Transcript: Live Ask the Guru Session with Katya Andresen

Kristin: Hi and welcome back to ‘Gear up for Giving’. We are here with our second session of live with gearing gurus where you get to ask your questions about nonprofit social media to our gearing gurus. Today we are lucky to have Katya Andresen from Network for Good. Katya is Chief operating Officer for Network for Good but she is also a well known speaker, blogger, and author on social media nonprofit marketing, fund raising and online outreach. She is been involved in lots of different kinds of causes in media relations and she has won lot of National and International awards for her marketing materials. So, we are really glad to have her today and we would love to have you start chatting in your questions or sending them with the ‘#’ tag on twitter ‘# AGC’ or you can continue emailing them to ‘gearup [at] casefoundation [dot] org’. I am going to take a few minutes and let Katya give a few thoughts about her perspective on fund raising and marketing via social media. I also would like to mention that she did a great blog post for us yesterday on the case foundation site about six miserable marketing mistakes. So, check that out if you haven’t seen it yet after this session.

Katya: I will make my opening part with the one that I leave with you today and if you remember nothing else from anything that I say today this is a kicker that I have learnt from experimenting with social media for the last couple of years and that is, the key to social media is knowing the social and not the media. By that I mean it’s about people and human bonds more than the wires and technologies. So, when I am training people about social media and talking about social networking it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by how much is out there and I often feel overwhelmed sometimes myself. But, if you step back and look at all the things that is going on and how the internet is evolving and why these forms of technologies has exploded, it’s about something simple that we all understand well, which is people have a basic human need to be seen and heard and to connect with other people. That’s what many of us want in life and that’s one of the most important things in our psyche. Like the internet is letting us do that, let’s do that online and that’s what is behind facebook, that’s what is behind twitter and that’s what is behind all these things.

People want to have a platform for personal expression and they want to connect with likeminded people or they want to debate with people who aren’t likeminded. So, that’s what is going on online and if you want to be really good in engaging social media at building communities through social media and finding support through social media, you can do that well if you keep your head in that place. It’s about engaging and developing relationship with people. That means it’s not about taking your marketing mega phone and broadcasting everything you think to the masses through social media, that’s not what this is about. It’s about listening to what people are saying, to what people care about and then connecting to those in a very authentic sincere and open way and that’s a very powerful tool. If you can tap into those basic human needs and tie them to your cause and use those relationships for fund raising that can be incredibly effective. The last thing I can say about that is, it’s hard to fund raise especially in this present economic environment and everyone I know who works in development and communications, marketing is pretty overwhelmed all the time particularly this past year. Try to look at social media as a way to not to be alone anymore, you don’t have to be the only one out there trying to get your message out in the world. You have people, you may not know who they are but I hope at the end of this session you will know how to find them. You have people who love you, who are your ardent supporters, your champions of your cause and they would love to talk about you. Maybe they are already doing that, but they are really good in talking about what you do to their friends and family and to their circles of influence. If you give them the freedom and the tools to do that, you are unleashing a whole group of people who are helping you fundraise, market, develop relationships and that’s a great thing because we can’t do that job alone. We need a lot of people to help us to that and technology helps us to find those people and enabled to take conventional word of mouth and amplify it.

Kristin: I think that’s a great point. Thanks for the opening path I hope we go ahead with a lot of follow up questions. I really hope that people get to hear that social media is not something that you have to think like an extra thing to do but more of tool that helps you do the thing that you are already doing and encourage other people to do your job basically. So, if we look at it that way we’ll do well.

Since one of your areas of expertise is fundraising, I would want to start with a question we have about fundraising. ‘Have you used social media in addition to the traditional fundraising technique to the raise money?’

Katya: I want to make two points here, the first point is don’t approach social media with dollar signs in your eyes. This isn’t an avenue for going out and doing a massive appeal like you do on a direct mail. You go ahead and broadcast too many people and expect them to receive the message and send in money. You need to think about it a little bit differently. You need to think through the eyes of the folks that are engaging online. How did they come to you, what are their expectations? Do they come because they thought that they are signing a petition and want to be part of an online community? Did they come because they want to look good to others in the facebook page and show to them that they are green? Or are they really extremely passionate about what you are doing and really talking about it. You need to see how people are behaving with respect to your nonprofit. How they came to you online? Are these the people that I can fundraise with? The second thing is, it’s not about you fundraising online necessarily, through most of these social networks what we see is; getting attraction and becoming most successful in fundraising is not when this nonprofit goes out and asks for money through the social network tool but rather when they ask they supporters to do so with their communities online, that’s much more effective. I would like to ask you to tell me the last time you gave money; I do this often when I have live audience in the room with me and ask them to tell their stories. Without fail the vast majority of the stories are about, a friend whose mother died of cancer and the friend is doing a walk-in memory of the mother; it was someone’s birthday and they were raising money for a cause on facebook. I don’t hear lot of people saying, I got an eloquently word admission statement from an organization and I had to give a donation. It’s usually someone we know who has asked us for help. So, when you are thinking of fundraising online in particular to your social networks, it’s all about the messenger. You want people who really care about your cause to do the fundraising for you. When you make that transition of command and control like, “I am raising money, please give me money.” Letting your speakers speak in their own voices, to speak about you about their own personal experience with you organization and ask people to support your organization. People will give not because of your organization, but because they care about the person who is asking. The messenger is more important than the media particularly with respect to social networks.

Kristin: Great, I have a follow up question from chat that relates to what we were talking about before. One of our viewers saying, social media is about amplifying the word of mouth. Should we be strategic in giving people the talking points and how do we do that with social media?

Katya: We really cannot give the people the talking points. They key is not really to control the message and that’s really a scary thing but I really like what Clay says about this in his book. I heard him speak recently and he said. “The area where we can go and controls everything is gone and you shouldn’t be hesitant in engaging the social media because you cannot write the talking points or control the message. Believe it or not, control was gone sometime ago. So, there is no reason to feel anxious about the train that left the station long time ago. If you need proof for that, or if you need to people of you own organization to tell about that, it’s very easy; setup TweePe alerts, setup Google alerts and you will see all the conversations going on that you can’t control but that’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing because you’re talking points are never going to be as good as your supports particularly in terms of fundraising. Why because your supporters are experts on how to persuade their own friends and family to do things. They know their friends, they know what buttons to push; they know how to handle them. So, you want to let them do those. And the last thing that I would say is it’s just a cultural thing, social media is like a big noisy community where people really are speaking to each other in a very authentic way. When you start to step in and apply the conventional rules where you seek to control that or you seek to tell people what to do that goes down very poorly. Just imagine yourself in a social event doing that to someone and saying “you know, Kristin actually you are meant to say these three things” it won’t go down very well. So I really urge you to stay away from that and give the power to do that, that’s said there are a lot of ways to encourage them to do that besides saying why don’t you say this, you can give people the tools. You can say, “We are trying to raise money for this specific child or this specific cause, would you help us?” That’s fine to give people the level of direction. You might even want to give them fundraising widgets or place to setup a fundraising page or link to your community on facebook. But let them choose the words and let them choose the medium because they have their own places where they hang out online, and that’s where you want to be, where their community is.

Kristin: I think putting up those resources online on various social media platforms where you know your audience will be just helps them to be able to share those things with their audience in a way that they want to.

Katya: Absolutely true and this reminds me of a story. At network for good we started a website for social networking for good causes with Kevin Bacon called 6 degrees. That came about because Kevin Bacon has finished so many movies and his is just 6 degrees newer from any other actor. He wanted to use ‘6 degrees of Kevin Bacon for social good’. He sort of modified it when he realized this channel can do a lot of good. One of the successful fundraiser of all time through that was a woman named Alley Edwards who has an autistics son. She runs a scrap booking block, travels the country working for scrap booking and has a huge community passionate for scrap booking. When she saw the tools, she saw that she can use to raise money for autism. She put it on the scrap booking blog and raised an incredible amount of money and brought hundreds and hundreds of supporters for her cause because she was given a tool that allowed amplifying what she naturally do, which is not about scrap booking but mention about his adorable son. She put him on a fundraising widget and she talked about him and talked about why she cared. People gave because of that, but it made that extra step. She had the passion she cared about the cause and she had the tools. Those are the ingredients for a successful fundraising online for a cause champion.

Kristin: Great example. One of the questions we have from email is ‘we are an auspice group and I am having a hard time understanding how a social networking tool can help us.’

Katya: I really liked that question because one of the causes that I worked most of my career was for caring auspice. Thank you for that question and I really care about your cause and I would get out and do some evangelizing for you online. I think what you want to do is not to worry too much about the tools. Stop and take a step back and think about hustlers and who are the people in your community; who care about what you as an auspice? Imagine of people who are having auspice services who are very seriously ill, imagine you have their family members who are extremely grateful for the servicing that you are providing, imagine their family members who passed away due to auspice who have very strong and favorable feelings for your organization. Imagine you have donors in your community, perhaps folks from the medical community who have benefited.

You need to note down all the audiences and think about what they are looking for, what are they trying to do and is there a social media tool that can help do that better. That’s the way you need to approach it. When I think about auspice, I think about the incredibly support services it provides, it’s not only the key management people who are in auspice but the emotional care of the person in auspice in family all of that is really powerful. I would think that’s something that people who are in auspice or who have experienced auspice know very well and would like to talk about others. Some of the most interesting things that you can see online are some of these caring pages, where people who have their family member who is ill, they put the updates on social media so that everyone can follow. So that they need not be constantly testing or calling to find how the patient is doing. I see really wonderful work by the mark of jimes, a community for the parents who have babies born prematurely, talking about their experiences. You would see this wonderful dynamics happening where people who have gone through are reaching out to other people. So, it’s again about the people, why people passionate about the auspice and how social media can engage that and then you may find people who wants to fundraise for auspice down the road or people who really care about it and wants to have signatures in their community; put those tools in their hands and they will do what comes naturally which is spread the word and get the support for you.

Kristin: Great. I am going to take another question from chat about twitter actually it says, “do twitter followers care about the nonprofits’ follows on twitter and do they care who is following us?”

Katya: Interesting, the first point that would make about twitter is about quality and not quantity. So, when you are looking at followers on twitter and this is a point what Jeff Livingston made when he was asked this question. What really matters is not how many number of followers you have, it’s who is following and who are you following; are they who are actively engaged, are they influential and can really spread the word about what you do. I have been experimenting this for a very long time and it’s taking me a while to figure out whom to follow because I want to follow people whom I can learn from and who have useful things to provide. I don’t aspire to follow 20 or 30 thousand people. I aspire to follow people who really are useful, helpful and enrich my professional life. So, when you take that approach, it is important who you are following and who is following you.

You would want a community that really helps you to advance your mission, learn and engage but you don’t need to focus on the actual numbers. I haven’t had any instances of people really having the time to scrutinize on too much on who is following but the active member of the community are posting and replying and that’s where you end up getting followers. You may have hindered followers but you are good if you have twenty followers who are retreating what you say, who are posting really interesting things for your issue which results in more people following ultimately engaging in building the community.

Katya: I think people would really care if you are following them, like if I am following a nonprofit and talking to them a lot, retreating them. I would appreciate if they respond. Pay attention to who is talking online and make sure you are following them because that would make sense for you to have conversation with them. You don’t want to be following zero or five people because that shows that you don’t really care about having conversations. If you follow people who are talking about you and the cause you care about and that would show that you are willing to engage in conversation with them.

Katya: I couldn’t agree more and that’s an important point I would like to make. It’s gets to the part of one of the most crucial thing that you need to do in social media is really values it as a listening tool. If someone is actively following you as a donor who really cares for the cause. You would have to be following them because one of the powerful value of social media. It’s not about getting a donor; it’s about engaging and learning. You can learn about enormous amount by listening to people out there and they don’t like it if you don’t listen to them. Remember, they are online to be seen, heard and connect and if you are not listening, you are not seeing, hearing and connecting and people don’t appreciate that at all. Never forget to listen, never forget to follow up.

Kristin: I am going to take another question from our email which is going back to the fundraising and the tools. ‘Is there a social media tool that is best for fundraising?”

Katya: No, I get a lot of questions like ‘should I be on LinkedIn, should I be on Facebook, should I be fundraising on facebook’. I won’t know because I don’t what your need is and I don’t where they are and what their expectations are and that’s where you need to start.

You need to sort out where your supporters are. So, the first step for doing that is to listen and you want to setup very simple things. Google alerts for example or TweePe which sends emails when folks are talking about you or your cause or sending people your website. You can setup a few listening hosts and you start to learn where people are online, and then you can start to handle. You would find the community where you can fundraise. Again, don’t start with the fundraising start with relationship building. So, the right answer is where your audience is engaged and would be interested in supporting you with financial gifts. Don’t get too excited with the actual tool; remember it’s about the people.

Kristin: Great. Also, when I follow up on your mission fundraising widgets; I think not everyone knows much about widgets, how they work. Could you talk more about widgets and when and how should people be using them?

Katya: I think a technology person might hate this analogy but it works for me. Widget is like a little suitcase, it enables you to take content from one place to another online and it makes things affordable. In the suitcase there is a code, don’t ask me more about the code because I only know the basics. If you do things like setup a box on your homepages that has your local weather or stock tips, these are all widgets. They are giving you information coming from another source online. So, fundraising widget is all that which enables to all that in affordable way, it gives you a code that you can post anywhere you want like facebook or blog. You can send that through email if you want. The idea is, it’s something using which you can ask for money when you are online. It makes things affordable and that’s really important because the days of hoping that everyone will come to your website to give are gone. People want to give wherever they are thinking about a cause, wherever they are engaged, wherever they are doing the business and talking to their friends online. This is very important for the fundraisers to realize that we can’t expect everyone to come to us to give money and widget is that piece of technology that lets us makes that affordable. It makes giving an experience in anything you are doing online. So the fundraising widget for example the one Ally Edwards had with respect to 6 degrees, in that particular widget you can upload your photo your view on why you cared about your cause and it would generate a widget.

Case foundation has done an incredible amount of work with all kinds of folks who had widgets. Global giving has widgets; on facebook obviously you can use all kinds of different widgets to raise money and causes. The important thing is it’s not how they work but it makes things affordable, they make fundraising a part of many experiences online particularly among friends and family which is really the key here. You can insert fundraising at the cause of personal relationship that’s a very powerful thing.

Kristin: Great. I got another email which I thought was an interesting question from Norah at the Queens Museum of Arts. She said, “This year in lieu of our traditional Gala we held a virtual non Gala online and in which we integrated facebook and twitter. It was actually very successful. Next year we will go back to the traditional Gala but would like to somehow engage people of social media have a way for people who can’t afford the $300 ticket to remain involved. How do you integrate that?

Katya: I am really glad that Norah asked that question, because this is a really important actually. One of the things that I hear a lot is that people who gear up and engage on social networks aren’t as committed as people who gifts you a web site or gala. You know, they don’t come back as much or support as much. And actually I am analyzing those numbers right now for an article I am writing. That is somewhat true. But, one of the things we should think about there is how much is the nature of the donor and how much is about the nature of how we engage with them after they did that act online. So, give into a lot of causes online Facebook etc., and I only had one ever thank you through Facebook; I had only one ever persisting give any updates with the Facebook and I find that we sort of forget that we should go that people remembering how they came to us. I think it’s wonderful she had on that. I think it’s appropriate for her to let the Folks know that there is a Gala this year. But it would be a big problem not to give this folks an opportunity to have a virtual event against to acknowledge what they did last time. So, I asked her a couple of questions. Number one. What did you do after that event? Have you been riding everyone over the first year to thank them for participating in the virtual event? Have you talked about the social goo that resulted because of your event? If you haven’t done that, do that quickly before you invite them to another event. Because cultivation is key here. It’s not about trees or like ATM machine. Only calling them when we need them. People don’t appreciate that. Again, it’s about relationships. So, that’s step one. It makes sure that you have done a really good job thanking them for last time. Second one is to really engage with them. Talk to some of them. Talk to people who are particularly active and sort of leaders in last year and ask them what they would like to do this year? Were they like to continue the event? How are they going to support you this year? I won’t try to force them on to post them on to the gala. I would respect how they first engaged with you and ask them you know what would you like to do this year? And because, then the wonderful thing is you can go back and say, you know, hey, as we told about all the good results, and we would like to do it again this year. And you could turn the people who are enthusiastic about it into the folks who lead the effort this year. Remember, you don’t have to do all the work. If they are really engaged, and if they were doing things online, spreading the word online, by all means, let them do that again. And third, I am glad you are thinking about offline and online together. That’s wonderful. And you need to keep doing that. So, you are genius you know your way out of the curve. Because most people are still thinking about all the stuff in stylus. They are thinking ok we have our online givers, we have our direct mail folks, we have our folks who come to our gala and they do don’t do things like ask people at the gala for their e mail addresses if they like Email updates. Sometimes the people who gave online want your updates and you need to think about how all these things work together. One does not replace the other. Hopefully they work together. People don’t necessarily stay in any categories. So by all means, invite some of those people from the gala. They might want to participate in person. But also give them other means to do so. One example is might be you know, sometimes people have a twitter feed kind of up there on the screen so that people who are at the event can you know actually people who are not at the event which you can do pretty easily with lap top and projector.

Kristin: I think that would be a great idea to make the virtual participants very visible at the event. That’s a great suggestion.

Katya: But remember it works in two ways. The people who are at the event might want to engage with you afterwards virtually. And I one of the things I have entered in my blogs before is how many events are gone to that am incredibly powerful. And someone gets up and given n amazing speech and there is no so called action. There is nothing to do. You sort of called get busy over your chicken dinner and you go home and no one has asked you for anything. So I would try to work it both ways. I would get the virtual participants to have a visible presence of the real event. And then get the people at the event to carryon that moment online engage with other folks. Both online and offline they are go up there. They all have something in common which is they care passionately about what you do and you want them to connect with each other.

Kristin: Ok. I am going to take one second since we are half way through to remind everyone to take the survey which is on the right hand side of the screen. It is just a brief survey to let us know how we are doing with the discussions and how they can be little more helpful to you in the future since we will be here every Tuesday and Thursday for the next month or so on that 1 PM eastern. So you should take the survey and you also have an opportunity to win a flip cam and a $250 gift card for your favorite non-profit. So, it’s just a small thing but could be great and then also wanted to remind you that if you have to drop out or if you missed the beginning of this session, we are recording this and will have it on our website this afternoon and we are also going to have a transcript. So you can search for specific questions or keywords afterwards and that will take a couple of days. So it is regarding the reminders. Yeah. I have another question from Twitter which I think is a great question that I hear people talking about we actually had some conversation about the social citizens which is how to find a balance between personal and business related tweets. But I think that also can go to how do you a find a balance between the purpose on the personal on the Facebook and how do you find it on your blog and all of these different things.

Katya: Does anyone out there is figured out the ideal work right now and please email out to me. I think it is always a struggle to find out that ones. I think the straight answer there is everything personal is business and everything business is personal online now. The lines are really blurred there. You may think I use Facebook for personal and I have a professional Twitter identity for example, those barriers don’t really hold well. I can tell you couple examples we were chatting in here before we got started today about why did we use blog post recently for ports which has great results in social media and they use my facebook which is fine, but the picture of my children look Halloween. So you pick a couple of things here. One is you want to think about social media as rather blurred there. That means it’s very helpful when you think about the organization have some ground rules. And often, ground rules get meet up very quickly after the fact when something goes for a ride, someone posts something inappropriate, someone goes and comments on a blog in a way that is defensive or in not the way you want the organization to be represented, they may think they are dealing as an individual but as we all know those lines are blurred. So, the first thing is let’s recognize the lines of blurred and come up with policies around that. So we have a social media policy network for good that we worked on. We did not invent that from scratch. That Cancer has done lot of great work with that. She had some researches on that as to know how that works. That’s where people you have big online cousins. You can just Google them and find the resources.

Kristin: And that she is also one of our Guru’s.

Katya: She is indeed your Guru. Why this social media really spells out. What can you do personally just keep in mind you know people know you professionally want to be very cautious about what you are putting in your Facebook page itself. We are very clear about when people are posting as individual versus posting as a representative of an organization. You want to be really clear and authentic about when you are a representative of an organization. This is the key. I know that earlier talked about. I had people listing on my blog. I don’t like that. But, that’s when you get on a con and pretend to be someone else. You don’t show that you have self interest here. You are representing the organization. That’s not a bad thing. You have their listening. You need to be honest about that. Overall point there is, you want some ground rule. The second piece is, don’t be afraid if you are doing things like blogging, if you are doing things like tweeting to have some personality in that even if it’s primarily professional function or extension of your organization. And social media is as I said repeatedly is about people. And it’s about authenticity. So, you don’t want to stand like a robot; or your feeling talking pints are just putting press releases on line in your blog. No one will read it. It’s really boring. No one will want to follow you on Twitter if you are just talking about yourselves or putting very official things there. So, it is okay to be little more relaxed, a little more human to remember that you are connecting with people out there. So you want to talk as an individual. And I can tell you that it really pays off. With the people you see incredible followings on line like I am thinking like Apple CEO and others which are amazing work on twitter that he is not just a CEO and he is a person and that’s a really good thing. And when I on my blog talked about something personal or I abused my children I get an outpouring of comments. And I struck by the more human you are and the more you make clearer that you are talking honestly, authentically and more sincerely the more people want to engage with you.

Kristin: I think that’s a great point. I totally feel the same way about the people that I follow on Twitter. People I enjoy the most are people like blizzards. You know he is representing a brand. He does talk about work and shoes. But he is clearly a person. He will have the personality. And that’s what makes it interesting to follow him. So, I tried to encourage people to let some of their personality show too.

You know, no one wants to know what you are eating for Lunch. No one wants to be that detailed. But if there are interesting things that are nothing to do with work, I think that is fine to share them as well. I think this also touches another issue similar. People often ask, should I have organizational like logo where I have the case foundation, twitter bead, or should I be myself or should I be both? Or should all the employees to be twitter beads or how should we co-ordinate this?

Katya: Well, I think it depends on your goals. And what you are trying to do online and where you are online. That’s primarily it. But I think you often end up with a combination. I think the case foundation has a combination as well. I know I get things from the Case foundation. I see things about you and others from the case foundation. And I appreciate and I like that. We did the same thing for good. We have a fund raising trip. It has a network for good logo. But I tweet and other people who work in network for good on twitter. I think the combination works really well. And again, because there are some people come personally to do fund raising trip every day. And that’s great. May be someone just wants to hear about Case Foundation happenings and they can follow that tweet. That’s great. And there may be people who are genuinely interested in the different areas that you folks are focusing on and you know interested on those areas of specialties and staffs you have. As well as may be they are up to what interesting observation they have on what’s going on in the world and you want to have those people to have a community chew. You know, in we often want, and you know we often see different portions of messaging going out there. You know, different editions of different traditional media. It’s the same thing here. You probably want some personal edition and professional edition.

Kristin: Great. I have another follow up question from chat which is I work youth development non-profit and we are concerned about following people on twitter because we don’t endorse their message if it’s against our mission. What should we do?

Katya: Well. I think that on Twitter, it is understand that you don’t necessarily endorse the people that you follow. You are interested in engage and conversing them.

Kristin: When you kept overly concerned about them?

Katya: That’s it. You want to be careful you are not following someone is offensive, he is saying things that are destructive, he is not a constructive member of the community, who perhaps does think that he is isolate, turn off lot of people in your community like using propensity, or being insulting. So there are some common sense rules there. You folks like that. You might want to stop follow him. He might want to de-friend on Facebook. By the way, the person doesn’t get an e mail to do that. See you shouldn’t be afraid to do that. Probably not. But In general, if you only engaged with people are like minded, and in lock step with you, that really counters to what’s going on in social media. The aim is social media, which is really a listening and engagement tool, if you are only engaged with the people who think the exact way you do; it’s not as interesting, it’s not as rich and it’s certainly not as sincere or apprentice.

Kristin: It’s great. And I am going to take another question from e mail; which is from a person who says they are struggling to find partnerships aside from rotary clubs in their area that will provide them with sustainable funds. How can we reach this community of funders? So, how do you raise a new community of funders? How can social media help them?

Katya: Ok. That’s a great fund raising question. When you think about partners, I am going to get away from individual donors for a second, because we are talking about Rotary clubs which is certainly more of a moreover less than a individual donors. When you want to think about partners, who wins when we win. The ideal partnership shares a similar onion. There is some overlap in the persons you are trying to reach, so if it’s a company. The people that the company is marketing to, overlap with your donors may be constituents; that’s a good thing. If you are trying to reach the same online sources. And if the actions hat both online sources. Take are complimentary to both of you then that’s going to be long lasting winning partnership. We had a lot of what I am talking about the partnerships where we all pulled hands and said that we are all partners. There is no really substitute to it other than you share logos in your sites and materials. That’s a lot of effort it no game. You want to look at really in your community benefits from the work you do and think really creatively about that and those are the blogging best prospects that you have to go after. Then you want to go after major donor or partner, what you want to do is that not talk about what you want from them but talk about what you can do for them. And, that’s a really big shot. I was at an independent sector last year doing conference and I heard that heard about the Wal-Mart foundation talking about how frustrating is that most non-profit organizations came to them you know, just wanting a big check. Very few of them take time to look at Wal-Mart’s profit agenda, its private deals as well as business realties. You know, Corporations have business priorities and profit priorities. They already have both. And you want to really look at those, listen to those and ask about those and talk about how you are supporting the organization and that’s something that they will ask us to extend their business and their impact in the community. Then it’s a win-win. Same thing, with the nature donor, you want to look at what is this person care about, what’s interesting to them, how can I tie into that, why is my cause relevant to them. The best mantra that I can give you is when trying to find a new partner is ‘Don’t tell people about your cause, tell how your cause relates to their existing values. You know, the last piece I will give is the 4 questions that you need to answer to make anyone to give money. These are good. These apply with online media with individual donors, they apply with social media, but they also apply to offline fund raising. The first question you need to answer to a perspective donor is ‘why me? Why should I care about this?’. This is what I care about listening first and connecting. And that is the key. That’s how you get someone’s attention. You won’t get their attention if you don’t start there with their perspective. The second thing is ‘what for? Why should I pay? If I give you money, what’s going to happen for me? So, if you fill out a survey, as Kirsten pointed out, you may get an iPod.

Kristin: That’s a foot cam.

Katya: But that’s an example for why should I fill out the survey and what for. If you get someone a coffee mug, but also what for? Who’s going to benefit with me. What amazing stories can you tell about the social impact to someone who supports you? That’s more and more important because donors got to call this day. They aren’t sure where their money is going to go. We need to talk tan gently about the social change we are going to achieve because these people are supporting us. So, that’s the second question. Third question is ‘why now’. To get anyone to do something, you need to instill some sort of sense of urgency in your ask. I can tell you, online behavior and social media behavior, we see giving urgency most naturally coming in three cases. One is natural disaster. You see an incredible up search in online activity giving. Because, there are human lives that are in stake. People want to do something right away. Another one, people want to give is in December, because that is the end of tax year. Two biggest online giving dates are December 30th and 31st right up to midnight on the 31st. The third category is when someone we know ask us for money. There is a real sense of urgency, you can see there. If it’s Kristin’s Birthday and she is asking for money, I am probably give her the money by the time her birthday rolls around. Because, I can see sense of urgency around there. And the last question you want to answer is ‘who says’. Who is talking about this message? Who is telling me that this is a worthy organization? This is really the key and there is all kinds of fascinating social psychologies about social endorsements. But, we always believe people we know more than the people in organizations, institutions, foundations, etc., The last time you took a trip I bet you, you scrutinized trip advisor, or before you went to a restaurant you looked at to help, more than you believed in the official websites of the restaurants, more than you believed in the pictures on the hotels website. That’s because we look to people we trust. The person delivering the message is really as important as the message. To get someone give us the money, ideally the trusted messenger is the one who is talking. And that trusted messenger could be one of your supporters, could also be someone who benefited from one of your programs. Some of the best fund raising I have seen are programs where the people helped by the program talking about the impact that it had on their lives. Your volunteers can be amazing spoke people. And I often get comments about, ‘well, we can’t put the children we are helping there because of so many reasons. We can certainly put the parents’ on there. We can certainly put the folk that helps the children. The frontline people of your organization telling the stories. That’s really effective. So, sorry for the long answer. But the last point here is you asked about social median expanding into social media. Where are you going to listen? And you are going to figure out where people are conversing and then when you are ready to make a fund raising, ask the folks who are online and around social media. You want to be sure that the four questions are answered and first and foremost in your mind to get that conversion in to a gift.

Kristin: That’s great. Thanks. And I think I will want to highlight the story telling element on that and will talk a lot about the effectiveness of storytelling and advocacy for your organization and fund raising as well. Also, people have great stories to tell, both people who got help from your organization, volunteers, and social media can be a great way to allow people to tell their stories.

Katya: Two finest examples of that. Hulmosness, you know we all heard about Hulmosness. There are some people who do amazing work. Hulmosness tweet social media tools right now. One of my favorite ones is invisible people TV. Mark Hobart is formerly Hulmosness himself. He travels all around the country inner giving Hulmos people. And I have to say, after watching these videos with Hulmos people telling their stories; I look at the issue completely differently. It’s transformed by understanding Hulmosness and how it can happen to anyone and stories that you seen on there are incredible. And I become an advocate for an issue that I never was before because of what he had done with that foot video and that kind of thing. It’s amazing. Second one is, I don’t know you watched it or not over the weekend. A woman, who become an instant celebrity who had become homeless, he lost her job, she moved into a camper and she is living in a Wal-Mart parking lot. She started to blog called ‘carol sky to Hulmosness’. And she started to write how she is surviving in a camper in a parking lot and all the things she is contending with. She was a gifted writer and very authentic messenger, the next thing you know she was in TV stations, CNN, and all magazines need her as a contributor on her blog. But that’s an example of amazing power of story and authentic messenger. And so, if you are feeling like that, or you just don’t know what to put on your kiosk or you are really stuck on what to use on your online, go to people like that, because their stories are so moving and so effective and write their stories. Let the social media spread their stories far and wide. Really economically and really economically.

Kristin: That’s true. That’s a great example. I haven’t seen the second one but Mark I have seen some of them and that were really moving.

Katya: I got her up in my blog.

Kristin: Oh. Really.

Katya: Yes. She is terrific.

Kristin: Another question. We got several times. I kind of asked Geoff last week, but since we get it so often and people have different opinions. Obviously, I wanted to ask you as well. With limited time, everyone knows people who work in non-profits; it’s already a lean staff. People are working really hard and not being paid the whole lot and sometimes it is volunteer staffs. And, how do you make the most with the resources you have? Or there is couple of social media tools. Which is the one? Or what are the two social media tools I should be using to reach to most people?

Katya: Ok. So, You do. I think you do want to limit yourselves to a couple of tools particularly if you are just starting. Because it is easy to become inundated, overwhelmed. Despite yourself too fit, it’s bad to set up a twitter and not tweet once a month. Or to set a blog and never post on it. And set up a Facebook page and not enjoying anything because you really aren’t trying. So, you don’t want to do that. It’s almost worse like having a party that no one shows up for. So, you want to focus on a couple of things that you have time to do. And you know what, if you have time to do none of them, at least setup a Google tweet and just listen. Just start somewhere. But, do that as a first step. If you have a little bit time, set up a couple things that you can do well. Which are the best ones? I wish to add a silver bullet secret answer there. It depends on where your highness is. If you are trying to reach really young people, twitter might not be the best place. If you are trying to reach people who are sixty plus, they are actually some of them are acting in social networks. But not necessarily be some of the ones you might target. If you are going after 20 to 30 year old, you need to think about whom I trying to reach and what I am trying to get them to do. Why I am engaging this. And then and only then, answer ok. Then you know what, you really make sense for me to look at Facebook. You really make sense for me to look at a blog for someone within my organization. But, do find a couple of things that you can do really well. That’s the first thing. Second thing is try to organize, you with technology tools that Geoff talked about last week. They can help you stop the madness. I tried out 50 blogs that I tried to follow. I did not go to all the bloggers websites. I have them in my Google orbiters. You know there are tweet jacks. There are different things that can help you organizing. On Facebook you can set up just the people you want to follow most closely. And ignore the people who you don’t know who they are any more. So, I would encourage you once you set the priorities, a couple of things you want to do well. Take advantage of the technology tools that help you filter for those fans and for those online sources. Last thing is you do have to commit some at these. Lot of people talk that about how great it is can fall free. But, at least in my life, my time isn’t free. My time is incredibly precious. In fact, it is the most precious thing I have. So, if you are spending your most precious resources, which is your time, you got a lot to do if you are working on a non-profit organization. Ideally I work about 10 hours. I am sure you do it too. So, you are going to commit time to do this any other means time. So, by large you can take on what you can do well.

Kristin: I think you need to set expectations. So, when you start a twitter account; you don’t want to tweet twenty five times the first day and then twenty five times the second day and then the third day one.

Katya: Right. But when you get started, you got to think about what you really can do.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Katya: The same with the blog. If you only feel time to have you can blog only once a week, then put up a post every Tuesday and people will know you are going to post something new every Tuesday. But don’t start by having new blog every single day for the first two weeks, so people will come with expects and then have to drop out.

Kristin: That’s a great point. And that leads me to another important thing to our number here, and that is if you don’t have time to build or create something, that’s ok. Go engage with something which is already been created. You know we all talk about.

Katya: The field of dreams and journey.

Kristin: yeah.

Katya: Because if you don’t have the time to do this, you might not want to start something; it’s the best thing to do is just start a blog or just find three bloggers with huge followings who occasionally talk about you. I might go for the later approach as if I were short of time; blogging takes a huge amount of energy. I have done it for two years. It takes enormous amount of resources and energy. So, you may be better of reaching the bloggers. You may be better of finding a community that’s already been set up on Facebook, causes on Facebook. You can now set up great tools, you can go in for non-profit, and that will just make you a very big set up. It will solve your problem. You may not have to set up your official page. So, do figure out what is out there. And then the last thing is don’t neglect the basics. So, one of the things that worked for good, that I am telling the non-profit organizations is social media is great. But if you don’t have the option to collect donations on your website, if you don’t have a way to e mail supporters, you shouldn’t be doing social media yet. You need to get the basics covered and then start examining on a scale that you can achieve and set some really easy, achievable, small and clear goals that you can measure your progress against it and learn lot.

Kristin: It’s great advice. I think we are almost out of time and I want to ask you one more question and then give you couple of minutes to give your final thoughts you have. I got one e mail question which was ‘Hi, I am the web master for a small non-profit organization and I am hesitated to dig into this extra social media like Facebook and Twitter. It seems like people are too busy to continue to dedicate their time to email Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media platforms. So, my question is social media afraid that it will die in the near future? I thought it is a hopeful question.

Katya: we will just go away.

Kristin: But I heard people say social media is attacked right now and it’s not going to continue. What are your thought on that, the future of the social media? Is it something just for now or it will continue?

Katya: It’s a great question. Ok. So, here is the deal in my opinion. You get a hundred opinions on this. Don’t throw away your postal meter. Don’t stop your e mails. It is still the most effective way to raise money online. Ok. Add social media to your arsenal. Because it is really important to listening to all like one day focus group for about there. And it’s really important as the means aged people who will be donors down the road, if they are not already. It is one piece of the bigger picture. And it is one of the newest keys and we are still learning all the time. So, you don’t want to neglect that is considered old fashion, even e mail is considered old fashion now. I am afraid; it is called new old media just today. You want to keep doing those things, because they work well. And you don’t want to so carried away with the social media you know you can collapse these things. Because that’s. Still where most of you’re fund raising dollars are going to come from. Is Social media failed? Absolutely not. But in five years, they may not be the some of the same tools as they are now. They may look entirely differently. The tools may change. It’s not going to change. And their supplies to direct mails and their supplies to telemarketing. And that’s that. Our relationship with donors has been forever changed. And social media is not that the way in which people expect to engaged with each other with institutions in our society. The way the expectations they have of marketing. In fact marketing is becoming more and more about conversation. Traditional marketing will be there. That is changing forever. And I can’t tell you if twitter be here in five years. But I can tell you, your donors will expect to have conversations with you in five years. And there may be a different new technological tool that you got. And they are going to expect that. And that’s going to part everything you do. You are going to have to take another approach to direct mail. You are going to have to be really careful in your direct mail to make people feel that they are engaged in a conversation. There is a new generation of donors and supporters who expects that. And they aren’t just going to blindly write checks and nor expect where their money went, not to like to participate in the organization. None of them are going away. And the better you do a grasping that now and reacting to that now, the better position you are going to be for the future whatever, you know, technological innovations come in. But focus on the relationship with the donor and that’s above all things. Because that’s going to continue to the world, we are going to scrambling to keep up. But that’s really important that we do. And if you look at what organizations are growing now; you can mention organizations things like Keither, things like Donor choose which are re-written the book on how to engage your supporters.

Kristin: Right. I think that’s actually brief point to end on the future of social media.

Katya: Honestly how you can handle.

Kristin: And I want to thank you so much for joining us for an hour. We had a lot of great advice and again that will be up on our video in the next 30 minutes or so and the recording up on our website and we also have the transcript available later this week. So if you missed something in the beginning of this session you should definitely come back and look at it because Katya had some great advice for non-profits interested in getting into social media. Also, I want to remind everyone to take the survey. Just a couple of quick questions and you will be entered to win a $250 gift card for your favorite non-profit and a foot cam for you. So everyone wins. And also, we will be back on every Tuesday and Thursday for this month and this Thursday Gear up for giving aspeduros will be on the road and my colleague Kerry seritopski will be in New York with Allison fine who is an activist and blogger for eight fine blogs. That will be wonderful. Please come back and join us.

Katya: Thank you.

Kristin: Have a great day.