Building Daffy's Brand: Key Takeaways from the BTB Conference ??

A bit delayed, but better late than never? Two weeks ago, Daffy's Head of Marketing (my other half as a marketing team of two), Chelsea Starr Paul and I had the opportunity to attend the Marketing.fan conference in San Francisco. I must say, as a marketing professional, this event had some of the most tangible and applicable learnings from industry leaders on building strong, emotionally resonant brands. In this post, I'll share some key takeaways that resonated with me and how we may plan to apply them to enhance Daffy 's brand and marketing efforts.

Crafting an Authentic Brand Experience

The first person we heard from was Camille Ricketts from Notion , who emphasized the importance of aligning your brand with the tangible value and experiences it provides to users. Essentially, where does your tool fit into people’s lives? Brand is about helping people feel the way they feel about themselves. Essentially, help people feel good about themselves. At Daffy, we know this feeling all too well. Our mission is to close the "Generosity Gap" – the difference between what people want to give and what they actually donate. To achieve this, we need to ensure the Daffy brand evokes feelings that resonate deeply with our members' desire to be more generous.

These were the three?essential components she laid out that make for a successful brand experience:

Capability: Capability is all about individual empowerment—equipping each member to give smarter. For us, that would mean showcasing how Daffy members maximize their giving, making people envy the people who are using Daffy, and enabling Daffy members to feel capable of using our platform through storytelling.

Beauty: Someone once explained this to me as the "french fry moment"—that delightful surprise when you find unexpected french fries in your 麦当劳 bag. It's a small, unordered delight that elevates your entire experience. In the world of tech, design and user experience are those french fry moments—killer features that surprise, delight, and deeply engage members. Our Chai feature perfectly exemplifies this principle. In Jewish tradition, the number 18 holds special significance. It represents "chai," the Hebrew word for "life," making donations in multiples of $18 a meaningful way to symbolize the wish for a long and prosperous life. Now, when Daffy members donate to Jewish charities, they see easy-to-use $18, $180, and $1800 buttons. We've also added a prompt explaining this tradition, inviting all members to participate. We even made it fun to smash those Chai buttons.

Our Daffy 2.0 redesign also embodies this commitment to exceptional design. Inspired by extensive member feedback (over 100+ interviews), we've created an intuitive, visually appealing dashboard that serves as a central hub for all giving activities, reflecting our belief that thoughtful design enhances generosity.

Recognition: People want to feel part of a community and have their efforts recognized. Recognition is about community impact—celebrating how individual actions create a powerful, shared identity. We should celebrate and amplify the generosity of our members, fostering a sense of belonging and making our members feel part of something bigger.

An example of how we do this at Daffy is through “badges.” As a fun way to incentivize generosity, Daffy members earn “badges” when they achieve milestones or take certain actions. Some examples are:

• when a member completes their first 10 donations on Daffy, or
• when they set up a recurring donation to charity, or
• when they launch their first Daffy Campaign.

We also show Daffy members the badges they haven’t earned yet to motivate them to take those actions.

Building Effective Marketing Campaigns

Scott Holden from Brex shared valuable insights on crafting compelling narratives for marketing campaigns. He shared that any good campaign or story begins with your truth, what differentiates us, and what our mission is. Some of the different ways of crafting a compelling narrative are: proof, provocation, novelty, wit, aspiration, category awareness, and competition. At this point of the conference, Chelsea and I looked at each other and it was clear…I tend to lean into “wit.” Can you tell?

Something we talk about often at Daffy is, how we want to talk about other charitable giving vehicles and traditional DAF providers. We unequivocally support ALL of the different ways to give, but what was an interesting insight was, “Sometimes attaching yourself to a competitor is the fastest way for people to know who you are.”

A great example was Brex’s Concurrrrugh campaign. The concern was that they were giving competitors too much air time, but in reality, it got people talking and made them feel something. This approach could spark conversations and make people feel something about our brand.

Product Naming

Maya Spivak 's conversation with Tanya Khakbaz from Stripe reminded us that product naming should aim to reduce cognitive load by describing the offering clearly. We've already embraced this principle with straightforward names like "Daffy for Work," "Daffy Campaigns," and "Daffy for Families."

Measuring Brand Awareness

A big question marketers always ask themselves is how to measure brand awareness effectively. Key takeaways:

• Invest adequately in experiments to gather meaningful data, at least $1K for initial testing (this was a big lesson for us with our TikTok experiment).
• Focus on the right indicators that align with your goals. At Daffy, our priority is growth, which may be measured by app downloads or sign-ups.
• Marketing makes modeling, compare performance across channels (ex: is there a correlation between LinkedIn impressions to sign-ups).
• Use historical data (minimum of a year) for better insights, without it focus on refining messaging or creative.
• Messaging should be incrementally tested.
• A/B test to find what creative resonates best with your audience in terms of frequency, reach, and impressions.

Avoid Random Acts of Marketing

The opposite of impact is random acts of marketing. I am certainly guilty of this. Here are some signs you are falling into that trap:

• Copy playbook from last company
• Idea from founder
• The thing you saw on LinkedIn
• Content with no distribution plan
• Position feature the same as competitor

Repetition Doesn’t Spoil the Player

Another interesting insight was, you need to say the same thing over and over for 18 months for someone to hear you. Our CEO & co-founder Adam Nash is always making appearances on podcasts and if you listen to them all like we do, you’ll definitely hear him continually reinforce our mission and key messages, like the importance of donating stock.

Unsexy Brands

Emotion is a powerful shortcut from awareness to action and solves deeper challenges than just awareness for unsexy brands. As a donor-advised fund…we can relate. The 3 questions key questions they encouraged all “unsexy brands” to ask themselves when creating campaigns include:

1. Will it make them smile?
2. Will it make them nod their heads?
3. Will it make them tell a friend?

Some fun ideas they shared included billboards (as a donor-advised fund maybe that would mean a billboard near an upcoming DAF conference) and branded items like t-shirts or socks to increase engagement and make our members feel part of a movement.

This conference was a treasure trove of insights from industry leaders on building beloved tech brands. I'm excited to apply these learnings to elevate Daffy's brand, craft compelling marketing campaigns, and ultimately inspire more people to be more generous, more often.

What resonated most with you? I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how we can continue to strengthen our brand and marketing efforts!