 Welcome everyone to the art of using photography and storytelling for social good. My name is Becky Wiegand with TechSoup, and I'd like to welcome you to today's event. Before we get started with the content, just a couple of housekeeping items here about how to use ReadyTalk. We want to make sure that you know how to chat into us using the little box at the lower left side of your screen. You can chat to us to let us know if you're having any technical issues, or to ask questions throughout the duration of the webinar, and we'll be on the back end to capture those questions even if you don't get a response immediately. We do keep all of our lines muted so that our presenters come through loud and clear, and that we capture a good recording for you to refer to later on. If you lose your Internet connection, please reconnect using the link emailed to you this morning in a reminder or in a confirmation email you received when you originally registered. 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If you're tweeting this event, you can either use the hashtags at photofilan or hashtag TechSoup. Again, my name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. I've been here for about five years working on small nonprofit issues of technology as a writer, blogger, editor, and now as the Interactive Events Producer. You'll also hear the voice of Saeed Mifada from Photofilanthropy, and he'll be introducing himself in just a couple of minutes to help introduce the rest of our presentation panelists. Just to quickly show you who you'll be hearing from today, we're joined by a prestigious panel of experts in their fields, Lisa Rose as the Executive Director of Photofilanthropy, David Bathgate, photojournalists from the Compelling Image, and Beth Cantor, master trainer, author, and blogger of Beth's blog. To quickly go over the agenda, I'm doing the introductions now, and including that, we'll do a couple of polls to see where you're at with using photography for visual storytelling. Saeed will talk a little bit about why storytelling matters. Then we'll be introduced to Lisa who's going to talk about visual storytelling best practices that you can take back to your own organization or work to improve how you tell stories visually. David is going to share some case studies with us from some of his global travels as a photojournalist. And then Beth will talk to us about social media and how to measure the impact of your photo stories, or of any of your stories. Then we'll have Q&A and we'll do some wrap up. We'll have some opportunities throughout the webinar to raise up questions as well. So as they come to you, feel free to chat them to us. We'll be looking at a variety of different themes today, how nonprofits can use photography, and storytelling to catalyze their impact, and we'll be looking at the elements of the great story and photo essay, what role does social media play in helping to share that story, and how we can measure the success. So I'm going to go ahead and have Saeed jump on the line to introduce himself and tell us a little bit about photo philanthropy. Welcome to the program, Saeed. Thank you, Becky, and welcome everyone. My name is Saeed Mirfaza. I am the program director at Photo Philanthropy. Photo philanthropy addresses the critical issues of our time by uniting nonprofits and photographers to reveal untold human stories that drive global impact. We work with over 500 photographers in over 88 countries representing 400 nonprofits. Our programs include Activist Awards, as well as a grants program, as well as an education program, as well as a corporate exhibition program. For more about our programs, please visit our website, www.photofilanthropy.org. Becky? Great. Thank you so much for that, Saeed. And quickly before we begin and hand off a little bit about TechSoup, if you're not familiar with us, we are a 501c3 nonprofit organization and we're partnered with Photo Philanthropy on presenting this collaborative webinar today. We're a part of TechSoup Global and we're working toward the day when every nonprofit and library on the planet has a technology, knowledge, and resources to operate at their full potential. You can see a little bit about our impact. We've served more than 208,000 organizations around the world in 56 different countries serving them with more than $3.61 billion in IT expenses through donations with partners like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Symantec, and more. So if you're not familiar with our programs and you are from a nonprofit, public library, or charity, feel free to visit TechSoup.org to learn more about our donation program. Saeed, I'd like to bring you back on to give a little bit more detail about our speakers, if you'd like. And then I will go ahead and run some polls. As Becky mentioned, we're really very, very pleased to be able to welcome such distinguished speakers today. Lisa Rose, the Executive Director of Photo Philanthropy brings over 15 years of leadership experience in the philanthropic sector. David Bathgate is a renowned photojournalist and anthropologist, and he runs the compelling image. If you have not had an opportunity to check out the compelling image, please do so. It's full of information, workshops, and trainings for photography and nonprofits working in the field. And Beth Cantor, Master Trainer, Author, and Blogger, renowned nonprofit expert, has written several books on the nonprofit sector, the network nonprofit, and the use of social media in the nonprofit sector. We're very pleased to be able to welcome these speakers today to help us think through how photography, storytelling, social media, and the nonprofit sector all work together at a very, very interesting and poignant intersection to bring about social change. Terrific. Thanks so much for that, Said. I am going to go ahead and get your feedback as users before we jump into the meat of the presentation. You'll see a couple of slides up on the screen. This will help our presenters understand where you're coming from as a storyteller. So please let us know by clicking one of those radio buttons if you have done visual storytelling in the past. Have you used it? And we can say for your personal life, but let's say for organizational use or in your career, have you tried to use it in a professional context? And I'll give just a few more seconds for people to respond. We have five, four, three, two, and one. And it looks like we have some people here who are experts on our call who probably could be working as presenters as well who've done it all the time. That's about 25%. We have some folks who've done it a few times, and then some that have done it never. So hopefully everybody on this call will find something that they can garner from this conversation to help improve their visual storytelling. And then one other quick poll. Go ahead and let us know when you're seeing that come up. Please tell us what motivates you to use visual storytelling. This one you can click more than one item. We want to get an idea of why you want to visually tell your stories, why you want to use photography and storytelling. So let us know what are the reasons that motivate you. And it might be all of the above, but I didn't include that in the responses. And if you have some other reason, feel free to post it in the chat window. Again, this will help our presenters get an idea of who our audience is and where you're currently at with storytelling using photography and how you use it with social change and social good. So it looks like about 80% are looking to use it for advocacy and education purposes or education purposes and about 65% for social change. Those are the two standouts. And then growing supporters and engaging donors are a couple of other big ones. That's great. We have some people in the audience chiming in in the chat window to recruit teachers that you want to use it for personal transformation, cross-cultural, cross-language, cross-generational impact, increase program applicants, grow positiveness, all good things. So thank you for taking part in those polls. We also have somebody saying that it helps with rebranding. I'm sure that's also the case. That's great. So thanks for taking that poll. And I'm going to go ahead and hand back over to Said to introduce why we're talking about storytelling today before our first speaker starts. Thank you, Becky. So just really quickly, I wanted to ground everyone in the context of storytelling. Telling stories and creating images are deeply rooted cultural traditions in human society. They're a cornerstone of human existence stating back to when our ancestors carved images into cave walls. In fact, anthropologists say that 70% of what we learn is through stories. Storytelling is how we make sense and meaning of the world around us. And we really don't need to look any further than our own childhood for evidence. Children learn through stories. When we put children in circle time and we read stories to them, we're helping them make meaning and sense of the world. Now, fast forward to today's world of smartphones, mobile photography, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. And we find ourselves in a brave new world where the pixel real estate on the web is dominated by visuals. But what does this mean for us? And how is visual storytelling going to help us create social change? When and how are the best and most effective ways to connect and communicate with audiences? Those are some of the things we're going to begin to explore. Now, without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to our first presenter, Lisa Rose, who will give a fuller introduction of herself and then talk to us about how best to make, how best to create effective visual stories with photographers and nonprofits. Thank you, Syed. I'm Lisa Rose, Executive Director of Photofalanthpe. A bit more about me. I've worked in the philanthropic sector for nearly 16 years, during which time I've held roles in development as a funder, as a board member, and now an ED. For me personally, I came to this work because I've always believed deeply in the possibility of a more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate world. And I'm really most interested in illuminating what unites us as human beings rather than what divides us. And in my many years in the social change space, I've seen the greatest change come when we are able to reach out and see the humanity in the other. And I think visual storytelling is the perfect medium to do just this. And really, you know, because at the heart of every social cause is the need to connect deeply with people, to inspire and encourage them to take action and or change behaviors. Visual stories have the power to transcend language and culture and connect us to one another and ultimately emphasize our common humanity. They enable us to see something outside of our own experience, and yet they show how we're all deeply connected. So they draw us in. And as storytellers, we invite the audience in and we take them on a journey. And this is an invitation into a relationship, one that gives voice to those who might otherwise be silent. And we will hear firsthand from our next presenter, David, how compelling stories are told. So I'd like, in the meantime, though, I'd like to share with you how Photofillanthopy has recently been working on what we've been recently working on to better understand visual storytelling and a framework that we've developed. Okay, so in January 2013, Photofillanthopy embarked upon a research project to better understand three questions. What challenges does our community face around visual storytelling? What are the opportunities to support our community with visual storytelling? And how can visual storytelling lead to greater social impact? We interviewed many organizations and individuals, including nonprofits, professional photographers, funders, media outlets, and policymakers. And from these conversations, several key themes emerged. Our research revealed that nonprofits and photographers understand that visual stories can be a powerful aid for conveying complex stories in simple and effective ways. However, many smaller, highly effective nonprofits lack both the capacity and resources to amplify their stories among their most critical constituents. As the broader society continuously sets higher and higher standards for visual communication strategies, many nonprofits that deserve attention are being left out. And this can result in social issues that become increasingly marginalized. So some of the most important social issues, because they are only affecting a small percentage of the population, remain invisible to key constituents who might help advance their mission. Our third finding, a very important finding, a clear call to action creates a pathway to engage your audience, and this is essential for social impact. And unfortunately, this is often the missing link to even most compelling visual stories. And last but not least, you must have quality images. I cannot express enough how important this point is. Quality is what rises to the top and stands out from the noise. So in response to these findings, a photo philanthropy developed a set of seven best practices. It's our hope that these can serve as a blueprint for nonprofits and photographers, particularly nonprofits with limited staff or funds, to elevate your story and reaching a broader audience and maximizing your social impact. So the process begins with a clear definition of your goals. In defining your storytelling goals, focus your efforts on the outcomes that you hope to achieve and what will be different as a result of your communications efforts. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, and responsible and timely. And you should identify how you're going to achieve your goal. In our second best practice, you always want to be thinking about moving your audience to action, whether you want them to donate, to share your story, to volunteer their time, or just go to your website. And there are a few rules that you should follow. Keep it simple. People don't want to think too much. The more confusing the call to action, the fewer people will respond. Use a few words and make it clear. Make it obvious. Don't bury your call to action. Make it clear and upfront. For example, donate, download, forward, post, comment. Most important, make it valuable to your target audience. Perfect segue into our third best practice. It is essential to get to know your audience and what's important to them. What are their values and preferences? And we all know that nonprofits have diverse audiences. Donors, volunteers, activists, journalists, policymakers, and the list goes on. Audiences can be segmented into groups whose members are similar to each other and yet distinct from other groups. For example, photo philanthropy has three distinct groups. Photographers, nonprofits, and funders. Our photographers, we know what they value. They want to turn their lens on social issues that have meaning to them and they want to get paid for that work and they want visibility for that work. Nonprofits want to advance their mission and mobilize their constituents to action. And funders often want to scale and deepen impact to their priority issues. So when we are tailoring messages to these different audiences, we're very aware of our aligned values, our shared values, and particularly what they care about. So it's important in messaging. Okay, so let me go ahead and speak to our fourth best practice, images. So the images you choose must be compositionally strong and artistic, but also informative and educational to provoke the interest of your audience. Photographs can have the power to elicit emotions and evoke empathy, letting us into one another's personal experience. And if we had them on the screen, we would see that we were an African woman who was grieving the loss of her child to malaria. And in this image, we are really drawn into the beauty of this image because the photographer has captured something self-much more elusive and intimacy to the grief that transcends culture and evokes compassion that I spoke about earlier. And I'd like to reference photographer Stephen Wilkis who believes that the still image can burn into our minds. And he believes that things don't stay with us unless we have an image. And he talks about a subtext beneath photographs and that the power of what's underneath is much greater than what's on the surface. I think this is such an important point. So the images you choose should create immediate impact. So editing is critical. The key component to this process, effective curating editing, turns compelling images into powerful narrative vignettes. Photo essays focus on central themes such as homelessness as we see in the images above from the photo essay, home and hope in the new land. Only include photos that are relevant to and strengthen the theme. Create a dynamic sequence of images that take into account context, order, and range. And I won't say much more here because our next presenter, David, will take us into the field and you will get to see firsthand how a compelling story is told. Fix best practice, use strategic distribution channels. Now that you've got a great story, great editing, and now you need to get it out there. And a good place to start is by exploring your own internal distribution channels. Your low-hanging fruit here is to connect with your members and supporters. Do you have a mailing list, an emailing list that you regularly use? Do you have a blog following? Who are your partners reaching out to? Go to their website, find out. What are the social network opportunities for your visual story? Or how can you best leverage your presence on Facebook and Twitter to broaden the reach of your stories? With the advent of mobile devices, the digital divide is disappearing. And it's important to not only have a traditional media strategy for sharing your visual stories, such as newsletters, annual reports, and annual appeals, but it's also important to consider an online social media strategy. And you're going to hear a lot more about this from Beth Cantor very soon. And finally, our seventh best practice. Measuring and communicating the value of your social outcome helps to demonstrate the importance of your work to you, to your staff, to your stakeholders, and funders. Take the time to evaluate the impact in the context of your original goals. The things you might want to evaluate would be the increased membership, donations, volunteerism, or other types of engagement, increased audience diversity and engagement, website hits, posts, retweets, reblogs, shift in public policy or dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed. And you're going to hear a lot more about that from Beth Cantor on measurements, specifically around results, value, and metrics. But back to your goals. Did your strategies help you meet your goal? Evaluate which strategies worked? Which ones failed? And what would you do next time? And that wraps it up for me. So let me conclude by thanking you for providing me the opportunity to share photo philanthropy seven best practices today. Say, Lisa, is this not correct that what we're really saying here with these seven best practices is that what you need is you need a strategic framework for your engagement with photographers. Just as you would be doing in any kind of project management or strategic planning effort where you're sitting down with your planning partners or your collaborators and creating a framework for your engagement, that's what these seven best practices do. They help you define your goal, number one, create a clear call to action, number two, identify and engage an audience, number three, use powerful high quality images, number four, to stand out from the noise, edit for impact, number five, use strategic distribution channels to get the message out and amplify it and maximize it, number six, and number seven, measure, measure, measure. Because as we all know, we need to create a return on our investment and demonstrate to our funders that this work is of value. Would you say, Lisa, that that is a good summary of the seven best practices? Yeah, it's a great summary, Sayid. Thank you. And so without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to David Bathgate from the compelling image who will help us see what this really looks like in the field. David? Okay, thank you, Sayid. And thanks to all the information that's come before me. As I was introduced, I'm a photojournalist. I have a school called The Online School of Photography, the compelling image, and I'm also a contributor to Corbis Images. I've been a photographer for over 20 years, and a lot of that time has been spent working with nonprofit organizations or NGOs basically in the developing world whereas it's sometimes referred to the majority world because that's how most of the world's occupants live, not like Westerners. So today I have two case studies I want to touch on and talk a little bit about the images that go into them. First, to reiterate that what's already been said along the lines of human beings being visual beings and that a lot of people are simply visual learners like I, myself, am, and that a lot of the connections we make, a lot of the information we take in are through images. The connections that we make in our minds are through the images we see. One that comes to mind right away is a magazine I was looking at here in Germany just the other day, and it was a black-and-white reportage about elephants. And on one photo there was a wide-angle shot, a beautiful shot of a group of elephants lined up from the immediate foreground, clear into the back of the picture, clear down to little tiny elephants in the background. The next photograph was of rangers who put their lives on the line every day to protect these creatures, holding the tusks of animals that had lost their lives, and the tusks that had been taken away from the robbers, they had been recouped. But it was immediate connection. The first picture with the elephants in this long front-to-back line of elephants in the second picture, only their tusks being held, standing in the same position as the elephants were in the previous picture. It was very dramatic, it was very visual. The connection was there immediately. That's what I try to do in my own work. So when I go into a situation with a non-profit or whatever situation I'm in, I try to go right to the emotional heart of the situation. And working with non-profits, it's basically going in on the ground with the workers who are doing the work, whether it be in Bangladesh, as I was with World Vision, or Doctors Without Borders, as it was in Kenya a couple years ago. Can we start my first slide? Let's see here. Going to the first case study, I'm going to talk a little bit and show some pictures about the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh. And this is pretty timely in that the situation was very much in 1991 as it is today in the Philippines in the town of Tacloban. That is a hurricane hit in 1991 in the southeast of Bangladesh, right on the sea level, and the winds were hitting, as you can see on your screen, 250 kilometers per hour sustained. They were experiencing 20-foot surges of water coming into their villages along the coast, and it was widespread damage, much like it is in the Philippines right now. The embankments were lost, villages were wiped out, farmer's fields were devastated, and when I was there in 2009, people were still struggling to recover. The situation is in the southeast delta area of Bangladesh, the rivers of the Brahmaputra and tributaries of the Ganges washed down from the Himalaya Mountains down through the plains of India and onward through Bangladesh down into the area of the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh. And what has formed are very fertile islands of sediments mixed with sand, but these are very temporary settlement areas because the next storm can wash them away. So the people who live there are people who are basically landless and come into that area to plant crops, to raise goats, and they prosper quite well as long as things climate-wise go good. When the climate changes, as it is worldwide, oftentimes their livelihoods are devastated. In 1991, that was the case. When I went in, what I found were people still struggling to maintain their agricultural fields. They had lost animals, they lost goats, and they were still trying to hold on to the ones they had. They are living on what are called chars, which are islands in the delta area simply built of alluvial soils and usually no more than a meter high. So you can imagine what is going to happen with climate change. The water level is going to come up and people will not only lose their livelihoods, they may very well lose their lives as well. So that is the situation I went into with World Vision when I went in. I tried to go right to the heart of the situation. I am looking for photographs that have stopping power, images that are visually unusual, outstanding images. Sometimes they have the essence of surprise or they have a shock effect, but images that will stop you and have you look at them not just once or twice, but continue to look at them and come back to look at them to consider what is going on in that picture. I want the pictures to have purpose. I first of all caught the eye of the observer and then I want to hold that. I want to hold that and tell the story. So the image does not only have a stopping element to it, it has to hold. It has to have purpose. It has to have content. And most of all I look for images with emotional impact. And that is essential for all photographers. Looking for that moment that connects with the heartstrings of all of us and it is cross-cultural. It does not have to do with cultural details. There are feelings of joy that we see on people's faces. There are feelings of devastation we see on people's faces of fear. Those emotions we all feel no matter what language we talk, speak, or no matter where we come from in the world, those are the things I'm looking for. Those are three elements, but the picture needs to be technically well-made as well. It's got to be skillfully made. Therefore, it's always thinking about graphic quality, how I'm communicating. I'm using it through graphic means of lines and forms and color. Things that compositionally tell the story and bring the emotion across in a moment that connects with us all. Okay, so that's where we are in Bangladesh. If we can, I'd like to start the slideshow which also includes a short video. That's something that's becoming more and more used with nonprofit organizations and the photographers that work with them. It's a mixed video which still brings the idea across in a more immediate way. Do we have sound with this as well? Okay, that's a piece I produced or part of it for World Vision. World Vision is a Christian-based NGO. They operate in 100 countries throughout the world. In Bangladesh they are focusing their efforts on this delta area in terms of raising the health quality for children and families. These chars, these ephemeral islands of silt and sand are people who live there. They represent something like 1.5% of Bangladesh's total land area, but 5% of Bangladesh's population lives there. So they're a crucial feature of the demography of Bangladesh. The health issues are unclean drinking water. The agricultural situation is always precipitously dire to say the least. It's hard to make a living. NGOs, not only World Vision, but others work in that area as well. What I was focusing on were these common points I always look for, stopping power and imagery, purpose, meaning and content, emotional impact, and still trying to maintain this graphic quality of composition that makes a photo technically and aesthetically pleasing. What I want to do now is move on to Kenya, if I can have the next slide please. I was in 2011 in Kenya, first of all with the World Food Program, in an area where the country received too much rainfall, far too early. What it did was it devastated crops and left farmers without a harvest that year. So the World Food Program, which I followed into these areas, was supplementing any food that was on reserve for these villagers, having lost that year's crop because of rotting of crops right in the field. Following that stint with the World Food Program, I moved onward into the Horn of Africa with Doctors Without Borders. We focused on the more remote villages, the tribal peoples, and the situation of extreme drought that not only affected the human beings but affected the livestock. Many people lost their livelihoods, their herders of cattle and goats, their pastoralists. And these people had flocks and herds that were just devastated by the drought. They were unable to find water, children were malnourished, families were desperate. I went in with Doctors Without Borders. We didn't go to just the larger towns. We crossed the dry areas, the waddies and so forth and got into where the people really needed the assistance. And again, it was right in the heart of the emotional situation and my work was to focus on what Doctors Without Borders were trying to accomplish. I sat and listened to their goals before we went in and I basically tried to follow that script, if you will, to document along the lines of what I described, how I document things, exactly what they were doing in the field. Okay, if you'll run that slideshow and then we can talk a little bit about that. This is a shot of an area that was devastated by early and too much rain, crops rotting in the field in contrast to drier areas in the horn. People were receiving assistance from World Food Program, mainly in the larger villages where they operate in a very orderly fashion and then on into the Horn of Africa with the tribal area of people, trying to organize the groups so things could be done ordinarily. I'm trying to capture the players, the actors in the situation as well, as well as giving an overview of the situation. I'm going to answer a question that's popped up here on the chat. Why the shakiness in the previous film? Well, the shakiness was simply a walkthrough with the video camera. It doesn't add anything to it, but it gives that raw feeling of being there. It's not technically perfect, but again I wanted that raw element to it. Okay, can I have the next slide please? Okay, as far as storytelling, as a photographer working with NPOs, as I'm mentioning here, there was only photography before we had video, and again we're visual beings, and we make these connections visually more than anything else. So a photo story does and can have impact when it reaches the core values and emotions of the people who are watching it. And when I'm working for a nonprofit organization or an NGO, I'm looking for moments. I'm looking for again those emotional moments that touch our hearts, that raise people's awareness of the situation. I want to touch audiences. I want to touch donors who will never go to these places, but should know why it's important to be there. That's my primary goal, and a story that I developed is developed around these core values and emotions, and as I stayed here, a compelling photo story, one is told honestly and skillfully, meaning compositionally well done, and focused on emotions and emotional concepts of that story. And the partnerships that I go into with NGOs, we always sit down and discuss the goals and the roles of the NGO and the particular operation that we're to be photographing in. So I become a part of the story. The photographer becomes a part of the story. And believe me, when you're in there and you've got a viewfinder in front of your eye, you're engaged in the story. And a lot of times the emotions come through and when the camera goes down from your eye, it's immediate and you feel it. So a photographer who is to come away with a powerful photo essay that achieves the goals of the NGO he or she is working for has to be emotionally attached, has to know in depth what the situation is and what the outcome desired is in order to produce the kind of work that benefits both photographer and the contractual organization. Okay, so the successful relationships between photographers and on-profits do hinge absolutely on visual narratives that reflect both the specific goals and the target characteristics that the NGO has in their mandate. And that's what the photographer is aiming for. Okay, I think that's it for me. Thank you so much, David. Very compelling imagery and very, very interesting concepts that you put forward. And I just wanted to take the opportunity to summarize with you, as I did with Lisa, some of the key points that you brought out around composition, emotional impact, purpose, authenticity, honesty you mentioned, and then working with the NGOs around their goals. You mentioned their goals and you mentioned the outcomes that they want. Does that not very much relate to the seven best practices, the strategic framework that Lisa talked about? I think it absolutely does. Yeah, just intuitively it does. And when one sits down and looks at those points, it follows the script completely. Excellent. And I have a question from the audience here too that I'd like to throw your way, David. The question is, wondering if the presenters can go over the best way for small nonprofits to capture compelling images? Do we invest in equipment? Do we hire a photographer or what? My answer would be that given the budget that a nonprofit has, they could put investment into training some of their own people to do the photographs based along the basic practice model. Or if their budget allows to hire a professional photographer who has worked with NGOs before, I think he can go either way. And as I say, the more you can engage your audience, the more the impact will be. And it may not just be with stills. It may be with stills in audio. It could be multimedia. It could be with video. It could be a mixture of all. The more senses you bring into it, the more impact you're going to have as a visual storyteller. And I think both NGOs can develop that skill for themselves in-house or they could contract a photographer to bring that to the program. Excellent. Thank you, David. And you mentioned a couple of other themes that I'd like to be able to return back to if we have time in the Q&A period, especially around honesty and authenticity, especially in the digital age, as well as the sense of purpose. I think we all sort of understand what emotional impact might be and how we look at composition as photographers, but the sense of purpose and authenticity in the digital age is especially interesting. But let's see if we can find time to come back to those themes at the end of the webinar. You did mention audience engagement. And with that, I'd like to begin to transition over to Beth Cantor and the folks. You haven't had your seatbelt on up to this point. It's time to strap in because Beth is going to go over some very, very interesting concepts for us around social media and being a network nonprofit and having a data management mindset. So Beth, once we have our stories, how do we get them out to our audiences? Beth, that's great. So let me start with a little story to illustrate some of my points. So that's a photo of me and I'm in Cambodia and it's 2007. And did you know that I was the first person to raise some money on Twitter because I had this relationship with some bloggers from Cambodia. They asked me to come over. Can you come to this conference? Can you do some training? But we don't have any money. So I got onto Twitter. I raised enough money to sponsor the conference and to go over there and teach this amazing master class, connect with this whole network. That was just amazing. But at the time, in 2007, the Internet was very unreliable to say the least. There was some satellite connection for this particular conference. But in the afternoon, during the rainy season, the satellites would fill up with water and the Internet would go down. And so I had a chance to go back to Cambodia just about a year ago in 2012, just five years later, and it's dramatically changed. Those are a couple of the signs that you would see all over. Everyone, at least in Phnom Penh is on Facebook, Skype, Google Talk. And I was able to get a SIM card for my iPhone and I was able to get 3G fast Internet in the middle of nowhere, even faster than Silicon Valley. And of course, the reason I was there is that it was sort of a homecoming trip for my kids who were pictured there. They were adopted from Cambodia. And I wanted them to see some of the social change work that I have been supporting and have done over the years. So they had a sense of giving back to their home country. So we got to meet one of the students that I sent to college with the royalties of my first book, that's Leng Soperoff. And what was really interesting when it changed is that they were able to actually meet her through Facebook before they actually met her face-to-face. And I connected with some of the bloggers there. And we were going to get on a taxi at that point and drive up to a place called Siem Reap and see Anchor Wat, see the antiquities of Cambodia. But in Cambodia, the driving standards are not like the United States. The roads are horrible. People drive like crazy, crazy drivers, and lots of accidents, a lot of fatalities. They don't even have a seat belt law. So I got my colleague, Monk Ho, to write a note for me in Khmer and that note translates to Dear Taxi Driver, my family and I are not in a hurry to get to Siem Reap. Please drive slowly. We want to live a long life. So I handed that to the taxi driver and he was really good for the five-hour drive up to Siem Reap and we made it and we climbed to the top of Anchor Wat, one of the temples. And I got blessed by Monk for the way back because I knew we were going to have a different taxi driver. And this particular taxi driver, he didn't smile at me when I gave him the sign. And this was kind of like how the ride was, looking at oncoming traffic. And so I was huddled in the back. There were not seat belts in the car with my kids. And I was able to get 3G on my iPhone. So I posted this update onto Facebook that said, oh, the other thing too is the cab driver was talking on his cell phone while driving like a crazy person. So I posted this update and I asked my friends, I need a sign in Khmer that says, stop talking on your cell phone while you're driving. And within two seconds, one of my Cambodian friends wrote it out for me, posted it. I was able to tap the guy on the shoulder and show it to him. He put his cell phone away and obviously we arrived safely. So what's going on here? I tell this little story to illustrate the impact of three digital revolutions that are happening. We now have more pervasive broadband access, particularly in the U.S. but also in other places of the world. In the U.S. I think it's 82% have access to broadband. So that's getting better. So we no longer have an internet where it's like watching paint to dry. We have social networks. 72% of adults are connected to a social network. And what this allows us to do is to connect with other people who we know, who care about what we care about, and people that we might not even know in a distant part of the world. And thirdly we have the mobile revolution. 89% of American adults have access and use mobile phones and I know it's higher outside of the U.S. So this has been creating a digital revolution. And let me tell you a story about that. There was a cat, and I don't have the slide in here, a cat named Sir Stuffington. And if you were to see the photo in the missing slide, you would notice that the cat was this adorable kitty but it was kind of sick. It had a little eye patch over its eye. It was scratched out by a raccoon. And a volunteer for the shelter dubbed him Sir Stuffington. The cutest pirate cat you've ever seen and started a Facebook page to get him adopted along with the siblings. And the page went viral. People love cats, love to share pictures with cute cats, but more importantly this volunteer who worked for a local animal shelter wanted to spread the word about the opportunities to volunteer to donate and to adopt animals. And not only did the Facebook page garner something like 50,000 fans in just a couple of days, but it also garnered mainstream media attention and the animal shelter, it wasn't under their branded Facebook page. It was just one of their volunteers. In my first book I called this a free agent who was there to help. So people are out there on network to care about your cause. And if they're attracted by a compelling story, you can bring them into your movement or your network and set them loose to help with you. So over the years as I've been teaching capacity building to nonprofits and literally I've worked on every continent of the world with different types of NGOs small, large, medium-sized. One of the things that I've learned is that change can be hard and it's best that it happens in slow incremental steps. So I developed this sort of maturity, a practice model that was inspired by this Martin Luther King quote that if you can't fly then run, if you can't run them walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward. So the practice model takes a look at what nonprofits need at various stages of maturity in their practice. So we might have at the crawling stage you might have a need for a more formalized communication strategy with goals and a way to engage people or there may be some culture change. At the walking stage you're starting to link your social to results and your networks and you're piloting. You're focusing on one campaign or one channel and the use of storytelling and you're building your incremental capacity. Kind of getting between walk and run. Now that's a capacity investment issue and organizations that get there start to allocate more than 20 hours of organizational time to social and that means having more people have accounts enlisting the use of volunteers and also some dedicated staff time. In addition to that having a formal ladder of engagement, a sort of theory of how do you get people from knowing about you to being captured by that emotional moment to pulling out their wallets to write you a check or at another level being an evangelist and sharing your content, sharing the word about you with others. Also at the running stage they have a method for piloting best practices and there's some measurement and learning in all. When we get up to the flying stage we have network building, we have many champions like the champion for the animal shelter who got Sir Stuffington his home in medical care. You have multi-channel strategies and tactics, not only compelling stories and photos but texts and not only distributed on social but through other channels as well and that you have a process whether it's a one person show or it's a whole team, you have a process for reflection and continuous improvement understanding through measurement what worked, what didn't work and how can you get better impact. So with that let's just do a quick poll. I want to get a sense of where people think they are. If you're at the crawl, walk, run or fly stage. And by the way I just sent a link out to a description of this and it also gives you resources on what is the next incremental step that you should take. So I'm going to give just a few more seconds for this. Here we go. Okay one thing I want to say if you're at the crawling and walking stage that's okay that's great you have a place to start. I think where we get into trouble is we think that we're going to go from crawling to flying and we scatter our attention, we scatter our most valuable resource, our time, our capacity and we're not getting as much impact. So my advice is don't try to go too fast, take small incremental steps in places that you can improve your practice. I've also shared a link to the actual assessment document which is just an example of someone taking this sort of test if you will because it describes 15 different organizational practices and different levels of maturity and they assess where they are and they put some goals on where they want to be and they've actually kind of graded it by this is low hanging fruit, the greens, this is easy for us to do, yellow is it's a moderate amount of effort and red it takes a lot of change. So they can look at this and not try to do all of this in a week but maybe have a more strategic plan laid out with incremental changes. So somebody just asked me what I meant by multi-channel engagement. I want to say multi-channel meaning not just social media but it's email, it's your website, it's mainstream media, it's all the ways that you communicate with your audiences. So being effective in social media is not just about social media. So I'm just going to talk about three different areas and I must admit they're not as fun as David's are compelling. These are more kind of broccoli categories of social media practice. I'm going to talk a little bit about culture, capacity and measurement in the next few minutes. And I'm going to go fast. So keep those questions coming in the chat and I will get to those. So the first thing is this whole idea of a network mindset and this ones hard because it's not very tangible but it's really a leadership style. I don't know how many of you are executive directors or volunteers or the leaders of your organization but I think this starts with opening up and having more active listening, more active participation, having transparency, decentralized decision making and being able to learn from your data, learning from failure. So really it's a mindset change from sort of traditional top-down control to this more distributive and collective action. So let me give you an example of this. This is the social CEO. This is Odie Ufer and he was the new executive director of the New Jersey American Civil Liberties Union. And they were a fairly small staff, I'd say less than five, six people. And when he came into his job, the communications person said, Odie, we want you to tweet. And to go on Instagram he said, I have no idea how to do that. So they said, I'm not even sure I want to do that. And so they talked about it and he discovered that, well, my job as the CEO really is to promote and to engage with our community and the audience and the press about our issues. And so Twitter and Instagram are great ways for me to do this in addition to the traditional press conference. So the staff sat down, gave them a tweet tutorial and they came up with this, ask me anything. And so I sort of said, well, what's the ROI of this? What's the return on this? How much time are you spending, Odie? Is it worth it? And he said, well, I spend about an hour a day but I use my found time. I'm on my phone a lot and I'll do this during my commute on the subway or on the bus. And I'll do it while I'm waiting in line for my lunch. And while the return on investment has been great because I can walk into a legislator's office and they will already be educated about why I'm coming because they follow me on Twitter. And also he's had success with placing news stories based on his interactions with reporters on Twitter. And thinking about this from an organizational perspective, you will have your branded Twitter account but you may also have the leader and other staff members with an account. So here's an example from a Cedar company, the Goodman Theater, the branded account and then their artistic director. And if you look closely at their tweets, they're saying a lot of the same things but the voice is different. So you'll see that the artistic director is talking about the artwork but in a very personal way while the Goodman Theater may be pointing people and urging people to buy tickets. So why even bother to do this? Well, if you do an analysis of who they're reaching, they're reaching different networks. This is a thing called Twiangulate which will help you analyze your network and who you're reaching and so you can compare different accounts. You can compare your brand with your leader's account. You can compare other similar types of nonprofits. And what it's showing here is that there's some overlap but there's also that they're connecting with different influencers. But really what you want to be having is you want to have everyone on staff playing a role with social media and having a social presence. It's not just for the branded account. It humanizes it more. And what that requires is having some rules and guidelines in the form of your social media guidelines. And I do have some resources online that can show you some really good examples. I like this one because it's very visual. It's very easy to understand. And just by having that conversation can help you make some change in your organization. So I want to hear talk briefly about this whole concept of being data informed. I'm really excited about it because I think it's not just about measurement. It's not just about data. It's really having a whole culture in yourself if you're a one person show or your organization that you bring your wisdom to the data. And I imagine I was thinking about that emotional moment capture that David was talking about that if you also measure that how well it resonated it would give you so many insights about when you're ready to capture and share visual content through your networks. So I'm just going to tell a brief story of an organization that is data informed. It's dosomething.org. Some of you may be familiar with them. They are an activist organization that wants to get 15 million teens active in online social campaigns. And they are data informed because it starts at the top. They have Reid Hoffman and G.J. Patel, they're data scientists from LinkedIn on their board who told Nancy Lublin, the ED, you need to not just make decisions based on gut. It needs to be connected to data and you always need to be asking what does the data say? And they didn't just say that. They also put the infrastructure into place. And you'll see it down there in the bottom. They have people on their staff who have data skills. That's Bob and Jeffrey. They are their data scientists. Now even if you're a small organization you don't have to have a whole staff person dedicated to this. There's lots of ways to get volunteers to help you. A lot of online tutorials. Even just using some of the tools like on LinkedIn to recruit some data people. You don't have to have a whole staff position. But in this case they do. The interesting thing in their organization is they've torn down the silos around data. There's not just a fundraising person saying this is my data. And the mobile team is saying this is my data. They're all working together towards common outcomes and their learning. And the key to their success is that they spend less time collecting data than actually thinking about it and looking at whether or not it's working for them. So here's a campaign and this was a campaign based on some research that they did that they found out a lot of animals were being killed in kill shelters because there were not enough cute pictures of the pets being shared or posted on social networks. So what they did is they created an app on Facebook to recruit photographers, these were teens who would go into shelters and take photos of the pets and share them on their social networks. Okay, so when they launched this they went on the Today Show with Kathy Lee and unfortunately she dropped one of the cute puppies on its head. They brought puppies onto the show. You know, everyone loves puppies. The puppy wasn't hurt. But you'll notice there's a hyperlink to dosomething.org and it goes right to the landing page where people could download the app. And when this happened, it started to go a little viral, bloggers picked it up, they were getting a lot of attention on that landing page. And so the data nerds excused themselves and they were looking at the conversion rate of people who were watching it on TV, going on the Internet, going up to the landing page, downloading the app. And they were brainstorming how they could improve it as they went for the next part of the campaign. And as you can see, it wasn't just a lot about getting a lot of eyeballs or even getting people a lot of downloads. They had a whole ladder of engagement that went from promoting the campaign, downloading the app, getting kids to go into the shelters to take photos, sharing them online, getting people to volunteer at the shelter, getting people to donate supplies to the shelter, and at the very top adopt a pet. And they know that not everybody is going to get up to the top, but what they do is they have a metric that they know that they've been successful at converting people at each of these different levels. And dosomething also has this mindset of testing. So you'll notice the photo of the dog there. They tested different landing pages for the dog where the dog was looking right at you compared to looking to the side, a dog, a different breed of dogs. And they figured out what was the optimal visual that is going to kind of elicit that moment of emotion that's going to get people to sign up and download that app. So in closing, I just wanted to just cover a few tips very quickly about becoming data informed. So like, okay, so how do I do this? You know, I'm a one person or I'm a two person. I'm a small nonprofit. So the first thing I urge you to do is to get beyond counting and stop counting fans, followers, you know, Twitter followers or whatever. That's not success. Keep on asking what is the ultimate success and what are the incremental steps that you need to get there and then figure out what it is that you need to measure to know that you're on track. Of course it requires, you know, some measurement discipline and this is all described in the book. There's different ways that you can apply this discipline, you know, having a goal, knowing your audience, figuring out the cost, having a benchmark, comparing to others. There's some dogs. Your key metric, having a data tool and gleaning insights from this and rinsing and repeating. And this doesn't have to happen on every single thing you do. You start with small pilots to make it happen. So the most important step is maybe sitting in a room with your team and figuring out, you know, what is the most important outcome for your project? Why are you using these photos? Why are you telling the story? What is it that you want to happen? And then how will you know you're successful? How will you know? I call it the kicking butt indicator. The other thing is, you know, up your skills in using Excel. Look, I am not an Excel person. Two years ago you couldn't get me to touch Excel. I was allergic to it. I'm more of an artist. I'm a right brain person. But you know what? I realized it's not so bad. I love Excel. And I found all these amazing free tutorials. And I got someone to help me. I got a coach. And now I can actually found ways to visualize the information in Excel. And it's amazing. I'm learning how to tell stories with Excel. So finally I think I want to say that when you're doing social media or when you're doing anything, even if you're doing photos, when you're just starting out with everything, it's not going to be perfect the first time around. And that's why it's really important to have reflection and improvement processes. So Moms Rising, which is an activist organization, they have this thing called Joyful Funerals. And if something is not working, they're not afraid to say, okay, let's bury it. Let's give it a funeral. It's not working. And then they discuss why it's not working. And that takes the stigma out of it not working, and it's no one's fault. And they do this by dedicating 15 minutes a week at their staff meeting to Metric Mondays, where they actually talk about how are we doing against our key goals? And what is the data telling us and how do we improve? So in summary, I would tell you that for social media there's different stages of maturity, and it requires different incremental steps to improve your practice. Go slowly. This is the slow social media movement. We're not here to go fast. I'd rather you do less and do it well than try to cover the world. Measurements of discipline, but don't have it come at the expense of being networked. So you're balancing this kind of serendipity with strategy and relationship building and your return on investment. Always link your social media to outcomes, and that might require if you're a larger organization to silo bust. But if you do it, you'll be more effective up your data literacy. I know I would never think two years ago that I would be saying how much I enjoy Excel. Give it a try. It can be fun. And please, go beyond counting your data and learn from it. Thank you so much, Beth. Obviously a lot to cover there. And you can always use Beth's blog as well as her books that she's authored for more information on the wealth of information that Beth just shared with us. But once again, Beth, I heard, as I did in David's presentation, the importance of having that strategic framework going back to the visual storytelling best practices that we talked about earlier in Lisa's presentation, of having a framework that helps you outline your goals and helps you get to the measurements of those results. Would you say that's correct, Beth? Yes. Yes, it sure is. Can't just all of a sudden say we're going to measure and run out and collect metrics without relating it back to a goal. I think that's a big mistake. I see a lot of people do. And I did it myself until I learned better. Excellent. Well, we're moving towards the Q&A portion of our webinar and there are lots of wonderful questions that have come forward. But just to wrap up, during the session today we talked about storytelling. We established that context. Lisa Rose covered the visual storytelling best practices which is a strategic framework for photographers and nonprofits to engage with each other. David helped us look at some case studies. We're successful partnerships hinge on strategic approaches and connecting with your audience. And of course, Beth just shared with us the whole concept of having a data mindset, adopting a data mindset and using social media to your strategic advantage. So without further ado, let's go ahead and take a few questions from the audience and there are many good ones. And I'm just going to throw these out to anyone in the panel that would like to tackle any one of these questions. But certainly when we think about mindset, one of the questions that comes forward is what are the best strategies to build a storytelling culture within a nonprofit? Panel? Well, this is Beth and I would put it back again. A lot of it rests with leadership because leaders have to model the behavior they want to see within their organizations or people within the organization who have influence on others. And so if I wanted to start a storytelling culture in my organization not even a teeny little bit of the photographer that David is or probably many of you on the call, what I would do is actually encourage storytelling at meetings because you can do a lot of learning through storytelling internally. I would encourage storytelling through data. I would encourage storytelling in all of my reports. So it's getting leaders to model the behavior they want to see. It's also maybe sharing stories and looking at other similar organizations and how they do it and being consistent about modeling that behavior until there's a change. Some questions and we get this kind of question a lot. How does one protect their images on social media? Have any of the panelists come across this particular issue? And what advice would you have? This is David, David Baskate. One thing that the digital era allows us to do is digitally tag photographs. And that's what I do with mine. There's a digital copyright on each photograph and with particular software you can actually track where that photograph is gone if you need to. But that said, things that are put onto Facebook and so forth have such low resolution that they're really unusable in any other context. So I don't worry too much about photographs that are put into social media context like Facebook and so forth. I mean I go the other way and I guess this might be a photographer asking about it because I know there is like if you do photographs and that's how you make your money I guess there would be a concern from an organizational perspective. I know a lot of organizations want to encourage their supporters to share their photos and so may use something called an image overlay where they are sharing some of their organization's photographs but there may be a text slogan on it and a call to action or a URL on it. And I also know that some photographers have embraced Creative Commons licensing and actually don't share their best works maybe or their most valuable works but share some of their seconds through Creative Commons licensing which can require people, which requires people to give you attribution but allows them to use the image at no cost. That's a good idea. Thank you Beth. Beth this is another question that I think is perhaps a follow up to the mindset question. The question is how do you work with a leader who says that our work tells our story and that communication strategy isn't necessary? Okay so let me make sure that I understood the question that basically the leader of this organization is our work stands for itself and we don't need a communication strategy. That's how I read it. Okay and I've heard this a lot and actually at one point there is a part of me inside my own heart that feels this too. It's like if I do good work, if I do good work I don't have to go out and talk about it because ooh that's self-promotion and I'd rather do the work. But on the other hand we live in a very media cluttered information overload society particularly here in the US and I really think that if you have a clear communication strategy it'll take your good work further because you can cut through the clutter. Excellent. David another copyright question. What are copyright restrictions or personal rights when we take a picture of someone on the street? Can we use those images or do we have to have them sign a release? Any person that's photographed in a public place doesn't require a release. Any photographs taken of people in a private situation like a mall for example or a museum or so, you need permission first of all from that organization or that mall and then you would probably need as a model release a photograph or a sign release from the person you photographed. But in public places meaning out on the street, no. There's no model release required. Excellent. And panel this is going to collapse a couple of questions here into one. How do you improve the visibility of positive images as a small nonprofit? How do you engage potential donors through photos focusing on the positive aspects of your work rather than the poor environment people live in? And there was a sort of related question about as a small nonprofit how do we really get the message out? How do we amplify the story? So how do we amplify the story and how do we help focus on the positive? This is Lisa. I'll jump in here. I think focusing on the positive is really important. I think so often we focus more on what's broken but we need to be focusing on what's working and people invest in what's working. So I can't stress enough the importance of conveying hope and solutions in the stories that you tell and amplifying and it just depends on your goal and your audience and you can, I'm thinking of an example of a little book that was made for San Francisco Child Prevention Center, Abuse Prevention Center and they told very positive story of children and they made a little book and distributed it to their donors as a stewardship piece. I don't know if anybody else wants to add on how to amplify the story. A related question that's come up. What about when an NGO wants to change the behavior of a small community who practice a harmful practice? Do you think storytelling would work in the same way? Is there an example that you can give to that? Or a hypothetical one? The question doesn't give an example but perhaps they're thinking about animal abuse for example or chicken fighting, things like that, culture, dog fighting. You know I'm thinking about also a specific example where maybe it was Africa on Middle East where they were trying to reverse kind of practices that were harmful to women and girls around, you know, girl marriage which is kind of a normal mindset in the villages, in some villages and they were trying to change that and I know of one organization that not only, the first thing they had to do was to identify like who are the people in the villages community who are the influencers? It's very much like social media. Who do people listen to? And to get them on their side and then in delivering the message to use stories telling around it and that change happens slowly especially with certain behaviors that have been going on for centuries. Right and we are getting some examples from the audience, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, bullying. Certainly some issues bring up ethical considerations and some subjects may not want to be photographed because of the nature of the issue. David have you come across that and how does one approach that? I have a colleague who was a student of ours at the compelling image, Vlad Slokin who's been working in Papua New Guinea with domestic violence against women and he's won a lot of awards on his work in that way. He's gained rapport into associations and the families and so forth and he's actually got UNICEF involved to the point where they brought about a publicity campaign against this so it's brought domestic violence in Papua New Guinea to the forefront not just nationally but internationally. So I think there is a change that can be made through storytelling and that's one example of it I know of personally. Great and I'm going to take one or two more questions before we wind it down. Again a question to the whole panel, what are the techniques to developing a photo story? Storyboarding, aligning to non-profit, photo essays, what are the exact number of images in a photo essay? How do we go about setting this up from scratch? Okay well I'll say a few things about that. Based on my own clients these days photos stories range from 8 to 15 photographs and they are constructed in a narrative fashion where you grab the attention of the viewer with the first photograph, you move them through the story and the final photograph is one that really stops them, it brings the story back into their minds and gives them something to think about at least with a message. That's basically how I develop my photo stories these days and there are around 8 to 15 photographs and that's basically what most venues will entertain. Thank you David and with that I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up with a big huge thank you to Lisa Rose from Photo Philanthropy, one of our presenters today. Obviously Becky and Ali from TechSoup who are a tremendous support and help to us today for pulling off this webinar. Beth Cantor and David Bathgate we can't thank you enough for your expertise in your own respective fields and what you have brought to the table for us today. Thank you all very much for a very informative webinar. Becky I'm going to turn it over to you for last minute closing out. Thanks so much Saeed and thanks to all of our presenters again. We have a few additional resources here that you can go to to find answers to some of your questions that we may not have had time to get to. You'll receive the follow-up email later today with the correct slide deck and links to this recording so you can view it at your convenience. In case you missed anything you can watch it over again and share it with your friends. Feel free to visit us at the TechSoup forums. If you have any other questions that didn't get answered we have experts there that can help answer them for you. And I'd lastly like to thank not only the co-presenters but I'd like to thank ReadyTalk for donating the use of their platform for us to present these webinars to you on a regular basis. We hope that you'll join us again soon. So thank you all and have a terrific afternoon.