Road to the Conference: What's Actually Driving Digital Growth with Rodney Ferro, Founder of PN Digital

As part of our Road to the Conference series, we spoke with Rodney Ferro from P&N Digital – returning for their 13th year and joining us as the official digital marketing partner for the 2026 Technology for Social Justice Conference. This year, Rodney and the P&N Digital team will be offering dedicated, pro-bono mentoring and consulting sessions on-site, giving attendees direct access to practical advice across AI adoption, donor journeys, SEO and digital strategy. In this Q&A, Rodney shares what he’s seeing across the sector right now – and where not-for-profits should focus to build consistent, sustainable growth.

Last year, we explored what’s possible with a digital marketing workshop. This year, you’re joining us as the official digital marketing partner, what does that mean for attendees in practice? 

We're really excited to be part of the Technology for Social Justice Conference held by Infoxchange this year. This is our 13th year returning to this conference, and we are proud to announce that we are the official marketing partner for 2026. What does this mean for attendees? We have a special designated area for mentoring and consulting, all provided pro-bono. This is a great opportunity for you to meet with specialists who can help you navigate the digital marketing maze — from AI challenges to improving your donor journeys and customer experience across all your digital activities.

There’s a lot of noise right now around AI in marketing. For not-for-profits with limited time and resources, where should they actually focus to see real impact?

The biggest topic over the last 12 months has been the introduction of AI. Actually implementing it into organisations by transforming people, culture, and even terms and conditions, has been really challenging. What we’re seeing is that organisations taking the lead are those engaging with all their stakeholders (especially staff) to create a clear AI Policy. It’s vital to make it clear to everyone within the organisation what tech is approved, what tech is supported, and exactly how to use it.

We’ve started to see massive efficiencies in areas like blog article writing, rewriting subject headlines, and email templates. This is especially helpful for customer service inquiries; by using an AI agent to help write proper articles and uploading them to a knowledge base or FAQ section, your website can start self-servicing. We’ve also seen success in balancing AI chatbots that use predictive answers based specifically on your own documents and knowledge base rather than just pulling from the general web.

One question I always get is: "What is the one area we should focus on?" My answer is always consistency.
They say that "showing up is 90% of success," and showing up online is no different. This means consistency in two areas:

• Messaging and Brand: Using a brand and tone-of-voice style guide to ensure your imagery and message are clear across all channels.
• Timing: Consistently showing up with weekly posts, fortnightly EDMs, or monthly webinars. Your followers and advocates look for that content, and that consistency is where you really start to see the throughput of growth month-on-month and year-on-year.

How can people make the most of your presence at the exhibition tables this year? 

If you have questions about the Google Ad Grant or how SEO has changed with the new AI Overviews (AEO) appearing in results within ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, come chat with us.
Our specialists are happy to provide an audit of how your site ranks today and give you specific takeaways for your organization—whether that’s for Google Ads, SEO, email marketing, or lead nurturing. We are Raisely Partners and also work closely with Funraisin and several other major platforms to help you navigate your digital strategy for 2026 and 2027.

We can't wait for the conference—I can't believe it's only a few weeks away! Please come across to the P&N Digital stand and say hi. We’ll have some postcards and cue cards with tips to help you with donor management and event attendance.
Plus, we have a little door prize this year: we’ll be giving away some Crocs and our famous Croc charms! We look forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting plenty of new ones.