[Top Agency Series] Harnessing Digital Tools To Fuel Nonprofit Missions With Erik Rubadeau

Erik Rubadeau is the CEO and Founder of Yeeboo Digital, a digital agency specializing in helping nonprofit organizations leverage technology to achieve their missions. He is a seasoned leader in the digital agency space with over 20 years of experience. With a hands-on approach and an eye for the intersection of technology and strategy, Erik has been instrumental in streamlining operations for impactful entities such as Habitat for Humanity Canada and Save the Children. He is passionate about streamlining operations and enhancing technology use within the nonprofit sector to help organizations achieve greater impact. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:58] Erik Rubadeau talks about Yeeboo Digital and how it helps nonprofits leverage technology
• [07:23] Erik’s intriguing past as a forest firefighter and how it contributed to his current career
• [09:34] The unexpected catalyst that led to the launch of Yeeboo Digital
• [20:14] The strategic hires that catalyzed the evolution and growth of Yeeboo Digital
• [26:33] Erik discusses the evolution of Yeeboo Digital’s service offerings
• [30:41] How Yeeboo Digital identifies and fixes pain points for nonprofits
• [33:52] How nonprofits can better utilize existing tech tools to maximize fundraising efforts 
• [43:15] The value of having mentors as an entrepreneur

In this episode…

What is it like to navigate the turbulent waters of the digital world as a nonprofit organization? How can you harness technology effectively when resources are stretched to the limit? These are the pressing questions many nonprofit leaders face, and the answers may lie in tapping into digital expertise and strategic innovation.

Erik Rubadeau, a nonprofit technology expert, brings his rich experience from outside the tech world into the heart of digital innovation for nonprofits. He tells the story of transitioning from a forest firefighter to a tech enthusiast, then accidental agency owner, and now to a leading advocate for digital efficacy within the nonprofit sector. By taking leaps of faith and continuously learning, Erik has created an agency that not only sets up powerful technology infrastructure for nonprofits, but also ensures they maximize their fundraising and operational potential. Sharing practical tips and success stories, he demonstrates the transformative power of technology in amplifying the mission of nonprofits.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Erik Rubadeau, CEO and Founder of Yeeboo Digital, about leveraging digital tools for nonprofit success. Erik talks about Yeeboo Digital and how it helps nonprofits leverage technology, the unexpected catalyst that led to its launch, the evolution of its service offerings, and how it identifies and fixes pain points for nonprofits.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Erik Rubadeau on LinkedIn
• Yeeboo Digital

Special Mention(s):

• Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters
• Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish
• HBR IdeaCast
• The Knowledge Project

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Structuring Your Org Chart Properly And Growing Your Company from $10K with Jon Morris, CEO of Ramsay Innovations LLCrris, CEO of Ramsay Innovations LLC” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “You can always make another dollar; you have to try, you have to learn.”
• “It’s really about making a conditionalized offer to someone and maximizing your potential revenue.”
• “Most nonprofit professionals would buy technology once in their career; we do it ten times a year.”
• “Pre-selecting the average gift directly influences fundraising efforts.”
• “Teach the organization to fish; don’t just hand over the technology.”

Action Steps:

1. Embrace continuous learning: Keep updated with technological advancements to identify tools that can further streamline operations.
2. Audit existing technology: Regularly assess your current tech stack to ensure you’re maximizing its potential and not underutilizing any tools.
3. Invest in expert training: Provide your team with training on key digital tools and platforms to ensure everyone knows how to utilize them effectively.
4. Optimize digital campaigns: Develop a strategic plan for digital marketing and fundraising campaigns, focusing on metrics like traffic, conversion rates, and average gifts.
5. Strengthen support services: This addresses the common issue in nonprofits of losing momentum when key personnel leave, ensuring sustained organizational efficiency and capacity.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Erik Rubadeau, and he is the founder of Yeeboo Digital. And Erik, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes the podcast people should check out. There’s a really good one with John Morris. He built up an agency to over 200 people, then sold it, and he started a software in the agency space for agencies to make better decisions, called Engine BI. It’s enginebi.net. Check the episode out. Really interesting. How you walk through the journey of the agency and then selling another good one. Erik and I were talking about how important it is to streamline operations and businesses, and he helps nonprofits do that through technology, which we’ll get to in a second.

But Adi Klevit was on, and we geeked out on our favorite software tools, productivity tools and technology. And she is an agency that helps, goes into organizations and helps map out their SOPs. So that’s all she does. They come in, she’s like, we need to map out these SOPs. And she’s a done-for-you service to map out SOPs so they can streamline operations, Client Onboarding, staff onboarding, or whatever it is. And that was a really good episode as well. And Kevin Hourigan was another one. He runs Spinutech, and Erik, he had an agency since 1995 so it’s interesting to hear the landscape of business, the internet and agency life in the mid-90s till today. So that was a really cool one. So check those out and more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.

We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the company the host, so they can develop amazing relationships, and most importantly, run their business while creating great content, of course. So the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people in companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasts, and you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected] and we’re happy to answer anything that you have thrown our way.

I’m excited to introduce Erik Rubadeau. He’s a 20-year veteran of the digital agency space. He bootstrapped the Yeeboo Digital agency from the ground up with the single focus of helping nonprofit organizations harness the power of digital to help them achieve their mission. Oftentimes, we’ll talk about the sector, Erik, I know, understaffed, overworked. So how do you streamline these things so you can focus on the highest and best use of your time? Will they help you do that? They’ve worked with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity Canada, Save the Children and many, many more. Erik, thanks for joining me.

Erik Rubadeau  3:46 

Thanks for having me. Appreciate the opportunity.

Jeremy Weisz  3:48 

So talk a little bit about Yeeboo Digital and what you do, and as you do that, there’s a video piece to this. I’m going to share my screen, and we’re going to pull up the Yeeboo Digital.

Erik Rubadeau  3:58 

All right, cool. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, Yeeboo Digital, as you sort of said or alluded to, we’re a digital agency, and we focus specifically in the nonprofit sector. All of our clients are organizations that are trying to really achieve and grow with digital. So, from our perspective, there’s so much potential in digital. And I guess I come from a background of taking things apart my whole life. So, for me, the idea of digital, the power of it. I used to build computers when I was a kid. I just, I’m fascinated by that kind of thing. And I fell into this sector kind of by accident. And when I started working in the nonprofit sector, I realized, there’s so much good work happening here, and this is really this back in like, 2004 or five, there was so much great work happening, but digital really wasn’t a big part of the scene. And so, over the last 20 years, I’ve been kind of fortunate, I guess, to work on amazing projects with organizations, but really focused around digital-first, how do we leverage technology to make organizations lives easier? Because what I was seeing was technology making organizations lives worse.

So, we’ve built our agency, kind of first and foremost on our expertise in the technology platforms, whether that’s the in sector, ones like Blackboard or engaging networks, or the sort of marketing platforms, Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc. Because as we grew and kind of perfected this technology first, this kind of technology infrastructure projects, if you will, expertise helping organizations with their CRMs, their email marketing tools, donation forms, websites, all that kind of stuff. What we realize is that, oh, well, once we’ve got them set up, from an infrastructure perspective, there’s the campaigns to run, there’s the marketing work to do, there’s the support that they need for the technology, and then there’s the strategy. So we’ve ended up kind of with these four points, infrastructure projects, which is, you know, sort of described. Are these, like underpinnings, if you will, the CRMs, the tools, the websites. But we also have a campaigns and email marketing team do a lot of digital media buying to help organizations get their name out and connect with people. We also have a support services team, which basically is reactive support.

It’s capacity enhancement for organizations because as we’ve trained organizations on the tools that they’ve purchased and got them all set up, well, it’s inevitable that someone leaves, and there’s this gap, whether that’s a gap with the current team or whether that’s a gap left by someone who’s leaving, so we’ve ended up with this support services team that’s focused on helping organizations with capacity enhancement. And then lastly, all of this is wrapped together with strategy, right? How do we get the most of technology? Do we have the right technology in-house? Now, you know? So it’s technology strategy, it’s growth strategy, it’s digital strategy, and a lot of it is very much focused on helping organizations, raise revenue so they can change the world. Our mission here is to change the world, but we’re not the ones doing it. Our goal is to change the world by helping the organizations that we work with actually go out and change the world.

Jeremy Weisz  4:11 

Talk about the niche for a second. I’m always intrigued by — so how did you get into nonprofit?

Erik Rubadeau  7:23 

Yeah, so I have a degree in political science, so clearly when I came out of university, I had a seven- or eight-year career working in forestry as a forest firefighter for the BC Forest Service. But I wanted to kind of switch gears and apply my degree. So I moved to Toronto.

Jeremy Weisz  7:42 

You were fighting forest fires.

Erik Rubadeau  7:44 

Yeah, yeah, that was my previous, previous life.

Jeremy Weisz  7:47 

What was the scariest story from that?

Erik Rubadeau  7:53 

I have been in three helicopter crashes. That is a part of the job. They don’t tell you, is there, right? Is sort of more of a regular occurrence, if you will, probably the scariest one. Most of them were kind of small-scale, like, lower to the ground. We had a door rip off a helicopter flying home late one night, kind of pushing the edges of grounding. And these machines are, some of them we’re flying in there from the 70s, the 60s, like Vietnam War era machines. And they’re still super functional. They’re great, but, you know, they are machines, right? And so we’re humming along, sign the setting, and then just in the split second, the door rips off. And all credit to our pilot, honestly, his name is Max, had the machine on its side in like, before I even realized the door had ripped off. Because the door that ripped off, if we had stayed straight, it would have gone right through the tail rotor, and we would have just spun to the ground and crashed. So incredible, like, and those are the things that could just kind of becomes normalized, I guess, when you work in that space. But yeah, when you kind of get away from…

Jeremy Weisz  9:01 

That’s the first helicopter crash, you’re like, I’m out. There’s enough for me. You endure two more.

Erik Rubadeau  9:06 

Yeah, what it is when there’s enough people around you who are like, oh, it’s okay, you know, hey, that was, you know, we’re all alive, everything’s good, you know. You kind of like, okay, yep, all right, this is normal, right? So, yeah, it’s a bit of a different life. But you know, when people say, you know, hey, you run an agency. You put out fires. I say, well, it comes from previous careers. Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Weisz  9:28 

Wow, put things in perspective a little bit. So you do that. And then what was next?

Erik Rubadeau  9:34 

Yeah, well, so, I thought, oh, I’m gonna apply this degree. So I moved to Toronto with my then girlfriend, now wife, and we got a little apartment, and I was going to go and work to apply to work in the Foreign Service. That was my plan. So I was writing my foreign service exams. So it was kind of going through that process, and I ended up volunteering with an organization called Journalists for Human Rights. Just kind of saw they needed help, had time on my hands, I was sort of just kind of gainfully unemployed for a little bit after working all summer, and thought, I’d be great to work for an organization. So I started working with them. And this was in the closet in a helicopter office in Rosedale, I think the Ben Peterson, the guy who started the organization, kind of had a connection and got us the space. But I just did a little bit of everything for the year that I was there, you know, I helped throw an event, fundraising event. I helped with the website.

I got the first direct mail package out the door, like just things, I called every single person who’d ever been to their events and asked them if they wanted to be a donor, like just all of these things that I had never experienced before. But I was just trying to help the organization out as I was going through the process, that ended up that I met someone who I’m trying to forget exactly how it happened, but I met someone who was working in an agency, and that agency was focused specifically on helping nonprofits with technology and digital and I was like, this is cool. And so I applied, I got the job, and I started there. I think there was four of us when I started, and about 15 people when I left. And it was one of those sink or swim, every day was something totally new, because it was early, 2000s trying to help organizations leverage the Internet, right? It was like, not quite my space, but we were coming out of that era, right? Like it was just, what is, email marketing was just taking off.

So, you know, online donations were really just starting. So it was kind of an interesting place, an interesting time. We had a lot of stuff that we did not know what we were doing, but it was an amazing place to work from that perspective. And you know, a lot of people in our sector who are out there doing great things spent some time there.

Jeremy Weisz  11:48 

It was interesting how you first got started and launched your agency. It sounded like you didn’t intend to even start an agency.

Erik Rubadeau  11:58 

Nope. No, absolutely not. It was a, I didn’t intend to work in agencies. I didn’t intend to be in the space, I have a half-finished Foreign Service exam somewhere floating around with the government. Maybe I’ll do that when I retire. Who knows? But, yeah, I got a client, an ex-client of mine, who we’d worked together for years when she was at Doctors Without Borders. She left there, ended up at coming to House International, bunch of years a bunch of months later, and kind of called me on a Friday and just said, you know, hey, I would love to work with you again. Would you consider stepping away from where you’re working and kind of doing your own thing and joining me? And I sort of said, well, I give it some thought. And she said, Okay, well, the only hitches I need to know on Monday. So, at that point, I just thought, I’ve been here for five or six years, I can always go back to working at another agency, or even back to this one. But Molly Elliot was, was the woman, and she, she’d just been a really great mentor to me, even though I was, you know, I was the agency, she was the client.

She just had, she had a great outlook on things, but also just a great strategic mind. And really loved working with her. So I just thought, you know what, this is a cool opportunity to go and do something different. So yes, I worked with Covenant House International as an external agency, if you will, agency of one for four or five years, and in that time, we shifted, she ended up leaving the organization about a year and a half later, and it was a bit of a shift up and I worked with drugs for neglected Disease Initiative for a little while, and they went back to working with Covenant House. And, yeah, it was just one of those things. You get to a point where there’s enough work in the day, and then you realize, you’re like, you know, I was young. I was really enjoying what I was doing. I was probably putting in 12 hours a day. And then when you start to realize, like, there’s enough time in a day for somebody else to be helping me.

So, my wife left what she was doing at the agency, joined me, and we kind of wrote two of us for a bit, and then we hired a third. And then, you know, kind of rolled from there. So yeah, we ended up. We’re now a team of 20.

Jeremy Weisz  14:05 

I want to hear about some of the key hires, Erik, but stick on the Covenant House International for a second. Because, you know, was initially, did you know? Okay, this is just launching in. This is going to be full-time work like when they’re like, We need you here. Is this going to be? Did you realize it was going to be 10, 12-hour days? Or were you thinking, okay, I can maybe handle this project while keeping my job?

Erik Rubadeau  14:34 

No. I mean, I don’t know if I really, in all honesty, I don’t want to say I’m impulsive, but I follow my intuition, and I just had this feeling. I was like, no, I should be doing this. This seems like the right thing to be doing right now, you know, when I can’t see a reason, why not? I do and I couldn’t see a reason, why not? So, I just jumped in with both feet, I had a chance to talk with my wife about it and say, you know, Am I nuts? And she said, No. Go on, try it out. You never know, right? So, you know, I knew there would be lots to do, you know, based on my conversations with Molly, and it wasn’t even that work that ended up really being the big piece. It was a couple years later, in that relationship, where we started with a program that was called Sleep Out, which, at the time, was focused on, like, high school students, sort of, like, the 24 hour famine concept, right? Like, trying to get students to sort of understand and do an experiential. And it was the concept which, some people might be familiar with now, but it was focused on just getting kids to sleep out for the night, hey, here’s your sleeping bag in your cardboard box, you know, raise a little bit of money and do this experience sleeping out together, kind of, you know, at the school, or whatever.

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