2023 into 2024
Happy New Year, friends! 2023 has been a year of growth for Blue Hills Digital, so I’m taking note of some wins and lessons-learned here, and setting some intentions for 2024.
2023 was the second full year of working on Blue Hills Digital as my sole, full-time income. Before that, the business was a side hustle, where I got to indulge my interests when a fun website redesign or consulting gig came along, and I didn’t care much about important business questions like positioning, establishing an ideal customer profile, or building a ladder of product/service offerings.
2022 — the first full year — still felt like hustle-mode. I had targets for the net profit the business needed to hit and the number of hours I was willing to work, but it wasn’t clear what combination of clients and projects would get me there. I said yes to projects big and small, from all kinds of different clients.
Going into 2023, I was more deliberate. At a high level, I set three separate goals for the year, and 12 months later I’m pleased to say I hit all three:
Expand the proportion of nonprofit or mission-driven clients to match the business positioning. Starting the year, revenue from clients in the nonprofit/mission-oriented/social-impact sector accounted for only 27% of total revenue. This was a legacy of the business positioning in the earlier, side-hustle days. Through 2023, I adopted much clearer positioning focused on communications needs in the nonprofit sector, and the client mix shifted dramatically. In 2023, revenue from clients in the nonprofit/mission-oriented/social-impact sector accounted for 59% of total revenue.
Pay the bills, steadily. Not a surprising goal, but an exciting one to hit. I wanted to take a consistent biweekly draw from the business throughout the year (so our household budget has the steady feel of a biweekly paycheck) and I was able to maintain that regular draw, despite a couple of challenging cashflow months.
Don’t overwork. While I don’t bill hourly, I do track the time I spend working overall, because I don’t want to design myself into a business that requires more working hours than I can consistently put in. My kids are still young and I have a busy family life that I want the business to support, not pull me away from. And I’m please to report that’s working in a way that feels balanced.
Me, not working (Human family not pictured)
I realize, in hindsight, that 2023 was a year-long listening tour with nonprofit communications professionals. All year I spent time in talking and answering questions with nonprofit professionals in free consultation calls, in Slack communities, in Facebook groups, and on email lists. As a result, I’m ending the year with a much clearer sense of where I can deliver value and help organizations tackle their communications challenges.
In 2024, I’ll dig deeper into:
Making websites that work. In particular, organizations need help determining when is the right time for a full website redesign, vs. adding functionality, appying a new theme, or conducting an invisible, behind-the-scenes replatforming. (And I’ll continue to implement some of these projects for a handful of clients where I have capacity.)
Making sense of web analytics. The list of orgs seeking support with Google Analytics 4 is loooong, and I’ll continue providing support that looks beyond quick setup projects and builds conversation around which metrics make sense to track, and how to incorporate analytics into decision-making in a meaningful way.
Communications strategy. I’m still building my capacity here, and hope to have the bandwidth to support 2-3 orgs in their communications strategic planning process in 2024.
I’m incredibly grateful for the professional position I find myself in as we start the new year. In my work through Blue Hills Digital, I get to meet such a wide variety of people all over the country (and internationally), each doing high-impact work on issues spanning reproductive justice, climate change, criminal justice, education, healthcare, and more. It’s a true privilege to contribute little pieces of advice or strategy in support of these amazing organizations and their work.
