BE CONTENT: HOW CONTENT MARKETING CAN HELP YOUR FUNDRAISING
Episode aired May 26, 2021: Content Marketing
Blogs, social posts, ebooks, guides, website copy, newsletters, emails. There’s a LOT of content you can be producing. Abby Jarvis of Qgiv produces all of it- and her content gets results! How? In this episode Abby discusses
- how to find and where to look for content
- what 1 thing every piece of content has to have
- what to prepare in advance of writing a blog post
- writing tips to keep the audience reading
- how your content helps your fundraising efforts and
- juggling everything to produce max content every year.
Below you can listen, watch or read this podcast episode.
Ephraim: Welcome to this edition of Your Weekly Dose of Nonprofit podcast, the podcast that delivers actionable items you can implement at your organization right away. I’m your host Ephraim Gopin of 1832 Communications. Today I’m really happy to have with us a talented nonprofit marketing and fundraising smartie, Abby Jarvis. Abby, how you doing today?
Abby: Doing pretty well, doing pretty well.
Ephraim: Let’s introduce you to our listeners, watchers and readers.
Abby Jarvis is the nonprofit education manager at Qgiv, a company dedicated to building powerful fundraising tools that empower nonprofits to thrive and grow. In her eight years at Qgiv, Abby’s become passionate about understanding industry best practices, learning how they can help nonprofits be more effective and sharing that information with other fundraisers. She’s authored a number of different articles, ebooks and research studies, including the recently released report “Expecting the Unexpected,” which explores fundraising patterns and takeaways from 2020 that can help fundraisers build more sustainable programs and campaigns.
What Is Content Marketing
In today’s episode we’re going to discuss content marketing. Let’s dive right in. Abby, how do you define content marketing and where do you research or find ideas for new content?
Abby: So kind of at its heart content marketing is understanding what questions people may have about your cause or your mission. Anticipating those questions, answering them and then giving people a way to get involved. So if you are an advocacy group, you want to help people understand the cause that you’re advocating for. So you would first get people educated about the cause that you’re working toward and then giving them a way to get involved, instead of just like defining the cause and asking them to donate. You would educate them a little more.
Then as far as where to look to get started, honestly my favorite method for content marketing is just to take a look at what other people are doing that are kind of in your same space and then tweaking it. I’m not saying plagiarize what other people are doing but certainly take a look and see what’s working for them. If you’re an advocacy group, maybe look at what other advocacy groups are doing and then kind of use their experiences as a template. Experiment a little bit and then tweak what you do to suit your own goals and mission.
Ephraim: I absolutely agree. No reason to always have to reinvent the wheel.
Abby: No, there’s no point.
Content That Causes People To Take Action
Ephraim: How do you decide what topics to cover and write about and then does each piece have a goal or a bottom-line action that you want people to take?
Abby: When we’re trying to decide what we want to do, there are a few things we consider. The biggest things that we consider are the conversations that are happening around us. We look at conversations that are happening in the nonprofit industry as a whole- that’s the space that we operate in- and then we do look some at conversations that are happening in our communities and even like country and worldwide. I’m in Florida. So an example of how we’ve kind of pivoted some of what we’ve… that’s such a dumb word that people overuse all the time. I can’t believe I just did it. Gross. We’ve had instances where there has been an overarching conversation that has kind of dictated that we change what we are talking about. Natural disasters are a big one. If there’s a national disaster in Florida or somewhere else in the states, we’ll kind of stop what we were gonna talk about because that conversation is dominating the industry that we’re in.
Other things we look at are cyclical. So we know in the springtime that’s when people just really start planning their summer events. So we don’t talk about planning summer events in the summer. We talk about doing it in the spring. In the late fall, early winter, Giving Tuesday happens but most people are planning their Giving Tuesday campaigns in August or September for a December campaign. So we like to look at when people are actually looking for the information that we’re putting out. If you are looking to start a content plan, the best thing you can do is really take a look at what your peers and your donors are talking about and kind of building your plan that way.
Then of course try to be flexible with what you put into place because you’re probably gonna have to tweak it a little bit. For example, that “Expecting the Unexpected” report, we actually ended up, two days before we were going to push it live, rebranded the whole thing. There were a couple really tragic events that happened in the states right around the time we were going to publish it. We decided it was inappropriate to publish at the time. The conversations that we were looking at was not the time to do it and we actually renamed and rebranded the whole report so it wouldn’t detract or distract from the conversations at hand. Look at what people are doing but also be sure that you’re flexible enough that you can change or postpone or kind of update things to be appropriate to what’s going on.
Ephraim: Fantastic. So does each piece have that bottom line or a goal that you want people to actually take?
Abby: Yes, yes, for the most part. If you’re a nonprofit employee and you’re putting together a content marketing plan, your time is too valuable to spend putting together a resource or a piece of content or something that isn’t going to work for you and isn’t going to help you achieve a specific goal. So whether you write a blog article or put together an ad campaign or send a newsletter, there should always be something for your audiences to do. I mean for a lot of people that’s going to be asking them to donate. It could be asking people to volunteer, it could be asking them even something very small like asking them to share your resource on social media. For me it’s very often asking people to download something, it’s asking for them to sign up for a webinar. But everything does generally have that call to action at the end of it. Because like I said, time is valuable and your work is valuable and it would be a real shame to have a piece of content that doesn’t kind of pay for itself.
The other thing really is to have that goal in your mind when you’re starting to create the piece that you’re talking about. I’ve seen brochures… you’re gonna put together a brochure about your nonprofit. That’s super cool. What do you want people to do about it? Because just reading a brochure isn’t that cool. You might learn something but that education isn’t really as valuable as it would be if there is an actionable way to to take that knowledge and apply it somewhere.
3 Things To Prepare Before Writing A Blog Post
Ephraim: Excellent. Could you tell us… it’s today’s actionable item. Could you tell us three things to prepare or know in advance before starting to write a new blog post?
Abby: Okay. So I need to know or prepare… The things that initially occur to me is understand who you’re talking to, especially if your nonprofit is in an area that uses a lot of industry terms that people aren’t necessarily familiar with. You have to know in your head, are you talking to someone who has never heard of this mission before. I’m going to use health care. I see a lot of health care organizations, specifically around rare diseases or something like that. So I’m just gonna use that as an example. I may never have heard of this disorder that you’re raising awareness of. If you are writing to me, you’re gonna write very differently than you would be if you’re trying to reach out to doctors who may already be familiar with your work. So know who your audience is. That will help you lay out your content efficiently. You may define all the necessary terms up front instead of spacing them throughout. It will help you understand at what level to speak to people and it also will help you determine that call to action, before you have actually built your content. If you know that you’re speaking to… you want to get some people involved, if you know that you’re going to be talking to teenagers and you want them to volunteer, you’re going to approach your content very differently than you would be if you knew that you were going to be talking to doctors that you wanted to get on board for a specific cause. So that’s important.
The other thing to know is just basic writing tips and I don’t mean when I say basic, I don’t mean the writing tips you learned in your high school English class, because that’s not going to be terribly fun for anyone. It’s not going to be fun for you to write and it’s not going to be very fun for people to read. That was something I had to really break myself up when I started working at Qgiv. I have a literature degree. I am all about the 3.5 paragraphs. I can just rattle off to you all the instances in which you would want to use a semicolon or an m-dash or regular colon or whatever. You can kind of put all of that on the back burner. The best copy is not necessarily the same copy that would get you an A in your freshman lit class. It’s shorter paragraphs, more white space, incomplete sentences totally fine. You can end a sentence with a preposition. So the piece of advice I like to give people when they’re writing is to read what you’ve written aloud before you publish it. If that’s not how you talk, you should switch it up a little bit. People, I think especially the younger people that we’re reaching online, so not necessarily your 75-year-old donor who likes getting the long form newsletters but other people that you’re going to be reaching with your content, are accustomed to social media content. We’re accustomed to short, snappy updates and we want everything to be bite-sized and really digestible and very informal. So that’s another one.
I’m trying to think of a good third one because there’s so many things I want to say. I will say this: When you write a blog article, you are putting a great deal of work into a piece of content and it is helpful to have in the back of your mind a quick little blueprint of where you’re going to use it and how you’re going to use it. If you are writing a blog article, for goodness sake don’t just write it and leave it on your page. Write it, put it on your page, put it on social media. Take a couple sentences or like a snappy quote and put it in your newsletter and then link to the blog. Link to your blogs within other blogs, so when you’re updating you’re building kind of a little network of all these different articles. They’ll link to each other. One article is a lot of work but it can do a lot of work for you. As you’re writing it, try to think of how you will use it. If you know that you are going to want to feature this in a newsletter, you can maybe add a nice pull quote in there and then you can use that pull quote in your newsletter. Your blog is doing extra work for you without you having to put in a lot of extra work.
How Content Helps Fundraising
Ephraim: Fantastic. All three of those. Excellent. If we’re now going to talk… You just mentioned and talked about the different content that you’re putting together. How can content that a nonprofit pushes out help its overall fundraising effort?
Abby: Oh my gosh. I could just yell about this forever. This is one of my favorite topics. Of course there are the educational aspects of it. I for example live in a county in Florida that has very high food insecurities. So a nonprofit that is focusing on raising money for the food pantry that they run would benefit from sharing with people, hey, we serve X number of people in our county. So there’s the educational aspect of it.
There’s also the inspirational aspect of it. People love human stories and donors like giving to other humans. They don’t get as excited about donating to an organization as they do about giving to other people. So if you can put together a blog article that shares a really cool story from a client, someone who’s benefiting from your services, that will be very inspiring to your donors.
Now I get this question very frequently. When I say that you should be telling stories that highlight your clients, I don’t necessarily mean you have to have a verbatim, word for word story from a client. There are a lot of nonprofits that for one of a bazillion different reasons may not be able to feature clients. You could be dealing with privacy laws, you could be dealing with HIPAA laws, you could be thinking about how to share stories without exploiting your clients. So you can also share composite stories. If you’re a woman’s shelter for example, you don’t want to list the name and age of one of your clients. You may want to create a fictional character whose… the story that you’re telling will pull from various examples from different clients. So you want to inspire your donors by telling them personal stories, even if the people are not real people.
You can also do this with animals. A lot of those people love an anthropomorphized animal. Works really nicely. You can do this with other causes that aren’t necessarily as people driven. You can share stories about people encountering the arts or people who’ve leaned on the arts to get through the pandemic. You can talk about, if you’re a nature conservancy… I get a lot of questions like we don’t have a person that we’re saving, we don’t save puppies, we’re saving an ecosystem. Okay, we’ll talk about the people who are interacting with their ecosystem. So the educational aspect, the inspirational aspect and then… I had another point and I lost it.
Ephraim: So far everything you said was great. You hit on the rational, you hit on the emotional. You hit on all the parts of storytelling, the different parts that you need to hit. When you’re telling it, when you’re telling those stories that are meant… my follow-up question then, those stories are meant to help fundraising. How are those stories going to help fundraising?
Abby: Yeah okay. The third point… So educational, inspirational and then the act. You tell a beautiful story about this woman that came to your shelter. She needed help getting out of a bad situation. She had children in tow and a superhero swooped in and because they had donated to your organization, she had a safe place to stay, she was able to transition into a new job, her children had a way to get to school. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to help another woman like this! Guess what? You totally can! Here’s how. Or look at this puppy that we brought in. We had this beautiful interaction with them. They went from being frightened and bitey to being loving and happy now because of you. They’re totally healthy, they’re in a forever home. Wouldn’t it be great if you could help another puppy just like that one! Guess what? You totally can! That’s kind of the fundraising piece.
The other thing that you can do… We talk a lot in the industry about being active on different channels. Making appeals on social media and in regular written appeals and in email and in this and that. The blog article is really kind of the base of all of those pieces. If you have a wonderful story written, you can share that story on five different channels, each of which will point people back to your donation form. So I think that’s a really powerful way to engage people. You can also turn that story into a little graphic for Instagram. You can share it a hundred different ways, so it’s a versatile fundraising piece that works on a lot of different channels.
Producing Lots Of Content
Ephraim: Fantastic. Speaking of all those pieces now, you’re in charge of producing quite a lot of different content for Qgiv: ebooks, blog posts, website copy, email marketing, newsletters, online resources and I’m sure I missed about 20 more. That’s a lot of juggling. How do you manage to produce so much content each year?
Abby: Right now I am very blessed in that I have a large team of people. I rely heavily on other people to help me. I’ll use the research study that we just put out as an example. I love research. I love writing but I am not a particularly well-organized person. I mean I know where all my notes are and everything but I set milestones for myself. Okay, we’re going to start research in September, we’re going to have the first draft done in January, the second draft needs to be done in February blah blah blah. That’s not my gift. I will get passionate about a project, do a real deep dive and then the next thing I know and I did it this time, my draft is due in two weeks. Oh my gosh I’m gonna be glued to my computer for the next like indeterminate amount of time. So my boss and my good friend Sarah forces me to be very organized. That’s her strong point. So I lean a lot on her. I’ll even have a meeting with her and be like, oh my god, I didn’t think I was gonna get this heavy into it. Should we push the date back? And she’s like nope, you can do all of that additional research as a follow-up down the road. Not right now.
We have someone who edits everything that goes out. We have someone who understands SEO way more than me because I understand SEO but it stresses me out and I don’t like thinking about it. So she’ll tweak things for me. We have people who just make it pretty. I am a terrible designer. Don’t ask me to design you anything. It’s gonna be a bad, bad time.
But I also know that not everyone has access to a team as large as mine. When I started at Qgiv, we didn’t have all of these people in place. It was very much me and maybe one or two other people generating a ton of content. The secret at that point is really my weak spot, being very organized and setting milestones in place. When I say setting milestones, I used to have to sit down and say, okay, research for this thing is going to take this long. I need X amount of time to create a draft, so my rough due date for me is going to be this date. I need to have it at other places by this time and then we’re going to publish around this date. For blog articles I could say it takes me two hours to sit down and write a blog article. So if you want me to generate four blog articles this week, that’s fine but I need time. I can’t be maybe in this meeting. I’ve had to be really intentional about automating reminders. For this podcast I had a reminder last week that I needed to be ready for this podcast because otherwise I would just… time sneaks up on you.
The other thing that has been helpful and I’ve had to get good at is understanding what capabilities I have and being able to communicate where my boundaries are. That’s something that I think a lot of people, especially if you’re working in a small shop, are afraid of doing but it’s very important. If you have an over enthusiastic Board that wants you to generate X amount of content in X amount of time or if you have a really passionate development director that is setting goals that are super high for you and then they throw something else on your plate, there is nothing wrong with saying hey, this seems like a wonderful project. I know how passionate you are about it. I would like to do a good job but I have these things on my plate. My plate is full. How would you like me to shift priorities? I can do this for you but this thing is going to have to move. That’s a very scary conversation but I have found that people will respect you a little more if you were to say, I want to give you two really wonderful products but you’re asking me for three. So which two would you like? That’s very helpful. Those would be the big the big things. Have boundaries, communicate them and then there’s no shame in asking hey, help me prioritize this because I have too much happening and I can’t do a good job. I want to do a good job but I need your help.
Let’s Learn More About Abby
Ephraim: I hope the audience heard that answer because it’s perfect and it’s very, like you said, it’s very hard for people to do it but it’s a must, considering all the things we’re being… that are being thrown at us at once. So yeah, absolutely. Excellent. Let’s move on to the lightning round and learn more about you. What got you started on your nonprofit career path?
Abby: Oh it’s a whole situation. I did not intend to do this. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I know I wanted to… I’ve wanted to be a writer for forever. I got into working at Qgiv entirely on accident. They were interviewing for a, I guess an administrative assistant and I interviewed for it and they messaged me later and they’re like, so we’ve decided that you would not be… we think we could use you to do something else. We want you to launch a blog and we want you. They were having me do… I was calling clients or people who had gone through the buying process with us and then interviewing them about why they did or didn’t go with us. I hate talking on the phone. I hate it so much but I started learning a lot on those phone calls about why people would or would not choose a software company and through that I learned a lot about what goes into running a nonprofit. So to kind of address those gaps, people would say, oh I really needed a platform that helped me do X and I don’t know that that’s a thing Qgiv can do. I could say yeah it totally is but at that point they had already moved on.
So when they asked me to start the blog, I had never written a blog article before but I started learning. There are set ways that nonprofits need to do things. It looks different for everyone. If I can understand how those processes need to work and understand how my platform fits there, I can make a pretty decent blog article. It has the educational aspect of it. Not a lot of inspiration when it comes to software, although that’s something we’re getting better at now, is telling the stories about people who actually use what we have. But it was a total accident.
So one of the other things I do at Qgiv, I do our webinar program. When Todd, the president of Qgiv, asked me to do a webinar, I was panicked. Absolutely panicked. I’d never done one before. I just started researching everything. The best thing I think I ever did as an employee here was set up in RSS feed of fundraising thought leaders. Julia Campbell was one of the very first people I started following. Gail Perry was in there. A lot of people. I didn’t know anything. I knew I didn’t know anything so I made a long list of people who knew everything and just started following them and then this has carried me into other places. Now I volunteer with a local nonprofit, sit on their Board, help with some of the fundraising aspects. I have a lot of the book smarts and now I’m getting more in the trenches like fundraising.
Ephraim: Cool. So given where you sit at Qgiv, you’ve got I guess an up top view of the sector, but you’re also- as you just said- in the trenches. So you’ve got book smarts and street smarts. If there’s one thing you could shake up in the nonprofit world, what would it be?
Abby: Oh, that’s a lot of a question. I really wish I could shake Board members by their shoulders and reiterate the significance of building relationships with a nonprofit staff. I think that would solve so many issues in the nonprofit world. I think it would help solve the burnout issue that we see a lot of in the nonprofit world. I think it would help the fundraising aspect of it, especially when it comes to building relationships with larger donors. I think it would help with getting resources which contributes to the burnout. There is so often a disconnect between a governing Board and the staff and it makes it hard for staff to get reasonable goals and to set reasonable goals and maintain reasonable workloads and I think the boards would feel way more excited about the work that they’re doing.
So the amount of tension and anxiety I see from fundraisers during the pandemic is a perfect example. The conflicts between Board- not even conflict, because it’s not like an angry thing- the disconnect between boards and staff was immense. Fundraising staff needed to raise money but boards didn’t want them to talk to their donors. Or boards on the total opposite end of the spectrum would want to launch a campaign that was totally inappropriate for what was going on at the time and there wasn’t a clear line of communication between staff and boards and there was a lot of consternation on a lot of people’s parts. If I could change one thing about the nonprofit industry that would be the big one because it would solve so many other problems.
Ephraim: One word, co-sign. What is orchidology? I don’t know if I said that right and what do you know about it?
Abby: What is what?
Ephraim: Orchidology or something like that.
Abby: Like the study of orchids?
Ephraim: Bingo. I saw something on your LinkedIn that you know that and now I’m gonna ask what is orchidology.
Abby: I am a gardener. I’m fascinated at what you saw on LinkedIn. There’s nothing to question that. I don’t know a lot about the botany, like hard science kind of thing but I am a huge plant dork. Orchids were my first foray into that world. Now I have a yard that is all edible. We’re on almost a quarter acre. I’ve got more than 100 different edible plants in my landscape but I do still have a dedicated little section where it’s all my orchids. I am not really good at the taxonomy of things but I feel like a wizard and like Harry Potter every time I say the Latin name of an orchid. If I say like dendrobium aggregatum, I feel like something’s going to start floating in my office or something like that. Orchids are super cool. They’re a black hole. If you buy one, it’s only a matter of time before you start going to weird orchard shows and rattling off terms in Latin and then your husband is going to look at the plants that you bring home. He’s like, where are you going to put them? And I’m just going to say, I don’t know man. Stop asking questions. It’s a slippery slope.
Ephraim: I just learned about 20 new things. That’s fantastic. Love love that answer. The good and the not so good of living in Florida?
Abby: I think I’m a recent ish convert. The things you always hear in Florida, we don’t have seasons. And by that I mean we do have seasons. We have a lot of seasons. they’re just not as well defined as they are in other places. It’s aggressively hot. I went for a hike on Saturday and despite it being early April, the heat index was up over 90. I drank half a gallon of water and still felt sick at the end of the hike. It was probably a poorly planned hike but that’s fine. So I always joke that in most parts of the world, people get pale and fat in the wintertime and then you have to get ready for swimsuit season. It’s the opposite. We do it in summer here because everyone stays inside. You don’t do things. You don’t go outside.
But I think the pluses are much more. We have beautiful parks. Where I was hiking, it’s called the Lake Wales Ridge. It’s back in the before times, in the pre-history part of history. Florida used to be an island. There was just one little ridge and that was an island. The rest of the state didn’t exist and this ridge is that ridge. We have plant and animal life you can’t see anywhere else in the country. If you can find a beach that’s not super crowded, the beaches are pretty great. It’s cheap to live here. That’s awesome.
The people are generally pretty nice. We do have our share of the weird news stories that come out of Florida. But fun fact and I say this because I get angry because, “Florida, that’s where all the weird people live.” Yes we have those but the reason you see Florida man and all the news titles is because Florida doesn’t have a lot of the laws protecting the identities of people who are being investigated for whatever they’ve gotten into. So it’s open season. you can report on any of it. So everyone else has their share of the goofballs and the oddballs and the weirdos but we just talk about ours more. That’s never dull.
Ephraim: I love that answer. You are a self-described fairy tale enthusiast. Favorite fairy tale as a kid and why?
Abby: Oh man, I had so many favorite fairy tales. If I had to pick one that people are familiar with, I loved Sleeping Beauty mostly because I wanted to be Aurora running around in the forest with her talking good friends or like woodland creatures. Very into that. That’s very much my vibe. I want to run around in the woods with some animals.
But there is a story called The 12 Dancing Princesses. That’s a little bit older and it’s… they’re these 12 princesses that their father wants to marry them off predictably. This poor farmer shows up. He falls in love with them and there’s a mystery in the castle: The king wants to know why the princess’s shoes are always worn out in the morning, when they are supposed to have been sleeping? So this poor farmer follows them and the princesses go into this magical realm where there’s a castle and there’s a ball and they dance with these fairy princes until they’ve worn holes in their shoes and then they go back home go to sleep and that’s why their shoes are always worn out. So the farmer solves the mystery. He marries the princess. Everyone lives happily ever after. That was my favorite. I think it’s in the Red Fairy book. There are a bunch of different fairy books which are volumes of different fairy tales and that I think, that’s in the red one. It’s really good.
Ephraim: Lastly, let’s turn the table. You get to ask me a question. I have absolutely no idea what’s coming.
Abby: I do have some questions. Aren’t you from Boston? Like that area?
Ephraim: Yes I am.
Abby: Okay so my question is in two parts. How did you move from Boston to Israel and how on earth do you manage the time difference?
Ephraim: Let’s see. I was born in New York, then we moved to Boston, then Florida, then Connecticut, then Toronto. The deal is that for most of those years was spent in Connecticut and Boston. Basically my father’s whole family is from Boston area, so I have very deep New England roots and so I grew up in New England. Connecticut was where I spent my formative years, so I always called New London, Connecticut my home and Boston was my second home because we always went. My grandparents were two hours away. That’s where I live. Once I left Toronto after high school, I came here a little bit over 32 years ago almost now and I kind of stayed. I was in the states for a couple years after that but basically I’ve stayed. So it’s kind of moving up and down the northeast, the east coast of the U.S., in Canada and then I moved here.
In terms of the time difference, I kind of just got used to working 24/6 so that there is no time difference and kind of people who I work with, they know I’m available at all hours except on Saturdays. Friday night and Saturday where I tune out for 25 hours and they know I’m just not available. But I’ve done conference calls 4am local time here. So I understand that to some people that’s crazy. I agree but I go out walking around 5am. Basically that day that we had that conference call, it had to be at 9pm EST. So I said, okay, I’ll just get up an hour earlier and go walking at 4am instead of five and I’ll just start my day an hour earlier. No biggie. So I’ve kind of just gotten used to the time difference. It doesn’t bother me. The only problems I have is when the states moves their clocks forward or backwards and then I have to figure out, are we six hours ahead? Eight hours ahead? It kind of does get confusing for those two weeks where we’re not. The rest of it? Not a problem. Bring it.
Abby: Can I ask one more question?
Ephraim: Yup.
Abby: What is your favorite Passover tradition?
Ephraim: Because I love storytelling… this is gonna sound crazy to the younger people in the audience but when I was five, I started flying on my own every year from Connecticut to Cleveland to be with my grandparents for eight, nine, ten days over Passover. And yes I flew by myself people at age five and I wore a suit and tie because that’s what you flew in in 1978. I’m just saying that’s what you wore when you flew. Passover for me was my grandmother made all the foods, all the foods and she made- because I was the only grandchild there and I’m her oldest grandchild- she made sure I had everything that was good in the world I had it all. The good yummy food that today everybody would say is totally not healthy. I don’t care. I ate it for 10 days. In terms of traditions, I don’t necessarily have a tradition that I love more than other traditions. It’s more of just the foods around the holiday and I get that nostalgic feeling of my grandmother’s house. Like my mom this year made special noodles for the chicken soup that I haven’t had since I was probably 11. And I said, oh wow, this reminds me of going to Cleveland. So to me…there are wonderful traditions. To me it’s more nostalgia and that feeling of I was with my grandparents, little me, at age five or six, alone, had special time with them. I got all the presents, all the candy all the yummy you name it. I got it and that’s what I get to look back and so for me that’s what Passover does for me.
Abby: I love it.
Ephraim: It’s all about the stories and all about the nostalgia and the food. Yes, I’ll admit and the food.
Abby: I’m a huge sentimentalist, so I totally understand.
Ephraim: Abby, thank you very very much for appearing today on the podcast. You can learn about Qgiv and Abby’s work at qgiv.com I also encourage everybody to connect with Abby on LinkedIn. Abby, it was a pleasure having you here and being able to learn from you. Thank you.
Abby: Absolutely. Thanks for letting me talk to you. A pleasure.
Ephraim: Have a great day.
Abby: You too.