connection with because we had that commonality. And that’s when I pitched the idea to someone I knew who had worked in nonprofit technology about building out a very simplistic, easy to use platform for one to one nonprofit connection.
So from initial ideation to when we registered a business name was a very short amount of time, maybe 3 weeks?
We started out with a simple waitlist to start gathering interest. I’m a marketer by trade and for me it was critical to know what the greater social impact community was actually looking for versus creating something that no one was going to use. We lived just using the waitlist and some basic social media for over 2 months before deciding to take the leap into actually building the MVP.
We launched October 19th with our first Hive chats, so right around 6 months after the initial idea but only 3 months after we truly started to figure out the technical requirements for setup.
During this time we built up a really healthy social media following; we found very early advocates of our idea who thought it was amazing and started to pump it out over their own socials and encourage others to join. I think where we’ve really shined is being able to find ways to encourage and create community inside the social impact space. Truly the platform, the technology, is super simplistic and not complicated. but the community building around the platform is what has really helped us grow.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Hi, I’m Tasha, a busy mama of three with a background in all things relationship building. For some of my career this has looked like client management services, always with some elements of sales, and more recently a deep dive into relational marketing. I’ve been working in businesses that serve the nonprofit sector for over 7 years now and often have been the person wearing many hats. I love tying together all of the client engagement work that helps drive business growth. More recently I co-founded a platform called The Nonprofit Hive, a one-to-one weekly meetup for change makers from all over the world to share about their work in nonprofit and find community and connection. I think what has always set me apart in my work is a deep desire to work with people; so when I say I work in sales or marketing it’s always been with the lens of ethical sales and relational marketing. I’m always looking towards the long game of connecting with other people and not trying for a quick win.
In my work building The Nonprofit Hive the thing I’m most proud of absolutely has been setting aside my thoughts on what this platform, this community, was going to be and instead letting our members tell me and show me what they are looking for. Putting aside ego has been critical in our success because it’s not about what I think the product should be, if it doesn’t serve the community it doesn’t really matter. It’s been an incredible and liberating experience to meet and connect with so many changemakers internationally, they continuously build a fire in my belly for the work and for trying to make the world a better place.
How did you build your audience on social media?
The number one thing I would suggest as a relational marketer when working to build an audience on social media, is making sure you know where your potential users/customers are. For us, we knew it was going to be easier to find people who were truly engaged and wanting to meet other social impact professionals on LinkedIn. So it became our primary social media platform and all others were just offshoots of the main message, primary visuals, that we created for LinkedIn.
One of the cool things about LinkedIn is we were able to have a business page for the company, The Nonprofit Hive, as well as use our personal LinkedIn to put out similar messaging and talk about the business itself. I see lots of people simply sharing their business posts, but I just find the algorithm for LinkedIn doesn’t respond well to that.
I was often using my own socials, I still do, to talk about the state of nonprofit work, challenges that are being faced by our members, successes they are seeing. But I made sure that my personal LinkedIn didn’t just become brand messaging for The Nonprofit Hive. It was a place to show my expertise in relational marketing, a place to show that I cared about what my business was being built on. to share articles and videos from thought leaders across the field and really establish myself as part of this ecosystem.
Our business page was a great place to test out messaging as well, and it also became an incredible place to find new members. People who followed us on LinkedIn were also most likely the people who were engaged enough to actually decide to join the nonprofit hive.
Part of our social media strategy also relied around user interviews, the creation of original content by our users (called Hive Mind articles), and sharing their wins whenever we could. By using our socials to pump up our own members, who were already part of the nonprofit ecosystem, we found that they’re engagement increased at the same time. We had people who evolved into brand advocates and them putting their reputation behind what we were building was just as or more valuable than any social media we could have created.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Kind of funny, but the old adage of always entering any conversation willing to give more than you get is one of the core values I’ve built my work around. and people know when you’re coming in with that attitude. By preparing to always give out more resources, give out more advice, pump up other people and cheerlead them on without any plan for reciprocity, helped me build up a reputation as someone of value in the social impact space. I don’t know that initially it was a strategy so much as it was something I wanted to be known for. I wanted to remember people’s birthdays, I wanted to remember what was happening in their business, I wanted to reach out to them when they were searching for a job and be able to go “ I just heard of this job and it made me think of you”.
Being overly generous and cheerleading other people on is such a blessing in your work. People remember a kind word, people remember when you took the time or energy to engage with their content.
In the social impact sector, much of the accolades go to senior leadership, or more often the donors, when there is success in a fundraising effort. Having that moment to highlight all of those people who work inside a non-profit, the people who truly make the mission run, is not a messaging that many nonprofit professionals are hearing in their work. So it definitely made me stand out at a time when there is a lot of upheaval in this sector.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thenonprofithive.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenonprofithive/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thenonprofithive/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-van-vlack/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/UrNonprofitHive
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9QcP1UT1c5spCJ3dv2YrBQ
- Other: Business LinkedIn –https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-nonprofit-hive/
Image Credits
So as an online business we dont really have much in the way of photography being done! Included some visuals we have created to date but let me know if there is something more that would be useful.