Transcript: Live Ask the Guru Session with Marnie Webb

Kari: Hi there, welcome to the Case foundation’s ‘Gear up for Giving’. We are here today with Marnie Webb and we thank you all for tuning in, for those of you who are tuning in for the first time, we are doing these sessions every Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1 o’clock Eastern Time. We are thrilled to take your questions live; this is a fairly unstructured program. We want to invite questions from your non-profits and social media strategy. We have a number of questions that are lined up but feel free to join us in the live chat in the screen just below you. We also can receive your questions via email, please email us at ‘gearup@casefoundation.org’ and if you are already on Twitter, please use the ‘#’ tag ‘# AGC’ and we will be able to point your questions.

We have really seen this has become kind of a community each time we have done these in the last couple of weeks. Folks are participating in the chat, giving each other suggestions and advice when we can’t get to specific questions. We really appreciate that and hope this continues throughout this. Before I introduce Marnie which I am excited to do, I want to thank our partners in this, the Goldhrish Foundation, See3 Communications and also flip video. For those of you who are tuning into our Case foundation site, you would see on the right side of the screen, there is an opportunity to take up a survey and let us know how we are doing, and you will have an opportunity to win $250 for your cause and a Flip video camera to help showcase what your organization is up to. So, we appreciate Flip video for providing that and also our other partners, See3 Communications and Goldhrish Foundation.

Now, I want to introduce Marnie Webb is the Co-CEO of TechSoup Global, we are at San Francisco today and we are so thrilled that you are here. Marnie has lot of knowledge in non-profit strategy and social media strategy, she is been leading up the squared efforts and is been recognized with countless awards; from ANTenna for the social media person of the year 2008. We are just thrilled to have her inside and should be taking your questions throughout the next hour. So, please make sure you send them in or chat them in. Marnie I am going to hand over the phone to you to tell us more about some of the trends in social media and maybe for some of our folks who saw your blog post on our case foundation website yesterday, tell us more about that.

Marnie: Thank you, hi I am Marnie Webb and I am the co CEO of TechSoup Global, we are a 22 year old non-profit organization that helps other nonprofits in the USA and around the world actually to figure out how to implement the technology so that they can move their own mission forward. In my role in the 9 years that I have been here, we have done a lot of work helping specific organizations and movements; figure out how they can access different kinds of technology; give them the messages out and really engage people with their causes and make the kind of change that they are looking for. Some of that have been inside the firewall, database driven; you need to have a data dictionary kind of work but increasingly more and more of that work is pointed outside the organization. So the things that happen on the other side of the firewall like initialing the facebook and twitter but also engaging in the public conversation around issues which is sometimes different in engaging them in organizational conversation about fundraising, both are very important things but they do require different tools and sometimes different stands and public profile. You have to think liberally on how to link both things together. So the two drums that I have been banging around is about two things, one is that organization need to think more and more how they can provide internet access to the people that they serve and how they provide access to information to their community and that means really about publishing their insights. So in your organization you do a lot of work connecting the dots between the data points on the ground. You need to engage with technology and with the community so that you are giving your information in your insights out there. You can be pointed to other people who are talking about issues so you can make sure about those. There is a big difference between data which we have a lot of and insights from that data. So you want to make sure you are contributing your organizational insights into the conversation. The second thing is to follow up on those conversations with the people that care and that was the subject that I wrote in the blog post that I wrote for you all. Those are really about, when people really give you ideas or feedback or whenever they participate recognize that. Certainly I know that I am trying to voice any at the end of financial ask and I think we sometimes go too far with that and we don’t voice engage. I think in social media the ability of organizations to publish information and the ability of organizations to use social media tools to actually engage in conversations on issues of the people and to follow up on those conversations. When you see somebody tweeting about your missionary whether they are talking about you specifically or not, to go back and inform them, given them more than what they ask for is a great way to build what everyone refers to as bonding capital, deeply caring about relationship of the people that already care about you.

Kari: That’s a terrific way to set the stage to this conversation, thank you Marnie. Remember to tweet in your questions using the tag ‘# AGC’ or email us at ‘gearup@casefoundation.org’ or participate in the chat that’s happening just below the screen. The first question comes from the folks at the Museum of Northern Arizona, they said “most of the examples we see about using the social media site, causes are pretty easy sell - they pull on your heart strings, Network for Good’s own advice is that something that tugs at the heart strings is the number one thing that you must have on your website. So, if you are a museum, you don’t do heart strings stuff like feeding hungry children. How is that they can broadcast their message and help people bring in to their conversation?”

Marnie: We are technology capacity building organization. It’s something that is your organizational work. I think the advice is less about show them the baby seals and children, it is much more about, touch what people care about and move them with their emotions and a lot of times that is exactly what the museum are engaging with, they doing it in different ways but they are moving people to some sort of greater understanding of the world around them. Its matter of saying how do you provide people more than open door and access to that kind of a view point and that’s just a sort of factual like we are having an opening or reception on this day to control the biotech. Get out of that kind of information and give them the stories behind of what is going. On the cancer’s blog she has done a lot of good work talking about how museums are using social media and has a lot of terrific examples of that in particular from engaging with your communities so that they can select item to do online exhibits so that people can engage directly and form a community around the different pieces of exhibits to do on cast with artist or with the people that are supplying the electoral capitals in the national museums, scientist or whatever maybe behind the things that you are showing to your audience. I think it’s more of that kind of a connection than of hot springs that we think of.

Kari: That’s sure I think the folks at the Arizona museum would find that useful. Our second question from email is how should time be prioritized for engaging in social media? This particular person who wrote in said, “I am a one person communication department usually have about one hour per day to go and check the website as well as engage in social media. Are there one or two social media that I should definitely pay attention to?”

Marnie: I think we should give more time to listening and you should figure out how you could listen online, you can put digital listening or digital monitoring into your favorite search engines you are bound to get lot of good hits. At times we have media resource, we have some fantastic resources specifically around listening and that can help people to get a concrete way of start. Basically pay attention to people who are saying about your issue area and your community, not just you as an organization because there are a lot of people talking about your issue area whether you know them or not. You want to find those people and engage with those people, so that they are setting up the tools that allows to monitor the conversation that are happening online and then what happens over time as an organization is you find what is best for you to contribute. If you are dealing with limited time, like an hour a day and that’s how much you can work on this, if you can spend half hour of your time listening and them half hour of your time responding to what you heard actually on the platforms of the choice of the people to talk. So, that maybe on the comments of their blocks, it may be on facebook or twitter. The next step for the organization especially when you are dealing with scarce time is to figure how to get those conversations back to your website, there are a lot of ways like RSS or terrific tools like back type to aggregate or front feed, different things like that to aggravate your contributions on various places on your website you can display them. You want to start a situation where it’s not either or, it’s not like I am going out and commenting or I am writing a full content for my website. It’s like whatever you are doing you are building your organization in the eyes of the people around you. One more thing is we have sort of mistaken notion that the way people experience our information on the web is by coming and looking at it. It is changing, people are aggregating the content in the way they are seeing it on your website, there are a lot of emails, they are treating it that way, and they are scanning through it quickly. They get aggregated to a page like a customizable homepage like Google or Yahoo, so I think the efaith would be a little bit like, would you need to get all that information that are findable. I think we really can’t forget the way the people are accessing that much more pre arranged way and we need to be pre arranged contributors to conversation.

Kari: I think that’s an idea of give and get, the high score for a blogger is when somebody leaves a comment on their post.

Marnie: Absolutely, and I think it’s not either or, that comment on that post can become a content on the site. So, you can build a quick wall post saying that I commented over here, you are not only leaving a comment you are giving some social capital by pointing to that.

Kari: Yeah, that’s fantastic. We have got some good questions in the chat so I am going to take one from that, “for organizations who do not have good technology infrastructure or who don’t have steady internet access, how do you think they should approach getting involved in social media?”

Marnie: That’s such a hard question because it’s such a reality for so many organizations and so many parts of the world, depending on who you are it becomes a very hard question because it’s about giving access and I don’t think there is an answer to that. I think there are few organizations who do not have steady internet access and people whom you serve do not have internet access either and your community may not either, you should look at some widest way to contribute to the conversation; twitter seems to be a wide way contributing to the conversation. Its 140 characters in terms of content you can push out any time but also the ability to use your mobile phone, text messaging or using other things to do that but I there isn’t a good answer to that question, you need these things you know. I think it’s about figuring out what you are going engaged via text messaging and then alternate it with your internet presence when you are able to be connected.

Kari: That’s a perfect way to lot of organizations that are asking about SMSing text messaging and trying to figure out the right ways. We are actually seeing the digital divide of text users much more now than of online usage, even that is squared hosted, the next one challenge is focused on mobile applications. What are you seeing as some trends and how the nonprofit organizations are beginning to adopt some of the SMSing?

Marnie: Certainly integrating with other tools like twitter is appropriate so you have a little bit of backup so people can access it as one of the ways, that’s a great example been played out in different things. In fact one of the winners from the square last year was front line SMS which is using text messaging SMS to help get out that diagnostic information and support doctors in the field who may not have good access, other individuals as much as doctors actually for the problem.

Kari: Sure

Marnie: Increasingly what we are seeing is there needs to be a web database background for that at some place to make it steady. So that you are collecting information and you are making sure to send out reliable information and you are really engaging. The gateway to all that information is a simple cell phone not even a smart phone and just text messaging. It’s phenomenal actually, most don’t know but you can access almost all of the major search engines by text messaging. You can text in your query and get a response right back. There is a lot of potential to get information in and out by text messaging. I think we need to be more deliberate in thinking about it not just in resource constraint areas which is where you see al lot of it or there isn’t simply an alternative. Organizationally we have to continue thinking about how we are using it. Of course you see innovative projects like here in San Francisco there was a project for the teens around for sex education, they used text messaging in part because most teens have a cell phone but it gave them an immediate way to say their opinion and get a quick answer, because even in a resource rich that may not be the right answer.

Kari: There was a follow up question, “what are some the tools that can help me in listening” you were talking about like one of the most important thing is to be out there and listen. Can you just list some of the tools and we will make sure to put these in the chat as well.

Marnie: I think even in the blog post, I pointed out some resources for listening online, presentation to help you improve your background and so on. I think in this case we have RSS and persistent searches.

Kari: What is RSS?

Marnie: RSS is Really Simple Syndication and it is essentially a way to subscribe. If a website owner has enabled this, it is a way to subscribe to that site so you would see notification if a new content is displayed on the site or the content itself. If it’s an old model, you have whole bunch of bookmarks, you go look at it to see if there is anything new and I there is nothing you come back, with this new model you just subscribe to the feed and you just look into your feed reader for analogies in your email and you can quickly see there is nothing new there or even if there is it is something that I am not interested on it. I think the big thing when you start using the RSS in that analogy is if your email breaks down you can simply ignore the RSS, you can let it build up and treat it the same way you treat your emails inbox necessarily, it is more information that is coming to you. So, the ability to subscribe to websites that has information important to you is important. You can also use the same tools to subscribe to searches, it’s like going to sites like Google, front feed, twitter putting in good search trends related to your organization. It’s important to your organization to put some time and brainstorming on what the search terms are and what the key words are and then subscribing to the search. Anytime somebody posts something new that needs your search altered you get a notification via RSS. Can be a good way for the organization to listen and then you can follow up and engage in conversation. You do have to make it a practice; you can’t just go and check it once a week because the conversation would have passed by. It is something like a half hour thing in the morning before you get into your day, spend a little bit of time responding and then go on with your day and then you can build it more of a practice.

Kari: So, one of the questions that we have seen a lot is idea cost fatigue it’s also related to social media fatigue and then when we start talking about checking RSS feed, checking twitter feed making sure your keeping up with the comments in your facebook wall. There is a bit of information over load. You have any tips or tricks for the people on how to manage their time.

Marnie: I think different people will have different temperament to allow them engage with different stuff. So, I think if you are the kind of person who reads everything that comes into your inbox, has to make sure you followed up or not on everything you are doing it is actually very overwhelming. I think you have to think of it more of river leaves kind of a way. When you step into a river, you are not catching all of the water, you are not catching every molecule of the water but you definitely have the experience, you know what the temperature of the water is; you know how fast the river is and how deep it is, without touching every single molecule of the water there right. So, whenever you subscribe to these feeds and you start getting more news you have to trust. Your engagement is going to tell the temperature of the conversation, if it’s important you are going to see it because it’s going to show up over and over again and you need not have to be tied into the fact that you are going to get every single piece of the information and if you want that every piece of information you really draw boxes around those pieces of information.

Say like if it’s about my organization’s name, anytime somebody answers my organization’s name I am committed to respond within 24 hours or if you don’t know what it is, separate them so that you can treat them with a broader perspective.

Kari: Very helpful. One of the things that lots of our folks are asking is about monitoring their social brand or their brand online. What are your ideas about brand monitoring?

Marnie: You know, I think it’s very important but I think sometimes we get too caught up on terminology. If you are a nonprofit organization and if you trying to move a specific cause for that’ what you are actually monitoring and you are effectively using social media tools to engage in conversation about the cause, that is going to attach to your brand and what you are doing without worrying about what you do specifically, I really genuinely believe that. But if you are out there saying that you are a domestic organization and you see somebody tweet about your statistics and you are participating that is going to track back to you as an organization and that’s going to build awareness around your issue, engagement around your issue in the perception that you as an organization are really smart in providing the opportunity to correct that to potentially engage in more support. As organization when you think about it narrowly as my brand but sometimes it can make the organization to think about it in a command and control way, which is how you have been thought about brand, you know. Everybody use the right color of orange; use the right PowerPoint template; don’t forget to save the tag line you know all that kind of stuff and that’s not what is most important in this venue. That is kind of traditional thinking about identity management brand management.

Kari: A question from twitter “under any recommendation can nonprofits build a shared social media dashboard to listen throughout the organization.” I think this is more internal.

Marnie: Within a nonprofit organization?

Kari: That’s what it looks like. This is question in twitter; you can clarify whether it’s internally or externally. We’ll take it internal for now.

Marnie: I think one of the best and simplest ways is to do some organizational keywords setup in the RSS feed, setup the search feeds that we were talking about earlier but then take that package of RSS feeds and make them available to people within your organization so that you make sure you’re all standing in the same river. In the sense you are getting the same set of information that doesn’t mean you can’t act to that, they can individually but you can start with something big. If you are bigger or sophisticated like some of the stuffs that Wendy Harman of Red Cross has done in thinking about how you are looking at that information and propagating it in your organization is just fantastic. But that requires pretty dedicated resource and spending lot of time thinking about that material and organizing that material, I think they are simple steps here is what we have subscribed to, everybody should be looking at that stuff to show the next step and setup some sort of intranet and putting in those things. So, you are encouraging an internal conversation.

Kari: right

Marnie: The danger in that is you need to make keeping that conversation internal and nobody takes it externally. Next is to get more sophisticated with somebody taking on these practice areas in your organization.

Kari: Is there any stats out there about how much of this talk about social networking, produces in terms of volunteers and donations. I am sure that there is a lot of data that is out there and we cover some of that in our blog, you guys cover that as well but I do think that there is this idea. If you put a lot in networking ideas and strategies what are we getting out of it and how do we make sure that we are getting increase number of funds.

Marnie: I think it’s important to use those stats to do a reality check in your organization because personally I believe not enough organizations are regularly practicing and reporting on these things. So we worry about the lesson that people learn from these statistics. You end up many organizations getting a dollar each and a few organizations getting $200,000 and then if you look at that you should be getting $50,000. You are looking at it where it doesn’t actually work because there are two ends.

There are people who are practicing at high level and people who are dipping their towel in the water. How I encourage the organization in which I work with, I actually sit down and say what are trying to get as an organization by engaging in this, are we trying to more volunteers; are we trying to get people to spread the word about what we are working on or are we trying to get people to turn up and give them date to do something. Look at the places where you could be engaged in the right time of graphic and think about how you invest you organization in that in the same way you think about a piece of clatter. When you look at it as a piece of clatter, you are like “I am only giving this to 50 people so am I really going to spend the $200,000 of course not”

Kari: That’s right

Marnie: So, if you are trying to get people to turn up for a day who have never done anything on the web. You really have to think about what your investment is. Social media is about engaging in ling term conversation to bring in more supporters and get them committed sometime it might take long looking at these statistics. I think it’s valuable to do a reality check but you also need to lay your hands with it to know do you have the organizational experience do you really have the supporters. There are so many variables in to that it’s just hard to take the face value.

Kari: we have got several twitter questions about crowd sourcing. First of all if you could explain a little about what crowd sourcing is and what are some of the ways to crowd source feedback for organizations and have you seen any successful examples on these?

Marnie: Basically, crowd sourcing is reaching to network that is very broad and trying to get their input and opinions and help on something that you are working. A very easy example would be logo design. May be if you can’t afford there are few websites for alpha telescoping. This one is like logo stream or something like that. I can’t remember.

Kari: We can find some of those also.

Marnie: you just need to be watchful. You go out and you either put out your four logos that you designed internally and get feedback from the community, let them go. Or more you say here is my parameter for logo. I got $5000. I am going to crowd source it. I am going to put it out into the world. You guys are going to say here is the logo that I am presenting to you; if I get picked as the winner, I get the $5000. And then you also use your constituency to see to help you to determine who the winner is. And the important thing is it’s not just getting submissions. You actually want to get opinions from other people. You want them to say I like this one, not this one. There has to be everyone having a word. We have seen some organizations use them to things like logo designing, or help to get more information. You see more sophisticated projects that crowd source or social actions. That’s crowd sourcing by providing the mechanism for all of the different sites they have volunteered the opportunities or to get them out. That’s sort of technical approach than a human engineering sort of approach. You know social engineering machines sort of approach than what I just described. I think it’s hard to do. You have to have a pretty robust and wide reaching network to do it or you have to do it online. These websites will help you do it like one of the logo development websites. There’s an organization called PACTE that did some interesting work in finding links and send it and you can share it. They did some interesting work with using sort of a market approach to crowd sourcing. That’s comfortable doing the stock market. There are other places where they have using stock exchange to help make decisions. So people are kind of betting on investing on a particular problem or solution. There was also one of the games for change did an interesting crowd sourcing using gaming. That’s the way to do crowd sourcing. So the object of the game was to solve a worldwide hunger problem, a worldwide draught or a pandemic strikes. And so they set it up in a game and people were part of the game trying to solve this real social problem. So, that’s another way people were doing crowd sourcing. But I think it’s pretty tough to do really.

Kari: Terrific. Turning back to our chats, what are some of the ways that beyond Facebook and Twitter that organizations can promote their events and others using social media?

Marnie: providing an easy way to people to link to an event and share it; one of the super basic things a lot of organizations don’t do is you don’t wanted to be like ‘ok, go this link; scroll down, under the picture of the yak and you know, there’s a sort of event you reading. So make sure that you have a good solid URL that describes the thing you want to promote and not a lot else. That’s more of the more important things Organizations sometimes overlook the URL people try to abrogate around and share. I think if you are talking about offline events; I think tools like meet up, upcoming, eventful. These are places that you are broadcasting to a different audience depends on what you are doing you might choose one over the ones we have to open that square one we have. We should call in that Tuesday to volunteers organize their setup in cities around the world. We used to meet up. It’s the terrific way to do that. Because there is lot of people say when they recruit they when meet up is to set up around. Two, it gives you an easy way to other people to join our local event. But, for things that we do there are much more one time deal in control with these things like upcoming and eventful as a way to get that. But you know, really just making it something that your constituency can share, encourage them to share, and having a good length to track back to because it is one of things that you can do.

Kari: That’s great.

Marnie: And radio. Radio maintains a terrific way in huge parts of the world to get the world.

Kari: Very good. So we actually have several questions coming in about Facebook on causes, effective uses of each and for those of you who are tuning in, I want to note that we are actually going to have Sera Kalf from Facebook causes. Next week is going to be really primarily on how to use that platform and answer some of those questions in more detail. So, you stay tuned for that we hope. But one question that just came in e mail with regards to one organization. We were 9 intercity public schools in New York City. We are considering starting a Facebook group. Should we start one large group for students, alums and board members or should we segregate that because of the dependent’s interest in demographics? And then they also said each school has their own student group. You have any advice on how to go about? That’s really a tough question.

Marnie: yeah. It’s a typical consultant answer. Because I think it depends on what your goals are. If your goal is to connect people across schools, then you have to set something up like process. The school demographers might use something like current students are allowed, your teachers has a way to wide up your ideas. But, if you wanted to be about all the people within one school to be able to provide more information to each other, it has to be school based. I don’t think you have to search as one though. You might have something where you actually do want the schools have and manage on their own. So, they are getting deeper connections with the people that are part of that school that are already interested in that. But then, as the Umbrella Organization, actually you may want to set something up that helps you monitor and provide serve the connective tissue between what’s going on in those different schools. So, without knowing what the resources are that’s actually the approach I will take. If they have the school setup, school one, give them the tools for doing it. Then, I would have somebody on the Umbrella Organization sending one up for the network of schools. And then, somebody committed to send hand, and interesting thing happened over here and surfacing now. And they are using to cross pollinate ideas and help make the connections between people. And if you don’t have a broad organization doesn’t have its resources to do that cross pollination and pay that kind of attention; you should keep its focus probably on the little one of those.

Kari: Terrific. Hopefully our folks in New York that helps answer your question. Another question joined to e mail and we encourage you if you have questions that are too late to put in the chat; e mails us at gearup@casefoundation.org . But continue the conversation below the screen. We love to hear your questions on that and also if you are on Twitter go ahead and use the house stag account AGC. We are trying to get to as many as possible. We got about 25 minutes left. Here’s is another one from e mail. This is something I think that has come up in several of these sessions. The idea of personal and professional and this person said that having a hard time keeping up with all of their different accounts and then the personal, professional things that they are doing with them. How do you manage multiple social media and then how do you strike that balance between sharing if your bosses going to were into it may be see it on Facebook or elsewhere?

Marnie: I think that again, remember that’s the way that most people elaborate their search box whether it’s on Facebook, whether it’s on Facebook’s search box, or Google’s or Being’s or Front page or whatever; I just want to caution folks that they may be spending a lot of effort segmenting their work and somebody brings it altogether by searching it on your name. You do have to think about how you’re going to be found and seen. Just to put that up there, I think there are two answers for that question. One is what is the organization comfortable with? How comfortable are you as on organization having organizational messages about answer other things. We certainly have this. We have employees, we have people that are working for you, and they are involved in many things. They are doing a theater event next Tuesday. Whatever it is they are doing and they are tweeting out giving information about a chat session. It’s about the offers and right after that they are tweeting out something that they are doing into different thinking in a different part of your life. So, you think that before you ask your employees to engage; you do have sit down as an organization as to what’s our comfort level with this? Do we want to segment this? You see a lot of people doing things like Holy Wasman and Henness doing. Organizational name is part of difficult to handle, its part of how you identify her. You know she is pretty clear about that. She may be doing personal things into their web mail thing. You know, you can certainly know more things about that. But, that’s not going to serve primarily and everybody knows it. You know, if you are a sportsman, the commentary feels up the same. And then you have other people there talked about I am getting professional setup on Twitter or Facebook. I am going to set it up privately and I am going to limit it to really my friends and family. And so they do more work segmenting their network and building walls around certain parts of themselves. So the first thing is organizationally whatever do we want to happen? Do we want to have a policy that was pushing out? And the second thing I think that is just at the individual level making sure that you are thinking through? If somebody searches on my name, or they are bringing together; what do I push to part if not how do I help with that? And I think most people that you are engaging with they are using social media outside of the organization probably they are mixing the two things together. And it is the conversation just the same way it might be at a conference and it’s not working about. And you have to think about how to manage that most appropriate and mostly folks see that from the outside. I think we tend to worry from it more than it’s a real worry.

Kari: Ok. That’s terrific. So, turning back to the chat now; here is a question, I understand that the more people or organization that you follow on Twitter, the more followers you like to have. But, you don’t want to follow every time them. So, is there any way around, how can you participate? I guess this person is particularly focused on the Twitter communities.

Marnie: I think it depends on what your goal is. Is your goal on Twitter is amongst most of the followers, then you have to pretty much have to go in and watch the percentage is and follow what everybody follows. But increasingly, I will tell you I see somebody with huge number of followers and there is enormous number of people not following. They are following a huge number of people. There aren’t very many people following them. Like the numbers is way off like I follow 5000 people 2 people following me. And they have not tweeted anything or they have very few tweets. That’s not a very valuable account may be because I am following people that I want information about. I think the way around all the followers is to have a good sure pioneer links your organization so your people will see who you really are as an organization. And the second thing is to have a body of tweets to demonstrate who you are and what you care about and follow people who participate in conversation with. And then the last thing I will say about this is Twitter very much a sort of metaphor used and really it’s used in many places on the web. It’s about setting into revere information. Twitter is very much that revere approach. You are not supposed to follow every tweeter like your e mail from people inside the organization. We have to read 140 character messages and think about it. Scan and it and trust a process to a few people who you want to really pay attention to and make sure you have a mechanism to pay attention to those folks. Lot of the tools like Tweetek for example allow you to do that in helping you segment out using big stream to hear to 30 or 40 people who I really want to follow.

Kari: Very helpful. The chat is kind of heating up now. There’s a question about setting directives around social media, guidelines for an organization and this particular individual says many employees are on there and using social media. They are happy that they are promoting things. But now, we have to take a step back and it feels like we should set some guidelines. What do you think and what’s the process that you would help an organization.

Marnie: So, again I think that you have to think about really what you need to do here as an organization. If you are working with , you know what you are doing is about safety in your constituency or health information, very personal information like credit card information of the donors. You should have a very clear policy that says don’t share that information on social media or not. You don’t want people sharing that information of that a party, to the friend or in any mechanism. So, one we will take the policies you already have may address some of the biggest concerns about to be keep information confidential. You haven’t addressed it; probably you should consider addressing them. Then just apply that to social media and know whether we develop a policy or not. We have 170 staffs. We have a policy or not, our staff will be probably talking at some point about the work. To know what they care about and what they do. So we try and concentrate rather on here’s what how we want you to use Facebook, here’s what how you share and you don’t share. We concentrate and this is confidential information. We don’t share it. In any way, can’t you ask us for that? Donor asks us for that. We don’t give it to them. So we have clear boundaries around what we consider to be confidential information. And then, we want people to tweet or Facebook or something like that and send a message. Actually they send a message around and what people grab it and share what they need to do. We actually don’t need folks to share in that mechanism. You know, on the HR side, one of the things I worry a little bit about people losing some part of their personal lives is when you need to be careful that you are not setting up a policy were you say that if you are on Facebook you have to work via friends. You are saying the right thing. You can’t do that realistically.

Kari: Several questions have come in the e mail around Video storytelling and sharing and I am wondering if you are seeing any trends in non-profit organizations are starting to use video. I think you are doing something with Flip. So, what are the trends and how can organizations most effectively start telling stories through video.

Marnie: yeah. So, small commercial moment, we are on September 30th, Wednesday we are starting digital story telling. It’s going to have a series of webinars. We are bringing in different experts that are working with Flip and also about tools and talking about how organizations effectively use this media now. I think that the technology like many things the technology is actually thinking about the story of messaging you are going to get it across. And then thinking about how you can use video as part of that. I think that one of the best things that video can provide a lot of organizations is with very low resources things like Flip Camera. But also, the video that are cell phones, video cameras, don’t think to produce something of super quality with those devices. You are living like in this room small hand held camera. It’s not going to look like professionally published piece. It’s not. So make sure you are concentrating on giving authentic voices and stories and with that encouraging the people that you are working with to submit their stories. I was talking earlier about how you provide as an organization how you provide information about your community using video to story tell person from the museum. I said before we don’t have the touching feeling heart string stuff; but if you can talk about how somebody was moved, how they learnt something because someone exhibited. That will be a great thing to capture in a 2 minute video and get that out there. I think just collect as many as such as you can photographs and video things like that. So, when you get to a place when you budget or when you need you can put that together into a really nice story if you are collecting some of it on the way. There is a organization in San Francisco uses digital storytelling and also does a lot of work about how you can think about this is a program area or to pause that to domestic violence organizations that uses digital story telling with those who went through some sense of crisis. They can tell us stories. I think you can also use a program.

Kari: From chat this question came out little bit earlier. I’ve followers but it’s hard to get engaged. I ask for inputs, I ask questions but haven’t got much of participation yet. What are some other ways to help people get on to the conversation?

Marnie: yeah. One way is this is where I think searchtrons can be a better way to follow to just necessary people who follow these depending on the twitter tools you are using. Actually, just if you do it here on the Twitter page on the web; you could go on and search and save the search. That’s actually where you can save it and then you can go back and click on the searchtrons. And then when you see people talking about that saved searches you contribute to the conversation. I think then it’s a give and get thing. So whenever you are asking for feedback, you are asking people to give something to you. I think the best way to get them to do that is to give something to them first. So, whenever you see a great tweet that somebody’s done; retreat it. You do those kinds of things so that you are contributing to their social cause. Then, whenever you done that for a while you turn around and say ‘hey, what do you think about this?’ You are going to get start more response. The other thing that I talked about the proposal I did for you all is whenever you ask for the feedback; connect them and show them how you used. So, show them something you did and that’s going to help you get more feedback the next time. So, it’s a process you build over time.

Kari: Right. That’s terrific advice. I think that exchange and helping people really understands how you are using them. It takes you to the next level. There was a follow up. People wanted to know about the Flip Webinars are going to be available? Are you doing webinars? How is this information going to be shared?

Marnie: The horse stag for this is #tsdigs. You can find links to it if you just run that on Twitter or something else. I can send you a link so that you can provide more information to the people. We are doing webinars; you can sign up whenever we do webinars. We record them so that people can see them later. It’s an online conversation. It’s about the activity.

Kari: We will make sure to get that out as well. Actually this morning was very exciting for the Case foundation; we finally publicly announced that we are going to be doing America’s giving challenge again and we are partnering with causes on Facebook and Prate magazine and starting October 7th all non-profit organizations will be able to participate to help you know bring their donors and their social networks together around causes that they care about. And, there will be monetary prize of $50000 as the top prize. I think this series of gear up for giving really been an opportunity to move us towards helping non-profits to feel more comfortable about using these tools. As we are walking over here this morning; you had said, it’s not a matter of you know organizations are using the tools, it’s no longer a question of whether they are using them or not; they are using them and now we have to figure out how do we use them effectively. So, for fund raising what are some of the trends that you are seeing in social media fund raising and how people might use these tools to attract donors but also you know we talked about fund raising and friend raising. I think those goes hand in hand. So, talk a little about that.

Marnie: Sure. I think that you know it’s far because in most situations you never just walk up to somebody in social environment and even in professional network environment and say ‘hi, give me $10’. You know you both there for the same reason and you care about the same thing. You just wouldn’t do that. Though you might get their names and follow up with them and ask about it. I think that we need to approach some of these things in the same way. I think that the biggest thing that we see is that organizations don’t do enough to building their network and by that I mean getting names on their list, getting people to sign up, providing information, proving the value of the organization has in that network. So, if you have people signed up on Facebook is probably requires for example. You know one of the things that happens is that comes in to their stream and they have an opportunity to promote their cause with that people. And what they are doing we are talking about organization grounds; what they are doing is building their personal ground. For saying, this is what I care about, these are the movies that to find me, these are the causes that to find me. That’s what they are trying to do. So you want to help and give them good ways to do that, give them information that they are willing to share and make sure that some of that information is fund raising request; but not all of that information. You know, like a ratio I walk around with say 60% fund raising and 40% non-fund raising. You might have somebody to send the detailed work to say this is how you need to think about the break down. But I think that we work out a cause, it sounds like all you do is asking me for money; you never ask me to do anything else. You never reach out to me for any other reason. And if you don’t want to be that organization which making people feel that way; you want to really engage people and give them more than one entry point; not just money. I think that you do though and be for the sustainability of the organization, you need to be thinking about how you are turning a friend raising into fund raising. I think a lot of that on social media may have a longer time frame. I don’t know. Look at the normal life cycle of donors. How long between acquiring them and getting money do you have? Is it immediate or does it takes a long time to do it. And then apply something about same time frame to your social media and think of it if you are going to be my friend on day one, I think that’s going to convert to a donation on an average in a year whatever you hold them for. Also, you recognize sometimes you may be steering a little bit; I mean look at the demograph, its shows a lot of good you put it any tool demographics like Facebook Demographics. They show good reports on how old people are about it are as an average giver or you are going into a new audience. So, we might add some time for that too.

Kari: Very helpful. So, question is about social media here to stay. What are you seeing as kind of a next big thing? What should people pay attention to? There was a question about you know we are spending some time on my space, but it seems that people aren’t really using that anymore. Should we waste our time is what they say. What are some of the scenes that were seeing and how do we keep up? What would you suggest?

Marnie: There was recently a great article done by Danaboy and I will give you the link so that you can share it. It talked about the digital device with different social networking tools and this perception of people moving from my space to Facebook. Infact members say that’s not true. What’s happening is certainly demographers are moving from one tool or the other. So, you tend to see Facebook being more app and more educative, starting to skew older or my space may be more urban and or tends to have more racial diversity and a few others that she pointed out. She was saying that what we would do to traditionally ascribe to digital divide like people that are connected and people that aren’t connected are starting to fly out of social networks. You get squares and circles people from different places and you go to different places look around all those people that look like me. I think that when it is about the trends, one of the things that always worried me is that it’s a great way to find more people who think like I do. Persistent search. One of the things I encourage organizations to try and put in is persistent search that will show you people who disagree with you; follow them and talk them too. But also if I am using something that will show me the other people that also like madman or whose favorite movie is caparey or whatever it is. They are going to be of my age and relative demographics and how much of other things are going to be comfortable and we have a lot of tools that help us find people like us. And I think as non-profit organizations we have to be deliberately trying to connect different audiences. We have to provide some of the connective tissue between those demographics the way we traditionally done it is that the donors and then the people that we serve. I think that social media I think is a richer way to cross pollinate those different groups. Because in many instances people we serve aren’t our donors. They fall out not always museums may be kind of example of that. But a lot of organizations working on deep social problems have two distinct audiences. And so I think that you have to think about that as an organization and be vary of those trends were you just saying nobody is on my space and everybody is moving to Facebook really or is it just the people you know. And you need to reaching out broader than that and should you be continuing some sort of organizational presenting because one group is actually the people that you serve or people that you want to be engaged with different reasons. The next thing, the biggest thing is that you are giving to a place where the user is that the center point of the web is not the organization anymore or the blogger/ the publisher of the content, but it’s actually the person that is using the content and the blur between the consumer and the producer is blurring, I don’t need it like what sort of our websites that we cannot use it to generate a content come in way. Meanwhile I was talking about earlier like it’s not a lot of time on your web design we do; we should spend more time on our website. But infact people bust that up by using the search engine. They bust up all of that our carefully planned; try to get from this point to this point by coming in using a search engine. By subscribing the things, by abrogating their subscription of our site and they will probably seen intense information, ideal worse information and our information altogether. In the rear, even though we have designed our sites differently, different audiences, but in terms of design they are looking at it with that safe frame work. And so I think that you have to think how are you yes you still have to have our design, it’s still has to be good, we still have to get people navigate our site. But we have to be conscious of the fact that the web is starting to orient around the user not around the domain men. So, let’s not orienting around texip.org but you. And you are saying I don’t want all these information texip.org. I want only this piece of information. And I am going to make with other stuff. By the way, I want to use open idea because I want to see those sites on every place. I want to have to trust you; you know with my valuable password information. I want to control more of my identity. So I am going to even break that apart. I think you have to think about actually enabling that letting stuff flow apart and then figuring out how you pick the best of lot when it goes out there. And when it happens how you pick the best of it instead of pull it back. You know, you are abrogating at the central place where people want to engagement and whether they really want to engage with you or not.

Kari: That’s fantastic. I actually got the two minute warning about two minutes ago. But that’s quite alright. An important question too to spend some time on. Marnie, thank you. Thanks to Global for providing us the space to be able to do this, this morning. We really appreciate this and just to those of who you are still with us; thank you so much for participating. Again we are here every Tuesday and Thursday, I will be back here on Thursday up in Port line with Holly Ross from NTEN. We are very excited about that. And then next week we have Sera Kalf from causes on Facebook. And then we have Dutt Canter will be closing our session. So, very excited for that. We thank you again. Continue to send in your questions using that horse stag #agc or via e mail gearup@casefoundation.org or make sure to get those next time around. Once again, thank you for joining us. We will see you back here on Thursday. Thanks Marnie.

Marnie: Thank you. Thanks.