You can outsmart 40,000 marketing agencies by following this social impact entrepreneur.

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Today with me, Jim James, here in the UK. We'll go to Santa Cruz, California, to meet Eric Ressler, who is the founder and CEO of a company called "Cosmic." And we're going to talk about cause-based marketing and entrepreneurship. Eric, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

Well, thank you because we were interested to have a chat with you because you are working with companies that are really making a social impact, right? And companies that are having to change behaviors often for their audience, introducing maybe disruptive technologies, as well that needs communication. So, really love to hear from you. First of all, tell us a little bit about "Cosmic," and the kind of clients that you serve, and why they need what you do?

Sure. So, "Cosmic" is a social impact creative agency. So, we work with organizations that exist in order to create a social impact as their primary mission. That includes actually a pretty broad variety of organizations, from nonprofits to social enterprises to foundations or funders, sometimes even government organizations. The thread that ties them all together, though, is that they exist primarily to create positive impact on humanity. And so the way that we help them, as a creative agency, is we help them with their brand, and building a brand, and their digital expression of that brand through websites and other digital channels so that they can help reach their audience, build brand awareness, and kind of scale their impact with whatever niche that they serve.

Eric, tell us, why did you choose social impact businesses? Because, you know, that could limit your options, couldn't it, as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, so that's the idea. And, we really wanted to figure out what our niche could be as an organization. Even in just the US, over 40,000 marketing focused agencies out there that are serving various types of clients. And we realized that in order for us to really scale our organization and grow, not necessarily in terms of size, but in terms of our impact, that we needed to find a niche of our own, a category that we could own. And we really looked back at all the different work that we'd done over the years as an organization. We're about seven years in at this point when we made this transition, and we'd done a lot of work with tech startups being close to "Silicon Valley". You know, "B2B" and "B2C" brands over the years, and the experience was awesome working with all those different types of organizations. We learned a lot from all these different sectors and from our clients across those sectors. But, we really looked back and found that the work that we got the most enjoyment and the most meaning out of was when we were able to work with social impact organizations. And we also saw a huge opportunity there because traditionally their branding, their marketing, their content was not at the same level as some of the other organizations that were doing tech, or doing entertainment, or doing food and beverage, or whatever it was. And so, we really felt that our expertise around design, and communication, and technology applied to social impact had a lot of potential.

Eric, that's wonderful. And I completely get the need to be passionate about the clients you work with, having run an agency for, 30 years myself. It makes a real difference. Can you just tell us then, for these social impact businesses, just for those of us that are not quite so aware, what does that encompass? Is that, you know, people? Is it environment? Is it circular economy? What do you define as social impact?

Yeah, there's a huge variety of focus areas within social impact. So, everything from climate, environment, and sustainability, and conservation, which is often where people go. Social services, helping people who need additional support. But really, the categories can be very broad. We also consider science and research as social impact, right? Organizations or institutions that are doing research to figure out how we can create new technologies, or new systems, or new ways of doing things that can make society better for all of us, right? I think, we're in a situation right now, globally, where there is a lot of inequity still, where there's a lot of folks who are just doing their best to get by and maybe not even, you know, succeeding there. And then on the flip side, there's a lot of folks who are quite wealthy. Have wealth beyond what they could ever need, or spend, or imagine. And there's, you know, everyone in between. And I think, we're trying to figure out, globally, how we can create a society that works better for all of us. In certain ways, we've succeeded, and in a lot of other ways, we've failed. And so, I think the good news is there's a lot of institutions, organizations, people who see these issues and want to help to make it better. And so, I think we're really lucky to be able to work with organizations looking at that from all kinds of different lenses.

Yeah. Eric Ressler, CEO of "Cosmic". I love the way that you've got into that category because you're doing good work for good causes. Can we just talk about what are some of the challenges that you think these social impact businesses face specifically, that may be different to, say, the guys in "FinTech" or maybe in the mature FMCG businesses, right? They've already got operations, they've got brand awareness. People are used to using those goods and services. So, some special challenges for any of our fellow unnoticed entrepreneur listeners that they might resonate with.

I think, and this might not be completely different from profit driven counterparts, but funding is always a challenge, right? How do you attract, retain, and grow funding in order to scale operations? This can be in certain ways, more challenging, in other ways, not as challenging in our sector. So, in general, what I would say is that the social impact space is underfunded. There's not enough funding to reach the scale and scope of the problems that we're trying to solve. Oftentimes, staff and employees, and leadership within these organizations are making significantly less than they would make doing similar work in the corporate sector, so to speak, and making those sacrifices because they care deeply about the work that they're working on. And even those that are maybe paid more fairly, are still working longer hours or taking on more work than they typically would in the corporate setting. So, that's something that I think we're starting to see some shifts. People are realizing that's not sustainable. Both at the "organizational level", as well as "funders", who are funding these organizations, whether that's government or, institutional philanthropy and foundations. So that's one really unique challenge that we're starting to see some tides change there, which is good, but it's still a persistent problem.

And what about from a communications perspective? Because, in a way, being underfunded isn't unique to social impact, right? I mean, that's all of us that have started businesses, we're all underfunded, self-funded, generating cash flow before growing. Are there any sort of communication challenges that you see unique to social impact? And then we'll talk about how you've overcome those.

I think, in general, less emphasis on communications, and brand building, and marketing in the social impact space. And again, that's starting to change as well, in a positive way. I'd like to think, hopefully, some of our work is starting to help there. But other organizations just like us and other leaders and consultants who are saying, "Hey, just because you're a nonprofit or a social enterprise, doesn't mean that you don't also need to build a strong foundational brand, invest in marketing, invest in communications". And I think it stems from this, persistent problem of being underfunded. A lot of organizations would love to do this, but they just don't have the funding to do it. Or they don't have sometimes even the understanding of "Why it's important?" or that "We shouldn't do marketing because we're a nonprofit". I think that has been traditionally kind of the idea. And that's starting to change, which is great because it needs to change because we've seen how critical building a strong brand and having an understanding of the potential of marketing and applying that to social issues can really make a huge difference. I mean sometimes it can be the thing that can help you break through as an organization. Doing really good work, but not doing a good job of telling people about the work that you're doing or attracting the right supporters that you need or even the right team that you need to do that work. So, I would say some of the other unique challenges would be oftentimes within these organizations. There is no in-house capacity or capability, or expertise around how to do these things, like build a brand and do marketing. Sometimes in the traditional corporate sector, you have a marketing department, you have marketing expertise even early on, and that might even be one of the first things you invest in before even some of the core operational work so that you can start to build awareness. So, I think that challenge is pretty unique. It's one of the reasons we saw opportunity in this space as an organization that these organizations really need help doing this work. They don't have internal expertise, or if they do have internal expertise, they don't have the capacity to do it. So they really need a partner that can help at least build the foundation and teach them how to use these tools properly.

Eric, I love that. And you know, some work that I've done in the past showed as well that a big part of it was about education. As well, in the market about social impact isn't charity. It plays a fundamental role in well-being for societies and helps with growth at an economic and social level, too. Eric, would you like to give us maybe a case study of social impact business, a client that you are working with at "Cosmic" that can give us a flavor of the kind of work that an entrepreneur that's running a social impact organization could listen to and be inspired and learn from?

Sure. I think the first example would be an organization called "STEM from Dance". They're based out of New York, but they're expanding outside of that region and into the rest of the United States, and hopefully ultimately beyond that as well. And they have a STEM-based curriculum for high school aged and younger girls. Primarily, trying to help reach black and brown girls who, traditionally maybe, don't have interest or access to STEM-based education in the way that they would need to be prepared for a STEM-based career. And the way that they're doing it is really awesome. They're doing it through dance-focused curriculum. So they're bringing girls in and creating these dance performances that have elements of technology. So the girls are programming lights, and working with technology and code, and mirroring that with dance. So, it's this really interesting kind of expression and creative-based way of bringing people into STEM who traditionally haven't had as much access, or opportunity, or cultural interest in STEM-based activities because of the structures of society. So, it's a really cool approach, and we help "STEM from Dance" with brand refresh and building out a new website in digital infrastructure to help scale their program and to generate more interest in funding for the work that they're doing.

That's wonderful. Just to be clear, that's "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math", isn't it? STEM. And my daughter does ballet to a fairly good level, and I'm sure they would find it absolutely fascinating that you could fuse dance and STEM, as well. Sounds brilliant. Is there another one that you can give us an example that you are working with, where you've done something maybe slightly different as well? Again, as a case study to give people an idea of what can be done. Because it's not all about money, is it? It's about creativity, about the use of technology, and about getting, some attention through, maybe, some PR. So, I wonder what else you could do to share with us.

Sure, another example that's more in the climate action space would be an organization called, "Let's Green California". It's a regional campaign here in California that we helped with a brand and building out an action center and education center. And really, the idea is that they're creating legislation and a grassroots movement to help push California's role as a climate action leader even further, even faster. So that we could use this model of how California is leading in the climate action space, and environmental space, and the sustainability space, and apply that model to other states, and eventually, the world to follow as well. And so we helped them with their brand, their overall messaging strategy, and then building out some digital infrastructure that really allowed them to not just generate support and a movement for the campaign, but ultimately led to them publishing a bill that they're able to get signed into law here in California, which is really exciting. That helps with creating some new policies that are gonna get us closer to where we need to be for climate action here.

Eric, a couple of questions. You talked about doing branding. "Visual Design". Are there any elements within corporate identity that are unique to social impact? Are there some guidelines that you follow, some recurring themes in terms of fonts, or colors, or iconography?

I think that creating a visual identity is unique to every organization. Certainly, there might be some trends within social impact that we follow, but I think the way that we really think about branding is understanding the audience that our organization is serving and trying to reach deeply so that we can create a brand that resonates with that audience. So, it might be, you know, that there's some trends within, let's say, "Environmentalism". We might actually go against those trends, intentionally, to create something that stands out, that's different, that's bold, that captures people's attention. And that's actually the case for "Lets Green California". If you think about a lot of climate action organizations and their branding, it's traditionally kind of somber, negative, sometimes alarmist, and we're like, "That's not gonna work". If we want people to feel like they can make a difference, then we want to build a brand that feels good. And so we actually tapped into some of the kind of "Nostalgic, Good Vibes of California" in the past and launched a brand that's a little bit almost retro, and like retro-futurist in a cool way. And we did that because we wanted people to feel like they could make a difference and feel good while doing it, not like there's so much doom and gloom out there about climate. And for good reason, don't get me wrong. I mean, we need to get our act together, but if we just constantly focus on the problems, but make the solution too hard to feel even emotionally connected to, then it just leads to apathy instead of action. So, we wanted to create a brand that was inviting, and had a positive feeling, and made people feel like there was still a sense of hope, even though there's a lot of work to do and we need to do it very quickly.

Yeah, Eric, I love that. Sort of, "Beach Boys", meets "Carbon Neutral". I just imagine that sounds fantastic. And Eric Ressler, also you mentioned about technology there. I personally believe that technology offers so many opportunities to entrepreneurs, social impact, and otherwise. What sort of technology are you using for your own firm and all your clients to help them to amplify the messaging that you're creating?

So, we use a ton of different platforms and technologies. We use some for ourselves, of course. Our clients all have various tools and platforms that they use. Sometimes, by the time a client gets to us, that's established, and we're figuring out how to best use the tools that they have, or maybe extend them or build on top of them. Other times, they're asking for our help with what's the right platform to use. So for example, with Lets Green California, we use a tool that's called "Every Action" because it's built specifically for advocacy work, and there's specific benefits around their platform that wouldn't exist in a tool more like "HubSpot", which we use for our marketing automation and for our CRM. So, it really varies a lot. I would say like the two categories of tools that are most important would be some internal project management tool. So, for example, we use "Asana" to manage all of our work and have a place that we can look at to know what our priorities are, what our deadlines are, et cetera, across multiple clients in our case. And then some kind of integrated CRM or marketing automation platform. So, "HubSpot" is what we use. Other organizations use "Salesforce" and "Pardot", and that kind of ecosystem. But having a really solid solution for your internal organization and planning, and then for your external marketing communications and contact management, are really the two key pillars to all of this.

Yeah, Eric, that's wonderful. Yeah, and you've got to have that all in place, haven't you? Before you really try and scale too much. Eric, you've had "Cosmic", I think you've mentioned, since 2009. So congratulations on building a business and surviving so many challenges. As an entrepreneur, I'd love to ask you, "What have you found really moves the needle in terms of getting 'Cosmic' noticed?"

So for us, there's a number of elements. In the early days, we were really focused on just doing really good work and serving our clients really well, and I think that is always important. And if either of those two things go away, then nothing else that we do really matters at the end of the day. So, that's kind of this foundation that is critical to doing our work. Beyond that, though, we knew about seven years ago when we made this transition into social impact that there's gonna be a lot of work to do, to really make a name for ourselves in that niche. We had a handful of social impact clients that we'd served, we'd done good work for them, but no one really thought of us as a social impact focused firm. So, really at that point, it was time for us to do a rebrand, which we did. And come out with a new message and a new mission as an organization and articulate that clearly. Of course on our website, but in everything that we did, in terms of how we communicated, the types of clients that we brought on, that whole process. And that was a pretty rapid evolution for us, but one that we couldn't just close the old doors and open the new doors, right? There had to be a transition, especially because we're funded by client work. We had to keep cash flow going, and keep payroll going, and all of that. But, we really just started to make a name for ourselves in that space. I think a really critical part is that we really committed to producing content around this niche. Mostly in the written form, in articles on our website, white papers, articles, resources that are free. So, you know what you would traditionally call content marketing, right? Producing valuable free content that we got out there, that would be helpful for folks who will never hire us. That's really the ultimate goal of content marketing is that the content is valuable. Even if someone reads it and doesn't hire you, they still benefit from that transaction, so to speak. At least that's the way that I like to think about it. But it includes things like this, coming onto podcasts and talking to folks, building brand awareness that way. So that we weren't so regionally focused. You know, we used to get a lot of work being regionally focused, having an office, based kind of in the Bay Area. And you can do quite well as a firm doing that if you're a generalist. But knowing that we wanted to really hit this social impact niche and not be constrained by our region, we knew that we needed to have some other tactics in order to build more broad brand awareness. So we kind of really started to do a lot of the things that we were suggesting our clients do for ourselves, which is ironically not something that most agencies do. It's really easy to not take your own advice as an agency and not do content and not spend a lot of time on your own marketing and just expect referrals to kind of keep the doors open. And so, that transition has been extremely valuable, and it's a lot of work. But, it's work that's well worth doing. Not even just from a marketing standpoint, but producing content and spending time writing really helps sharpen your own expertise in a way that we weren't expecting. And sometimes you might think, "We know all about this, and we're going to write an article about it", and then you sit down to write it and you're like, " Wait, we don't actually as we thought we did". Turns out there's some deeper thinking that must be done here, so that transition's been really good for us.

Eric, this is wonderful. Thank you so much. And you know, unfortunately, we've only got 20 minutes. So, thank you for coming on the show. Eric Ressler from "Cosmic" over in Santa Cruz. Thank you for joining me on The UnNoticed Entrepreneur today.

Thanks so much for having me on.

It's been my pleasure. We've got a lot of great information in a very short amount of time, and as always, I'll include my guest's details in the show notes. If you've enjoyed the show, do please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, and it would really help me if you could rate the podcast as well. So, until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.

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