Frank Barry: The Ethics of Selling to Churches

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As a marketer, you probably already know that it's important to do business ethically.

But if you're selling to churches or other organizations that have a strong ethical standard, you may feel like you're walking a tightrope. Finding the right balance between ethical and effective marketing can be a challenge.

So what marketing strategies can you use to build trust and create a positive relationship with your customers? How can you make sure that your marketing efforts don't come across as shady or spammy?

There's no other person better qualified to answer these questions than our guest Frank Barry, COO of Tithe.ly. Join Travis as he sits down with Frank to discuss the marketing strategies that can help you grow your business while staying true to your values!

Frank Barry is the COO of Tithe.ly, a church-giving platform that helps congregations raise money through software. Frank is also a marketing and technology professional with 10 years of experience in the software industry.

If you want to grow your business in creative ways that make customers happy—and do it without selling out or compromising your values—you've got to listen to this one.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• Effective marketing strategies for startups
• How to identify, improve and optimize customer experience 
• Why being ethical is crucial to business success

Want to give your podcast the boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition? Check out honestpodcasts.com and take the first step toward achieving your podcasting goals!

And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Transcript

Frank Barry  0:00  
We are Christians who want to do the right thing. It's sort of a foregone conclusion like we are not going to do things that are shady or spammy or scam or clickbait, like we don't go down that path because it's just not who we are. It's not who we want to be in a market or it's not our company. The people we have that work entirely love what they do. They love the fact that we're serving churches, oftentimes, they're volunteering their own local church. So it's just kind of in the DNA to do the right thing. It doesn't mean we're perfect, it just means that we kind of default towards doing the right thing.
 

Travis Albritton  0:33  
Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton. And today on the podcast, we have one of the cofounders of Tithe.ly, Frank Berry. So in this episode, we're gonna be talking about early marketing strategies, that helps Tithe.ly get off the grounds. Tithe.ly being one of the larger church and nonprofit domination management software companies. We're gonna talk about how Frank specifically stays connected to his customers, even though he's in a leadership position, CEO of the company, but still taking time to connect with the people they're serving to stay in touch with their needs and the problems that they're facing. So that as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as someone who's removed from the sales process, the front facing sales process, still having that connective tissue to some of the things that he does to stay connected in that way. And then also, some really creative ways that they were able to save money as they were growing the business, and as they were growing the company. Because with marketing, you can spend money on all kinds of stuff, but not everything works. And so you'll hear him share some some really unique things that they were able to do in order to not just grow the company, but do it profitably. Now, make sure you stay tuned to the very end of the interview where I share my number one practical takeaway from my conversation with Frank. But without further ado, let's dive in. So tell me in five minutes or less, who is Tithe.ly? Who do you serve? And what is it that you do?

Frank Barry  2:07  
Amazing, five minutes or less? I think I can go less.

Travis Albritton  2:09  
Yeah, maybe 60 seconds. Maybe I set the bar highly.

Frank Barry  2:13  
Yeah. So Tithe.ly is a software company. We make software specifically for churches and ministries. We do some other nonprofits and charities and whatnot that uses, but you know, real specifically focused on churches and ministries. We serve churches and ministries all over the world. We have, you know, nearly 40,000 customers of all shapes and sizes, you know, from the startup church, you know, the brand new church that's got 10 people in a garage that's kind of has big dreams all the way up to the big mega church that's got 20,000 people meeting on a Sunday. And specifically, we started out with making a product that let you give to your church, right, like make, you know, churches for I don't know, your audience may or may not know. But in churches, usually every weekend, there's like an offering moment, there's a time during the church service, where people are gonna give financially to support the work of the church and kind of do good in the community and all those kinds of things. And traditionally, you take the plate, you take a plate or a basket or something that you pass it around. And so we were like, you know what, that should be done on a mobile phone. Because things like Starbucks, and Amazon and Uber and everything else exists, you should be able to give to your church on your mobile phone. So we started off with a real simple giving app. And then we've added a bunch of features over the years. We do full like church CRM systems and websites and church apps and email and text communications. We really striving to be kind of the world leader in church software, at price points that every church can afford, with, with really good service. Like in the church, you want to deal with real humans. And so we try to have a real human touch to our business and kind of care for our customers in ways that that resonate with them.

Travis Albritton  3:58  
And so when did, when was Tithe.ly started, like what was the year? Because that'll also help set some context for kind of what was, what else was going on in the world of tech at that time?

Frank Barry  4:08  
Yeah, 2015 is when we kind of incorporated and officially like launched the company publicly. There was a little bit of time before that. We're like, Dean, our CEO, he's the one that had the idea. He's like, you should be able to give on your phone, kind of like you buy us coffee at Starbucks. And his son, Barn and engineers, so Barn went off and kind of built it. And then we had just some kind of friends and pastor friend churches using it and whatnot. So that was a little bit prior to 2015. But it was to, it was June of 15, June or July of 15, when we like finished incorporating the company and kind of publicly said, alright let's go, let's get after this. So middle of 15th was the real launch date.

Travis Albritton  4:52  
And so what are those, what did that early data feedback look like? When you're, because I imagine you all are, have different jobs working in other companies, some are ministry, some were working kind of in the secular world. Like, what are those early years look like when you're shaping the products? And trying to find like the product market fit that's going to help set you up for long term success.

Frank Barry  5:17  
Right. Yeah, yeah, there was four of us that, that got it going. And we were all doing other things at the same time. And trying to figure this out. I think one of the, early early days, either Dean or myself, depending on kind of time of day, and work schedules and all that kind of stuff, we would be on the phone with a new customer. So someone would find us online, and we can get into that at some point. But we focused heavily on kind of an inbound, you know, find the solution, go to the website, sign up for the product, you know, don't talk to a person kind of approach. But our, our, I don't know if it was secret sauce, or just kind of our approach was actually that we did want to talk to you, we wanted to make it easy for you to sign up and start using the software. But then simultaneously, we wanted to get you on at the time of Google Hangout. And, you know, I wanted to know, we would spend time on the phone too, but preferably, I could get you on video like this, this was pre COVID. Right. So this is before everybody was using Zoom. This was still, I wouldn't say early days of video conferencing, but it wasn't mainstream by any means. But you know, again, it goes back to our kind of real human approach, right? If I could get you on a Google Hangout, and we could interact like this, and you could see my face. And you might see one of my kids running around. We could talk about, you know, our churches and ministry. And it just added this human component that we enjoyed a lot, it was kind of part of our DNA. And I think that the early customers, and even to this day, also enjoy, because you kind of get to put a face with the company, and you don't just sign up online. So we made it really easy to come to us and sign up on the website and start using it to take donations immediately. So frictionless and easy signup, and all that were kind of part of our core DNA, but also just that human touch, where we could talk to you and help you get to know whatever you needed to about the product and us as a company.

Travis Albritton  7:21  
So when you say that you were relying on inbound, to really kind of put yourself out there and then start attracting prospects to become people that you could serve, what were some of the things that you were doing? Was it blog? Was it SEO optimization? Was it, are you doing any paid traffic at the time? Like, what were some of the things you were pulling at to get that first 100 or first 1000 customers and then work. Because that's always the hardest, you don't know what's gonna work. You don't know, you know, hey, we're gonna throw this thing out there and may crash and burn, or it might be the thing that like, takes off. So yeah, what were some of the things that you were doing at the very beginning when you were first getting traction? You know, just really start building momentum.

Frank Barry  8:01  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one piece that might just be good context for people listening right are the church in America alone is about 300, and some odd, right 310, 315, 320,000 churches in the US. And then there's churches all over the world. So it's even far bigger than that. But that alone is a pretty big, like marketplace, if you're thinking the business side of this. So there's a lot of them out there, and they all need software, some form of software, and they're all taking donations, you know that in 2015, they were al,l cash and cheque is the primary way that you would give to your church. So it was sort of built in right pretty big market, customer doing something in a little bit of an older way that was still existing in the church as it existed in other places, right? You used to, we probably all remember the day or at least some folks will remember the day that you go to the grocery store and somebody in front of you be paying with a check, right? It doesn't happen anymore. Or at least I haven't seen it in a long time. People don't even go to the grocery store anymore, they just use Instacart and whatnot, but like if you go to the grocery store people aren't using checks anymore, they're using usually their debit card or something like that. So you know the church was bound to go through that kind of digital transformation at some point and become more digitally savvy and using not just forgiving but for all kinds of things. CRM and member management and apps and better websites and using email and text communication and all these different things accounting, online accounting software, like all this stuff was bound to happen. So I'll just let that's, just a little bit of like groundwork for you know, we entered the market and we had you know, early kind of friends, right like my church and other churches that I was associated with starting use it Dean's church, Barn's church, like like we just started getting friends to use it. So that was one way, there's a little bit of word of mouth built into that. And then from a a marketing perspective, beyond just the word of mouth, it was just all inbound. So I have a little bit of a marketing background, and kind of was a believer in the whole, like inbound marketing style. And so really, from day one we wrote, you know, if we could, it was at least one blog post a week, if I could crank out two or three, we would. Right? And then we had our newsletter. So it was the blog posts, or two or three a week, and then it was a weekly newsletter. And then it was lots of guest posting, like finding, you know, building relationships with anybody that we could, that was also writing content for the church, or, you know, serving the church with a product or somehow, you know, doing something online for the church, like building tons of relationships with people getting to know the other people in the industry, doing things to serve churches, and you know, just kind of helping each other. And so I would do tons of guest writing, and trying to get backlinks and all the SEO magic that you can think of, right? Like, it was a daily thing of just SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO. And writing content was kind of the pillar of that, you know, even to this day, we still write three days a week. We do a podcast. We do our best to kind of produce content that our audience can really benefit from. And, and that just pays off with, you know, like, we get a lot of traffic to the website for all of that.

Travis Albritton  11:22  
Yeah, well, and there's something that you said that that really just kind of stuck with me, which is like, thinking about how you observed other industries innovating in specific ways. And then identified like an industry that was kind of lagging behind, but that would eventually catch on to that same trend. It's like there's nothing new under the sun. Like even when I think about disruptive industries, like, like Airbnb, right? It disrupted the hotel industry. Right, right. But you could really see it coming. Like if you if you started to identify like, oh, Uber, people are starting to rent out their own cars. And right, well, how long until that then trickles into all these other things? Which, you know, I imagine, if you're in the VC world, you hear where the Uber of stuff, right? Yes, it's like, yeah, we just happen to be in an industry that hasn't been disrupted yet. And so even just when you're at a product level, identifying like, okay, how do we kind of ensure success as much as possible? Or how do we get as many chips on the table as we can? It is seeing that same change happen in other places, and spotting the similarities in the trends and then applying them in the industry that you're trying to change as well. Were you doing that? Or were you like, looking at seeing like, okay, Starbucks is doing this, is there a piece of that that would work for churches? Or, you know, like on an eye level.

Frank Barry  12:42  
Is it like the original? Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't, we were not sitting around, looking for the next thing. You know, what am I saying? I think it was definitely, you know, the App Store was out, apps were starting to become a thing. You know, Starbucks had it where you could put your credit card in and buy the coffee. And it was easy, right? So it was almost like it happened. And it sparked an idea. It just so happens that simultaneously, like the whole church industry, which isn't necessarily how we talk about it, but for sake of this conversation, right? Like the industry was behind, right? And so like the idea and the fact that the market, like needed the idea, we're, we're kind of like, like you know, Dean was a pastor for a long time. And I went to church for a long time, but like, so we all gave with checks. And Dean was a pastor. So he actually led the church and sort of had, you know, behind the scenes insight into giving in the trends and how it worked. And what would happen in the summers. And what would happen when there was a rainstorm or an ice storm in Atlanta, or what would happen when, you know, it was Christmas, and people were on vacation or travel like, so you see what happens to giving. And then you're like, oh, but if you can do it right on your phone, you can kind of give anywhere anytime. You don't have to be in church necessarily, or your local church. You don't, you don't have to remember your checkbook. When you know, when you're scrambling to get the kids out of the house and get to church. You don't have to remember that because you're not forgetting your phone. So yeah, I don't think we were nobody was sitting around, I think, you know, it was technology evolving, you know, an app or another app, sparking the idea. And then just knowing it makes sense. At that point. It's like well, yeah, people pass the plate. Eventually the plates gonna go away. You know, it's not it's still not gone. We've gone through COVID. Now at this point, and the plate is still there. People are still giving with cash and check. It's a smaller percentage, but it's still a big number. And you know it, but eventually it'll go away, right? So like spotting that trend, being really, really early. And then just being like, we're almost eight years or seven, you know, a little over seven years into this. Like that's, that's a good chunk of time seven years doing one thing and we got plenty of room to keep and keep going, you know. So it's kind of longevity and persistence and staying with it, you know, not given up through the whole thing.

Travis Albritton  15:20  
For sure. Well, and I'm curious, making the pivot from early stage startup, new company, getting traction, to then scaling the company, both internally with your team, the number of customers that you can serve. And then like the marketing levers that open up to you once you start getting more revenue coming in. When did you start adding to that SEO kind of inbound focus, which still is at the core of what you what you do, right? But start getting into Google Ads and Facebook Ads and sponsoring conferences and things like that. Like how did all of those things evolve from the growth that you're experiencing and what you were trying to do moving forward?

Frank Barry  16:04  
Yeah. And we actually, we started running Google Ads actually, really early, we didn't have a lot of money. Sure. couldn't spend a ton. But we did start doing that, because that was also a little part of my digital marketing background. So we definitely started doing that in the early days. And that's just like grown over time, as you sort of understand your key metrics better. And you know, how much you can spend to acquire, you know, early days, you don't really know any of that. And you're just kind of, you're sort of like, just praying for new customers anyway, you can get them and you're doing whatever you can, and you're trying everything you can. And so we actually would go to some events, we again, we didn't have a lot of money. So it wasn't like we were paying a lot. And I remember, I'd show up in an event team would do the same thing. And we'd have like, one of those like pop up tables that they give you with with like, no tablecloth, like one little, like stand up on the table, like pop up banner, and like our laptop, like it was that sad, right? And we would just do our thing. And nowadays, we have a great booth and we look somewhat professional at a conference and we pay for bigger sponsorship opportunities, you know, where it makes sense. But I think early days, we were really scrappy, in the sense of, yeah we wanted to get to some conferences, but how can I get there and not pay to be the biggest sponsor? Could I do a session? Could I do a dinner? Could I get coffee? Could like, what could I do that help save money, but still kind of got me around things? And how can I build relationships with the people doing the conference? You know, that we're not just about the conference, but maybe you're part of a network of churches, maybe there's other things we can do that serves you guys well. So it makes sense to have a set your conference where we're not paying to be there. And you know, so we just, we spent a lot of time building relationships and connecting with people and figuring out how to get around in the industry. And, you know, like, where should we spend our time? How can I do something on a budget and and make it work? So we spent, you know, we did a lot of that early on, Dean and I. And as we hired people, they had the same kind of DNA. And, you know, nowadays, we generate more revenue so we can spend a bit more on marketing. We actually have a marketing team of handful of people, six or seven people over there doing things. It's still a fairly small team, but we have a team and they can they can do more now, because there's more of them doing it, you know, so yeah, I'm not sure if that even answers your questions. But small and scrappy. We spent some money on stuff, not as much as we spend today. But I think it was good for us because we learned how to acquire customers, like we learned how to, we serve really small. Again, I don't know the audience particularly well. But if you're if you're in the business, side marketing side, like we're like an SMB inbound company, right. So we're like, vertical software with payments. We serve like SMB, the small to mid size market really well. And, you know, you got to get good at at acquisition and good at retention, and all those kinds of things in order for the business to work, because, because people don't pay us a lot of money. It's like volume and scale that make the business successful. So we had to learn how to do a lot of that early on. And look, some of it is whatever you want to call it luck, or you know, God was with us, right? Along the journey, we didn't know everything. We didn't, we didn't go into it with a formula, like we just did some things well, and I think we cared about our customers a lot and I think that paid off.

Travis Albritton  19:52  
Talk to me a little bit more about retention because I think that that can often get lost in the the world of marketing where everything is about growth, top end growth and revenue growth. And, you know, my favorite of the businesses that are like, hey we hit seven figures annual revenue, woohoo, and their burn rates like 1.2. And they're away from running out of cash, you know. So right, you know, the numbers that we can celebrate, don't always paint the whole picture. But what were the things that you did beyond just caring about your customers to really try and help with retention? Whether that's support or being really responsive on the product side. Like, like, what are some of the things that you really focused on? And said, wow these are the make or break things for us in driving retention, and really increasing that LTV to allow you to spend more to acquire new customers.

Frank Barry  20:40  
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, there's, I mean, I think the customer care part goes a long way. And I'll, maybe two parts of how that played out is, we really tried to onboard you well. Right? And knowing a lot more today than we did then, like, really, we just wanted to help. We wanted to get you on that Google Hangout call. We wanted to, you know, beyond that, maybe the sales moment we wanted to do the training, let's answer your questions, let me walk you through the tool, our original product didn't take you long to get used to. But if I could spend 15 minutes with you, and get you really ramped up and know, you know, having all your questions answered and knowing how to use the tool, so that the kind of early training and then helping you launch to your church like giving you resources, we would make graphics and videos and email messages and content that would help you go communicate it to your church, we would prepackage it all, and give it to you so that we can make it easier for you to go launch this new product into your church. So we spent a lot of time doing that. And some of it was terrible. But you know, we were, you know, like we were getting new resources to try to help make it easier for you to launch into your church now that you have this new product. So we wanted to onboard trainee, well give you resources, and then we just put a lot into support, you know, we wanted support to, you know, like, we've sort of prided ourselves on having like phone support, like you can talk to a human, you know.

Travis Albritton  22:10  
Like it's a lost art form nowadays. 

Frank Barry  22:12  
Yeah, a lot of tech companies talking to a human. Now we've had to evolve how we do that over time, because it does, it costs a lot of money to hire, and keep people answering phones and all that kind of stuff. So we still have that capability. And we've had to evolve how we do it, but I think caring for our customers and that, like okay, let me help train you, let me help onboard you, let me give you resources, let me, let me let you know, you can call me to get help. Like all that kind of stuff. It massively helps with retention, you know, and maybe isn't all, isn't super scalable. But some of it is like, if I can provide great if I can do training better with some pre done videos now. And if I can give you these resources and make it like half, like make it, get it to you easily from the beginning. And so you know, you have access to those. And I can kind of automate a bunch of things that maybe we were doing manually before getting on the phone with somebody, well, I can have you schedule a call versus just pick calling straight in like I can have, you know, I can schedule it and make sure I have people staffed at the certain times where I have more my call. Like I can do a lot of stuff to scale. But still have that kind of, you know, built in, like customer centric, customer care kind of approach to it.

Travis Albritton  23:31  
Yeah, and I think, a mistake that I see a lot of entrepreneurs make and business owners make, especially if they are more of the kind of visionary mindset of like, we're gonna go take that mountain over there is running everything through the filter, does it scale? And if the answer is no, immediately rejecting it, like, well, that's not that's not an idea that will serve us in three years. So why are we doing it now? But I think that's where the differentiation.

Frank Barry  23:55  
Even you think three years ahead.

Travis Albritton  23:58  
Yeah, your business plan now is like, okay, well, how many crazy things can happen in the next three years. Have another global pandemic, you know, you know, a couple of world wars, like, who knows what's going to happen, right, three years is an eternity. But, but I think I'm certain that was a key at you being able to grow  to what it is now is having those unscalable moments, where it's like, we are going to maintain a human connection and interaction with our customers, period. And that's just the part of the DNA of the company, no matter how big you get, or no matter how big the team is. And then finding creative ways to leverage that time better without replacing it with, oh we're just gonna outsource this to a call center or we're gonna replace it with an FAQ page like.

Frank Barry  24:44  
So don't get me wrong. We have lots of FAQ pages now, right? And we try to use those but you know, like, that's part of growing up. But it you know, to your point those didn't replace and get rid of the human touch. They just hopefully make it better. Like sometimes people want to self serve them. I want to talk to you humans, they really, they want to read it, and they want to keep it for later. And they'd rather a video where they can take their own time and watch through it. So people kind of like, you just get all kinds of people and you just support them in the ways that makes sense for them. But some people still want to get on the phone or get on a zoom and show them. You know, we grew out of Google Hangouts, I'll say that much, or what I don't know if it's called Google Hangouts.

Travis Albritton  25:24  
I think it's Google Meet now if it still exists.

Frank Barry  25:25  
Google meet. Yeah, we, we outgrew those guys.

Travis Albritton  25:28  
Yeah. Well, the funny thing being, somebody will probably say like, hey, let's hop on Zoom, then here's my Google meet link. Right? It becomes the new, the new verb. Yeah. So it used to be Skype, remember, used to be like, oh, yeah, let's Skype. And now, no, we're gonna resume it.

Frank Barry  25:44  
I remember those days. Anytime someone tries to use Skype. It's been a long time. But I remember like, I don't even know my password. And I can't get in anymore. Like, I don't even know how to do this.

Travis Albritton  25:58  
Yes, good times, good times. So I want to pivot a little bit to the specific market that you are reaching, churches, Christians, and how that can play well in butt against marketing best practices, right? Because the internet is full of things that work. Clickbait works, but having a certain ethical standard, or a certain level of integrity, with what strategies you choose to pursue and how you choose to implement them matters. And I imagine more so when, you know, the people that work at your company, are Christians serving Christians. There's, there's more in the relationship than just a transactional. I'm Nikka Widget, you buy it. Right? So talking about like, what those conversations and discussions look like when you're considering new marketing strategies or how you're going to implement something to make sure it's consistent with with that ethic? And how marketing is perceived just in the Christian world in general? Which in my experience has been, meet it with lots and lots of skepticism. Yeah, that's the default.

Frank Barry  27:12  
Right. All right. All right. Yeah. You know, it's a good question. I've never really thought about it. I think some of that is just solved by the fact that we are Christians who want to do the right thing, just automatic. Like it's sort of a foregone conclusion, like, we are not going to do things that are shady or spammy or scam or clickbait like, it's just not, it's not who we are like, so it doesn't even really cross our minds to do stuff like that. Do you know what I'm saying? So, like, I can't think of a of a moment where we were like, oh, let's try this crazy marketing thing. That seems a little sketchy, but it really works. You know, like it just, I don't know if this is a good answer, right. But I guess a lot of it is that we don't go down that path. Because this is not who we are. It's not who we want to be in the market. Or it's not. It's not our company, that people we have that work entirely love what they do. They love the fact that we're serving churches, oftentimes, they're volunteering their own local church. And so it's just kind of in the DNA to do the right thing doesn't mean we're perfect. You know, so I don't want to come across that way. It just means that we kind of default towards doing the right thing. And as best we can, you know, so. Yeah, I don't know, if I have much beyond that, you know, we just don't want to do spammy things, even even with somebody like buying lists, right? Like, like buying an email list where you buy it from some other thing, and you're gonna send emails, like, that's a thing. I'm, I'm pretty sure we've never done that, because it just feels icky. Like, they didn't give you your email, like to do anything with it. And now we've partnered with, you know, a Christian publication to say, hey, let's run some ads on your website or to your email list to promote this timely thing where you're sort of paying for that marketing channel. And, but you know, that's kind of normal marketing, like you have an ad program, we're going to use your ad program to send people some info about what it is or an event we're doing or a new product we're launching. So we'll do that often. We'll go to conferences and give away something like hey, you know, win an iPad, you know, book a demo, to learn more about tithing, you're entered to win an iPad. So we'll do stuff like that at conferences. But, you know, hopefully, none of that is shady or, you know, sketchy to people. But I do think church like at the church level, marketing has a weird connotation because I think a lot of churches are pastors. You know, don't think you need to market Jesus kind of thing or market the church and you know, I get where they're coming from. Like, I get what they're saying. And I agree. Um, I think, but maybe we just mean it differently. You know, like, I think a church does need to get exposure in the community and, you know, have a reason for existing, and people should know why you're there and what you do and how you serve and who you are. And, you know, that's all marketing. That's all getting your, your name out, not your name, because you're you want to sort of be promoting Jesus, not yourself. But I think I don't know, I think it's just not understanding marketing a little bit or getting caught up on some of the things that feel icky about marketing versus going no I'm just trying to get my Church known for good reasons in the community, so that people know we're here and know they can, they can come because we love everybody.

Travis Albritton  30:42  
That's exactly what I expected you to say, to be totally honest, just on our relationship, and knowing each other and working professionally together in the past. But it's not something to be taken for granted. Like, it's very easy when you're looking at data, or you're looking at like conversion rates on a landing page, or how is this performing versus this, and over time, iterating your way away from your core values, just like one small step at a time until you're like, well, we finally made this profitable. We made some questionable choices along the way in order to justify X, Y, and Z. And so it's great that you've been able to maintain that core identity and still experience growth. Maybe not the kind of meteoric growth that would have been possible with some of those strategies, but really building a company you're proud of.

Frank Barry  31:32  
Yeah, absolutely. And who knows, in our world doing some of those shady things might have killed the growth, right? You just don't know. Right? I mean, we tend to think that people in the church want to deal with, you know, people that are doing the right things and have, you know, like, I feel confident about Tithe.ly's reputation. Again, not that we're perfect, but that we have a set of core values that are meaningful, and we try to hire people that share those and we try to treat our customers, you know, really, really well based on that. You know, so we just try to do the right thing and not shady things.

Travis Albritton  32:09  
It's funny how that becomes a marketing strategy. Just be a good human.

Frank Barry  32:13  
Yeah, be a good human.

Travis Albritton  32:14  
Just be a good human. It's funny how that can be a marketing.

Frank Barry  32:18  
It can be a good marketing book, that can be a good like title for a marketing book.

Travis Albritton  32:22  
That was almost the name of the podcast, it was gonna be a riff on that. We're Honest Marketing, it was gonna be marketing for humans. And so kind of like putting the human element back in performance marketing, but honest, honest, kind of does that too.

Frank Barry  32:37  
Yeah. I love it, dude. Love it.

Travis Albritton  32:40  
So I would love to kind of fast forward a little bit to the current present timeframe. Because now, you know, we're seven years removed from when you started. There are other companies doing digital giving, it's not a rare thing. Now, most churches post COVID have some sort of digital giving set up. And it's become, I don't want to call it a cottage industry. But there is an industry that has been born out of a need to go digital for the churches, for churches and Christians in general. So how do you continue to work on him or find the things that are working right now, while also looking forward towards the shifts that are going to happen in the future? Because it is easy, like, once you discover something that works, you're like, okay, well, this is it. This is our gravy train. We're just going to ride this forever. 50 years from now, it's still gonna be working, we're still gonna be writing blog posts and trying to get organic SEO on Google. You know, but likely, that's not the case. If we just looked at like history.

Frank Barry  33:43  
Yeah, you don't know what's gonna happen.

Travis Albritton  33:45  
So what is, how do you how do you balance that? Like, continuing to do the things that work and using that to kind of plan for the future and being able to, you know, pay your team and afford investments and things like that. And then how do you also innovate forward? And how do you strike that balance so you don't lose what you have, but also, don't put yourself in a vulnerable position in the future?

Frank Barry  34:09  
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I think we'll keep doing the things that are working as long as they work, you know, and I don't think I don't think Google's going away. I don't think Facebook's going away. I don't think things going away. I don't you know, I like things may evolve and look different, but I don't think they're going away. I don't know that search is going away. Right, like so. I think it will evolve for sure. Like things will look different in 10 years and 20 years and 30 years like that, who knows they might look different to yours. But see, we'll keep doing those things and we'll keep hopefully staying. We will keep good marketers around that are paying attention to kind of what's working and how it's working and how to how to reach our audience. You know, successfully wherever they may they may be. Um, one thing that, you know, I don't think goes away is like reputation and brand. And, like word of mouth. You know, and we're of a size at this point that keeping a great reputation, keeping a great brand, treating people well, doing the right thing, like serving our customers with excellence. You know, again, I say all this going, I don't think we're perfect, but I think these are things that we strive to do always. I think, you know, like, customers are still going to tell their friends, you know, no matter what, like churches are very connected, pastors are very connected. So I think we keep doing that, that word of mouth. It scales tremendously. And I think, you know, you can't be a one trick pony, either, like we started out in giving, if we just did giving today, you know, maybe we don't exist, or maybe we're not who we are, right? So I think you got to keep adding. Most software companies are going to go from the thing that they started with, and they're going to expand, right? Look at, I don't know, look at Microsoft, look at Google look at modern ones like Stripe or Intercom or, like, pick a, you know really, Atlassian, Basecamp, like, pick somebody and you're gonna see they do. You know, a lot more than what they did when they started. Because you keep serving your industry, you keep serving your clients and figuring out okay, well, I'm, I'm a provider that wants to serve my customer with great software at an affordable price and do great business with them. What's next? What do they need now that I don't do today? And am I the right one to go build it, or partner with somebody else or acquire something to offer it to them and put it together in a way that makes it better for them than it was without it? Right, like, so I don't know, churches still use sticky notes for things, churches still use spreadsheets for things, churches still run their membership on, you know, Outlook, like, you know, there's still all kinds of opportunities that you just have to keep paying attention to your customer and paying attention to what they're doing and where they can be served with better software, or where they're experiencing some kind of pain, or it's just not enjoyable to do this particular thing, or there's not good software for something, you know, that already exists. So you just always paying attention always. Like, I love talking to customers, right? Like, and hopefully our team loves, our company loves talking to customers. So we're just always talking to customers and watching what they're doing and listening to what they're saying. And hopefully, that information keeps fueling us, right? What's the next thing we need to go do? To go build or to go buy or to go partner with in order to kind of provide an even better suite of software. You know, because if you want to be the world's leading software provider for churches, you got to keep going, you know, like, there's a lot of software that do a lot of things. So we could be building for years before we get to the end of that.

Travis Albritton  38:03  
Indeed, well I'll leave a link to Tithe.ly  in the show notes. So if you're a church or if you're a pastor, and you're looking for a donation software, full church CRM, all that definitely go check out Tithe.ly, but I want to give you a special plug or an opportunity to plug Modern Church Leader.

Frank Barry  38:19  
Oh, yeah.

Travis Albritton  38:19  
Which is a show that you host. Come on. And, and talk to, one, like how that show came about as a piece of content marketing for Tithe.ly? But then also like, like, how it has served you as someone in a leadership role of the company and in building relationships, building connections, learning? Like how his Modern Church Leader as a show also helps you to stay connected with, you know, the customers you're trying to serve?

Frank Barry  38:45  
Yeah, no, thanks for that. Modern Church Leader podcast totally puts it on, I happen to host it. Modern Church Leader, it was born before COVID. And we were, I think, playing around with interviewing folks. But I would say that really when COVID hit, like COVID was crazy for everybody on the planet. In the, in the church space particular the the folks that we serve, every church was closed down, like in churches, it's a human experience. It's like you meet together in the building or in the park or in the garage or in the house. Like you meet together with people and then churches were shut down. So I was like, man, what are pastors going through? And so that was like the kind of catalyst for Modern Church Leader and to like, really go. And so really, at the beginning, I was in Facebook Live, book a guest and I would go live with somebody for half an hour, 40 minutes every single week for like, it must have gone on for over a year of just, there was no format. There was nothing. It was literally just interviewing a pastor of any kind of church, small church, big church, whatever, like all types of all shapes and sizes. Going like, what's going on? How you doing? What do you do? How are you pulling this church online thing off? What are you using for technology? How are your people? How are you staying engaged? How are you ministering to people? How are, you know? Like, what is it like for you in your part of the church, and just trying to share, right and then have other pastors who are also going through that kind of see other guys talking about what they're going through. You know, just be like this kind of sharing resource that hopefully somebody would have an idea that somebody else saw. And they'd be like, oh, I'm going to try that. You know, and like, kind of spark ideas. So that's where it got kicked back up. And, you know, I like talking to pastors and church leaders. I think that's another part of it, right? It's a great way to stay connected to our customers, to learn what they're thinking abou. What keeps them up at night? What what they're resting with? What they love? Like, you know, just really understand our customers. So I enjoy, I just enjoy talking to pastors and church leaders about what they're doing. And I've got to interview some, you know, super high profile folks. And I've got to interview a ton of, you know, pastors of the 50 Member Church on the corner of the small town, doing church online from their iPhone. Right? Like all kinds of cool stuff on, so it's a great show. If you're a pastor or a church leader, go check it out. You can just go to Youtube, Modern Church Leader, you'll find it. And I'm sure there's hundreds of episodes by now.

Travis Albritton  41:26  
I would say so. We've done our best, right?

Frank Barry  41:29  
Totally, totally.

Travis Albritton  41:31  
Awesome.

Frank Barry  41:31  
And you are a huge help in this latest iteration of kind of upgrading the whole experience. So if you need podcast help, Travis is your guy.

Travis Albritton  41:40  
Thanks, Frank. Appreciate the vote of confidence.

Frank Barry  41:42  
Yes, for sure. 

Travis Albritton  41:43  
Well, Frank, definitely appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on and sharing all the things you shared. And yeah, just thank you so much. 

Frank Barry  41:52  
Hey, appreciate it, man. Good to be here.

Travis Albritton  41:53  
So my number one takeaway from that conversation you just heard from Frank, is do the things that don't scale. aAs entrepreneurs, as marketers, as business owners, it's easy to gravitate towards only considering the strategies that can scale beyond a one to one human interaction. But it's often those human interactions that can set your company and  your business apart from the others in your space. That you actually have somebody who will answer a phone call, that you have people on your team that will hop on Zoom calls, hop on Google Meet and Hangouts and actually connect with people on a human level, answering their questions, and really helping them with your product and your service and really getting to know them. Do the things that don't scale. Because at the end of the day, growth is only one side of the coin. Retention is the other and it's often with retention that we can overlook that, that we can downplay its significance, because you can always outgrow it. If you lose one customer. Let's just go find two more. But if you can do those things that don't scale and really connect with your, your customers, the people you're trying to serve with your company at a human level, that makes a big difference in the profitability and longevity of your business. Now, if you have not yet, make sure you subscribe to Honest Marketing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts. And if these episodes have been really helpful for you, it would be really great and helpful for me if you would consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to let other people know that this is a show worth listening to. And also I love hearing from you and hearing your feedback and interaction and so it'd be really fun to read those as well. Thanks for listening to the show. It's a pleasure. It's an honor to be able to serve you in this way. And as always, be honest.