Connection Creates Real Impact - Stacy Huston

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Stacey Houston, CEO of SixDegrees.org, the social impact organization founded by Kevin Bacon and a leader who has built her career around turning purpose into action. She also serves as executive producer of their top-ranked podcast, using storytelling as a catalyst to drive real-world impact.

0:47Beyond that, she leads Entertain Change, a social impact agency that brings together entertainers, brands, and organizations to create meaningful, measurable change. Now, Stacey has worked with some of the biggest names across media and culture, including Peacock, Warner Brothers, iHeart Media, CBS, MTV, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the ACLU. Her work has earned her recognition like Shorty's Impact Nonprofit Marketer of the Year, Advertising Week's Future is Female Award, and the Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award. If that's not enough, if you're still with me, she's also the creator of the Craft Method, a framework designed to help organizations build deeper, more authentic engagement.

1:31Stacey, I don't know how you have time to come up for air, but I can't wait to get into this. Welcome to the show.

1:36Stacy Huston:Thanks, Steve. Whenever I hear even like a little piece of that, I'm like, I'm tired. I just, but here we are, right? The wolf doesn't stop. Well, if you need a nap, we can come back. I can just sit here. I can talk for 15 minutes to myself. That's fine. Okay. Now we've all heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, how that all started out. Oh, that's true. But not everyone knows the story behind SixDegrees.org. So walk us through it, what it is, what problem were you trying to solve when it was created. Start at the beginning. Okay. Yeah, I love it. So yeah, Kevin couldn't, Kevin Bacon, actor, philanthropist.

2:08Stacy Huston:he could not run from this idea of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, this cultural phenomenon that was started back in the 90s. And when he hit, you know, 40 years old, he was kind of like had a lot of success in his life and was faced with that moment that I think a lot of people are faced with, which is like, my legacy, what can I do to make a difference in this world? And he was inspired by Paul Newman, Newman's own brand and what he was able to do for good and thought, you know, what's the thing that I have? And he kind of turned back to this idea of Six Degrees and said, well, if you take me out of it, we're really all just connected by Six Degrees or less and from someone or something that really needs our help.

2:48Stacy Huston:So how can I make this about connection for good? So Six Degrees was born out of that moment of, you know, there's a lot of amazing, huge global organizations doing work all over the place. But we really wanted to focus here locally in the United States and specifically for like small grassroots local nonprofits because small businesses get all the attention, right? They're like the lifeblood of this country and our economy, but we really believe that nonprofits are right there with them. They're filling the gaps. They're helping communities thrive and survive often. So our focus is we're a nonprofit for nonprofits.

3:23Stacy Huston:So we come alongside them. We believe that disconnection is the single biggest force that's eroding society. And we choose to tackle that by creating these opportunities for people to meaningfully engage with nonprofits and therefore with their neighbors and strangers. So we're on a... So you... Yeah, go for it. No, I was just going to say... It's like a delay. I'm sorry. Can you tell we're both podcastos? 100%. You mentioned connection. And I was just going to ask you to expand on not only that, but community and impact. It's clearly at the core and the heart and soul of this whole organization.

4:00Stacy Huston:Yeah, I think that like when we hear words like social impact and connection being really such a big hot topic right now, it can almost feel overwhelming. So I try to bring it back down to kind of the micro sense. It's about communication. It's about how we talk and connect with one another, how we can kind of find that common thread. I know a lot of your audience are marketers, right? And so they understand the storytelling piece. We call it storytelling and marketing. But it's really about like, how can I create that shared pain point, that piece where we say, we get it, we're on the same page.

4:34Stacy Huston:So even though we might look different, grew up in different places, have different ideas of what, you know, we believe we should do to get to from point A to point B, we can believe that we have the same kind of value system or understanding. So really, it's around that. We want to create these meaningful moments for people to stop seeing each other as others and start seeing that as a reflection of themselves all around them. Because we actually think that that is how we're going to get back to a place where we're healthy again as a society. You just mentioned and alluded to why usually you talk to CMOs and marketers and brand leaders and chief digital officers and all that good stuff.

5:10You're coming at this from the nonprofit side. Talk to us, how is marketing different when the goal was in selling a product, but driving impact?

5:17Stacy Huston:Yeah. So the thing about marketing for nonprofits is it's a lot more complicated because unlike a for-profit, all of your dollars in a nonprofit space are being tracked and judged. And they look at marketing as this line item that if they can avoid spending outside of programs, then that's like a good thing. Unfortunately, we understand that like marketing is mission, that if people don't know that you are around and they're not seeing you come across on their feeds and in the places that they live, work and play, then they're not going to know how to help you or even know that you exist or God forbid, know that you're an option if they need help.

5:56Stacy Huston:And, you know, nonprofits should be spending somewhere between five and 15 percent. Much of them are only spending about one percent of their overall budget on marketing. So I know someone in marketing, you understand that's like that's that's nothing. Right. Especially when a lot of these nonprofits, their budgets are quite small to begin with. So we are really tackling two issues, getting nonprofits to understand that they need to look at marketing as part of their mission, that it needs to be really thoughtful, very strategic. And then we want to come alongside marketing, brand companies, communicators, these people in these fields that really understand storytelling to say, hey, you have a problem too.

6:38Stacy Huston:And at Six Degrees, we really understand that. You know, Forbes released an article and there's been many like it, different studies. But they said about 82 percent of people, consumers specifically, want to buy from brands that reflect their values. As that's happening, we're seeing seven out of 10 employees in the workforce are disengaged, which might just sound like a word. But what that really means is like your bottom line is being hurt. that's about$9 trillion of loss to our global GDP from just disengaged employees. And we think that we can solve both these issues because if we can say, hey, nonprofits, you need stronger marketing training, media training, press, you know, abilities to get your mission front and center, and we can connect you with experts in this field that are also really hungry to do something of purpose.

7:32Stacy Huston:Because we know that when you do something around missions, around purpose, your overall satisfaction shoots through the roof, right? You become more engaged, you perform better, you're kind of accessing a different part of your brain. And so we believe that when you bring these two things together, it really can be unstoppable. So we're talking about marketing from both these standpoints. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm curious to get your thoughts on that percentage of where nonprofits should be allocating their budget to for marketing versus what they actually are. I mean, that's a huge disparity. Why do you think that is, you know, from your lens of doing this as long as you have that so many nonprofits, do they just not understand marketing, value marketing?

8:15What do you think it is?

8:17Stacy Huston:Absolutely. Like all of the above. I, you know, unlike someone that might be an entrepreneur or start an advertising company or marketing company, you know, they may have gone to school for this. They've done some internships in it. They maybe have their MBA. A lot of people that start nonprofits, not to say that that doesn't happen as well. It does. But more times than not, people are going to nonprofit work because of lived experience. They've experienced some trauma. Someone in their life has experienced trauma. They have a heart for this mission. And that actually is the most important thing in nonprofit work because it is hard.

8:50Stacy Huston:And so you have to deeply love what you're doing to keep doing it every day when you're getting beat up the way you are. Right. And so oftentimes they're having to say, OK, I don't know what I don't know. But then they're going to have to trust that there's gonna be a partner, you know, maybe it's an internal person that's much like them that's like interested in doing this work, but they're, they're not getting paid very well. That's the other piece, like, nonprofits get slapped on the hand if they spend more than, you know, 8%, you know, on basic overhead. That isn't that's an insane statement.

9:23Stacy Huston:I talked about this when we met at advertising week, Steve, like, if you can sit there and say, like, hey, for a dollar I can feed 10 people. It's like, would you want that meal? Like, what are we really saying here? Like you're, you're, you want us to solve the world's greatest issues, but you want us to do in a shoestring budget. Right. So that's the, that's the reality of how we're getting graded and how funders look at us. If they can do things as cheaply as possible, then this is worthy of funding. But then in the rural world, we know that like you need to spend money to make money, right?

9:53Stacy Huston:You need to put money into the search engine in order for you to get the people clicking through and this is all data analytics. It's a numbers game on top of a messaging game. So a lot of it is just, it's incongruent messaging and trying to make more sense of it. So what we're trying to do is get them the creative that they need that says like, look at this beautiful creative you have now. Look at this training you have around how to use this new message and framework. And now you can feel more confident putting some funding behind it as opposed to going in blindly and not knowing what you're doing.

10:29You mentioned you and I met earlier this year at Advertising Week New York, and it was during what's called what's called Purpose Produced, right? For those not hearing or hearing about a fertilizer time, what exactly is Purpose Produced? Yeah, it is an initiative that we launched last year, early last year, alongside our

10:49Stacy Huston:friends at Advertising Week. I don't know if you've seen this campaign, but you probably did because it took just the marketing world by storm. It was called Assume I Can, and it was by Core Down, right? And it was the World Down Syndrome Day campaign, and it was everywhere. Like we won a Webby that year for our podcast. They won a Webby. They were at Cannes. They were like everywhere you could be seen. This campaign monumentally shift how a person made assumptions about the limitations of someone with Down syndrome. And the reason I knew it was really just having such success because friends that were outside of the social impact space and outside of marketing were commenting on it, were resharing it to their feeds on Instagram, on LinkedIn.

11:32Stacy Huston:Everyone had something to say about it because it was really powerful. And I just thought, man, if a small grassroots nonprofit could have access to that type of creative intellect, like just a strategy session with the brilliant minds that come up with these kinds of campaigns, it would be transformational. And so like you have to do, if you're leading anything, you have to kind of have audacious dreams. So I called a friend of mine, Michael Gerwitzman, who's over at Advertising Week. We've known each other for many years. And I kind of pitched him this idea. I said, hey, like we know nonprofits.

12:05Stacy Huston:We know nonprofits with powerful stories. If we can identify six incredible orgs that are ready for this type of injection of creative and also have the bandwidth to take on what will come of that. Will you find six advertising agencies that will create these pro bono campaigns for them? And without a beat, he was like, absolutely. Let me talk to Ruth Mortimer. And she was immediately on board. I mean, we've worked with some big brands and you know, there is a lot of red tape and you have to kind of go through all. It's very elongated. It can take forever. So contractual. They were just like, we're going to trust first and we're going to figure it out later.

12:45Stacy Huston:And we just built this side by side. And within six weeks, we launched. They lived up to their word. They found incredible agencies that we were able to pair. We had over 200 nonprofits apply for this. And we were able to create six fantastic campaigns at the end of it all that are all now out in the world and having incredible success. and both from the nonprofit style, but also just the attention that these agencies have received and what they've received, you know, more of like those benefits we talked about with their employees being able to do this type of work for pro bono. It was really, really powerful.

13:21Is this something you think you'll do again?

13:23Stacy Huston:We are doing it again, Steve. We just launched a second round. So we're currently, you know, the advertising week or our partners again, they're like all in. They're like, we are, we're now like family. So they are gathering six agencies. At least one of them are coming back from year one, which is really exciting and a huge testament of the excitement that they all felt. And we are currently looking at applications. I spent the last two days diving in deep to these incredible organizations from all over the country, variety of different causes, and we're going to whittle it down. But this year, we're making a couple, I think, really powerful changes.

14:04Stacy Huston:And that's really because, you know, year one is our inaugural year, we had some learnings. And this year, we're really thinking about are there brand partners and product partners that could be looped in very early in this process, along with these agencies and the nonprofits to help inject some of what we need on the outside, which is once these are built, and they're ready to go the world, you know, we need to place them, right? And right now we have incredible partners at Kepler that have said yes, that they want to partner with us. They're going to help us push these out into the world, which we are super grateful for.

14:39Stacy Huston:But it would help if we had some cash on hand to also do out of home radio placement, right? To really be thoughtful for how we are setting these up for success on the other side. So we're excited about giving a little bit more runway so that those relationships can happen. We can have these conversations and find the right partners to help tell these stories. Now, this obviously is not, and I say obvious, Purpose Produce is not the first time Six Degrees has worked with this kind of endeavor, if you will, right? So how does Six Degrees typically work with brands on, say, corporate social responsibility?

15:13Stacy Huston:Yeah, we've done a lot of in-kind, pro bono support projects in the past, mostly with actual products like Bombas, Dr. Bronner's. They're huge partners of ours. A lot of these brands that like to give back a lot of new brands that are looking to kind of get attention on themselves. They kind of say, hey, is there a way that we can partner with Six Degrees on local or national activations? Six Degrees has done corporate social responsibility work for a really long time. We love working with corporate partners. We believe that it's like a three prong approach. It's like the corporate partners, right?

15:48Stacy Huston:The nonprofits and the individuals that are all going to have to come together to really make some magic happen. But we have distributed millions of dollars of services over the years, helping nonprofits. So you can really look at it as a nonprofit for nonprofits. We, as you can imagine, can get people to answer the phone and respond to an email quicker than a lot of these smaller nonprofits can, even though they're doing brilliant work, right? So we use the leverage that we have and the attention that we can garner to go to these brands and say, can you participate in something larger, get your employees involved?

16:23Stacy Huston:A lot of it is like their employees side by side doing some work, but we're really excited. We're currently piloting a community platform. What we noticed with Purpose Produce is that a lot of these organizations at one of these campaigns just weren't ready, right? Whether it was like their executive team just needed some initial media training before they were ready to go live, or their logos and kind of their initial brand storytelling was just, it needed to be polished, right? So we're coming in now and we're saying, hey, much smaller ask, still really powerful story. You know, do you have graphic designers?

17:00Stacy Huston:Do you have media trainers internally? Do you have other comms team members that can come alongside and maybe help plan what a 10-year anniversary campaign could look like for this organization, right? Can you lend some of your expertise and talent in a smaller way in these finite finite ways right these kind of more simple projects that way your employees are actually getting to give back they're actually getting to do the things that they are are good at and love to do and you're making impact in hyper local organizations in your backyard so that's um we're really excited about that because it allows us to do more than six a year right what do you say to a non-profit who says something to the effect of you you have the advantage of having a celebrity attached we don't that's correct and it can be a double how do we you know yeah how do we get our name out we don't yeah exactly exactly there are incredible organizations that don't have a celebrity attached to them at all um they'll get an attention of a celebrity right or someone that has a platform that finds them usually how on their social media, right, through their digital footprint.

18:07Stacy Huston:So I'll say, if you don't have a celebrity, how are you showing up in spaces that anybody, a funder, right, a corporate partner might find you? 70 % of corporate partners identify who they're going to give to through LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like a very untapped market in terms of how nonprofits are showing up in that space. So I would say, similarly, they need to think about their strategy. And they do need to think about where they're going to invest time. They can't do everything, especially if they're just getting started, but maybe pick a platform that their key constituents are going to be, right?

18:43Stacy Huston:Or their key kind of donor profile is going to be and put all of their attention there and do that really well before they expand. So you mentioned corporate marketers. It's a good segue. That's my audience. So what do you think corporate marketers get wrong or can do better when it comes to purpose-driven work or social impact? I think there's a message and it's not just corporate marketers, right? It is kind of this, the corporate world period, like when something's hot and popular, let's go all in and be loud. And then when it's not, let's like retract as quickly as possible. Instead of saying, who are we?

19:16Stacy Huston:What are our values? What do we want to represent? Knowing that consumers are looking at that. And no matter what happens, that is what we're going to stand by for our teams, for our employees, for our consumers. And we will build from that. So I think that that's a piece. And the second piece is that purpose-driven work is often looked at as like giving away something. It's like, well, if they're not working for our company and they're not using their employee time on our projects, then we're losing. They're not understanding the deeper psychology and all of the research-backed studies that show that this type of work actually can help your bottom line simply by how reviving and exciting it is for an employee that says the world sucks right now.

20:05Stacy Huston:If we can be honest, like it's, it's, it's not great. The news cycle every day, it's overwhelming. You expect your employees to like leave that in their car in the parking lot, or, you know, they're working from home in the other bedroom, isolated alone, right and just perform to their max capability every day when they feel like they have their head in their sand and there's nothing they can do to help and then this kind of work gives them something to do it actually gives them the ability to make a difference in someone else's life and that's one of the single biggest ways i think to kind of tap back into our purpose and us feeling more mission driven and you're going to see that then affect you know your colleagues working side by side the overall culture at the at your company and we saw that with with our agencies you know we had maggie malik ceo crispin we had her on a podcast and she just shared they had to like say no to partners internally because everyone to be part of it you know scott mcclure over at rain the growth who's now just rain agency said the same thing that it was just a win-win in doing this work so i think that they have to kind of be more open-minded that this isn't them losing time or losing manpower, but this is actually creating a pathway to get that engagement back.

21:22I'll take it a step further. It's a retention tool.

21:25Stacy Huston:Yes. Huge. It is. And I just don't, well, we could go down that rabbit hole because, you know, I talk to leaders all the time and you kind of want to, I just don't understand why you don't see this. And it also makes them proud to work for your company. Yeah. And I think I would even say attraction too, because you're seeing people that are, you know, looking at where they want to work, where they want to spend their time. And these kinds of projects are inspiring. And if there's an opportunity for them to do something like that, that's that's an inspiring piece. And, you know, it's not just marketing agencies and advertising agencies.

22:02Stacy Huston:It's like if you have a marketing comms department, period, you know, you could participate in this type of activity. You could be in banking and have a team that does something around purpose produced. Right. And so think about your different team members and the and the skill sets they have internally. And there is something that you can do that gets them using their creative, you know, intelligence around this this kind of purpose driven work. When you look ahead, 12, 24, 36 months, what does success look like for you? That's a big question. It looks like this platform being rolled out to not just the nonprofits that we have built, you know, a decade or two.

22:44Stacy Huston:We're going on 20 years next year. We've been with the organization for 10 years with, but it also, it's going to be a platform that, Steve, one second. Sorry, we're going to have to redo this. My six-year-old, it's a special election today. So she's at home. I'm so sorry. Okay. okay well i can do that will you let me finish this call and then i'll be right out to help you there's a scary movie okay so can you go into your bedroom and then shut the door and i will be right out i promise okay maybe you can read for a few minutes will you shut the door please i appreciate you yeah this door my office door thank you you know you know i'm leaving this in right sure i'm sure abby's big break give her no listen but i am the world's i just keep things is real.