Transcript: Live Ask the Guru Session with Holly Ross
Kari: Set up the recorder. Good. That’s how we broadcast. Hi there and welcome to our fifth edition here of Gear Up for Giving. You’re here with the Case Foundation. We’re up in Portland today with Holly Ross of NTEN. And we are so thrilled to have Holly with us today as our expert giving guru answering all of your non profit social media questions. And before I have the pleasure of introducing Marnie, I just want to… Marnie.
Holly: That’s alright.
Kari: That was last week or Tuesday, but….
Holly: I’ve totally been called worse. It’s fine.
Kari: It’s a compliment.
Holly: Yeah.
Kari: Before I have the pleasure of introducing Holly who’s very alive here obviously I wanted to just take a couple of seconds to first thank some of our partners in this, See Three Communications, The [Goldhursh] Foundation, Flip Video. You can… for those of you who are not involved yet with them, Flip Video Spotlight Program, check that out or you can get… non profits can sign up and register and receive free products from Flip Video. So a terrific program. We’re glad that they’re helping us out and providing Flip video cameras for folks that are tuning in just by answering some of the questions that are there on your side, the right side of your screen. I’ll let you know how we’re doing and you can win $250 for your causes as well as a Flip video cam. So, alright, [send it] by that we… for those of you who have tuned into these sessions before they are really very interactive and they go how you want them to go.
And they can go a lot of different ways and we would love for you to participate. So you can ask either questions below on your screen which is probably the easiest way, but also if you're on Twitter go ahead and use the # poundAGC and that way we’ll be able to find your questions as we’re going through. You can also email us the old school way at gearup [at] casefoundation [dot] org. So one of those three ways, please get in touch and continue to send in your questions. Really appreciated them and they’ve made the sessions very rich. I also want to mention that due to the big announcement around America’s giving challenge earlier this week Case Foundation is pleased to partner with Parade and of course causes on Facebook to bring America’s Giving Challenge again to non profits everywhere so beginning October 7th. So you can find out more information very soon by… for those of you who have very pressing questions about the Causes platform on Facebook we’re actually going to be doing some bonus webonars that the Causes team is putting together. So come back. We’ll actually… we’ll have those posted below in our Google calendar and we’ll start getting some… the word out around those as well. So those will be some bonus webonars starting I believe next week.
Actually we’ll be interviewing Sarah from Causes next week and then the following week right before America’s Giving Challenge starts we’ll begin those sessions as well. So those are some bonus webonars brought to you by Causes and really excited to use all of the social media tools that we’re going to be talking about today and the tips really are hopefully grounded in a way to help you be successful in the giving challenge. So without further ado I want to turn it over to Holly. Holly Ross is the executive director of NTEN, a non profit technology network. She is an… you know, an expert in her own right, social media and non profit and we are just… we’re thrilled to have her here today. Authored a recently released book around non profits and social media; has recently been named in the Non Profit Times Leader of the Year or Non Profit Leaders of the Year or the Fifty Most Non… whatever it was. It was terrific! And we are so thrilled to… that you’re giving some of your time today to help our folks that are tuning in. So Holly, I’m going to turn it over to you. Talk a little bit about some of the trends that you’re seeing in non profit social media adopt.
Holly: Sure.
Kari: And then we’ll fire into the questions. So…
Holly: Awesome.
Kari: Alright.
Holly: Alright. Thanks Kari.
Kari: Yeah.
Holly: And thanks for having me here and thanks to the Case Foundation just for doing this and spearheading this ‘cause I think that it is so important that we as a sector figure out how to use these tools and it’s great to have such a wonderful carrot to get us all involved.
Kari: Yes. Terrific.
Holly: Thanks.
Kari: Terrific.
Holly: So… and we think in terms of trends I’ve been talking about social media now for so long I don’t really want to talk about it anymore sometimes.
Kari: Understandable. Well, we go for the next hour. You will?
Holly: I will. I will. But, you know, when I first started going out on the road I had to do a lot of like convincing people, you know, “No, really you’ve got to do this stuff. You’ve got to figure it out.” And now I don’t encounter that problem so much anymore. People are sort of bought into the idea that this is a road you have to go down. But we definitely get sort of a new challenge which is every time I go somewhere and I ask, you know, “Hey, so what kinds of social media are you guys using? What’s going on out there? You know, I’ll get, you know, “We have Facebook presence. We have a Twitter account.” Or, “We have a blog.” That’s great. And then my follow up question is like, “So, why? Why do you have this Facebook page?”
Kari: Sure.
Holly: And, you know a good 6 or 7 times out of 10 the answer is, “Because our board member told us to” or, “The ED said we had to.”
Kari: Right.
Holly: Or… right. So I think it’s really great that folks are jumping in, but I think that without… you know, I think what we really want to focus on now as a sector is really helping get people a purpose for what they’re doing and really set them up for success ‘cause I think saying, “Hey, the board member told us to. Okay, so we got a Facebook page…” that’s setting yourself up for failure. I think nothing good is going to come of that.
Kari: Right.
Holly: Right?
Kari: Right.
Holly: So I’m really excited that so they’re in there and they’re playing around and they’ve had more a personal experience with the social media tools as well so they sort of get what it’s all about. And now we have this great opportunity to really talk about how do we… how we focus what we’re doing here to get what we need to get to meet our missions.
Kari: Now it’s… that’s terrific. And, you know, it’s funny because I do see that more and more executive directors are jumping in and saying, “You have to do this.” But then there’s also this reverse of executive directors or boards of directors who are a little bit weary of…
Holly: Yeah.
Kari: Of social media and not being able to control the message and all this. So for the folks who have written in and asked questions around that, you know, how do you get your CEO on board and how do you bring then into this in a way that’s comfortable what are some of the things that you usually suggest to organizations?
Holly: Right, well I hear this right too right? Our [IB] said we had to but don’t let anything bad happen, right? So I mean honestly I think the best thing you can do is get your leadership involved on a personal level. Get them to set-up their own Facebook page or their own Twitter account and get them to use it personally. So I think that social media is a real challenge. When we went from you know direct mail to email which I love that you call the old school way, right?
Kari: Right.
Holly: Like [woo] it’s taking so long its old school, when we went from direct mail to email the translation of [IB] was really clear right? Like you send an email we know what open rates are just you know, opening the envelope right? You know all that kind of stuff was really really clear. Now this sort of new way of communicating it doesn’t have an easy metaphor right? It and it’s really something that is difficult to describe to folks right? Like how do you describe what Twitter is?
Kari: Right.
Holly: Micro blogging platform, what does that really say?
Kari: Exactly.
Holly: Right? So the best thing you can do is get them set up with their own personal account and just spend get them to commit to 10 minutes a day with you to engage in the tools in a personal way completely unrelated to your work or your message so nothing terrible can happen and just get them to play around with some of the different aspects of the tools so they at least understand what’s going on there. I think that’s a really powerful thing to do, and then I think it’s also really important to show them, find case studies of organizations honestly that have had bad things happen, right? Where the thing that you fear worse has happened and show them that in fact the world kept turning the organization is still there, here’s the positive things that came out of it you know, it’s just a long education process. And there are certainly gonna be organizations working on that kind of change is just not gonna ever gonna be acceptable. But you know I think getting them to getting them the tools showing them case studies you know where things would arrive also good success line is really good and then I also think where it’s appropriate if you can launch sort of a guerrilla campaign that’s also very helpful too.
Kari: Okay.
Holly: So like totally on the dl, go in there get the Twitter thing set up make something really specific really small and really positive happen and then show them those results.
Kari: That’s great, that’s I think that’s great advice. So earlier this week you posted you guest blogged on our site and there was some…
Holly: I like your shoes by the way.
Kari: Thank you [IB] and if you haven’t if you don’t know what we’re talking about check out Holly’s post. What are the questions that came out of that you know the individual wrote ins and one of the major issues I’m dealing with right now is the inability to track our social networking and how people are actually clicking through and who’s clicking through, and if we do a register on our website poll is there a way for us to track that Jane registered because of the social networking call or it because you know, how do you track how people are coming into your network or anything or there are some tools or ways that you can do that.
Holly: Right, so I think there's a lot of things that you can track in social media so you know we can track the number of interactions, the number of questions people ask, the number of people that are you know joining our spaces you know re tweeting all those kinds of things and those are really those can be used those can be really useful indicators. A lot of what people wanna track is how many people are we you know, so you can track how many people you're recruiting to your social spaces right in those other networks. And what a lot of people are really concerned with now is how do I track how many of those folks I'm actually converting into donors or converting into activists or volunteers, how, I'm I moving people from this social space where they're already at in to my space where I'm able to you know message I mean get them engaged maybe more in my campaign. And that's actually really tricky and there aren’t a ton of [IB] out there and it's really gonna be dependent on the database that you use, several of them already have connectors built up with Facebook that's the first place where people tended to focus in terms of creating these integrations. Where you can actually see which of the folks in your database are also in your Facebook space and so that's really exciting but we need a lot more of those deeper integrations.
Kari: Sure.
Holly: But they're coming, people really get the best medium so they're definitely, everyone is working on it.
Kari: Right, so I wanna take a let's see, let's take a question from our chat, and it says here what's proof that donors and funders are using social media to evaluate a non profit for funding? I think, it's actually it's kind of an interesting question and I think you know are funders]now pay more attention maybe like as a [funder] maybe that's [IB] I don’t know [IB] but in any case I mean I think it's interesting to see that because there's so much more information that's out there, how are people you know absorbing that and using it to, to assess and I think beyond just you know our funders using it how are individuals using it to make decisions about their... the way in which they're investing their money and...
Holly: Well I don’t think that, let me put it this way, okay that's a hard question but let me, but let me so I don’t need facts or figures, right. They're not [IB] body research about this yeah. But here's my here's my here’s my gut on it, if it I think that you know in any case people make the decision to give or not to give, mostly based I don’t know if you do the reading that's out there, there is a body research around that it's an emotional thing right, they've had this sort of emotional call and I think that what is really interesting is that you can really amplify that in a social space because you can get your supporters to make the call for you and people feel more connected to the people that they know emotionally than they do to any organization, right? So you have a lot of opportunity to really to make this better sort of emotion based connections that make people wanna give in social spaces. I also think that you have a tremendous opportunity to screw it all up in social spaces in a way that you did it before right? Because we have [IB] social mediums you have this website that people would come to and they you know they might be your message on a billboard or get an email from you and then go to your website to learn more and they could read the website and if your message works [yaay].
Kari: Great.
Holly: Right? But most of the time you're probably not writing anything inflammatory or evil on your site you're not gonna turn them away per say right? But in social media there, but what they couldn’t do on a website right? Was like ask your website a question and then expect an answer in the next 5 minutes to an hour right? And in a social space that is true, people there is an expectation that people get instantaneous response from you its managing 10,000 conversations with 10,000 people instead of one conversation with 10,000 people.
Kari: Right.
Holly: Right? And so you have this tremendous opportunity to really screw it up by not listening to what people are saying about you, hearing the questions that they're asking and responding appropriately... I totally hedged that I hope that's fine.
Kari: No, that's okay; they'll forgive us I'm sure. So you know you mentioned listening and how much emphasis do you put on the idea of listening versus participating in the conversation versus you know jumping right in and you know creating a presence on every social media site. So what's the balance there of how much you have to listen how much you participate and...
Holly: Yeah I mean I think that listening should be the bulk of what you do, it should drive almost everything that you do and I prefer orgs that aren’t really in the social media space yet I know the [IB] challenge starts soon, but I would recommend you, like before you do anything else you set up some accounts and spaces based solely for the purpose of listening to what folks are saying that is huge. And to me it's gotta be more than just listening for what people are saying about your org name right? Like a lot of people put in their own name and that's it. But go find out what people are saying about your issues in general not just about your org name. Find out what excites them about those issues what they're saying to each other, what questions they have, what gets them riled up and angry you know listen to all of that stuff and that's gonna make you a much better participant in this space, I think it's the most important thing that you can do.
Kari: So, I wanna turn to Twitter we have some folks from the Unified [Seeder] so thanks for tuning in, they ask how do I grow my network outside of people who already support and participate in my program? We see that question quite a bit so beyond just you know the people that are already paying attention how do you how do you move beyond those walls?
Holly: Yeah, so I think again this is where there's like the keywords and the listening can come in really handy. You know people that know you, so don’t, stop listening for your you know your org name go listen for related keywords and maybe Geography based. So do searches on Twitter do, look for key people with with keywords and profiles on Facebook those kinds of things to find people who might have you know alignment with your where you guys are coming from, and then you can follow them and just listen to them and before you do anything you know. And then you can start when they say something related you can jump up with your value add right? Like "oh yeah we did something like that too and here's the link to it right? That's when they follow you back and that's how you build onings. You build your onings by listening and then responding with a piece of value for the people by delivering value and that's, so just look for those keywords that are related to your work that aren’t about your organization's name per say.
Kari: Okay another question from Twitter and this is, pretty focused on Twitter which is what are the find apps on Twitter that you could live you know that you couldn’t live without?
Holly: That I could not live without.
Kari: Yeah.
Holly: Alright. Well I tend to live my Twitter life in Tweet deck. I just, I think it is a great tool for managing all those key words, watching all those key words through out the day, managing how I interact with folks. So twit deck is where I spend most of my time. I also occasionally double in [Tweet Suite]. I like [Tweet suite] mostly because I think it has a better interface. There are time when I need to manage multiple twitter accounts and I like it's interface better for that and the fact that I can schedule Tweets at a time. Which I mostly don’t do cause it’s a little bit disengenerous but every once in a while I know I'm gonna be traveling and I wanna Tweet something out when I'm on an airplane. So I'll do that. So those are 2 things that I use a lot of, I you know I am constantly in the Twitter search, the # tags, #tags ought to work. It's something I use as well. I don't know if I could come up with five. That's pretty much it.
Kari: Those are 3, those are good. There is a follow up to the Twitter asked question that came in from chat which is what are the 5 social media apps that you can't live without?
Holly: In general?
Kari: Yeah, okay.
Holly: Let's think about that. Twittee on the I-Phone. That’s what I use on my I-Phone Tweet. I love that. I think that I'm in Facebook all the time. You know we use, we use, okay co-comment, co-comment is something I use a lot. Co-comment is a service that let's you track your conversations on blogs so when you go comment on someone else's blog, it will record that for you and then it will alert you when people do a follow up comment, that kind of thing. So it really helps you track conversations that you are engaged in, wherever they happen to be in the blogosphere. So if you do a lot of commenting on blogs, I think that's really useful. Gosh!
Kari: That's 3.
Holly: That's 3.
Kari: The 3, it's not the 5, for those of you who are tuning in the [IB], let's give away 3's. That’s right; we may come up with some others.
Holly: Alright.
Kari: So from email, since we've done some Twitters and chat, let's turn over to email. And we'll take this one. We are long time non profit in a small town at rural state. Should we be working on building our local, social culture or you know should we bring that more broadly and create a national culture based on the issues that we address? And you know I think that rural areas are struggling I mean you know there is, we're starting to see a digital divide minimizing you know a little bit but what are some of the things that you are seeing and how is access in those areas?
Holly: Yeah, I mean I think it's really interesting cause on one hand you would think that these kind of technologies I mean they are perfect, the rural areas where people are long distances, getting people together in same physical space is tough. On the other end you know their connectivity is a huge problem in rural areas in the United States. It's a huge problem in urban areas too and people should get involved in this issue. And so it can be a real challenge. What you can't do a lot of in places, in rural places a lot of, like what we are doing now, this live streaming stuff people don't have the capacity for that. But you can use social media in a pretty smart way for those areas, to do things that are designed to be downloaded right. So people can set them up over their phone line or their phone satellite connection to download. They can walk away; go make dinner, come back listen to the podcast for example, right. Or blogs or also great even Facebook although it's getting slower to load but blogs are great, if you do a really simple design, low really light on graphics you know, heavy on the texts. So people, you just have to design for those rural areas in the right way so that people with low bandwidth can still participate. But I think this sort of, should we focus, one of the other interesting challenges that comes out of engaging in social media for local orgs is the idea, I mean I wanna engage my local audience but when I'm out in social space there is no geographic boundary.
Kari: Right.
Holly: So there is a great example that is, an organization that I was just talking to last week in Denver, the Colorado children immunization project, something like that, I just muddled their name but I'll get it right for you later. And so their mission is to help make sure that people have the right facts about immunizing children when they wanna get kids immunized, right. And they of course have focused on the State of Colorado. But they are engaged in Twitter, they are engaged in Facebook and a lot of these national spaces and they actually have now some national, international connections which you know they are struggling to figure out how do we you know, that's great. On the one hand you get this national, international recognition. But if it still, does it fit with our mission, how do we [wrote] this in our program. So those are questions that they are really working through. They want the recognition, they want the involvement but how do we, weave this appropriately for our program and that’s just you know some strategy discussion you'll have to sit down and have.
Kari: Right. We have a follow up question that came in from Reading Village on Twitter. There is a lot of talk about listening but how do we actually do that? [IB]. Can you get a little bit more tactical there?
Holy: Sure you betcha. I think RSS is your biggest friend.
Kari: And what is RSS?
Holy: It depends on who you ask. But I'm gonna call a really simple syndication right now. You may also have heard of RSS as a feed reader right. So Google reader is the one that you know tones and tones of people use. I use one called Net Vibes. Other people log on to another popular one but if you just you know do a web search for feed reader of RSS reader, you can come up with lots of different options. And what feed reader kind of lets you do, subscribe to different web publishing thing, that's right. So if you find a blog that you like that’s you know someone's writing about a topic that you work on, you can subscribe to the blog. You can also subscribe to things like searches and newspapers. Like you can subscribe to the New York Times art section. You can subscribe to Twitter searches even like for like if you search for key word on Twitter, it's gonna, the results page will have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. And what you can do in the reader then is kinda stack all these posts up for you and you can then quickly scan through them to see you know who is saying something today about a topic I am interested in. And then you know if it looks good and you wanna go and comment, I think you'll be able to click through to the blog and go make a comment. And we have some really good tools on listening, particularly when an RSS reader and our projects that tap tap tap, wearemedia.org. There is a whole listening tool box that really I think that lays out that more details than we might go into here.
Kari: Sure. And actually I'm very glad you have brought up, wearemedia.org. I think there is some incredible content. How did that project come about and can you tell our viewers a little more about what they can find?
Holly: Sure, yeah. So I mean I think, we definitely wanted to, the whole [IB] thing was helping non profit understands that in this new world you are creators in your own media, right. You are out there, you are running the news stories, you are creating the videos, you are taking the pictures, you are creators in media and how do you do that in the best way possible and get it out there in the social media world? So it's a social media framework for non profit. It was developed collaborately with folks like Jack Livingstone and [IB] and Mathew Ebb and...
Kari: All of our viewers.
Holly: All of your viewers, right. And they have all part, they have all contributed to it and it's moderated and edited by Bob Kepper and so what's in there is that it's broken into 2 sections. The strategy section so it answers questions like should I be using social media tools. How do I convince my AD. How do I show the return on investment for social media tools and then the tactical staff. How do I listen, how do I tell my story, how do I spread the word, how do I get social networks working for me. If we can go in there and find resources and case studies and there is also a great tool box section that just says you know like listening tools right and story telling tools and have them broken down there. So...
Kari: That's great. So you brought up this idea [IB] return on investment and it's something that we've gotten some Tweets and some questions via email. So can you talk a little bit about you know what are, what does it mean to measure your return on investment using social media and how do you measure it?
Holly: How do you measure it. That’s the key. Alright, so ideally we can't....we need, you can't measure return on investment unless you know what you are trying to get out of social media. You have to go in with a purpose, right. Like I am in a [IB] and it has to be, if you are familiar with this smart framework, it's a smart goal. So let's see if I can remember what that stands for. But something measurable, attainable realistic and time bound, right will be adequate. But anyway something measurable and you might wanna go with like you know I am going to recruit 50 volunteers via Facebook in you know P1 20 time, right and that's our goal. So you go on with your goal and then what you are gonna do is you know obviously you wanna meet your goal that's the first thing did I return, get the return on my investment. You are gonna take, you are gonna do some tracking. How much time I'm I spending on Facebook doing this every day you know. Do I have, did I experience some negative flow back, what are the positive things that came out of it. And you are gonna put all those together and sort of the mathematical equation of time plus money spent you know time plus money and you want that side to be less than your outcome right so like what will it take me for me to recruit say 50 volunteers in person at the county fair right. Did I put less time and money in to recruiting 50 volunteers online than I would have you know in face to face then I’m good right. So that’s the kind of math that you wanna do.
Kari: Okay a more specific question about Twitter from [Kidney] NCA I’m assuming maybe [Kidney] Northern California. Can you explain Twitter etiquette how many Tweets in a day is okay?
Holly: How many Tweets in a day is okay, I may not be the best person to ask I Tweets a lot. I think okay so with Twitter etiquette it’s you know you gonna have to fill your audience out for sure and I think there isn’t you know a bound on how many Tweets you can do but you do wanna make sure that you’re being respectful and you have a balance there. So I worry less about how much I’m Tweeting although maybe I should worry more but I only worry how much I’m Tweeting I’m worried more about what I’m Tweeting.
Kari: Okay.
Holly: So what I try not to do all day long is just Tweet links out to NTEN staff right? Although pretty much this morning all I Tweeted was about this but I try not to Tweet about me right that I’m re Tweeting what other people might feel they're saying.
Kari: Right.
Holly: That I’m giving people props for being awesome do you know what I mean that I’m highlighting other good stuffs that I find. So what I really wanna do is achieve a balance of things that I’m Tweeting and worry less about you know how much I’m Tweeting but I’m I giving people a good balance of things and a good value of things that they you know they would want to get from me. So I try and think of it like you know having that conversation at a cocktail party I wouldn't wanna just sound like oh that’s right I did that too cause I’m awesome I wanna give a little something you know a little bit of everything in this conversation sure.
Kari: But Holly, the thing is you’re awesome and I wanna point to something that you know I think it’s awesome that you’ve done and it’s around this idea of non-monetary incentives and what is that and you’re you know you’ve already closed your eyes and.
Holly: Yeah.
Kari: But there was this video of you that came out I believe you are dancing to Beyonce’s put a ring on it.
Holly: Yeah.
Kari: And so in any case how did that come about and why is that and what, tell our viewers a little bit about why you did that and then how non-monetary incentives can work to mobilize people to donate money or to sign a petition or rally around on the cause and non-profit [IB]
Holly: Okay well here is the thing right, there’s a couple of things we know about fundraising online, here’s what we know kitten’s and babies right, people love like [IB] baby seals now, baby seals and babies right people love the warm fuzzy you know like okay but that works all time you can tug on people's emotional heart strings when you tell those stories and get people to give right much easier than when you wanna say the non profit technology network right not so emotionally exciting for folks. So we wanted to do a fundraising campaign to raise money for scholarships for our annual conference it’s sort of convoluted ask for a non heart warming you know saving kittens from trees kind of organization. So we knew that we'd have to do something different to get people to give because of our community of people and I’m really active within that community we thought that the best thing we could sacrifice and give for the campaign would be you know smile on the human being so that actually what we said basically was if we reach our goal I would do something to humiliate myself and you will get to choose what that is and people were really excited by the idea apparently not a lot and we met the goal and what people choose for me to do is to remix the single ladies video which I did and so except they're on You Tube but yes that's exciting for people but not for me and I think that you know that's the kind of thing that you can you know when you're a local organization particularly or when you're involved in a really heavy community building you've got personality on your side you can really use that personality to help drive some of the fundraising and so you know it sort of [sunk] based and we've seen other people do similar things [IB] writing about our experience [IB] executive director sort of shaved his head you know. So it can work but it's only gonna work in limited situations but I think the idea really is that you wanna think outside of just you know fuzzy kittens, small child mentality and think about how else can we engage folks in our mission the way that's exciting for them and it may you may be able to exploit that same concept instead of trying to you know get someone get you or someone from your organization to do this stunt, encourage your supporters to do stunts right and their friends and family. I think actually Brad our communications guy said he would shave [IB] to a Mohawk if we met the goal and that really incentived his soccer team.
Kari: There you go, sure.
Holly: To donate to the cause right. So that kind of thing I think really works making it really personal as is you know when you [IB] kittens from the babies it's really helpful.
Kari: That's terrific, you know it brings up something else which is this idea of the online offline connection and the way in which people are mobilizing people online but how do you move that action off line. We’ve seen some success through things like Twestival where you know a Twitter campaign then meets up in cities across the world to raise money for various organizations. But how do you help people move that activity from online to off line engagement.
Holly: We got it's.... just it's really possible it's not I don' t think it's you know any different than when we would email people and kind of you know we have an email list and we try to get folks to come to you know in person event. I think you know certainly in certain situations that's gonna be covered you're gonna you have broadly geographically diverse constituency you know or whatever but I think what you do is you aim you're building, if you got the social media presence people are already engaged you can move the conversation around this off line thing that you're doing and get people geared up for it and engaged in it that's really helpful. I think one of the reason that are in [IB] this year was that we weren't just talking about the conference and the social media phase the community was creating the conference in the social media space that we led up to it. So it's not just saying hey we've got this event hey we've got this event it's saying hey we've got this event and we want to do something really awesome how you know what you guys think you know what I mean.
Kari: Yep, question from chat, how much do your demographics matter how do you or should you approach them differently. So I’m not sure if they're talking about demographics of the network I mean I also think that demographics on social media is changing. So what do you say?
Holly: Yeah I mean I think you definitely wanna keep in mind what you who your core audience is. So what you want to achieve, who do you need to achieve it right so identify your audience and then go find where that audience is in the social status that's where you wanna be fore sure and that involves a couple of pieces of research to figure out if you can there are reports out that aggregate information about social media services that tell you things like Twitters mostly 35 year old like college educated people right and or you know the differences between My Space or Facebook those are [IB] findable online that's part of it. And then the other part of it is going and creating a presence on those spaces and really feeling out listening first and feeling out is this what you're looking for.
Kari: Yeah.
Holly: And I think it's important to note too they might you know, generally broadly be in Facebook but there a lot more niche social networks you know as well that you might wanna go really take a look at especially if you work with mum's there's like a mum's social network for like every block of every city in America online that you can find, those kind of things are helpful.
Kari: Okay, turning back to the email, who should be responsible for social media in an organization and is it okay to hand off some of that responsibility to volunteers.
Holly: Who should be responsible well that is certainly that's an interesting question and the other thing that I think is really interesting about social media in general is how it is it's really making organizations sort of address the silos they have, departmental silos that they have and talk about stuff in a new way because social media it's not just marketing it's not just fundraising it's a little bit program we gotta have some leadership involved it's all over the place right. Where I see it most often driven from is either the fundraising and the marketing folks and I think that's totally appropriate and fine as long as we're thinking of it as a multidimensional thing and not just not fund raising or marketing right and I think that' fine and the second part of the question was.
Kari: I have no idea, is it okay to volunteer is it okay to have a volunteer.
Holly: Hand it off to volunteer yeah, so what you wouldn't want to do is hand off your social media strategy to volunteers you should be in charge of that but I’ve actually seen a lot of organizations use volunteers very effectively to implement some of the strategies, so for example Red cross of the [Ozarcs] they have a very successful Twitter presence they get a lot of people engaged through Twitter and actually out to CPR classes talk about bringing people online here you know to an offline world. They’ve had a lot of success with that and that Twitter presence is run by a volunteer. So it’s fully, it can be done, what you need volunteers to execute not volunteers to create your strategy. And I do have to tell you if you have a college anywhere near you like there’s no college kid in the world who’s turn down the opportunity to be like your Facebook intern.
Kari: But I also think that that’s you know we see a lot of organizations who have a really great Facebook presence during the summer the day they have interns on board that are helping them out. And then you don’t see them active the rest of the year so I think that that’s part of what you’re getting at. They can’t own the project but they should be involved and…
Holly: Yeah and part of you know owning a strategy is owning understanding who’s gonna do the execution and making sure it’s consistent.
Kari: Right, right. So we have another question from email about blogging and it seems like blogging is a pretty time consuming project. Is there a good way to easily build an audience so tips and tricks on building your blogging audience?
Holly: There is no easy way, there is no easy way blogging can be time consuming I try I really well, okay see I try to do 3 posts a week I never do I’m very rarely it’s really hard. Cause when you sit down to do it I figured out that I probably spend on an easy post its 30 minutes right, where and mostly like pointing my ways to other places and putting it out there 30 minutes. If it’s something that like actually requires thought I’m spending a good hour to two hours putting that post together. And if I was doing that 3 times a week that would be a lot of my time.
Kari: That’s a lot of time yeah.
Holly: And apparently I have other things to do so I don’t get that done very often and I get that. So I think it’s really helpful when organizations have multiple bloggers in their organization to fill out the blog web to make sure they are keeping good contact out there and that’s important. In terms of building an audience I think it’s really key for you to… I always recommend that people practice blog first that they set up that free blogger account somewhere don’t link to it anywhere don’t tell your friends you're doing it.
Kari: Just try it out, get comfortable.
Holly: Try it our right just go out there and write. I think what’s really important about that is building into your work [mode] so that it is something you are making yourself go do several times a week and you just get to that point where you’re there with that. And then the other thing which I really think is key and this is part of building that audience as well is that you can use that practice blog as a place to find your voice because you have to have a voice as a blogger and a point of view. Like if you watch Project runway they are always asking designers “what’s your point of view?” Right like you need that as a blogger that’s part of an audience like people are gonna identify with you, your voice and your point of view if you don’t have any of that your just not gonna build an audience. So that’s key and then there’s lots of cheap tricks that you can do to build an audience.
Kari: Cheap tricks to blogging okay.
Holly: I mean I think…
Kari: I’m sure everybody’s gonna be…
Holly: Yeah my favorite cheap trick one time I did this post on the internet site called social media is dead no sorry not social media open source is dead [IB] open source right? Total cheap trick which I did partly because I just wanted to see what would happen if I was just really inflammatory in the title. The post itself was not that inflammatory I thought. But you know in fact it really did, it’s the most commented on post that we have you know all that kind of stuff. And actually it’s a really good discussion came out of it. So if you wanna pull it back from a cheap trick genre what I would say is you can do stuff that is…. Do stuff that is about starting dialogue just don’t put your own opinion on there all the time. But do stuff that is really meant to spark a conversation with that in mind so I think that’s really key. I think you also wanna make sure that you’re integrating your blog into all of your communications so another sort of cheap trick it’s an easy trick that we use over at NTEN we put our e-news letter almost everyone does right? So we put in an e-newsletter the articles in the e-newsletter we just put the first paragraph or so in the actual email, if you wanna read the whole thing you click through to our blog. Alright and then you’re on our blog, where you can subscribe to it you know or whatever. So that’s another thing and you can integrate lots of general ways right so the e-newsletter trick is one but you wanna make sure it's built, make sure your post are displaying on your home page or that you are talking about your blog and if you have really good posts not every post. But if you have really good posts you know put them all out via Twitter or on your Facebook page. So you’re doing that kind of integration and slowly things will build so…
Kari: Right and I think it also gets to the point of common, part of blogging is also commenting on other people’s posts because you know the most common, highest form of flattery for a blogger is to receive comments on your post and so you wanna be able to reciprocate and do some of that as well.
Holly: Absolutely that's a huge part of it for sure and that's part of your listening right is that you've got this accessory set up and you are able to see the other people who are writing about your topics. You can go in there and comment appropriately maybe link back to your blog if you have a post about a similar topic that's gonna help, how did that go?
Kari: Very good so another question so I guess this one actually came up in the chat. How do you respond to negative twits and I actually wanna broaden that a little bit? You know how do you respond to negative feedback online anywhere?
Holly: Yeah I think just like in real life, I mean it is real life right. So you wanna I think you wanna respond openly and honestly and non-defensively in almost every case. So what you don't wanna do is set up a fake account pretend to be not from your organization and then go in and like right through your organization’s defense right that's not what you wanna do. What you wanna do is address people's concerns. So again just in general I speak cause I have all these stories [from time to time] in my head. There is a I was [IB] the executive director of a children's museum and he was saying that you know they do a lot of social media monitoring and the most common complaint they get from the moms you know on their own blog is your museum is too crowded. Right, and so they really look for that and every time they will go in and they will actually say "I’m really sorry you had a tough experience here's what we're doing to try to solve the problem right we offer the alternative hours da, da, da." And you know here's a pass, a free pass to come back you know that kind of thing. So they just go in and you know they act like normal human beings and say "I'm super sorry here's what we're doing to solve the problems da, da, da" and I think that's the way you wanna handle it right? I'm sorry you had a bad experience you know offer some sort of we're working on it thing and maybe a resolution. I think you know 9 times out of 10 people just want to feel heard, they just want you to say "I hear you." and sometimes that can be enough. The one time [one out] of 10 is the person you don't wanna respond to and that's the person who's just being a jerk right for whatever reason.
Kari: They are some of them out there.
Holly: They are a mad old employee right or like they just hate you for whatever reason cause something was wrong a long time ago. The people you're never gonna appease you just wanna ignore there's nothing you can do about them don't engage.
Kari: Yeah, yeah okay good advice there. So this one came from chat do you recommend posting where we have social media presence on our website home page? So posters, brochures, walk throughs so I guess does it drive people away from an organization’s website? So I guess you know how much should you post on your web page and is it good to drive people out to other things that your organization is supporting?
Holly: Yeah so if I sort of get this question it's sort of getting the attention of do you... should you really be using these social media spaces as ways to get people back to your website? Or really trying to put all this stuff out there where they can get it wherever they are. And unfortunately I think the answer is that you have to be putting this stuff out there in the... not really worried about driving traffic to your website. If every... you give people everything they need to do to engage with the organizations where they are at and what that ends up meaning is that you're very, very busy right? You're managing all this stuff right and that's really, really hard. But I think that's what you wanna do right, if people wanna interact with you via Facebook give them everything they need to do in Facebook so that they don't have to go anywhere else to get what they need from you.
Kari: So hopefully that answers your question there on chat if that wasn't your question then clarify we'll get to it. So a few questions about issue fatigue, cause fatigue and social media fatigue are you seeing that in your world and how do we manage our time better so as not to feel just completely fatigued by all the things that are popping up on our screens or in our email boxes. Are there ways to control that?
Holly: Okay so I really recommend reading this book called 'Bondage [IB]' Jonathan [Haprey's] the author and the concept behind the book is the [IB] digital [immigrants] which is the kid that like came out of the womb text messaging. So anyone born 1980 or beyond, everyone else, all of us were digital immigrants we've come to this phase and our brains are not wired to deal with the way that this world works we have to rewire ourselves. And it talks about a lot of those issues I think it's really great. It doesn't have a whole lot of solutions but it does point out... bring up a lot of things to think about to think [of that] so read that, that said, social media fatigue I think you know in… ever time there is a new technology out I can’t remember who to site on this so I apologize to the person who thought of this but you know there’s this we go through this cycle with it where there is the early adopters and then we build enthusiasm and we sort of reach this peak where like people cannot stop talking about it they love it right? And then we hit the backlash right, and then we just went through the backlash phase with twitter right? Where I was like “Oh Twitter.”
Kari: Oh Twitter.
Holly: Twit no ones on twitter anyway why are you on twitter and then we just sort of ease off and to whatever model of adoption it’s generally gonna be right. And that’s you know we’ve seen this with particular social media tools and then social media in general right we’re still in this mix of like people sort of getting comfortable enough to let go of the backlash. And that’s just to be expected but these tools are not going away so I just wanna stress that and you have gonna have to develop this new skill set. I mean as I said earlier I’m just gonna keep saying this till it becomes like [off] quoted.
Kari: Okay.
Holly: Is that we have to develop the skill set I think as communicators and fund raisers we are really good at getting one message out to 10,000 people the new skill set is how we manage 10,000 conversations with 10,000 people you know in 20 different mediums and you know we really wanna consolidate them because that’s how we’re wired to work and it’s not gonna happen.
Kari: Right.
Holly: So we just have to develop the skill set and for different people that’s gonna mean different things the way that Beth and I tend to approach it is we have quiet time where we turn social media off right and we do but then when we go out of social media we go deep right. So for the 20 minutes that we’re really there, we’re really there so…
Kari: Right very helpful so a question from Twitter that that came through. Where have you seen good use of maven a peer to peer activation through social media why do think that was affective so how are people helping each other out?
Holly: Yeah I mean if you take a look at the health care folks as [IB] it’s actually it’s an old like 40 year old case study at this point. [Marchedimes] has a great; a really great community for mothers who actually gosh can you remember the name of the project?
Kari: No I can’t. But we’ll put it down on the screen.
Holly: So for example I think about it and I think this is really true with a lot of parent care folk’s right. So they merchandise is this really big website, where if you're family member but it’s really geared towards mums for family member who has a child who is dealing with you know birth effect you can come in here they have a bunch of tools for you to express yourself personally there’s blogs and all this stuff then a bunch of community forums and it is really amazing what happens in there because a lot of times people go in looking for really practical advise right my doctor told me x what do you guys think and I have some reservations. And they’ll get to sound out some stuff with their peers and then through that you know a lot of really amazing actual relationships between people blossoms and it’s not just you know support around this one question it becomes a life time of support for these families and you see a lot of that in a variety of different health care places I think that those are great places to go to start look for models.
Kari: We’ve got that 10 minute left so make sure that you’re tweeting in you questions using #poundAGC and that you are chatting below and asking you questions and you can also email us gearup [at] casefoundation [dot] org we’ve got about 10 minutes left… next question with regard to… smsing texting, lots you know the trend seems to be you know globally folks are very much focused on how to make use of their text their cell phones. Here in the United States we haven’t seen as wide spread you know adoption but what are some of the trends that you are seeing and especially when it comes to mobilizing people and are there applications for donating online, for people who are using text?
Holly: Yeah I think if you have not been thinking about a mobile strategy you definitely need to be thinking about one… the smart phones are not just for business people anymore like the I-phone definitely changed that game so there’s lots of things to think about there in particular I think how to engage your stake holders in volunteering through their smart phones delivering better information via smart phone, for people who like you know if you are a legal sources organization you need someone needs help because they think they are being evicted right how do you deliver that via smart phone much better. For a lot of people in the United States internet access is their phone okay. So like if you are… you know you’re a low income family you know that’s your internet access because you can’t pay 30, 40, $50 a month for internet so I think we need to start thinking about that more on a donation side there’s lots of stuff going on there and there are several providers geared just for the non profit sector [Mobile Collins] is one [M-give] is folks who are sort of spear heading the donation parts… there’s a bunch of different folks and Mobile active is an organization that’s a actually geared towards helping people figure this all out as a non profit go look there. People are doing [wedding] donations campaigns on via text message more frequently [Nero] has done a lot of experimenting with it like a lot of social meetings except there aren’t huge numbers coming out of it yet. But they are experimenting it is a possibility it’s definitely something to look into.
Kari: Okay great. A question that came up from chat earlier any advice on how to use Twitter to pull an audience?
Holly: Twitter to pull your audience. Do I do this? I use twitter a lot as a sounding board you know okay we’re thinking “Bla bla bla what do you think?” And many people you know tweet their answers back and I think that that’s really a good way to use your community or do a similar thing or we’ll do a discussion in our Face book group or something to get some of that kind of feedback as well and I think that those kinds of questions are a useful part of using the social media tools they actually cause the engagement, people actually feel like they are creating an organization with you and so that can be really helpful there are some tweet poll apps yeah but I haven't used them yet though.
Kari: Okay. Okay. So another question and this is actually , it's kind of a nice wrap up question so... to social media or not to social media is that still the question or have we gone beyond whether or not we need to be there and now it’s a matter of how should we be there? And so what are you seeing and how do people kind of you know what's the next big thing and how do people keep up?
Holly: Right, right oh god! Keep up. So you know I, do you have to have a Facebook page right now no do you need a Twitter account right now no. You're gonna get your work done but what I think is happening you can still be successful without them. But what I think social media is indicative of is... the differences set of expectations for the general public about how they’re gonna be communicated with. So there is this new skill set that we need to acquire and I see the folks that are working really well in social media are bringing those skills to their other communications as well whether it's email directly or whatever. So just to give you an example social media gives us an opportunity like to have really small one on one conversations or you know one to five kinds of conversations right and I see people trying to reflect this more in a way that they use email by doing much better and closer segmenting of their [IB] and then really emphasizing that if you send a message out on email and they get a response they should reply, you know they should answer it you know what I mean so whether you engage in a social media space or not there's going to be this expectation that you’re going to have more targeted value added conversations with people and that you are going to be much much more responsive.
So you do have to develop a skill set around responding that we haven't really had in the past right? And that's just gonna be the way that it goes. And I think that it is better for us I mean that we do an email study every year with [Eminor] strategic services [Spenchmarks] reports this year was the first year we were able... We had enough organizations that we could collect data on segmenting and enough organizations who were segmenting that we could collect data on it and you know basic segmenting of you lifts will yield much higher response rates because you're giving people what they really want. You know it's much we talk about personalizing email you know it’s not just about merging the first mail man it’s giving people the content that they want, it mean citing classic example they know if you came in on a dog or cat page and they're gonna send you dog or cat content there you go.
Kari: Yeah now that's terrific now so we're just about ready to wrap here for today next week we have existing week we have Beth Cater on Tuesday again one o'clock pm eastern time 10:00 am we'll actually be in San Francisco so 10 am for folks that are tuning in on east coast and then on Thursday we have Sarah Cock form causes on Facebook and she will be really taking all the of the questions that have come in very focused specifically on that platform and we're really using that as a launch into some additional webnars that will be that will be taking place that the cause that our partners at causes will be hosting and presenting to really help folks better understand how to leverage that platform and compete in America's Giving Challenge. So again if you didn't catch the top of the program, America's Giving Challenge again will be October. It's launching October 7th so we're very excited to do that again with Parade and with Causes on Facebook and stay tuned to the Case Foundation site for more information and more details around that very soon. And I just... I want to thank Holly again and, you know, if you have any closing thoughts that you'd like to share with our listeners. We really appreciated your insight today and anything additional.
Holly: Thanks so much for having me. And really have you noticed how many women you have? You...
Kari: I have noticed. Yes.
Holly: I wonder what that's about.
Kari: I'm not sure.
Holly: Yeah, okay.
Kari: But....
Holly: 63% of our interactions on Facebook are from women, too. I'm fascinated by this.
Kari: Really? Really interesting. Well, there you have it. Thanks again Holly. Thanks to the folks at NTEN Co.
Holly: How many people want to know about the giant penguin? You won’t ask...every year we have a wonderful friend from [magna] company picnic. They usually decorate the Non Profit Technology Conference with penguins. So this guy has been with us for several years now and... Yeah.
Kari: But unfortunately he doesn't have a name. So actually....
Holly: Yeah. Please suggest a name in the chat and we'll pick one. And you know what suggest a name in the chat and the name we pick, we'll give you a little prize.
Kari: There you go.
Holly: We'll send you a book. We'll send you a new book.
Kari: Perfect and what's the name of the book?
Holly: Managing Technology Meet Your Mission.
Kari: Great.
Holly: Thanks.
Kari: Thank you so much, Holly. That's to Mr. Penguin. Thanks to all of you for tuning in and join us again on Tuesday with Beth Cantor. Thanks you.
Holly: Thank you.
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