Ashley Budd is the envy of Advancement Offices everywhere. She and her team at Cornell raise money, communicate effectively, and, most importantly, Alumni ACTUALLY want to hear from them! How does she do it? Let’s find out.

Joel Goodman: From Bravery Media, this is Thought Feeder. My name is Joel Goodman. With me, as always is the noble Jon-Stephen Stansel. We are very excited to have my good friend Ashley Budd on the show today. Ashley, thanks for being on the show. Hi, how are you?

Ashley Budd: Yay. Hi, I’m good.

Joel Goodman: Awesome. Ashley, I’ve known you for a very long time, and your work. I guess in the last, I don’t know, probably like five years maybe. Yeah, maybe a little bit longer, but in the last five years you’ve kind of, rocketed into this sphere of, I don’t know, like trustworthiness and reliability in the whole world of advancement and particularly fundraising and engaging communities.

And we wanted to have a conversation with you today about how you’ve done that, because I think most people who have been in your workshops, at various conferences or have talked to you, on the internet or, you know, a plug for your, your newsletter, follow, you know that you. Just kind of bring a sense of innovation to our entire industry. So first off, give us kind of a, a summary of what you’re, what you’re doing. Like tell everyone who’s listening, what your current situation is and all the things you’re focusing on.

Ashley Budd: Yeah. I think to cut to the trustworthiness, I think I’m just sharing, like oversharing is one of my identities, so, that helps, you know, tell people about things. They tend to trust you more when you’re honest and open. So that’s what I think of what I’m doing, but, what I’m actually doing is probably like 19 different jobs.

No, that’s not true, I like to have my hands in a lot of things, so I think I’m also sharing a lot about like, things that I’m thinking about kind of sideways and things that are overlapping and that sort of stuff. But, day Job is Director of Marketing Operations in the Advancement Unit at Cornell University, and it’s been a pretty cool path to get there.

I started as a social media strategist in 2013 and in 2014 I went remote, which was cool. That was really good. almost 10 years, working remotely. So I really do feel like an OG in that, space. And then, we actually called our unit the digital innovation unit for a while, and then we dropped the innovation word because it was just like, I think too buzzwordy for us, but like, now that it’s coming back to, like you mentioned it this recording, I was like, oh, that sounds respectable again.

Okay. That’s good. But our unit was really, I think, unique and we can talk about that more, and now we’ve merged teams. I think we’ve gone through thinking about new digital strategies to like actually trying to implement them. And what that means is like culture change, structure change. So I’ve been living and learning.

And it’s like really working, I am so fortunate to be at a place that has resources to do this stuff, and I think that, just to bring it back to the oversharing part, I know that other places can’t do what I’m doing and I want other people to be able to translate it for whatever it is for them.

And learn from what works. Like invest in the stuff that works and maybe skip the things that we learn don’t work, and don’t waste your time on that. So that’s where I love contributing that back to the industry, that feels really great.

Joel Goodman: So one of the things I’ve thought about a lot from hearing, some of your talks at conferences and just kind of following not just you, but your, your coworkers and a lot of the people that are getting the work done with you, is you have a ridiculously talented and amazing team.

I think what strikes me as kind of empowering is a lot of the really cool like wins and metrics that you all have had is this sense of constantly engaging your alumni community. And it, it’s not accidental. Y’all have done a lot of work and a lot of research and a lot of, a lot of thinking and strategizing around how to engage and actually build that community up, and I think that’s what a lot of advancement and development offices really want to do. I think it’s what a lot of, you know, social media managers in higher ed want to do. I think it’s what a lot of marketers want to do with their respective audiences.

When you look at the last several years of kind of building that machine, are there strategies that kind of stuck out to you, or a couple maybe overarching approaches that you and the team have taken to, make sure that you are building that community and, and engaging those people?

Ashley Budd: Yeah, it makes me think about like, first props to Cornell for making the investment. Even before me, they, Chris Marshall was, leading the alumni affairs team at Cornell., And again, like disruptor, brought my boss, Andrew Gossen, who I’ve worked with, in my almost 10 years at Cornell and, at the time, so I think that was around 2009.

And at the time where like these alumni organizations are organized by regions. A lot of the emphasis was on the Cornell Club of New York or Sarasota, or Sheboygan. Right? And they knew when social media hit that, like now we, now our next region is the, like, it’s this place. And how do we think about applying what we know works in a kind of regional, like how we know works about alumni communities.

And how do we apply that to this new community thing? And so super smart to be like, hey, this is a thing we need to figure out. Let’s steal Andrew from Princeton. Let him build a team. And that’s the team I joined as a social media strategist. And so that was cool in thinking about the mindset really from this digital engagement.

And we were so well positioned. With the, you know, for the next 10 years for what was happening. So I think that’s where we kind of had that like leading edge kind of thought around what are the digital engagement things that are working, how do we apply that to advancement And having three full-time, like three FTEs working on social media strategy in 2013 in advancement is bananas. It’s still bananas. I don’t do that. Like my team does not have that. Not saying you need to have that. Like now we almost, it’s like half a FTE really, dedicated to just social, but that’s because now marketing operations is 16 people.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Let’s talk a bit about, about the breakdown of, of that team. Like you say, you’ve got got 16 people on your marketing team, which is a fair number of people. So what does that look like and how are those roles divided?

Ashley Budd: Well, let’s understand scale too, because you don’t need 16 people unless you’re tasked with raising 5 million and engaging 200,000 alumni. which, which I have contact information only for like another 75,000 . So it’s like, touch everybody, raise a ton of money. that’s the scale we’re talking about. So like scaling it down.

What kind? I think a good conversation, like a good translatable conversation is, what kind of roles are, I think like really important to get the work done., and so on the team we have, new to the team, like growth areas have been in email and, marketing analytics., those are positions like email specialists and marketing analytics specialists did not exist even before 2020.

So that’s a really cool new part of the team that’s making us move so much faster than we could before., another thing that we did, which I think was smart, in advancement, we had the digital team that I was on, we had a branded communications team for advancement, and we had an annual giving marketing team.

We merged those together. That’s how I end up with 16 people because there were people doing pockets of writing, and strategy and, publishing in all of those areas. And so we streamlined. Now the writers are writing everything, but they’re together and they’re writing one voice to one audience.

Like, great idea. This is like much more efficient, much, much more effective., so that’s how we get to more people too, was like thinking about bringing those teams together, and kind of having all the content creators. Then handing off to people who are doing publishing. So I think about when we started working in social media and you, like, I was doing everything right.

I was a graphic designer, a writer and publisher. I needed to know everything about the platform and also be able to like create stuff., now there’s people who create stuff. They create it multi-channel, and the reason I only have half a person dedicated to social media is because his expertise right now is the publishing channel.

And it’s like really what we all need to know, like how do I publish? And what’s the best way to do that? And the content’s coming to him. And then it gives him room. Really, the other half of the job is built because it’s a entry, like it’s an entry level position, and I wanna be able to grow that person.

And so, like, what else do you wanna do? Do you wanna help support this texting campaign? Do you wanna help support direct mail? Do you wanna help, you know, are you more creative? Do you wanna like, do more content creation? So, that, that’s like. I think, it’s still like the kind of generalist role it always was, I guess.

But, like right sized, honestly.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: That makes so much sense. Like, I mean, as social media grows, I know I am having a harder time keeping up with so many different channels. And different types of content creation. And there are things that I wanna do and, and I’m very lucky, you know, you mentioned hav having a specific marketing analytics person, oh three! Oh, awesome!

And, that’s so new, new to me too. My current role, like, okay, I have the analytics off of my plate and can focus on the creation, but also like how, what, you know, I find so helpful. We have dedicated analytics people who understand it so much better than I ever could as a generalist, but coming together and then like collaborating, okay, here are the, your social analytics, let’s try to hash out what they could mean.

So do you find some collaboration between some of these roles?

Ashley Budd: Yeah. And I wanna share more about these roles too, because if you’re thinking about, you know, if you’re a listener, hi listener, if you’re thinking about who are these people that are on my team, the, the marketing analytics team are also audience management. So they’re like, they understand the data.

They, know how to like, kind of help you tell that full circle story. Who was the audience? Who did it get sent to? Who actually received it, who converted? Who do we do like, it’s that group. So it might be the person that’s like pulling lists for you, you know, it’s that role., but then elevating it to really giving them the kind of performance analytics work that ends up living sometimes like with.

With a strategist or like, you know, with the person who’s doing everything else and you don’t get it, you know, you never get enough time to like do the reporting that you wanna do or like get into the weeds on like, how did that thing do? Or I wanna test something. You know, that’s what we’re leaning on that team for.

And a lot of it was like we just had to, we wanted to do a lot of volume and so we were gonna need, like a lot of, you know, two of the roles are really like dedicated to supporting, like getting those audience lists for all the stuff that we’re doing. Yeah, it’s a cool job, especially if you like spreadsheets.

Like you like spreadsheets. This is a cool job,

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Those people do exist, so.

Ashley Budd: They do. Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Goodman: And it’s the kind of position that you know back, I mean back, you know, six, seven years ago, only kind of like mega universities had marketing and data analysts, like on staff and were building out

Ashley Budd: Or like marketing departments.

Joel Goodman: Right? And today there, there are like very few institutions that have any of those people anywhere in the entire protocol.

You know, they don’t have, they don’t, they don’t have those people that are able to look at, all of the, all the data that’s coming in from, from open rates, from how people are using websites from, you know, especially like this whole kind of like deep 360 view of what’s going on with an institution’s marketing from top to bottom.

It’s just very rare within higher ed. I wonder if you could dive in a little bit to the difference that having those people, those roles make for the work that you all are doing, you know, beyond just like, cool, you get the data, but like, I mean, what are the kind of those tangible outcomes?

What was the rationalization for building out hat specific practice and hiring those folks.

Ashley Budd: Yeah, we had a moment in time, fall of 2020. We were like looking internally, you know, what are, let’s look at every person’s role, what do we need? And, Cornell was in a great position to, you know, they were able to keep everybody whole and. Lots of places. Were not adding roles, but I had for so long been making a case for like, we could do more, we can engage more people and we can bring in more gifts if we, you know, if we do these things, if we grow the email team, this is something that even, you know, colleagues of mine have been working on you know, for years and years and years.

We should grow the email team. And so while we were at that moment, one of the directives for going forward in 2020 was to use technology to engage more people. Like that’s what we were gonna do. This was like a scalable thing that we could do. And so that’s where the investment came from.

So again, it feels like Cornell just like being smart. Me selfishly like, let’s bring it back to me., me selfishly, like I was really curious about what would it be like. To run an agency, how do I, like, how would I build one internally, how do I position this marketing team to serve the whole division, all the alumni, and then also this annual giving program that we had just merged, which makes the team accountable for gifts under a thousand dollars.

Like if that, the big fat part of the pyramid is not healthy, like we’re accountable for that. And, It’s really nice to be able to tie your projects to gifts. You know that a lot of marketing departments are like budget held because they can’t be like, oh, if I do this though, like, we’re gonna raise more money.

Right. And then because my team is making, showing the connection between the engagement work that we’re doing, like this engagement work is driving this other thing, that is super helpful. So pulling those teams together, that was something we did before the pandemic, but pulling together like the people who were communicating with that annual giving marketing team was, that was a good move.

I recommend it.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Yeah, for sure. And it, because it, you know, being in higher ed social, in the more overall university marketing space, central space, it’s so tough because it seems a little scary to like look at giving and go, oh my work is going to be tied to a dollar number. Right? But in a way it’s kind of liberating because it’s like, hey, my value is tied to a dollar number.

I can point and say we did this. Whereas in central marketing it’s a little bit more, well, I’ve got some, you know, regular data for you, but you know,

Ashley Budd: It was hard, like I thought that was the path I was on. Like I was at a tuition driven institution, my alma mater, RIT, you know, the focus, I was kind of spinning the same focus, but you know, it’s revenue at the other end of the business, right? So trying to tie that to students in the stuff that I was doing.

And then I figured I’ll, I’ll go learn advancement, I’ll try understand that end of the business and I’ll land somewhere centrally at the university doing communication centrally. Cause I’ll understand it all. But then I realized that no, that’s a totally different. job. That’s like job number three, right?

That’s the brand. That’s like the whole, the like, it’s the community engagement different from, I’m trying to put people on like these more specific paths to enroll or. Become a volunteer for the university or be a donor., so I was like, no, no, no, actually, like, I like staying on these ends where like I can tie it to revenue or like, you know, and so I, I know, colleagues, I, that’s why I stay where I am because I do think that like central role is really hard when your, your, you’re accountable for the brand.

Um, and that, the ROI on that is not as clear as like someone just made a $50,000 gift because I sent that email. Right? like

Joel Goodman: Yeah.

Ashley Budd: Bingo. Right? It’s so much more direct.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: And that makes the case for like so much restructuring at universities, right? And the central marketing office is kind of the redheaded stepchild sometimes where it’s like, oh, okay, well you’re under enrollment management now. Oh, okay. Somebody new comes in. Now you’re under advancement. And that central marketing team is solely responsible, and changes, and like has to alter to the whims of whatever place they’re in now. And there’s so much value in being in one place and becoming that expert in that area and having the social marketing office be their own thing.

Ashley Budd: Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: And rather than just, okay, well, whatever VP is, you know, arguing the most for having this under them.

So, yeah, I think it’s valuable to be very specialized, and I have the central marketing office, and then marketing for advancement and admissions and all of that together.

Joel Goodman: Have you had to do much like bridge building though, between Central and, and what you all do in advancement development? Like are there, I know a lot of institutions, so I started out in advancement, marketing within advancement and you know, got a kind of crash course in small regional college development work and everything else, as we were doing other stuff.

But I think as I moved around, as I, you know, I worked at two different institutions and then being on the agency side and looking at. a lot of different institutions and how they’re set up. You never really know what that focus is gonna be. But one thing that seems really common, across the industry is that disconnect between, organizations, you know, everyone siloing, blah, blah, blah.

Ashley Budd: Yeah, it can be.

Joel Goodman: So like, I guess like in, in your view and your experience at Cornell, what’s the thing that allows your office to be super effective? Utilizing the Cornell brand, and engaging your specific communities. Like have there been like strategic things? Have you had like challenges over the years that you’ve been there?

What’s, what are some of the, the key things you’ve noticed?

Ashley Budd: We’re always better together. Like, we always have a better relationship when we’re working on something together., so if we’re working on launching a capital campaign, right? Like we’re in much more constant, and I’m thinking specifically about like the communications teams., not like what goes in at like the presidential and trustee level thing, like, like no one can control those silos, but you know, like marketing team to marketing team, right? Like central to advancement, when we are collaborating on something for the brand that we know is gonna be like alumni and development facing, like a campaign or, our 150th anniversary, our sesquicentennial campaign was another one where it was like, we’re gonna get, like, we’re gonna have to agree on what this looks like.

And so I find that the times that we’re working together is the times where we. I don’t know, like we like treat each other more like humans. like, you know, we’re working on the same project and when we are not working on something together, it’s like easier to be like, oh, the central office. You know, like, and some, you know, and like it’s easier to treat them as if they’re not on the same team., and that I think is, that’s what I like. That’s just my reflection on how it’s, how it’s goes. When you, when you have open communication, it goes much better., and I think we can all learn from, you know, how, how you work with the distributed team. I think this conversation’s much easier now.

I’m like much more relatable now. We’re not in the office together, we’re not in physical spaces together. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t slack someone or team someone. A quick question and act like you are team members, that that should be like part of the culture, I think.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Exactly. It’s that convincing too that like, hey, we are on the same team, like we have mutual interests. from, from from the central marketing office perspective. Like you get so much of like, oh, well the central marketing office is not doing enough for our department or whatever, and they don’t, they don’t care about us.

No, we do, we just have so much going on and it does take that communication of like, okay, we need to talk. Let’s go have coffee. Let’s go do something.

Ashley Budd: What are you working on? And. how can we collaborate? Like how can we streamline, how we can make this more like, what are you working on that I can steal from so that I don’t have to do more work? like that is how we should be thinking. You never wanna like find a project, but you should be identifying projects where the teams should be working together.

And like if you’re a manager, model that or encourage the the open conversation to like ask them the question. Instead of being afraid of what the answer is, is that a lot of time, like you’re afraid you’re gonna get a no, or you’re afraid that you’re annoying someone, I don’t know. Be annoying.

Joel Goodman: Ashley, I think you’ve seen a lot of trends in your time working, in, in, well, the roles that you have at Cornell. And I remember, you know, years ago you were kind of spearheading micro donations and you all were kind of the ahead of the game on a lot of these tactics that I think have, are kind of pervasive now in, in higher ed advancement.

Two, two questions or two-parter. So one, what, what do you think is important right now for, for advancement development offices to be looking at in terms of how they communicate, in, in ways that, you know, produce results? And two, are there any things that you’re thinking about for the future that you think are gonna be new kind of tactics or trends that folks should be watching out?

Ashley Budd: So let’s see what we should be paying attention to right now., I think if you were to make an investment in anything right now, it would be email marketing campaigns.

Joel Goodman: Email’s not dead yet.

Ashley Budd: It’s the number one converter of all things I’m trying to get my people to do., it doesn’t mean that the other channels. Don’t in other ways, I think social media is a powerful awareness raising tool, and if people don’t know what you’re doing, they’re not going to do it because of the email that you send.

So it’s like sending email. It’s also like having enough communication. So, one of the workshops that I’ve been doing for years now, and it’s still important for people to understand, is about how to set up a, a campaign and have enough awareness, raising content, have enough content that tells people why.

That’s the one we miss so much, and my team’s investing in creating a bunch of why give content for this quarter, we just published an article. We’re, we have a video that we’re working on. We’re working on social media assets, and it’s because we don’t have enough of it. And we don’t have enough.

That’s like really like, slaps, so, we’re working on that and we’re doing it because on March 16th we have our giving day and we like, don’t wanna miss convincing people that it’s a thing worth doing. So having enough of that stuff and like, I think, and then also having enough of like the follow ups that feel good, the engagement.

Things we invest a lot in that next week we’re launching cornerdlle which is a Cornell wordle, and so like we invest in making games because they make people smile and they like, makes people connect with us. And it’s a nice, like, thank you for being part of our community. So that kind of stuff that, you know, more email communication, like these audiences want it. Like this is your brand that they actually adore, you know, like they have pride in their school, maybe not everybody if they had a bad experience. We can talk about that, like how to overcome that. But,

Joel Goodman: Are you talking about my grad school experience?

Ashley Budd: Perhaps, you know, like if you’re at the school that’s in that position, like you gotta think about how you’re providing new value because you know you can.

But, but yeah, like people have a really high tolerance for email, pain forum brands that they love. Think about like how, like the brands that you let. Flood your inbox, you know, and you do it, maybe not because you want seven emails, but like, you want, do you wanna miss the ones that are really good

Um, so that’s the thing for right now, I think I’m really jazzed on. I know that there’s more that we can do in other spaces too., you know, we still bring in the most revenue from direct. Just like so outside my comfort zone., and you know, it’s still like, you know, one piece over a million dollars.

Like you can’t, like the return on investment is just crazy. So I’m just really curious what’s gonna happen with the channels. Like, like how people are gonna wanna receive information. I’m like a little bit of a communication history nerd, and I love just how. We evolved from like calling on people’s houses and saying hello to like what the telephone did and then like what the internet did and what social media did.

And so, there’s like weird shifts between like private networks and, I think it’s, it’s important to pay attention to where people wanna be communicated. With, and that has been changing really fast. I don’t know. I like, see now I’m starting to get into like my interviewer seat and like I wanna hear more, we talk about future stuff.

I wanna hear more what you guys are thinking about that.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: It’s diversifying very rapidly.

Ashley Budd: That’s a good way of putting it.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: The platforms are changing and people’s attitudes are changing. And also I think there’s a big element of gen Z who got it hammered into them. Like, don’t post on social. You won’t get a job or get into college. And, which is terrible because it’s not really true.

Like, yeah, don’t, don’t, you know, post dumb things online, but like, you know, it can actually help you get a job. I that, I mean, I’m a perfect example of that. But I think there’s also, it’s driven them into being one more intentional about what they do post, but also into spaces that are more private, so more peer to peer, and that that is difficult for marketers for many reasons, like, but from a social listing perspective, from an engagement perspective, it makes things a lot harder.

But also finding avenues. we can be in those communities., discord is a big one. Like, okay, well we can, you know, it’s not somewhere your traditional social media, but we can, we can have a presence there and, and it be a little bit more personable. So the, the challenge I think is, is staffing all of that, because a university can’t have somebody dedicated for every single channel.

An entertainment property that I work on might, you know, so I think just as students are being more intentional about where they post, I think universities are, have to be more intentional about where they are. You just can’t be everywhere anymore.

Ashley Budd: Yeah, totally

Joel Goodman: Yeah, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking more along the lines of kind of UX and engagements. We can do with websites, cuz that’s where I live most of the time. but also content, you know, the, all the, all the AI stuff has been coming up. I mean, at what point are you gonna be able to. Allow your AI bot to actually interact with people, when the singularity actually does hit, because cause it probably will at some point.

Um, but I mean, even, even inside bravery, like we’ve been, you know, everyone has to have some sort of AI strategy, even if that’s, we’re not gonna use it, because it’s, it’s not leaving., as much as some people might want it to., but I, but I also think there’s, you know, one of the things to keep in mind is that it doesn’t mean that you can just get rid of jobs or people that are actually

Ashley Budd: It’s gonna make it so much easier. Like I’m team bring on the robots and I have been like, automate my stuff, do this, like these repeated tasks like. Let’s get rid of it. And if some, if a, if a AI wants to give me recommendations, love it. Like them to me. Give me all the ideas I want, all the ideas, and yeah.

And then you’re gonna pick the best one.

Joel Goodman: And tweak it. So it sounds like a real person did it. You know? And, and that’s the thing at some point, like I, I think it’s important that we don’t just assume that there’s, like, bots are a, AI is just gonna do everything for us without any intervention because at some point then like, cool, all the content’s generic.

It’s like the same algorithms are generating it, but. Finding ways to use it to increase our productivity or efficiency or increase what, or, you know, even improve how we’re talking about stuff and what our approaches are. You know, a lot of the uses for like getting past like a brain block, like is super helpful.

So we’ve been thinking in terms of how that’s. Gonna affect other places, but I, you know, I, for me, it’s just been looking at my own usage of various communication platforms and, you know, to J.S.’s point, like I’m in a few more discords than I ever thought I would be. But it’s generally, like I’m talking about baking bread with a bunch of bread nerds and stuff like that.

And you know, we, we talk, we, we, we talked on, I, I think it was our, our last recording, like, you know, TikTok as a channel. Like I’m less like thinking about TikTok as an actual channel, but I’m thinking in terms of like how people use and interact with that interface and like, are there ways to start using some of those patterns in other ways of communicating and in website design in ways that we, you know, kind of bring people into our content and find ways to make stuff stickier as we’re communicating. So I, it’s, it’s an interesting, we’re at a really weird time because I think to, to j S’s point, the, the, the diversification or I would say like fragmentation of like all, like our attention, everywhere and all the different platforms that people are on and we have to be on is just really, maybe not unprecedented, but it’s definitely at a scale that’s larger than I think we’ve experienced.

Ashley Budd: There’s a couple other future things that are on my mind, one is part of, you know, part of how I’ve got this engagement engine running right now is knowing who’s interacting. Right. Like knowing who’s downloading the digital download of the week, knowing who’s watching the videos, knowing and so that we can keep giving them what they want.

We can follow up and. you know, Google Analytics is now illegal in the EU you know, like now they’re, you know, I was in the UK twice this fall and I can’t answer, like, I can’t be the person talking about privacy on the panel. I’m like, we don’t do that in America., so I’ve been thinking about like how I’m collecting all of this information about people and wanting to like future proof myself.

We are living in the world of like, we get all the info right now and at some point, I don’t know, maybe not, maybe we’re too capitalist, but at some point, like America’s might be like, please stop with the data mining,

Joel Goodman: California. You see it state by state too though. I mean, California’s in enacted a bunch of laws like that. It keeps spreading across the.

Ashley Budd: Yeah, but like I was, I was watching that all go down like in September., when I was in the UK . And it was just like, that was a, oh, I’m in a bubble moment. I’m not thinking about this. And the other one was, the, just the social consciousness and like green Web’s sustainability consciousness of Europe and the UK that we don’t have either. And I wonder once that does, like that’s one that I do think we’ll get to this generation and how much are they going to react?

Joel Goodman: Oh yeah.

Ashley Budd: Obsessed with digital of the way millennials are so, that I think that actually gave me a little bit of hope like. We like, we’re gonna find some balance here that, will kind of sort itself out and maybe we can create, like, I think we’re gonna, I’m gonna have to then create communities where people are authenticating in Right?

And having enough value in there that it’s worth doing that. Because otherwise I’m not gonna know if you’re there or not.

Joel Goodman: Totally. That’s, I mean, that’s, that’s exactly it. It’s, it’s that, that standpoint on privacy issues where it’s not that, oh, you can’t get the data, it’s that they have to let you in this. So it does put a lot more pressure on those of us on the, the content creation, the engagement side of things to make people want what.

Giving them and then, you know, in your, in your case then that they’ll turn around and give you money back.

Ashley Budd: That would be nice.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Ashley Budd, thank you so much for being with us. Where can people find you? do you have anything, that you’d like to plug? Please let people know.

Ashley Budd: I’m on the internet. I think Ashley Budd ranks appropriately on Google search. My website’s ashleybudd.com and I have a newsletter that I owe everybody soon, and you can subscribe right there.

Joel Goodman: Thank you so much for listening to Thought Feeder. Thanks again to Ashley Budd for being on, Ashley, thank you.

Ashley Budd: Thanks!

Joel Goodman: If you enjoyed listening to this episode, we would really appreciate a rating and a review wherever you find your podcasts. You can also go to thoughtfeederpod.com. Listen to back episodes of everything we’ve recorded over the last 50 some episodes and find transcripts for every one of those. Find us on Twitter if we’re kind of there at Thought Feed Pod. We’re also on Instagram and pretty much anywhere else you might want to be on social media.

We’ll be back in a couple of weeks.