Transcript: Live Ask the Guru Session with Geoff Livingston

Kristin: Hi I am Kristin Ivy with the Case foundation and I am excited to welcome you to ‘Gear up for Giving’. A month long social media tutorials for non profits. We hope you to have an opportunity to check out some of our other Gear up for giving resources like the click daily show and our list of resources for some of the most popular social media tools out there. I am really thrilled with what we have today, which is our first live “Ask the Guru” session because this is your opportunity to ask your questions about social media for non profits whether it’s general or specific. We are going to be back every Tuesday and Thursday for this month with great giving gears, next week we will have Katia Anderson and Stacey Mann from “network for good but: I want to go ahead and introduce our Guru for today, Geoff Livingston.

Geoff: Hi Kristin, how are you.

Kristin: Welcome, Geoff is a well known public relation strategist and a blogging guru in the DC area. He has worked on behalf of an impressive list of causes and non profits. He has published an award winning book on social media and early this year he sold his social media boutique to CRT Tanaka. With all the great experience I am sure I don’t have to tell you that I am excited to have him share some of his time with us today. If you have not just read Geoff’s post on our site earlier this week, about the bridging between on and offline, I encourage you to do that right after this session. I am going to get your questions soon but first I want to ask Geoff to speak about his perspective on the Social media for non profits and how you use the social media effectively.

Geoff: Well, first of all I thank you for having me here and it’s great that Case foundation is doing this for all the outstanding non-profits out there who want to communicate with the skate holders. To hopefully achieve some good stuff and change the world a little bit. First thing that I want to mention is that, as causes we have a unique opportunity to communicate about something that people really care about. I also work for companies and do a lot of social media and innovative stuff on that side as well which for stuff that is as exciting as Mainframes and other technologies. I would just tell you, when we are dealing with things like cancer or genocide or the environment, this is stuff that everybody feels at their heart and they deal with it on a daily basis. Social media is inherently personal and relational and so in that sense we have something right off the bat that people are interested in and we have an unfair advantage in that sense. So, these tools represent a great series of ways to outreach, embrace and communicate with folks and achieve the things that we want to do with our organizations.

Kristin: Great thanks. I am going to start with the question that actually was from your blog post. One person wrote, “Help! We are going to be pushing for an activity in October to mark the anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. We’ll treat URL’s to sign up for the event and put info on our Facebook page but neither one of those has a huge reach. Do you have any suggestions for the things that we can do.

Geoff: Yeah, this is actually a great question in a lot of ways because, I think it kind of shows the traditional approach of the social media today which says, ‘Hey we are going out of twitter, we are going out of face book’. This is what almost every organization does right off the bat.

First of all, my question back would be, “What about the Afghanistan war, are we trying to communicate?” That’s not a social media thing, that’s kind of what we are going to do kind of thing. Are we trying to support the soldiers? Are we trying to get out of Afghanistan? Are we going to stay in Afghanistan? Whatever the organization’s goal is, it needs to be communicated clearly. So, making sure that the mission is stated is helpful. Actually, Katia who is going to be here on Tuesday stated clearly. If you want to end the Afghanistan war, that is a huge thing but if we are trying to do something more gradual, that’s helpful. So, you may want to stay till you achieve the thing. Now the face book or the twitter where your community is; everybody assumes in social face book and twitter. They kind of represent the McDonalds of social media you know, I mean everybody goes out there for a cup of coffee, big Macs and fries at McDonalds at some point during a year or even during the week or during the day. As the case may be, your community particularly with the folks interested in Afghanistan as the serious issue is not particularly on Facebook or twitter in that sense. They may use that, or those tools to communicate with the friends or the networks. But it’s more likely that they are participating and using that as “Use groups” or “Ning groups” dedicated to Afghanistan, I would post a response to the conversation with a bunch of blogs that are dedicated specifically to Afghanistan, find out where these influences are, find out where the conversation is occurring on Afghanistan and in particular five conversations that are sympathetic to your organization’s view, engage these people and bring them in. Ask them to talk about the event. Ask them to participate as ambassadors or advisors. I think that’s the way this can really take off and then definitely use face book and twitter; again once the work is up people are come to these channels to find out the information but this would not be the first place that they are going to look.

Kristin: Great. Also when I mentioned, we have a great list of questions that people have been sending through emails, posting on our blogs, and through twitter. But if you still want to contribute your questions you can use the chat box that’s below this video also you can tweet your questions; but make sure you use the tag ‘# AGC’ so that we can view them and pull it up from twitter and if you want to continue emailing your questions you can do that ‘gearup [at] casefoundation [dot] org’. On that note I am going to take a question, one question that was emailed to us because I do hear this question a lot from people who are concerned about having a limited staff, a lot of non profits are in lean now especially and so this person has asked, “if we had to use one social media site to focus on , what should it be and what’s the biggest bank for a resources buck?” meaning with limited charging what is the best strategy.

Geoff: That’s a great question and again the first instinct is to go to twitter or face book but that’s probably not the right place to go. It maybe, particular if you are a wide spread consumer organization. That being said I would find an organization or a site, where I could see a particular deep ongoing conversation. So, let’s say you want to talk to Mob’s would you want to go to burgher; instead of a twitter or face book, if there is a particular community organization that’s dedicated to the country’s use of oil, like for example General Pickens Plan you may want to be there. These are kind of things that you need to research and find where your community is having the conversations and once you identify that top place; if you can do only one thing, do that well and own it, make it yours.

Kristin: Great, also from twitter I would like to ask you this questions. Since a lot of nonprofits are still just getting started and experimenting with social media, maybe they’ve not even signed up for Twitter yet, we’ve had a few people asking, what are a couple of Must Do’s, the first things we should do, when trying to switch from 1.0, to 2.0, or even 3.0.

Geoff: That’s a great question. I think the thing I see most organizations do is try to treat it like an experiment, like “we’re going to do that social stuff”. When you get kind of treating it like a foreign object, like a completely bizarre thing, you start off on the wrong foot. What I would consider is, who are the best networkers in the organization, ask them what they do, what they engage in, what kind of conversations they have. Because the key word is social networking -- the networking never changes, you are just doing it in a different place. I kind of look at Twitter like an online networking event, or sometimes I liken it to a high school cafeteria. Facebook is kind of like a rolodex in a lot of ways with events and things like that. It just depends on what you want to achieve and what you want to do. I would look at your traditional activities and what you need to achieve, and how you can extend that into a social environment and your larger extended family of stakeholders.

Kristin: Great, well I hope a lot of people find that helpful. Another question specifically about Twitter, a lot of people have questions about Twitter I’ve found. One is, is Twitter a proven effective fundraising tool for non-profit staff who are already overworked and underpaid, and who really has time to Tweet? How do you make time to Tweet?

Geoff: That’s a great question. It’s interesting I’ve been on Twitter for a few years now, and I did that philanthropy study with another Giving Guru, and in that study we learned what high dollar donors are looking for, and I wouldn’t say that Twitter is the right answer actually, they’re looking for meaningful conversations amongst themselves in many cases in private social networks where they feel safe to engage in discussions about donations, whether or not the organization is successful, whether or not they’re accountable, and perhaps they even want to talk to some of the beneficiaries. Twitter is an important place to be from several standpoints, but not necessarily the greatest place for donations. It is a good place for flash flood events, so it’s ironic as we roll into the festival which is a gigantic fundraiser using Twitter across many cities throughout the World. And I think you are going to see some significant money raised. Both you and I are participating in the DC festival. By the way I will plug for Peter Lemont, he did the local festival and did a great job. But throughout the world, local organization’s like “Miram’s Kitchen” are going to have tens of thousands dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for them collectively. That’s amazing if you could use one social media tool to do it. But that is touching so many thousands of people, again, an individual maybe better off focusing on high dollar donors in different places.

Kristin: Great, we are going to take a question from Chat. How do you manage multiple social media outlets without having to update all of them one-by-one?

Geoff: I think there’s a movement called Life streaming…there’s a big blogger named Steve Rubelli, who decided to trash his blog and go to Life streaming, and there are various different tools you could use for that like Tumble. The entire social web is driven off of RSS, and you could use RSS feeds to update different types of social networks. So for example, when my blog publishes, it kicks out a Tweet. When I publish a photo on Flickr, it kicks out a Tweet. If I publish a video on YouTube, I can also integrate that into Twitter. I have my Twitter feed integrated into Facebook and my Ning networks, so as a result of that, when I publish in one place, it goes all across the spectrum. You can use these RSS feeds to make sure you are only publishing in a couple of places, and at the same time look omnipresent. You may also want to keep some social networks separate, so for example, I have some location based social networks where when I use them, everyone knows where I’m at, and there are other ones where only friends know where I’m at -- we all have to wrestle with that privacy issue in that sense, because when we are engaging in social media for our organizations, we are also putting a little personal equity on the line.

Kristin: That’s a good point. Another thing you touched on a little bit, that you’ve talked about in your post as well as we have kind of skimmed here, is being mindful of your stakeholders and engaging people on their terms. What are some things that you consider when you are trying to think about who is my audience and how do I reach them. What questions should non-profits be asking themselves about their audiences and how to reach them to determine what’s best?

Geoff: This is a great question; this is the ethos behind my entire approach to social media so it may wax a little poetic so please bear with me if I do. My favorite book on social media is actually Dale Carnegie “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and the reason why that book matters is because it’s about other centric behavior. It’s so easy when we have our daily lives, and we are sitting inside our office or our cubicle, stuck trying to get the word out, “I have to do this, I’ve spent 50 hours a week doing it,” – all we think about is what we are trying to achieve. And then, when we get out into the social world, which is basically any kind of a conversational world where we are trying to build relationships with people, if we just talk about ourselves or talk about what we want or what we need, we’re going to turn people off right away. It’s almost like going into a car dealership “Hey we’ve got a good financing deal. You got a caulker? Bring it on it!” That type of approach always turns people off, so mindfulness is really about, almost, saying “OK, I know what I want to do. What are these people trying to achieve? What do they care about my cause? What are they talking about as related to the cause? For example cancer, and the reason why I keep on bringing that up is that I have a relative who just successfully finished that, but, “How do you survive cancer? How do you support somebody with cancer? How do you make them feel that they’ll make it through? How can you support research? Those are the types of questions that they may be asking, as opposed to what you want to do, which may be focused childhood cancer. So whatever it is, you have to really consider how your stakeholders are thinking about the issue, why they care about it, and engage them on their terms, and then bring them into the larger dialogue. In essence, mindfulness is about humility, it’s about going out there and realizing that “hey, were not the only ones that care about this issue.”

Kristin: I’m going to take a question from the Chat window about Facebook. Within Facebook the Causes page seems more effective in raising funds, but the Fan page seems more effective in generating conversation and reaching individuals. Is there a better way to use Facebook? I do want to mention that we will also be announcing some additional sessions that will help you learn how you can use Causes effectively, since Causes is the platform for the next giving challenge that will be launching this fall. So we want to make sure all of your questions about Causes are answered. But we would love to get your perspective on Facebook, Causes, Pages, and Groups, all of the ways that that platform can be used and what is most effective there.

Geoff: Yes, there’s actually been a lot of controversy about Causes and whether it’s effective or not from a fundraising standpoint. It’s definitely a phenomenal branding tool, where you see organizations getting millions of people joining a cause but not necessarily raising a lot money, and I think there’s an art to that – I actually think I should probably tune into your session so I could learn it a little better. But at the same time, it’s something that you can use, and have people use for their birthdays, and personally go out and fundraise. One of the things I have noticed with Causes is that when people have ambassadors going out there asking for funds, it works. But when its non-profits shooting out messages “Can you support us, can you support us,” what you have is a lot of fans and not a lot of funds raised, so you really need that personal touch. I guess that makes sense as its social media, and again, you just need your friends to ask, rather to have some monolith. And not that your organization is a monolith, but again it’s a brand coming at you versus Kristen or Geoff. Fan pages are a little bit different in the sense they allow you to drive a lot more traffic to your website. You can use URLs; you can use the Fan page to own your own site. I prefer Fan pages personally because with the Causes app you don’t necessarily have control over how many folks you can email, you can’t drive them to your site as easily. My whole feeling on Facebook is that it’s a great place to engage people who want to be lightly involved with the organization, but not necessarily fully engaged. At the same time, you can attract people that want to be fully engaged and bring them through to your website, and get them to perhaps donate some funds, 20, 25 dollars, 50 dollars, and then cultivate them into a bigger donor or larger volunteer.

Kristin: And I want to highlight one thing you said about Causes, that it’s not only as effective when it’s coming from the organization. I think the great thing about Causes is that when you are a non-profit and you have people who are really involved and supportive, if you want to ask those people to start a Cause for you, or just let it be known to your network that you would love for people to do that, you relinquish some of that control, and people can use your Cause but fundraise in their own way for you. It becomes about their relationships, people they know, and it’s a whole different type of fundraising where people are doing it for you because they care about your cause.

Geoff: Absolutely. Word of mouth always works better, why not somebody else?

Kristin: One question from email is, “What suggestions does the Guru have for getting everyone in our organization on the same page in terms of launching social media? We have a small contingent that’s ready to go, and another contingent that’s not as familiar with social media and hasn’t bought into the value of it yet. How can we get everyone on the same page and get started?

Geoff: Oh my God! Welcome to my groundhog day! Wow that’s really tough, as you see behind this. If so you have a good chance if not you probably going to have a real hard time regardless of you whether or not having a sales team or not. I would focus on highlighting success and then making sure that whoever gets successful gets put up on a pedestal. Let’s say, if I was trying to promote social media throughout the case foundation which is not needed of course, you guys are great. But I would Kristen upon the pedestal and say “look what Kristen did this is great; this is how it impacted our organization. It’s amazing; this is how it ties back to our mission of what we are trying to do.” If you can show that real tangible benefit and return on investment from a time stamp point, I think would want to participate little more. It’s really important to work on your C-suite first. The chief executive office, chief financial officer; HR is really important actually so that people can get compensated for spending their time online. That’s just worries people by saying “Hey go on and tweet and do facebook, and by the way you have to do that on top of everything that you do” and that’s not a fair ask for people. To be successful you have to invest a significant amount of time and it’s not something that you can add on. Probably you can get away with it in a recession year, we are not going to be in recession year very long and lose your staff. I think it’s much more intelligent to focus on required activities when you need.

Kristin: We are going to take another question from Twitter from Jack Powers. The question is, “is social media about restricting access. Suggest your friend and followers.”

Geoff: That’s a good question and my response back is if that’s what you want that’s what you are going to get. If you want to track people that are interested in your cause, then you have to talk about the cause in a way that brings them to and attracts them. It takes some time, social media is organic; you can’t go out there and throw out a nuclear bomb and expect all the stuff to come up.

You can’t just go out there like an i-campaign and have millions of dollars spent and have attention to come up. You really have to make a meaningful impact on the community. That being said, if you do that you are going to have all so much of people that you never expected to talk to. Really the tangible benefits are so amazing, we always hear about how hard it is and how 80% percent of the market has a hard time adapting to social media but the 20% that does it right gains incredible benefits and that’s what we are trying to achieve.

Kristin: You gave a good example in your blog post about one successful approach with social media for a cause. Do you want to talk to people more about that because people haven’t heard about that or other campaign that you have been involved with where people have been successful?

Geoff: The blog post is about a monist in Vietnam, it was under the threat of getting thrown out or evacuated by the Vietnamese government which is still communist and doesn’t really believe in free religions. That particular monist is British faith in the sense they embrace all religions. I don’t want to get stuck into that; long story cut short, they created a twitter page and facebook page and a blog, and started publishing content and it didn’t work. The reason why was because, first of all they were not communicating clearly, they didn’t involve the monk that leads the monist. He is a noble peace prize nominee; pretty well known, he is a highly polities figure and they didn’t really have a great course of action. I think it’s about communicating clearly, giving them multiple ways to act and so we did that. Actually your suggestion on creating a petition, that seems to have got people. I mean, the community was on facebook, it was on twitter, was actually on e-mail. They wanted to have something that they can sign and do it. They went online, they signed and it was incredible. It was really amazing to see it happen.

Kristin: Quickly too.

Geoff: We had 7000 signatures in four days, that’s amazing. Another example is the child fund, the Christian children’s fund, it’s an organization that I worked with and everyone wanted to come with very low budget, they thought of having $5000 to launch. So what we did was we designed the campaign so that it would involve the children that are the beneficiaries of what this organization does. We try to stay away from the name change from Christian Children’s fund to child fund. It’s not that we would want to talk about but that’s what the organization cared about.

But people who were involved in the organization wanted to help the children in the developing countries, they really care. Christian and Venn jolical were really disturbed; we had couple of disturbances over there. We had a talk with those guys and engage. But for any changes we need willingness for the purpose of helping the children. So, when people follow the child fund on twitter, every twitter followers result in a gift to Africa, for African countries. We get a lot of gifts, per say we get 20,000 gifts, what we did get was the organic followers of people who really cared about. They wanted to make a difference; they wanted to have a report back on. Actually there are going to be reports coming back this month with photos and things like that. Different ways that these communities are benefitting from these gifts, as a result these stake holders who are following child fund now are going to say, “hey, I did something I followed them, these guys reported back, they participated they are in relationship with me and I want to get involved more with this organization. To me, I would rather have 2,000 really strong maniacs who are going to do anything for my cause, than 20,000 people who just pass by and that’s an example of organic social media.

Kristin: That’s a question on email, “How do I get more followers on twitter? It’s a question that a lot of people want to know, they want to know that the things that they tweet are not going just nowhere, and that people are actually reading them. So, how do you get more followers on twitter?

Geoff: Let’s hear the question straight on and then we can talk about the ethos of followers if we want. Is that fair?

Kristin: Yes.

Geoff: So, if you want great followers and you want to boost them then you have to be on twitter, which means you have to participate on twitter and engage in conversations. A live organization like the publish stuff, they like to put out all sorts of things about them and I do that as well on twitter. But the successful people in twitter do more than just contribute content or ideas. They engage other people’s ideas in fact they share other people’s ideas. They make heroes, for example today on twitter I thought I was talking much about myself and I made sure to highlight three other people that I thought had done great things and just to do that on principle, realizing that it’s not about me but it’s about the larger community and so, if you want to boost a follower then you need to be a great community member, you need to really participate and help your community more than helping yourself.

Kristin: and it’s all about conversation.

Geoff: It’s about conversations the other thing is, follow people that are interested and proactively engage them. For example I limited my followers. I used to have 7,000 followers I thought I had limited my conversations so I wanted to engage in their conversations more about their environment with my particular cause that I care about the most. Hence I followed all these environmental people and started seeing great things online now. I am able to understand better conversations with people. It’s all engaging the stake holders and they don’t have to follow you back. One other thing if you want to increase you followers is do not use an auto deal.

Kristin: People do hate that, I hate that.

Geoff: So, you will see writing about that all day.

Kristin: if you don’t know that it’s an auto deal a direct message that sometimes when you follow someone, they will automatically send you a direct message which says, “Hey thanks for calling visit my website” and you know that they didn’t type it just for you, they send it everyone. So, direct messaging, the person is fine if you want to say something to people offline but don’t want to feel that they had signed up for your RSSC.

Geoff: Could we talk about the ethos of followers?

Kristin: Yes, let’s talk about that.

Geoff: Now, people get big follow counts on twitter because you are doing some incredible things. So, you usually look at the people who have a large follow counts and there are some people who are popular because that’s their game as twitter. But for the most part, people who have developed large follow counts, own a tag or they are organizer tag or they are involved in case foundation tag or they are real celebrities. So, follow count is not a sign of influence, the sign of influence is using your network both on twitter and off twitter. I know some people in this business that has 300 or 400 followers but they all the right people. They can pick up the phone and call somebody and they can get a post put on Mashable they can post a put on all the right spaces and create a huge splash. I think effectiveness is about correlating the relationships in your life as supposed to having a follower count. Followers follow you if you do the right thing.

Kristin: Great, I am going to take another question from the live chat about professionalism in social media. “Is it professional to use social media and have people look down on it in the traditional business non profits world?

Geoff: That’s a great question and I think more and more professional audiences see such media at the same time they kind of look at it like, it reminds me a lot of 1994-95 when I was studying on career on electronics and industry alliance. I was geek to make the program websites. I wrote newsletters and all these crazy stuffs and I was actually looking at one of the stories that they wrote about this crazy technology combos. They used to look at me like a geek and ask can you do that website stuff. I am a PR guy teaching the IT guys how to use the stuff. The reality about social is you are still going to get squander little bit for a while but I think we are hitting a point whereby we realize what we need to do. Unfortunately, sometimes you are dealing with a palmer that stealing also has the chains on his hands, goes and create a gigantic mass and strikes on the wall; because it’s a different kind of tool set. You can’t control the message, you can’t dictate what the organizations’ brand is online like we used to be able to and as I result I some errors and I hope people start respecting social little more and start being more embracive on the conversations and the relations that develop here as supposed to just communicating.

Kristin: Another question from twitter. “Are non profits using MySpace effectively anymore, because I don’t hear people talking about MySpace? If so, how are they using it?

Geoff: That’s great; I actually have a major campaign that we are launching with CRT Tanaka next month using MySpace as part of the outreach. I don’t want to put the stuff down black and white, but I assume that there are some demographic asperities between facebook and MySpace and if you want to work with people that are probably high school educated, you need to be on MySpace. If you want to work with people that are college educated you need to be on facebook. Increasingly, actually kids are not on facebook. They are there just have the connections but they are not actually out there; their parents are out there. Facebook is no longer the place to be if you are in college. You see a lot of high school kids on MySpace. This particular campaign is dealing with MySpace. The thing is the Fox team was fired and they have put a new team that’s leading MySpace.

So, MySpace is starting their growth again and it’s like the quite facebook getting bigger and bigger. I would not dismiss MySpace at all I think it’s actually very highly networked. In fact, if you Google non profits and MySpace you will find pages listing all the nonprofit activities going on out there. For example the UNICEF dedicated a video last month; it’s not something to walk away from. At the same time MySpace is like all the other social networks, you can publish wall post, you can have videos, you can interact with people you can build front pages. Whatever you are going to use it for, it’s all about finding other talk about what you do on your particular page.

Kristin: I think that touches on the audiences question yet again, if you are trying to reach teenagers they are in MySpace but you should be on MySpace as well.

Geoff: Once again, voice your community.

Kristin: Exactly, another question from email, “My organization’s audience is pretty much 45 to 75 years old who do not use social media. Does that mean using social media may not be right for me?” On the other hand we would like to develop a younger audience. So how do we reach to them when we don’t have many 21 to 40 year olds on our mailing list? So, I guess the question is if you already have a relationship with that age group you can email them saying, “Hey follow us on twitter or check out our face book page.” How do you reach these new people?

Geoff: That’s great; let’s do the new people first.

Kristin: Sure

Geoff: New people, 21 to 45 again same thing; primary communities build something meaningful and have great conversation. Let’s say we are using the facebook, don’t do a cause do a fan page and try to pull back the people that are super engaged to your website and ask them to email for that website’s reference. When they type in those email addresses guess what, you are getting them you are capturing their email addresses and then also you can start engaging people more, having them volunteer for donations. Ask them if they want newsletters, all sorts of ways to engage them. That’s what I would do, but it’s all about getting them back to your website asking them for email addresses and asking them to tell their friends. When they do that, they become a word of mouth. But 45 to 75, you know my 85 year old grandmother uses social media. So, I would just say I don’t know if it’s always true.

Kristin: You may be surprised when they are on there.

Geoff: They are on there and also we need to remember that normal people don’t think “Hey I just finished my dinner I am going to get some social media for two hours.” They just go online and if they happen to be on a site which allows them to talk and converse with people, it’s great but they are going to surf this just like a CNN site. Increasingly one dot of properties has social function on it, so you can comment on anything and forward it anybody. I think it’s becoming less about social media and more about just being online. I would look at the age group of 45 to 60 as the primary growth segment right now on social media because really towards the end of consumer adoption and so that they probably engaged but not talking so much. They are much more likely to bookmark the stuff, they are more likely to email. So, try those options to them and have them engaged in that way. Chris Brogan is probably the top media blogger right now, he is a master of getting the people hyper involved in his site to sign up for email. That’s a great way to engage and it also integrating you traditional communications. Again, people don’t think about it as a social media, they think ‘I would like the email’ or if you have a hard newsletter you can email that. So, provide them those opportunities, when we have the people engaged we are game right?

Kristin: Right.

Geoff: Above 60 years old, I don’t want to waste my time. I would definitely use the traditional media this year. I mean, what happens in 2010, 2011 is a different story.

Kristin: Since, we are a little over half way done. I want to take a break to say a couple of things. If you have missed the beginning or if you had to drop off, we are recording this session. It will be in video form in our site afterwards and we are also are going to have the transcripts of the entire session in a couple of days. So, if you have missed something or if you are going to miss for the rest of the hour then come back and check that recording and also we hope this is helpful so far, we want to hear your feedback though. So, we have a short survey that you can fill out on the side bar of your screen, just fill that out. By filling that out you have an opportunity to win a flip cam and $250 for your cause. So, that never hurts.

I am checking another question from chat which is what’s the good way to show immediate result to my CEO? Because you mentioned earlier, it is important to get CEO, CFO, COO because if you have some good result how do you show those?

Geoff: you know why this gets back to financial return and investment. My question, always when we start any Afro F&A conversation is what you are trying to achieve. And that’s the first thing these people want to know why am I budging this why am I spending time on this; what are we trying to achieve. For some organization they are just experimenting; they just spend their time on this. To me, some executives just want to see how it works out. That’s fine. It is important when you gauge these organizations, you gauge how they are. So if it’s fund raising, how quick recourse of their action which is going to cause people give money and their measure from there will set low benchmark. It is always better to over succeed and say hey we are going to provide $10000. Ok, great, we raise 15. This is incredible. We have to do more. We provide lower bench mark you gets the flexibility to mix things and experiment a little. If it’s all about hitting the bench mark and fails, you may be affected. I will give you an example. It is from Washington actually. I think the fashion. It is been like three years. They wanted to raise money. Understandably, they lost lot of budget. So we created a blog on the blogger. They blogged about fashion; using Venice clothes and second hand clothes featuring all from give well stores locally every single week. You know on top of that, they had a run ratio on a newspaper to pay with. It just happened to be we had calls option on the right hand side which goes to the eBay stores which always featured that weekly offer. They love that. In top of that, we got all that intangible benefits, everything in DC we got. It’s amazing that in 3 years later the same campaign which still has the same value of proposition for the stakeholders which is young women in 20’s and 30’s gets 10000 rates above. We are talking natural area blog. I think that’s a win.

Kristin: Ok. We have another question from the chat. Do you have any advice for the tiny non profits operating mostly volunteer operation using session media successfully is heavily time consuming?

Geoff: That’s a great question. Every organization will benefit from that. How do you organize your volunteer is the question. How do you get these people to identify themselves and how do you them to congregate. Usually it’s not working that way. Right? You have to replicate that. Some place former mine, where it’s a group of my own community which I won’t recommend for a small metro area. May be you should making sure that you follow and they following you.

Kristin: Right.

Geoff: Okay. And, you want to create ways that these people can brace when you are doing and make it theirs. So, we talk a little bit of about face of causes of Birthdays and how to raise money for the organization. So, let’s say you have 20 0r 30 volunteers they are really hyper gauged more than the other 200 or 300 folks that’s going to say yeah, I do that once a year. Had these 20 to 30 volunteers asked them can you please raise funds for us on 9/11 or in November before the holiday season, you will be greatly appreciated and praise them. We give them very easy and clear cut instructions in the ways they need to engage. If you ask them to engage, they will probably say yes and then they won’t do anything.

This is what Obama café last for. Can you give us $20, can you buy a T shirt, can you organize a meet up in your city, and can you do the face pre causes asked for the Birthday donations. So if you give them four five ways to engage they will choose the one that is most comfortable.

Kristen: Ok. Another question from Chat about the study that just came from Peer lina litix saying that 40% of tweets are baffle. Does this hurt the value of twitter or has it affect your use of it?

Geoff: Great question. I always that it was babble. That is my experience. I actually put a blog for yesterday which was involving use of twitter after three years. I think the value of the Twee is astonishingly over discussed now. I mean, if we tweet it like this one, if there is 3 million followers, I think I may get 60 70 quick troughs. Nobody takes the guy seriously. However, if I have a hyper engaged community member, who has 2000 followers, everybody likes talking to as they are aware that they are real persons, I may get the same 70 quick troughs. The point here is triggers is what make is that the community you engage with. I am really judicious about who I follow and who I don’t follow. I really want to see quality tweets. Otherwise I don’t follow them. I don’t take twitter like be all. I work like a high school cafeteria where everyone meets, and say after school we will do this. After school is really meaningful.

Kristin: Another question, where do you think social media would be in a year from now?

Geoff: That’s great. I think this is your answer. This is my I phone. I am not saying that the I phone is end all be all platform as there are lot of black berries in the market.

Kristin: I have a black berry.

Geoff: And actually they have lot more than the I phone. You have Google; there is a good operation system. Nokia is a world leader in the mobile phones using Symbion. There always different operating systems for the mobiles. You can’t create a application for I phone and pour it in for a black berry. You have to create a new application for the black berry. It’s completely different technology. That is where the technology creates problem. The other aspect is most people don’t use smart phone sounds they are not capable of internet and real broadband access. In that sense, we are still dealing with the an early adoption phase. That being said, more and more people are using the mobile phones to access the internet. I think Facebook had more than 70 million people accessing it through mobile phones last month. If you consider the global users of computing devices, it’s happening here in computers. These people in general cannot afford to buy $2000 Mac pro. They can afford to buy a $200 subsidized I Phone or they can buy net book. They are accessing the network using the mobile phones. So I think mobility where we are heading. My best recommendation using a mobile network would be try playing with Four square which is highly engaging and let you travel through all over the United states and it provides the information on site seeing, great places to eat.

Kristin: do you know four square is going to available in Black Berry?

Geoff: It is already.

Kristin: I did not know. For a while it was I phone only right?

Geoff: I checked it yesterday. For a while it was with I phone only.

Kristin: I was jealous with the people using I phone for a while. I will go check it.

Geoff: It’s interesting. For some reasons these guys have the secret sauce that working. It’s kind of I pod where everybody was trying to make music players and these people came up with I Pod and it was over. I think that is what is happened with four square.

Kristin: I might take one more question from email. Then probably we have to wrap up. The last question is how does an organization assess whether it should start using social media tools for program publicity and general marketing that is not necessarily related to national fund raising event. You can’t always be doing a national fund raising event. How should we be using in the mean time.

Geoff: I would actually flip that equation say instead of using a fund raising event, just start engaging in social media and start engaging before you engage in fund raising event they can build community. Let’s get back to discussing relations ships. I don’t care what relationship, in any relationship there is procure right. Everybody puts in. There is give and get. Your very first touch with somebody is asking for money. You have to work really hard to get that gifts. You really have to compel people to open their wallets. However, if you really build a relationship involving in meaningful conversations which these people care about. You do this for a substantial time and then you have the campaign. It’s much more effective. The people care about you and feel they are part of the organization.

Kristin: And that’s you know, what we are trying to do at the Case Foundation where this give for giving program, we are going to give them a chance again this fall.

Geoff: That was awesome.

Kristin: A chance about a year and half ago and which you are going to be reading about what happened in the giving challenge and what the success stories were, how much money is raised online on our website casefoundation.org and that’s really our hope with this is that you can be using the resources on the site and playing social media beginning to recharge your networks. In the meantime, giving gears will be here and you can ask your questions as more questions come up all along and by the time giving challenge starts you already been engaging with the networks and hopefully you are using it more smartly than when we started. That’s the purpose of our giving this month.

Geoff: That’s great. It’s awesome what Case foundation is doing. I have to give you my friend Kristen because Kristen is been organizing this. She is put together all the giving gears for you and she is going to be sister of the month. What an amazing job Kristen and the entire Case Foundation is doing. It’s an honor to be there. Thank you so much for organizing.

Kristin: Thank you. Actually, I have not done this by myself. Kary Certoski our social citizen is going to be doing some of the moderation of some of the gearers and depending what was most geographically convenient and definitely a lot of help from the team. And just see, just a few notes to wrap, I want to remind you again quickly take the survey. It will take only a couple of seconds. How are we doing and how we can improve this as we go along? It’s also an opportunity to win a foot cam and $250 for your cause. We will be back here every Tuesday and Thursday. Next week we have Karia Andresen and Stacie Miann that will be from 1PM EST and there will be additional sessions on causes on Face book and how do you can use the causes well, because they have a lot of tools on there. The Birthday cards that we have talked about. How you can reach out to your supporters in different ways and raise funds. We have a more than a session now. For those case foundation.org. And if you missed anything earlier today we will have this taped and we will have the transcript. You can watch it over and over. I think that’s everything. Thank you Geoff. If you want to share something, we have couple more minutes.

Geoff: I just want to say that, if anybody is interested I am going to give significant activity on live earth. We are going to have a really fun stuff next week. Please stay tuned to live earth on twitter.

Kristin: And tell everyone your website how they can find you and all other stuff.

Geoff: My hand on is Geoff living in twitter and my personal website is geofflivingston.com and my blog is livingstonboys.com.

Kristin: Thank you so much for being our first Giving Gear and thanking you everyone for sending us your questions.

Geoff: Great questions.

Kristin: If we didn’t get you questions today, we will save those, keep sending your questions to gearup [at] casefoundation [dot] org. We have to get through everyone’s questions every Tuesday and Thursday. Thanks.

Geoff: Thanks again.