An Interview With Kieran Powell
Know that your job doesn’t end with the allocation of your budget. Telling the story of why you’ve allocated the way you have to both the executive level and across your team is critical. If your people don’t understand the impact of how marketing dollars are invested, those funds are likely to be on the chopping block during challenging times — often, the exact moments you truly need to invest.
In an age where marketing landscapes are rapidly evolving and consumer behaviors are constantly shifting, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a pivotal role in steering their organizations’ marketing strategies towards success. With a plethora of channels, platforms, and techniques at their disposal, the decision on where to allocate the marketing budget is more critical than ever. We’re seeking to explore questions like: What factors influence their decisions? How do they balance between digital and traditional marketing channels? What role does data play in their decision-making process? And importantly, why they choose to invest in certain areas over others? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Catherine LaCour.
Catherine LaCour is a seasoned strategist, innovator and marketing executive with deep experience building brands that provide value and drive connection. Catherine serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Blackbaud, the leading provider of software powering social impact. She leads Blackbaud’s global brand, go-to-market strategy and other strategic marketing functions and is passionate about delivering an outstanding experience to the organizations Blackbaud supports in their missions to build a better world. Catherine also helms the Blackbaud Institute, which brings together the best minds in philanthropy to develop and share leading-edge research and insights that accelerate the impact of the social impact community. Catherine currently serves on the Board of Directors for Panorama Education, as well as the Boards of the Women’s Refugee Commission and the Coastal Community Foundation, is an Aspen Institute Global Leadership Network Fellow, and is a member of the select Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit community.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I was born and raised in Charleston, SC, and studied Business at the College of Charleston. Then I got my master’s in business administration from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird). After college, I had an incredible opportunity to work for an arm of the United Nations in Kenya. I started off early in my career wanting to marry social good with marketing. I moved around a bit, working in the Bay Area during the dotcom madness in the late nineties and in DC for a strategic marketing and PR firm that specialized in healthcare technology and education technology. I was recruited by Blackbaud for a marketing position, which brought everything full circle — working in marketing for a technology company to help drive social impact. I was appointed CMO in 2018, and I’m so grateful for the role, my incredible team, and the work we’re able to do.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One thing that sticks out to me is the importance of prepping for meetings and knowing who’s in the room. I had an embarrassing moment early in my career where I sat down next to a gentleman at a UN event. I casually asked him what he did. I’m not going to name-drop here, but it turned out he was a very important person that I totally should have known! He handled it so gracefully, but I never forgot it. On the funnier side, I once pulled a lip liner out of my bag thinking it was a pen and went through an entire interview before I realized. Obviously, the lesson there is to take more notes!
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Of course one thing that’s on everyone’s minds right now is AI. Internally, we’re doing a ton of work within our marketing organization looking at how we can leverage AI to enable our teams to be more efficient, stronger and faster. There’s so much potential for generative and predictive AI in marketing specifically.
We’re also working to make AI more accessible to our customers, enabling them to market to their donors and supporters, analyze their results and streamline their business operations. We’re really excited about the potential to revolutionize technology in the social impact space so that our customers can make a greater impact for their causes. That extends to the traditional nonprofits you might think of, but also to the corporate world for companies that want to make an impact. We have a new product called Impact Edge that is the first social impact reporting and storytelling solution for corporate social responsibility teams. It leverages AI to enable corporate impact professionals to easily create a compelling picture of their organization’s social impact using data captured from their employee engagement programs, philanthropic programs, educational initiatives, and other trusted external data sources. It’s going to be a game changer for social impact professionals. And of course, for me as a marketing leader, it’s invigorating to get to introduce tools with such game-changing potential to our market!
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. Can you share an experience where a unique or unconventional budget allocation led to unexpected success in your marketing campaign?
I think what you see across the industry is that marketing teams are increasingly feeling pressure on their budgets. We’ve had success putting a lot of focus on how we showcase marketing ROI internally to get other leaders on board with investing in marketing spend. We’ve created KPIs and dashboards for each marketing function that we are looking at monthly or quarterly as appropriate to drive a culture of accountability, innovation and agility. With a data-driven approach, we can tie our marketing activities directly to customer retention and growth. That provides a lot of incentive for other departments across the business to rally behind marketing efforts and make them a priority. I suppose that would be the “unconventional” aspect here — we have a collaborative leadership culture here and we’ve been able to make this case in a really compelling way, so non-marketing teams have jumped in to fund marketing activities. We have a few events that are funded by our product teams and videos funded by our sales teams. Even though these are marketing functions, the teams know that they’ll see a return and that it’s worth their dollars. Over the past several years, this mentality has changed how we prioritize things as a company.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
The first thing I would say is that I don’t think “proven” strategies really exist anymore in a post-Covid world. Everything has shifted. But when it comes to trying out new trends, I think the key is to fail fast and fail forward. Try it. If it works, then incorporate it, and if doesn’t, then learn from it and move on. The data will tell you if it’s worth your time.
In what ways has data-driven decision-making influenced your approach to allocating marketing budgets, and can you provide an example of this in action?
We’ve seen an incredible influx of technology and new vendors moving into the MarTech space. We have so much campaign data at our fingertips now, and with each campaign we learn more about where and how our buyers engage with us.
One example is the brand campaign we launched in the height of the pandemic. It was focused on embracing change, and we saw high engagement with the message. Our customers were going through a massive transformation, and this campaign message and the resources that we provided to them (toolkits, webinars, tip sheets etc.) helped them navigate the overnight digital transformation that their donors needed and expected. This really proved the importance of looking at content through the value lens. We don’t just put content out for content’s sake.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
I’m really proud of the work our demand generation and digital teams have done to create a multi-touch attribution model that has given us incredible data to base decisions off of. We can see which channels are driving the most touch points and how those touch points are influencing opportunities in a buying cycle, so we know where and when to double down. It helps optimize our spend, reduce inefficiencies and focus our efforts.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget, and Why?”
1. It all starts with clearly articulating your corporate goals and building your marketing goals off of those so that your priorities are laddering up to overall company success. For example, if your company is focused on acquisition of new customers, then you might allocate more budget for high-touch events with top prospects.
2. With so much of marketing strategy relying on data, the tools that you have in your marketing stack for measuring, executing and optimizing your campaigns should be a top priority. Without the ability to accurately track and predict your performance, you’re operating in the dark. Your technology stack is a worthy investment that will pay dividends. Be strategic and deliberate about your technology stack from a macro vision perspective versus a focus on the individual pieces. Then have someone on your team who is an amazing negotiator with vendors!
3. I also recommend having a mix of short-term and long-term investments. Think about it like a 401K — there will always be some things that you need to put money toward now in order to have big returns down the road. Short-term investments are those that drive an immediate impact on revenue. Long-term investmets are those that grow brand awareness and affinity in your target audience, even if they’re not yet in a buying motion. These long-term investments in brand are crititical to protect — as a marketing leader, they are your unique priority, and won’t be as fiercely guarded by any other leader in your company’s executive team. Without sufficent focus on your long-term brand investments, your short-term strateiges will grow less and less effective. Our committment to building this long-term affinitiy, awerness, and trust with our brand is one reaon that we prioritize the work of the Blackbud Institute, a research lab that puts out free resources to help organziations in our sector work as effectively as possble — whether or not they’re customers of ours.
4. Know that your job doesn’t end with the allocation of your budget. Telling the story of why you’ve allocated the way you have to both the executive level and across your team is critical. If your people don’t understand the impact of how marketing dollars are invested, those funds are likely to be on the chopping block during challenging times — often, the exact moments you truly need to invest.
5. And last but certainly not least, I would say prioritizing employee engagement and development is key to your organization’s success. Technology is changing at such a rapid pace. We have an opportunity to change the way we work with AI. We have to make sure we’re equipping our teams to keep pace in order to continue generating cutting edge and innovative thinking. This is particularly important as more and more companies, Blackbaud included, are moving toward fully remote or hybrid workforces. Your teams have to have the technology and resources they need to be efficient, productive and inspired. Success can’t be achieved without a happy and engaged employee base.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on your overall marketing strategy?
There’s always pressure to optimize spend, and prioritizing your spend is difficult but necessary. We overcome that as a marketing leadership team by identifying our overarching vision and strategy and then developing a bottom-up budget that ladders up to that. We give ourselves flexibility throughout the year to shift as needed — and that’s accepted and supported by all marketing leaders. One consideration we often have to make is choosing whether to prioritize spend that focuses on customer retention or acquisition. We know that our annual technology conference bbcon is a marquee event that is critical for our brand and our customer relationships. We have continued to make the event a priority even through uncertainty of the pandemic and the following economic pressures. We are seeing payoff from that in the form of customer relationships forged, customer loyalty and customers signing longer contracts. There’s also a general halo effect that it gives our brand as a whole in the market, and we’re able to tap into that throughout the year with long-tail content that comes out of the event. With that said, we’ll continue to review and shift spend where needed to meet the goals of the organization in a way that best serves the company AND our customers.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I am so incredibly fortunate in my role at Blackbaud to be in contact every day with leaders at nonprofits, schools, universitiies, CSR teams and more — these are the women and men on the front lines of changing the world. Their passion, dedication and inspiration gives me confidence that there is so much good waiting to be unleashed. If I had some kind of magic wand to wave, I wouldn’t start a new movement. Instead, I would love to give more capacity, opportunity and white space to the people on the front lines to do what they do best — make a real difference in the world. The passion, the ingenuity, the love, the committment it’s going to take to build a better world — it’s already out there. What I wake up thinking about each day is how we give these world-changers the tools and support they need to bring thneir visions to life. It’s my honor and pleasure to help support that through the technology and resources that Blackbaud delivers, and we have an incredible opportunity before us to continue creating even more possibilities for our customers.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Check us out and learn more at blackbaud.com.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
CMO Perspectives: Catherine LaCour Of Blackbaud On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget and Why was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.