Dr Mamobo Ogoro's Marketing Playbook (Part 2) - scaling impact and financial growth

Welcome back to Part 2 of my marketing conversation with the powerhouse Dr Mamobo Ogoro — social psychologist and co-founder of GORM, the award-winning Irish social enterprise on a mission to advance belonging and unify people across differences through education and digital media.

In this instalment, Mamobo drops pure marketing gold for anyone building an impact-driven business.

She gets real about how to grow a financially successful business while also making a positive impact, how humour and curiosity are her secret weapons for engaging people in DEI activism, and the online tactics that are generating income, not just clicks.

We talk founder-led sales, the power of meaningful community-building, and using shock to grab attention online.

Every bit of marketing genius at GORM feeds one purpose: building a brand that matters, one that’s fighting prejudice and growing belonging every day.

It’s sharp, fresh and packed with insight. If you’re a marketer or founder who wants to scale a thriving, purposeful business, it’s a must-read!

10. You have a serious message to share on prejudice and equity, but you also have fun with it online and that really draws people in. Can you say more about this?

That is strategic on my part. The topics of race and equity are very difficult and can be hard for people to engage with.

They don’t want to feel like they’re doing it wrong. They don’t want to feel like you’re wagging the finger at them. They don’t want any suggestion that they might be racist. People don’t engage with that, they’ll just shut down.

It’s strategic for me to weave in humour, empathy and joy so more people can engage with the content in a meaningful way.

If I come in with humour rather than seriousness, I’m also not going to be seen as a threat. As a black person, I have to work around the systems that work against me.

So rather than people seeing me as the strong black woman trying to make everybody feel uncomfortable, I’ll come in with humour and befriend you. This is my natural self, of course. Once you’re comfortable with me, I’ll tell you the hard truth.

This tactic is particularly important when working in a corporate environment. You have to be very cognisant of the politics and how to navigate these spaces. I find building my brand with humour allows me to cut through in a way that is acceptable and engaging for our audience.

11. You have grown a deep sense of community around GORM in real life and online. You call your followers ‘unifiers’. Any tips for someone who’s trying to grow a community around their company?

First, you have to think of your community before yourself.

This is where I feel a lot of commercial brands get it wrong. At the end of the day, they want the people to buy. My personal belief is that’s not community, that’s just corporations using the idea of community to sell.

Community is an act of servitude. You are serving the people without the expectation for return. When I talk about community in GORM and the wider social impact, we are serving marginalised communities.

Second, it’s an ongoing effort. You need to build trust first. Trust is built through ongoing engagement. Trust is built by creating what we call in psychology a ‘third space’ - it’s not your space, not my space, but our space.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to build community and trust. Most corporations don’t feel that they have time to do that, so that’s why they partner with us for the community piece.

A great example of community-building is our Wideshot Programme, which gives young people from ethnically diverse backgrounds the skills to tell their own stories and enter the film and media industry. We’re very proud of it.

At the end of the day, when you see the positive impact on your community, when you see the sense of belonging develop, you’re just like, ‘Wow, this is why we do the work that we do.’

https://youtu.be/tvawXBfvOuU?si=t-9f8q1RX3UAzgDU

(Check out the video of the annual GORM Gathering above - showcasing the power and electric energy of the GORM community)

12. What marketing platforms or tactics are driving the best results for GORM right now for generating income?

The best way we get clients is through email, webinars and events. Those clients usually come in after they’ve built awareness of who we are through our brand and social media.

LinkedIn and Instagram are the two channels where we build awareness - both through my personal brand pages and our company pages.

We have a content streamline that starts with what we call a ‘mama’ article. Myself or one of the team will write a deep-dive article, 500,000 words - it could be ‘How to tackle racism on the streets.’ That article gets posted on our website.

We then give that article to our Communications Executive, Eilís Walsh and she turns it into 15 pieces of content. So for two weeks, she has her content sorted. She leverages our AI bot with our brand book to shape the content for each channel. She also creates some video scripts for me based on snippets from the article and I’ll use those to make some videos for our socials.

Our main goal is to get people on our email list so we can communicate with them again and nurture those relationships. We put a call to action on our posts: ‘If you want to learn more, join our email list.’

We find scenario-based emails work really well right now because they’re practical and relatable. Rather than saying, ‘Here’s a workshop that’s happening on this date and time’, we send out an email telling a story about what happened to Johnny and how Mary intervened in the situation. We’ll then invite them to learn more or book a workshop with us - it’s working well.

It’s the same with our events and webinars. People register with their email address. Getting those emails is the gold. Once we get the email, we can retarget them and nurture those relationships. After the webinar, we send them an email to welcome them to the community and let them know the services we offer. We also do some research on who they are and the organisation they work for.

13. As the founder, do you play a role in developing relationships with potential clients?

13. As the founder, do you play a role in developing relationships with potential clients?

I have a LinkedIn strategy for building relationships with people who are in senior positions. Those people don’t tend to come to our webinars or sign up for our email.

We have a list of ideal clients that we want to connect with in each organisation. Usually the people who come to our webinars work under that person and will need to get sign-off for budget. As the founder of GORM, the person I want to make a direct relationship with is the person who does the sign-off.

They’re not going to answer a cold email. I do some research on them. I connect with them on LinkedIn. I don’t reach out straight away. I post content most days on LinkedIn, so they start to build an online relationship with me through my content on their feed.

Then I slide in their DMs and send them a personalised message: ‘We have so much in common in terms of culture and diversity. I’d love to know if you’re open for a coffee, and I can learn more about your work.’ That’s how I build our client prospects on a personal one-to-one level.

I’m great at grabbing people’s attention, but when it comes to converting people, that’s the part I’m working on improving as a founder. I want to get better at doing that at a B2B level rather than B2C.

14. Is word of mouth big for you?

Yes. It goes back to the GORM brand. When I think of brand, I think ‘What do people say when you’re not in the room? What taste am I leaving in people’s mouth?’

With activism, sometimes the taste is discomfort and that’s necessary. It’s not a positive taste most of the time. So the question is, ‘How do I give that discomfort, but also leave a positive taste?’

Again, that’s why I lead with humour. I’ve built great relationships with people in our industry. I help people out a lot so those relationships are strengthened.

I try to ensure that when I leave the room, people feel inspired and motivated. And it’s the same for our team when they give talks and go into schools - we work hard to ensure that our brand resonates with everybody.

15. What has been your favourite brand moment or marketing campaign at GORM, and why?

I loved when we rebranded and launched our new website. We tend to be disruptive in our marketing because a lot of people think DEI is serious. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. We’re humans, we’re flawed, we make mistakes, and it’s fun, right? We want our education to be fun.

To launch our rebrand, we sent out an email and a bunch of posts on socials. Our message line said, ‘Guys, we made such a huge mistake. We’ve changed, we’ve lost our way.’ People were freaking out wondering what’s going on, what did they do? Then the first line of the email said, ‘We’re sorry we kicked ass in our rebrand.’ We got a lot of positive engagement, we did get some pushback too. It’s called marketing, people!

Most importantly, we got a lot of awareness and engagement for our new website, which spotlighted our services and offerings. We wanted our new website to be more business-orientated and bring people into the sales funnel, as well as showcasing our impact.

Using that shock tactic got us a ton of eyes on our services. I love creating those kinds of moments in our marketing. Our content and campaigns support the growth of our community and the voices that we elevate. The shock factor is really good for grabbing people’s attention.

 

 

 

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16. Where do you find inspiration for your marketing (marketers or founders who inspire you, podcasts, books, other organisations…)?

I’m chronically online. I don’t necessarily have channels that I follow for their marketing. I just keep an eye on what’s trending. Sometimes I jump on trends. Sometimes I jump on what’s going on politically.

When my brain is free, that’s when inspiration comes in. When I go to the gym or I go for walks, that’s when I get my ideas and I write them down.

17. Many impact-driven founders talk about the tension between driving impact and building commercially sustainable businesses. You are navigating that balance successfully in GORM, with an impressive 65% growth in income in 2024. Can you speak about this?

Very early on, I was meeting with one of my advisors, a corporate CEO. I told him my ideas around growing a community, elevating diverse voices and creating impact. He looked at me seriously and said, ‘How are you going to pay your rent? Your values won’t pay the bills. You need to make money.’

I had to do the work to figure out how I could deliver impact, but also build something that can generate a profit. Regardless if you’re nonprofit or for-profit, you have to make a profit - it’s called a surplus in the nonprofit world. Nonprofit means you are using the profit to deliver impact, rather than it going into shareholders pockets.

When GORM first started, we were essentially a content agency. We created campaigns for companies. Those campaigns were working well but they weren’t generating enough money for the business to be commercially viable.

Then we made the shift to education. We realised we could charge corporate companies at a substantial rate for DEI training. Today, the core of our revenue model is corporate training. We do some consulting and content creation as well.

It was a hard transition for my brain to make. I initially felt that if I’m working B2B with corporates and organisations, I’m not working on the ground impacting marginalised communities.

I had an incredible advisor who made me realise that I am delivering impact. We’re giving corporate teams the actionable skills to fight racism, prejudice and inequality within the wider organisation, which is creating a positive impact for everybody in society.

Of course, we still work with our communities. We have an ‘enabling communities’ pillar where we deliver community-based events and programmes that are supported by our wonderful funders.

We now have a goal to become a completely self-sustaining organisation financially in the next 3-5 years, and then any funding we get will be icing on the cake.

18. What tactic do you feel is best to change hearts and minds and get people on board for your mission of unifying people across differences?

Curiosity. That’s how you get people on your side. People want to talk about themselves. People want to feel like they’re listened to and heard.

When people have views on racism that you don’t agree with, it’s often coming from fear and anxiety. It’s coming from deep-rooted feelings of not feeling like they belong. And they’re channeling that anxiety towards certain communities.

If we jump in by wagging the finger at them, they’re not going to want to engage.

You have to ask curious and open questions, and make sure that you really listen. It’s one of the biggest ways to grow understanding. My approach is to talk about the anxiety first and then we can talk about how we can support them to do the work within themselves.

You have to give them the tools to understand people from where they’re coming from, even when they have views that are not the same as yours.

Of course, you have the extremists and hateful people - I don’t focus on them. The work that we do is for the people who are in that sort of unsure phase, the vast majority of people.

19. To translate that into the marketing space, what do you think is your biggest tactic for changing hearts and minds online?

We want to ensure that our education and content is perceived in a way that fosters that openness and curiosity. We share nuggets of knowledge and practical tips online to support people in their own journey of intercultural learning.

For example, I had a post that sparked a lot of conversation. The post said that if you want to create awareness in someone, don’t tell them that they’re a racist, because they’re not going to engage. It’s a small tip to help people foster more understanding.

Of course there’s people who push back online. But there will be many more who resonate with it. I focus on those people. If we can support people to be better human beings in their everyday lives, then we have more people on the humanity side, which can prevent and mitigate us going to the extremes in terms of polarisation.

At GORM, we keep sharing daily nuggets via our messaging, our campaigns and one-to-one conversations. Our goal is to support people to cultivate that space of belonging for everyone, bit by bit.

20. What does a typical day in the life as the founder and CEO of GORM look like?

This month is super busy because it’s Black History Month so it’s back-to-back events.

My typical day when it’s an admin day and I’m at my desk, I wake up around 5. I’m an early riser. I do some chores because I like to get those out of the way. I go to the gym at around 5.45. I do the gym for 60-90 minutes. At 7.30 I have breakfast for an hour.

I love having a calm morning, my brain is fresh. From 8.30 - 12, that’s my deep focus time, whether that’s doing client consulting work, research, reading, proposals, or researching potential clients online. Then I have lunch. The afternoon is usually calls or maybe record for a podcast. At 5.30, I finish for the day.

For non-admin days, I go to a lot of conferences and talks, deliver sessions with senior leaders, do speaking engagements, meet clients over coffee, that kind of thing.

We just hosted our annual GORM Gathering celebrating everything we do. It’s not just an event: it’s a living, breathing reminder that when we come together, we don’t just celebrate diversity, we build belonging. It’s supported by really great sponsors: Coimisiún na Meán, RTE, Spin, Skillnet and more. A day packed full of storytelling, speaker panels, short film and a ton of community engagement.

The GORM Gathering reminded me that hope still exists and now more than ever we need to share our stories, disrupt harmful narratives of historically marginalised communities and be in solidarity with those affected by hate.

Check out Part 1 of this conversation - Inside Mamobo Ogoro’s marketing playbook - how social media, AI and a strong personal brand are powering a movement for inclusion and belonging - Read now!

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