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Episode Summary There have been so many problematic practices we’ve used in nonprofit communications...so how do we start thinking about communications, differently? Well, in this episode, Michelle talks with Sarah Durham founder of Big Duck, a New York-based nonprofit communications firm, podcaster with The Smart Communications podcast and author of two books including Brandraising and The Nonprofit Communications Engine! We talk about the difference between communications, marketing and branding, how Americans are terrible at research, unnecessary urgency as a characteristic of white supremacy in communications, and what we can start doing differently today!
Episode Notes
Sarah Durham shares several great resources that we’ve listed below...here are links for content and references mentioned in the show:
References then Definitions:
Transcript
“...even though we have limited resources to invest in communications, we should abundantly spread them around and not hoard them for one arm of the organization. And that's a real culture shift you're describing that I think many organizations have not quite been ready to do yet.” Michelle Shireen Muri: This is Michelle Shireen Muri, your host and fellow traveler on The Ethical Rainmaker, a podcast exploring topics we don't often visit in nonprofits and philanthropy, including the places we can step into our power or step out of the way. If you follow how money is moved in the nonprofit sector, then you know that those of us working within it have always from our very roots catered to the donor, the funder. From accepting solutions that don't fit into the community's needs just to have the money to survive to more sickening practices, we center the donor and it's true in communications too. Nonprofits don't often prioritize investing in communications, which we're going to talk about today, but when they do, it's usually with its largest gift makers and information is power. So those with more money know the most, they are most apprised of what's happening. We see this a lot in other places like in politics, even investing, we're seeing it with the vaccine. And it's problematic, we know better, and we should do better. Today, we're talking with Sarah Durham. OK, so… Sarah, you are the founder of Big Duck - a nonprofit communications firm based in Brooklyn, New York - that helps nonprofits increase their visibility, raise money and fulfill their missions. You’re an expert on branding, fundraising and a host of other communications related topics...and you’ve written books to share your expertise, which I really appreciate. You are also the author The Nonprofit Communications Engine: A Leader’s Guide to Managing Mission-driven Marketing and Communications which just came out last year, and your earlier book Brandraising, How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications. You’re an adjunct faculty at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. And I’m so excited to talk with you. For the audience, I just want to mention that we are recording this in February 2021, early February where New York is undergoing a snow storm. So, I am normally recording at my home, in my bedroom. Sarah is also recording in her bedroom in the middle of a snow storm, and not the studio she usually uses so I want to say an extra thank you to you Sarah, for being here today and dealing with those conditions in order to talk with us. Thank you. Sarah: Well Michelle its awesome to be here I’m a big fan of your podcast, so thank you thank you! Michelle Shireen Muri: Thank you. I actually discovered your voice and all the information that you had to share by listening to one of Joan Garry's podcasts, and I bought your book, Nonprofit Communications Engine immediately, and I have been benefiting from it, with my clients ever since. So thank you. Thank you for your body of work. I've been exploring it the last several months. And I think one of the things that comes up for me in fundraising consulting...is really demystifying communications and marketing. So as a marketing expert and someone who's had your own firm for many years and really lives and breathes in this world of communications in branding and marketing, can you define for us maybe those of us that don't know, what is communications and what is marketing in a nonprofit sector? Sarah Durham: Yeah. I love that question because it's one of those questions that I think people assume they know the answer to, but actually if you ask 10 different people in 10 different organizations, what communications is or marketing is and what function it serves, you're going to get 10 different answers. My answer to that question is that in a nonprofit, communications is the practice of creating and sustaining mind share and engagement that advances the mission. And I said that kinda slowly, because there's a lot in there, but I want to unpack that a bit. It's a practice, meaning it's not one and done, you have to keep doing it. And then it's about raising awareness or building mind share and engagement that advances the mission. And you also used the term marketing. I would say that marketing is actually a slice of communications, but communications isn't even bigger tent than marketing. Marketing is usually about getting a pretty particular group of people to take an action, oftentimes like become a member or come to an event or sign up for something. Whereas communications is even bigger and broader and communications is not always just about how you communicate with people who are outside of your organization, it can even be about internal communications, how you communicate inside your organization. Michelle Shireen Muri: Got it. And while we're demystifying terms, can you talk to me about branding? Sarah Durham: Yeah. Branding is also one of those terms that I think is often misunderstood and misused, but I think the best way to understand branding in a nonprofit context is to think of your organization's brand as your organization's voice. And again, your brand is a part of your communications. It's one of three outcomes that a successful communications program can drive. So how does your organization write and design and speak about itself? How do you explain the whole story that is your organization not just a particular program? Michelle Shireen Muri: Thank you. Thank you. I think those definitions alone are extremely helpful for all of us that work in the sector, especially in fundraising. Because communications and fundraising go so hand in hand and we're usually not seeing, especially myself again, as a fundraising consultant...oftentimes I have clients who aren't investing in communications, haven't invested much in communications, haven't invested enough in communications. And I think that part of the challenge is really demystifying what those terms mean, where it makes sense to invest. And it just seems like such a big arena that I feel ends up not getting addressed. You've seen nonprofit clients for decades at your firm, Big Duck. And I'm wondering what you see as the most common reasons we don't invest in communications as nonprofit organizations. Sarah Durham: Well, a lot of people who are responsible for directing communications in nonprofits, like an executive director, for instance, or a leadership team, don't have any formal background in marketing or communications. And they probably don't have a budget to hire somebody with deep expertise in marketing and communications. And so oftentimes they tend to think of communications as tactical terms like, “Oh, communications, those are the people who are going to manage our website, or those are the people who are going to do social media or do PR.” But those are really just tactics. And I think the bigger question and the reason I wrote this book is to encourage an organization and the leader of the organization or leaders to think about what the outcomes you want to achieve are, what communications can actually achieve for your organization or how it can help advance your mission. That's really the goal of communications is to help advance the mission. There are lots of strategies and lots of tactics you can use, but you've got to start with that bigger picture and have a really clear strategy in order to know what kind of staff you need or what kind of tactics to engage in to make sure you're achieving that goal. Michelle Shireen Muri: Thank you. I can't help myself, but to ask you this question, why can't we just throw volunteers at communications? Sarah Durham: A lot of organizations do throw volunteers at communications and that actually can work, but I still think you have to do it with coordination. It can't just be totally ad hoc because as you well know, and people who listen to your podcast know, everybody brings their own identity, their own perspective and their own agenda to the work that they do in many ways. And what I've seen over and over again is when organizations use volunteers, they tend to bring whatever they've got. There's that saying, if you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So the organizations I've seen use volunteers really well are organizations where there's somebody within the organization who is able to be really clear about the goal of communicating and make sure they've got the right volunteers with the right skill sets and the right expertise who are working in a coordinated way, not just in an ad hoc, choose your own adventure way. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. I think I asked that question, honestly, because I just hear this idea when nonprofits are thinking about communications, they're feeling the sense of urgency around, we should say something and then they want to hire a young person, like, can we hire gen Z or a young millennial to just... “Can we just throw a volunteer on social media for a few hours?” And I just see that as the patch so frequently. Sarah Durham: Yeah. Yeah. “We'll get some college kid who'll intern for us this summer and they'll do all our social media and it'll be great.” Yeah. Yeah, no, that doesn't usually work. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. Started TikToK channel. Do six posts and then give up. Sarah Durham: Yep. Yep. Michelle Shireen Muri: This is The Ethical Rainmaker, I’m Michelle Shireen Muri and I’m talking with Sarah Durham of Brooklyn-based nonprofit communications firm Big Duck. You can find out more about her work at big duck dot com. Michelle Shireen Muri: Well, so one of my favorite recent examples of what an impact communication can make for us is this example of private school. Private schools are often nonprofits and the majority of the donors to private school are parents. But private schools also will treat their donors just like any non-profit treats their donors, which is that if there is money invested in communications or time, actually time more than anything invested into communications, then communications priorities are the major donors. Those folks who have the most wealth. I like the example of a private school because at an institution like that, most donors are parents, all parents care about their kids, all parents would lay down their lives for their kids, want to know what's happening with their kids. But the parents with the most money, get to know the most about what's happening at their kid's school, with their child's education. The development department will prioritize the time of leadership of the school with the parents of those kids who have given the most money. And then the parent experience is extremely different depending on what level of gift they make to the school. And if you have given the most money - you have the most information you know what's happening with your kid, maybe your child is protected, whether intentionally or totally inadvertently from things they maybe shouldn't be protected from because your family is giving money. And I use this example because we have a lot of parents, especially young parents that listen to this podcast. And you know, it's not fair - How we usually utilize communications is not just. And Sarah, I bring this example up because there are so many ways, I know you're from Big Duck has been looking at the ways in which communications have been donor centered, have been promoting the white savior complex, what we all should be doing about it to change that, how to center the community. And I want to talk to you a little bit about that because you've been in the industry for a long time. What do you see changing? Sarah Durham: Yeah, I think there is a really terrific shift happening right now where people are becoming much more conscious of the power and privilege that they afford to donors or to other people who might potentially have an oversized level of influence. And that's definitely a good shift. There are a lot of examples of this that I think all come down to this idea of being conscious about who you're talking to, how you're listening and how you're treating people differently. So historically, when I started working with nonprofits doing communications work in the 1990s, the traditional model you saw for communications was very media relations or PR based. That was because there really wasn't an internet or the internet wasn't used the same way. We didn't have social media, your website was basically a brochure that was online. Sarah Durham: And so a lot of organizations used earned media...getting press as a way to position themselves as experts or leaders or saviors, very much the kind of like “we're going to come in and we're going to fix this thing that's broken.” And there was just really no consciousness. And in fact, some really kind of by our standards today, pretty horrific examples of objectifying people and communicating in ways that I think today would not be acceptable. And speaking as an organization on a pedestal where we are really looking down on a lot of people and inviting donors to come up on the pedestal with us, instead of challenging, “why are we up on this pedestal in the first place, looking down on everybody else?” But today things I think are changing, not entirely. And I think to your point, fundraising is in the nonprofit sector, one of the places where some of these ideas about donor centrism, being a hero, savior complexes, where these things are the most prevalent. And we so often see communications that center communications on the voices and agendas of our donors rather than on the people who are actually being served by the work. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. So true. Also true, like you said, I'm still seeing so much of it. So much of that, “join us on a pedestal. You, as the donor are making all of the difference.” I have done that stuff myself also to be clear, I have definitely, when I started- Sarah Durham: I think we all have. Sure. I have too. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. When I started in fundraising, there wasn't a communications plan at the nonprofit I was working at. And we were really, our nonprofit was really focused on itself and the legislation and the policy and the bills and what we're doing about it and what else we need to do about it. And there wasn't a conversation that included anyone that wasn't programmatic - programatically involved or obsessed or whatever...engaged. And so I actually was fully responsible for creating donor centered communications. And I just remember we had some pretty amazing social justice minded staff when I was working at this nonprofit. And I remember bringing this to an all staff meeting and saying, we have not been doing a great job. We've only been talking about ourselves, we're very self-centered, our voice is self-centered when we do any communications at all. So I've learned about this new practice, donor centered communication, donor centered fundraising, we're going to do that. And then I just proceeded with years of really terrible practices that didn't feel good at the time, but felt like, well, this is better than what was here before. And so, yeah, I fully relate to all of that myself as someone who was engaged that way. Sarah Durham: Well, I think what you're describing is something that most fundraisers were taught and has been the model for fundraising. But I think another thing that's also true is even in organizations where nobody came in and said, Hey, consciously let's center our communications on the agendas or the experiences of our donors. I think it's still true that in most organizations, particularly direct service or even advocacy organizations, that if you look at where the dollars are spent in communications, the dollars are generally spent more on the fundraising side than on the programs or advocacy side. But if you think about the number of people you could reach with programs or advocacy communications, and the way that would advance your mission versus the number of people you are reaching on the fundraising side. There's also a real imbalance there too. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. What if they were all integrated, right? What if they were all integrated? Like “we need money to do this work. This is the work that we're doing. Come learn more!” It could be serene. It could be all encompassing. Sarah Durham: It could be, but what you're describing, Hannah Thomas who's one of the strategists at Big Duck wrote this really terrific blog recently that I really appreciated where she talked about scarcity mentality versus abundance mentality in some of these areas. And I think what you're describing is an abundance mentality. It's the idea that even though we have limited resources to invest in communications, we should abundantly spread them around and not hoard them for one arm of the organization. And that's a real culture shift you're describing that I think many organizations have not quite been ready to do yet. Another place where I think a scarcity mentality shows up with nonprofit communications is around branding. And this is something that I've been very guilty of that oftentimes when you're thinking about your organization's voice and you're going through branding work where you're doing brand strategy or messaging, or maybe visual identity work, there is an orientation in those projects. And again, I did this for years to think about distinguishing your organization from others in the space as if it's a competition. Again, the strategists on our team at Big Duck, sometimes call this The Nonprofit Hunger Games, right. Like we have to compete with each other and kill each other for whatever those resources are. But one of the things we've been talking about is that maybe it doesn't have to be, again, The Hunger Games, maybe we can think of how you position your organization, the voice of your organization as part of an ecosystem, a part of a dynamic world in which there, of course, I hope many other people trying to advance similar issues or related issues. And that if we position ourselves in ways that are complementary and maybe show where we fit into the ecosystem without having to block the daylight from other organizations, maybe that actually does more to advance the movements that we're a part of in the long run too. Michelle Shireen Muri: That's right. I think that's right. Yeah. I think that phrase, Nonprofit Hunger Games, I think that was coined by Vu Le. And it's so true. Sarah Durham: I bet it was Vu. Yeah. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. And it's so true. It's so true. That's how we behave. Like there isn't enough, but this idea of an ecosystem is really beautiful. I've been calling it a solar system or constellation, but I think ecosystem is perfect. I'd like to take that from you. Sarah Durham: Yeah. Well, I'll borrow constellation from you. Thank you. Michelle Shireen Muri: Thank you. Perfect. We'll borrow from each other. I love it. Reset: Sarah Durham is the founder of Big Duck, a Brooklyn-based non profit communications firm. She’s the author of Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications and her new book, The Nonprofit Communications Engine: A Leader’s Guide to Managing Mission-driven Marketing and Communications. And she’s my guest right now… on The Ethical Rainmaker. Michelle Shireen Muri: Well, so around this idea of going back to community and how we are moving from this idea of making the donor, the hero and the white savior complex and moving into... Many organizations have been doing this most have not been centering the community, but when we shift towards centering our communities, who gets included in decision-making about communications? Sarah Durham: Yeah. This is something that we have been really trying to build our own capacity with at Big Duck for years, and trying to make our clients think more deeply about, and it varies enormously. In my experience, a non-profit who's about to embark on a serious communications endeavor, maybe let's say, launching a new program where they need to engage people with a program or maybe a rebranding project, or even communications around a major capital campaign or something like that. If an organization has been doing deep community centered work in other areas, they tend to be more conscious about whose voices are included and involved in the project from the get-go. But I think so many organizations, again, still treat the inside of the organization and the outside of the organization with an invisible wall, where there is a community inside your organization, and there's a community outside of your organization. And the people inside the organization tend to make the decisions and call the shots without centering the people outside, or even just breaking down those walls and creating more fluid and dynamic ways that a broader exchange of ideas and understanding flows between people. Michelle Shireen Muri: Mmmm, that's a great point. And where do you see as you've been exploring this with your team, how are you starting to see community fitting into branding or positioning or communications? Sarah Durham: Well, there are a couple of layers. I think you can start to think about community. So if you work in an organization and you are embarking on a big communications project, one way to become a little bit more community minded is to not give short shrift to research or to the opportunity to listen to the people who are most impacted by your work. And this is actually something I think we as Americans seem to be particularly bad at. Michelle Shireen Muri: Yes, we are. Sarah Durham: I don't know Michelle, if you've ever been to the International Fundraising Congress, which is this big fundraising conference that happens every year in the Netherlands. Michelle Shireen Muri: I have not. Sarah Durham: Yeah. It's a really interesting conference because it's fundraisers who mostly come from EU countries. Although there are people who come from other parts of the world and they're talking about fundraising projects they're working on and what's emerging. And it's really interesting conference. And one of the things that struck me when I went to that conference for the first time years ago is how much more time organizations outside of the U.S. spend doing research before they begin projects. [Laughter] They're constantly surveying, interviewing, focus grouping. Even small organizations spend real money regularly on research. And we in the U.S. generally don't have a practice of doing that. At Big Duck, I would say some of the most successful projects we've done that center on the community served are the ones where real time and money and thought is given to doing research that includes the community very actively in an information gathering stage and gives the community lots of opportunities to be on the journey too, to share their ideas, to respond to things that are being developed so that they become really active participants and partners in it. And that takes time and that takes money. The other place, I think nonprofits can really proactively center their community or at least expand the voices they're listening to is to think about who is leading the work. If you are embarking on a rebranding or you're embarking on the launch of a new campaign or something like that, historically in the nonprofit sector, what has happened is one or two people direct that project, maybe it's the executive director, maybe it's a development person or a communications person, but they call the shots and maybe along the way they might seek approval or check in with some other people. What I would encourage you to do is to think of the layers of people who are your internal stakeholders, as well as external stakeholders, who can form a committee of sorts or even multiple committees that you work with. So for instance, if you're going through rebranding process and you're working with a committee whose voices are on that committee, how are you representing all of the people who are going to be impacted by the work? And how can you bring them through the process with you in a very engaged way? Rather than just wait until the end and do the big reveal and say ta-da, hope you like it, at which point it's really too late for those people to say, this really doesn't reflect us at all. This is being put on us as opposed to engaging us. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. But checking in takes time and money, like you said, and when it comes to time, we just societally hold the value of immediacy. I'd go back to Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones characteristics of white supremacy and immediacy is one of them. And so when we're saying it takes time, I'm watching so many folks who could take that time and actually could feasibly for the timing of their projects or whatever, just rush through it because of this need for immediacy. So you're right. I think taking time is something that we're not doing very frequently and could really help us be more community centered. And then the money piece, we see this everywhere. We can pay our community. This may or may not have been where you were going with that, but we can pay our community members for their opinions and we can ask them not to volunteer, but to actually come and be engaged. If they're giving up their time to give a feedback on something, whether it's talking about these messages that we want to put out into the community and do they really represent us, et cetera, or something else, or “is this program really what the community needs?” We should be paying our community members. And of course all the staff and folks who are involved and engaged in the research that needs to happen should be paid well as well. But we have this belief in scarcity and we bring it everywhere with us. So thank you for naming that. Thank you for naming that we need to take the time and we need to spend the money to really be listening to our communities. Sarah Durham: I think you're absolutely right to surface the value of immediacy or urgency. And it is a muscle that you have to build is, to identify when we are driving something forward with such speed, how real is that? One of the places I think most people see this very regularly is with hiring. I've seen a lot of organizations who post a job and they expect that from the time they post that job to the time they will actually have a person working in the job is maybe two weeks to a month. And in my experience, if you are going to hire the right person for the job and to hire a person who is not necessarily the first person who applies for the job, it's really going to take time that actually to hire the right person for a job in my experience often takes two or three months, maybe even longer, but you have to fight that urge for immediacy, and you have to challenge that and say, “is there a way that we can allow this hiring process or this project to take longer, but to be deeper and more thoughtful and to challenge the assumptions we're making and maybe challenge some of the biases that we're bringing to the process?” So that at the end of the day, not only have we done it well, but we've really done it in a way that's going to stick in deeper, more meaningful ways. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. Right. Thank you for that. Yeah. That's a great point. Reset: The Ethical Rainmaker is a regularly featured podcast on community centric fundraising dot org. CCF is a content hub centering the voices of people of color in the nonprofit and philanthropic spaces. So, check us out on communitycentricfundraising.org Michelle Shireen Muri: Well, we're almost finished with our interview and I wanted to just check in because I have deep and burning curiosity. I have that goes more to the practical side of communications, building your teams in-house. And that's that I, as I was mentioning before, something I've seen a lot is let's throw volunteers at it. Maybe not in a very thoughtful or strategic way, maybe not volunteers that are actually well positioned for success at the organization. Let's throw a young person at it and pay them on the lower end of the pay scale and have them drop in a few of their hours for social media to do some social media branding for us and they're young. So they'll just get it and they'll just do a good job and we will keep our heads in the sand about it. I've seen those styles of trying to build communications capacity, but I am super curious about what your thoughts are. I have the book, The Nonprofit Communications Engine. It's excellent. It really does give a great layout of what comms can look like in different types of organizations. But I'd just love to hear from you because I also know it's a burning question from our audience, as we talk about all of these issues, we're obviously also talking about the deep importance of communication and the need for non-profits to invest in it. I know you and I are speaking on your podcast about the need for communications, if we really want to be community centered and how, if we are taking money in, taking resources in from our communities, whether that's through tax dollars in government grants or other ways we really need to be showing our work and communicating out to the communities that we say we're serving, not just doing it in a vacuum, which is so often the case. So I'm most curious to know from you, how do we think about structuring when we're thinking about bringing on our first comms team, our first comm staff? Sarah Durham: Yeah. I love this topic. It's something that as I was researching for this book, I spent a lot of time talking to people who work in nonprofits ranging from very, very large national organizations with huge comms teams, maybe two, three dozen people in communications down to all volunteer organizations where there's no paid staff at all. And actually one of the things I found was that there is no corollary between the size of the organization or the size of the comms team and their ability to do great communications. I've seen great communications and not so great communications at organizations of all sizes. But I think what happens a lot for many organizations is that when they reach a certain size or they grow to a certain point and it feels like it's time to make that first communications hire, the impulse that a lot of leaders will feel will be to hire somebody for their tactical skills. In other words, to hire that person, who's a great writer because there's writing to be done or hire that freelance graphic designer to become a full-time graphic designer. But actually what I have found over the years is that sometimes the most effective first person to hire for communications is not necessarily somebody with those kinds of tactical or production skills. It's somebody who's got great interpersonal skills and great project management skills, because it's a lot easier to work with a freelancer for a lot of things and get things done. If you are a great project manager that an in-house communications person works very much collaboratively with and in service of other departments needs and goals. So if that first person you hire gets along great with your program's team, takes the time to learn how your programs work. Really understands what that program needs from a communications point of view, ditto, with development, ditto, with advocacy or government relations. They're going to be so well set up to help you create the communications you need, but if they're just a great writer, a great designer, but they don't truly have the interpersonal skills to learn, to understand, to process and to plan and execute a project. Their work might be beautiful, but it's not necessarily going to be the right work or done in an effective way. There is a whole chapter in my book about this, but I also broke out that chapter and with my colleagues at Big Duck, adapted it a bit, and we have a free ebook about communications teams that's on the Big Duck website. So if you go to bigduck.com and then you click on Insights, there's a whole bunch of free eBooks you can download there. And the one on teams is one of them. And that suggests that puts into more detail what I'm talking about here and adds a bunch of other stuff to it too. Michelle Shireen Muri: That makes so much sense. And thank you for those resources, I'll be posting that in the show notes. Sarah, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. Sarah Durham: Well, it is really, really fun to be on this podcast. I'm a big fan of it, and I think there's so many important topics that you're talking about and exploring. So I'm delighted to be here. Thanks again. Michelle Shireen Muri: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. So much fun to chat with you and that's a wrap. Outro: And that’s it for The Ethical Rainmaker. I’m your host and executive producer Michelle Shireen Muri. You can find show notes and transcripts of this and every episode, at THE ETHICAL RAINMAKER.COM We are self-funded. So. If you’d like to inspire this beautiful series through your financial contribution - we’ll take it on Patreon! Thank you so much to our newest patron, Regan! Please do pass on the word about this pod to people you think might love it - your coworkers, your friends and collaborators...it helps us get the word out! And it helps us when you subscribe to this podcast to get the best of what we have to offer. I promise there are more incredible episodes on their way - every other Wednesday. The Ethical Rainmaker is produced in Seattle, Washington by Isaac Kaplan-Woolner with editing assistance by Kasmira [kas-murr-ah] Hall, and socials by Rachelle Pierce. This pod is sponsored by Freedom Conspiracy, my fundraising consulting collective, which you can find at freedom-conspiracy.com. Our theme song “I’m Gold” is by Trick Candles to whom we owe deep gratitude! You can find them on Band Camp. We are so looking forward to continuing these amazing conversations so, see you in two weeks! Comments are closed.
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