Community Brands is a leading provider of cloud-based software and payment solutions to associations, non-profits and K-12 schools. It worked with Turtl, an SME, to completely transform its content creation process. The use of Turtl has enabled a small marketing team to create on-brand content that is packaged well, without straining team resources.
The challenge: Life before Turtl
Before Turtl came along, the marketing team at Community Brands would have to borrow designers from other areas of the charity business to try and pull together PDFs. Organising that, or paying outside vendors, wasn’t fully utilising the team’s limited time, money and resources. Worse still, the small team were struggling to prove how designated designers would be a worthy investment.
Kathy Nothnagel, Content Manager at Turtl, joined the team in late 2020. She said that the previous team’s driven attitude in their search for an effective content tool that anyone could learn to use set the stage for the current team’s success
The brand’s use of Turtl Docs has changed over time from data-driven impact reports to thought leadership collateral.
THE SOLUTION: Life with Turtl
Getting everyone involved
Community Brands has grown from one Turtl Doc creator to a whole team working on dynamic digital documents, including a group of dedicated in-house designers. Nothnagel said: “As time has gone on, we have more resources now than ever before, so we can do a better job, thinking strategically and creatively to make more resources that look amazing.”
While the creators make the content, the new designers elevate the collated look and then the marketing campaign team sends it all out. Yet, if there is an update that needs to be made or an asset to be swapped out, Nothnagel can make that change in an instant.
A change in content priorities
As previously mentioned, Nothnagel has seen a shift in what kinds of content are being created with Turtl. There’s been a decrease in statistic-heavy reports and an increase in creative thought leadership or helpful content directories. That’s mostly due to the in-depth analytics tool tracking all their output which anyone can access.
Everyone across Community Brands has the same information at their disposal which helps with making decisions and giving feedback. Someone doesn’t have to be a creator to see the results of content, and Nothnagel finds that sales teams will check who has read marketing materials and to what extent before and after calls.
Nothnagel also mentioned how it takes a lot of time and effort to pull resources together. She said: “We hoped adding assets into a series had the potential to make it all reach more people and get more attention. And by sending out a collated library of potential resources to prospect lists, we got more people to take a bite than they ever did with individual assets. It works! It’s a great way to continue capturing prospects.”
Getting gritty to give docs a longer shelf life
Digital documents still take some time, planning and resources to bring to fruition, but they also come with a longer shelf-life. The online hosted media can be easily shared, updated in real-time, atomised for distribution and automatically distinguishes between pages for pointing readers to specific moments.
Whether the Community Brands team is promoting a short fundraising guide or a lengthy inspiration filled e-book, being able to direct readers to specific pages is Nothnagel’s favourite aspect of Turtl Docs.
Personalising with Turtl
Demos can be overwhelming, people get distracted or they just forget to ask a question. After anyone in the sales team does a demo of GiveSmart (a platform which engages donors), they send a personalised Post-Demo Turtl Doc to the organisation containing an overview of everything a prospect needs.
Community Brands knows that the way a buyer journey goes with non-profits is that often you aren’t presenting to the actual decision-makers. It may need to go to a board of directors for approvals. Or it needs to be seen by executive leadership who are looking at multiple solutions, and you want yours to stand out. The personalised Post-Demo Turtl Doc can be shared (and tracked) to decision-makers and enables prospects to give a tailored presentation to anyone after only attending one demo.
So what now?
DEEPER PERSONALISATION : Given the success of its GiveSmart Post-Demo Turtl Doc, the team would like to try and make some more personalised Turtl Docs to see where else the format could help their metrics.
MORE RESOURCE LIBRARIES: Another brilliant success has been content that collates all other assets like events, graphics and statistics. There is a lot of potential in continuing to use Turtl Docs as an accessible library for its online community of prospects and customers.
SMARTER INTEGRATIONS: Nothnagel currently uses Turtl’s native HubSpot integration for form building and known reader tracking, but is curious to integrate further for automation, asset analysis and management of Turtl Docs.
Steve Greanias, General Manager, Community Brands, spoke to Intelligent SME.tech about how Turtl has changed the way they work.
How did Turtl docs justify your team’s growth?
Turtl has supported our sales teams in providing quality follow-ups, and it supports our marketing team in their efforts to build greater engagement with our target audiences. Community Brands works with a number of non-profit organisations, helping them to create high-quality, on-brand fundraising materials. Before partnering with Turtl, this content creation work was often time-consuming and provided essentially no analytic data for us or our partners to use as part of their strategy.
As a result of our work with Turtl, we’ve been able to justify our team’s growth through the use of detailed performance data. We have seen the average read time of our materials more than double – jumping from two minutes to four minutes 42 seconds – as a result of our ability to personalise them. Similarly, we saw bounce rates more than halve, while sign-ups for demos and reader numbers have also increased the more the team has refined our strategy and design with Turtl.
Can you tell me more about how Turtl provides in-depth analytics?
Turtl’s analytics give our team detailed visibility on exactly how each document is being used, how long people read it for, which videos and links readers are clicking on and how they respond to our polls. We share our documents via email and make them publicly available on the website, and the Turtl platform lets us glean full analytic data from all of our users. We build these overall trends and information garnered from known users to support our teams’ understanding of our market and our prospects. This data-driven approach significantly helps us with ensuring the accuracy and relevance of our outreach.
Which content did you find was getting the most interaction and how much did this change your content creation?
Recently, we have seen particularly strong interaction with embedded videos and other resource downloads. The reaction to these forms of content has allowed us to consider other ways we can repurpose and repackage our existing quality content into interactive Turtl Docs to continue to drive increased engagement.
The Community Brands team has also created a number of resource libraries containing our case studies, infographics and webinar recordings, which all offer significant benefits to our readers. This reorganisation of our content has been a serious piece of work but now offers the huge advantage to our readers that everything is searchable in one place! It has also greatly extended the shelf life of our content, allowing us to update content in real-time, atomise it and repurpose it to suit our needs at any given moment.
In which other areas do you think more personalised Turtl documents will help?
Personalisation on the Turtl platform allows businesses to build levelled-up content in seconds. This time efficiency, coupled with the dynamic look and feel of a Turtl document allows us to present our brand in the way we want to be seen. Additionally, personalisation catered to the user’s experience – in the form of pop-up quizzes – gives them a fun, interactive first moment with our materials that offers significantly greater engagement than simply downloading a PDF can do. And within moments, the user gets the information that is most relevant to them – rather than a bunch of content they don’t need.
How has Turtl’s native Hubspot helped?
Turtl’s native Hubspot has granted us detailed insights into individual behaviours. This has allowed us to gauge our non-profit and school users’ preferences by seeing what they have read or clicked on. This allows our team to better understand what is most interesting to them. That gives our teams a far better understanding of their motivations than was previously possible. The result of this is more genuine relationships and the ability for us to give our non-profit and school users a far improved buying experience.
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