 Welcome to Leveraging Social Media for Nonprofit Events. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm a webinar producer here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for 6 years, and prior to that spent 10 years working for small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California. I was regularly the accidental techie wearing many hats within the organization. So I've been in the position of trying to make the best technology decisions for my organizations without always having the best expertise and training. Joining us as our expert presenters today, we have Ritu Sharma, who is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Social Media for Nonprofits. And they are an organization committed to bringing social media education to nonprofits worldwide. She convenes thought leaders and practitioners in the social space with TED Meet Twitter-style conferences around the country. And you can find a list of those on their website at social media for nonprofits or sm4np.org. Also joining us is Tracy Kosolarshan. I forgot how to pronounce it already, even though we just practiced it. She is a marketing manager at Eventbrite, where she works to help deliver more value to nonprofit event organizers. She spent years managing marketing programs at American Express and OpenTable. So we are so glad to have both of them joining us, one with the real vetted experience in working with nonprofits and social media, and the other with a lot of expertise in working with nonprofits and events. So hopefully combining the two, you will walk away from today's event with a great start on how to leverage those social media channels to improve your nonprofit events. We know that there are also libraries likely joining us who host a lot of events. And we think many of these principles that they will be talking about will be just as applicable to you. So hopefully you will find the same. Also assisting with chat, you will see Ali Bestikian who is an interactive events and video producer here at TechSoup. And she will be there helping you with any tech issues and making sure that your questions are flagged for the presenters. Quick look at today's agenda. I will do an introduction of TechSoup for those of you who are not familiar with us. We will do a quick poll or two to see where you are at currently with your events so that we can best serve your needs in this webinar. And then we will take some time having both Ritu and Tracy share the event ticketing life cycle, how to leverage social media before, during, and after an event, and how to tie that all together. And then we will have time for Q&A at the end. But again throughout the webinar if you have questions, raise those up to us. We may have opportunities to bring those to the presenters even before Q&A. So TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit. We are working towards a day when every nonprofit library, social benefit organization on the planet has the access to technology, knowledge, and resources to operate at their full potential. We have been doing this since 1987 serving organizations in more than 60 countries and delivering more than now $4 billion in IT savings to those organizations. We have a wide catalog of donations available to you. If you are a nonprofit or public library you can find all of these at TechSoup.org. So now on to learning a little bit about you, our audience. We have about 270 people on the line right now. So I would love it if you could click on their screen to let us know what are the primary events that your nonprofit or library organizes. And if there is something that is not reflected on this brief list, feel free to chat it into us. Do you mostly hold fundraisers in Gallas? Do you mostly conduct training events? And trainings we are broadly applying. So if you are a library for example and you hold educational events for your audience or your patrons or for students those could be considered trainings. Do you host mostly conferences? Do you hold small community gatherings? Or other? So let us know. We have some people chiming in in the chat window saying webinars, special events, county fairs, free art and music programs, concerts, habitat builds, houses, lectures and panels, housing fairs, recognition events, volunteer harvest. Interesting. So we know you can't see all of the chat questions coming in. And so when there are things that are chatted into us from the audience that we think are particularly useful we will do our best to chat those back out to you to share that. It's one of the limitations of our platform. Lots of people are chatting in that they do live shows on the web, health fairs, that they have races in 5Ks, fundraising Gallas, music festivals, arts promotions. This is great. So a lot of different types of events. Oh I like fishing tournaments, kayak races, book drives, tax preparation. Terrific. So a lot of different types of events going on out there. But let me go ahead and show the averages from this poll so far. About 44% hold fundraisers in Gallas of some kind. And about 21% have small community gatherings. So we know that there is such a wide variety of types of actual events. So we tried to capture in big chunks some of the purposes of those events with this question. And this will help our presenters speak to your needs a little bit more specifically hopefully. Let's see, the next question is, how many people attend your events on average? So do they tend to be smaller than 100 people? Do they tend to have 100 to 300? Or are they pretty large events with 300 or more? We know this isn't capturing every area, but this will help again give us an idea of the types of audiences that you are reaching with your events. And thank you everybody for all of the great comments that are coming in about the types of events that you host with your organization. It makes me want to go sign up for some. They look like a lot of fun. So let me give just another moment for these responses to come in. One participant said that they have an event that has more than 25,000 attendees. So that's a pretty huge event. And another one, that one saying their festival hosts 53,000 attendees. So that's terrific. It's a huge event. All right, well let me go ahead and show the results here. So around 50% of our participants are hosting events that are primarily under 100 people on average, and 35%, 100 to 300, and 17% are hosting those bigger events, which we know again these are just ranges and that they can vary a lot from organization to organization. So I'd like to go ahead and have our first presenter join us on the line. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ritu. We are really glad to have you. And tell us how can we use social media and leverage those channels for nonprofit events? Hi everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us here today. As you know, I'm Ritu Sharma for Social Media for Nonprofits and the Executive Director and I help find this organization or start this organization. My primary lens that you've already heard my bio briefly, my primary lens in this conversation today is going to be sharing with you my experience organizing about 50 conferences over the last 4 to 6 years, about 30 of them in social media for non-profits and then about 20 of them in the for-profit sector. So I'll be sharing my tips and tools with that lens of what some of the things that have worked over the evolution of social web and what are some of those things that I've found are consistently applicable across the world regardless of the size and the type of events. So stay tuned. I'll be sharing a lot of those things and generally how you can use social media to amplify your reach and your message and reach bigger broader community besides the ones that you know. And on to Tracy. Thanks, Ritu. Hi everyone, I'm Tracy. And as Ritu mentioned, I'm really excited to be sharing with you all today about just how social media is impacting events. What are the trends? What are the resources? At Eventbrite we've seen, we know that organizers don't always have a massive event budget to work with so what are the ways that you can leverage social to maximize attendance at your event? Very excited to be talking about all of the different resources that are out there. Wonderful. So let's get started. Just to give you a broad overview of what we'll be covering, we'll be covering a little bit about the ticketing life cycle, how you should think about an event and spread out to ticketing efforts, leveraging social media before, during and after your event and tying it all together with data. And finally we'll close it out with some resources for you. Great. So thanks, Ritu. Before you start planning anything, we wanted to just start off with first of all, how are you defining success for your event? The ROI or return on investment for your event has three main components, how many donations you've raised, how much awareness you've gained, and how many ticket sales you've made. And you'll just want to define for yourself exactly how important each of these factors are to you. And that is really going to determine the type of presence you'll have on social media and which channel you use. For example, if you're looking primarily to increase donations, your communications would probably have more prominent calls to action for people to donate. If you're simply looking to just grow members, the focus can be a little bit less monetary, a little more about informing your audience about just how impactful your cause is. The one thing to keep in mind for all of these is that even if you're looking to maximize ticket sales, awareness is the key driver for all of these, even though it's harder to quantify. So you'll want to just make sure that you're not ignoring that side. Moving on. Now that you've figured out your goals, you'll want to start planning. An easy way to begin is just by using the ticketing sales life cycle as a guideline for your communications. Tickets and registrations we've seen usually go on sales about six weeks prior to the start of an event. And you can see here in week one, the ticket sales and registrations are high. The initial PR is working to raise awareness. People are excited. In week two, then you start to see sales drop into a trough and stay low up until the final week of sales. And in fact, nearly 40% of events see less than half their ticket sold or people registered until the final day is leading up to the event. And at that point, you know, use an organizer can be concerned about meeting the goals. And often about one-third of the events actually end up securing half of their ticket sales and registrations about two weeks before the event. And luckily, it's really not till about last week when most of the sales and registrations finally come through. So fortunately, you don't have to subject yourself to weeks of anxiety that aren't relieved until your last week of ticket sales. There are ways to smooth out this ticketing sales life cycle without becoming a data scientist. So there are ways that you can plan for this last-minute rush. Over half of nonprofits say that front-loading ticket sales is important to them. And we found that 88% of fundraisers actually send invites when tickets and registrations first go on sale, but then stop all communications after that. And you can use social media to actually create artificial deadlines to raise ticket sales from any late registrants in weeks two and three. You can announce early bread sales. You can have free gifts for anyone who signs up by specific date. Basically, the communication does not need to stop after weeks one and two. It can keep going to really help remove as many barriers to purchase, provide incentives to purchase early, and then simplify the process of turning site visitors into paying customers. Regardless of what strategy you choose, be it promotions or just constant communication, you'll want to make sure that you're monitoring ticket sales constantly as the behavior will be different for every organization and how you react and respond to that. Moving on, we're going to talk a little bit about how do you now really actually apply what Tracy just said, thank you Tracy, on how you can look at the ticketing life cycle and how you can influence that ticking life cycle. For the first part of the presentation, we're going to focus on what you can do as a nonprofit before the event. What are some steps you can do to be prepared for a ticketing cycle influence? So here we're going to go ahead and look at what are some simple tips and tools that you can apply. My very favorite and the very bare minimum that every nonprofit in my opinion, and for that matter, anyone that does events and has social media as part of their role should look at is a very, very good communication and content calendar. This is your biggest tool, believe it or not. Just having a nice Mont Blanc pen does not make you a best-selling author. Similarly, knowing all the different social media platforms doesn't necessarily make your nonprofit a social media savvy nonprofit or create a best-selling event just by itself. It's really knowing all the tools and how to use them to each of their strengths is what makes a magic happen on social, whether it's with Ice Bucket Challenge or it is with a sellout event. So in this very simple tool, you want to create a communication and content calendar for your event as part of your event marketing strategy a good six to eight weeks in advance. You want to start from the day of the event and walk backwards or work backwards until the very first event you find goes out. This is really important. What I suggest that you do as a nonprofit or as an event planner or social media strategist is to look at how many weeks you have. You have six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks. You make that many basically tons of tables in your Excel spreadsheet and basically you have four or six sections, however many weeks you're going to give yourself. And in each of those sections, basically you can count them as columns. In each of those columns, you're going to write down what you're going to do in that particular week and you can see a whole image basically. What you'll see is, starting with week one, I'm going to do a blog post. I'm going to create a registration page. I'm going to create a Facebook page. Week two, I'm going to do a social media campaign on say Twitter or on Facebook. I'm also going to post twice a day on Facebook about it. I'm going to create an event on Facebook and post about the theme. So you simply break down everything you possibly think you need to do to be successful and you start putting it down in the six or eight columns and do it by week. And then this way you get to see, okay, I did an email newsletter blast on week one. I can do another one at week four and then do another one at six weeks. So you can kind of easily move things around to make sure they're evenly distributed, that you're not too heavy in one week and very light in the other, and just put down all the different pieces, whether it is volunteer outreach whether it is board member outreach or others. So you could simply arrange all of these things. In my opinion, depending the number of columns are basically the number of weeks you have up until the event week. So if you're sending it out six weeks out and you're opening up your event, do that. If you're sending a 10 weeks out, you have 10 columns basically. So once you have decided this format, now you can take this entire column or the little activities you have on each day which on any given week, if you have five things, that's usually how much I have. On any given week, if you have five things, you can put those five things on a calendar either on the same day or spread it out during the week and you take all of this information onto a Google Calendar. And on Google Calendar you put your name, you put your event or the event action item, and you put who else is responsible besides you. So what it does is it makes your event marketing strategy a living document that shows up on your calendar, it shows up on your co-workers calendar, everyone knows what they're doing on any given week and day, and you are not overwhelmed by the amount of information that you see. This is one of my biggest things that I can recommend for you, and I think this is the single most important thing that has contributed to the several sold out events we've done at social media for nonprofits. A couple of tips in this space for you. If you are going to send out emails which I highly recommend, you send it on a Tuesday to Thursday. Don't do major email push anytime on a Monday or a Friday. Those events are generally speaking unless you are looking at your audience being very active on those days on email. Make sure to post this information on your website, on your Facebook account, Twitter, LinkedIn, local community calendars, your phone banking, volunteer, all of these things should be part of your strategy. And now talking about what this calendar looks like, just so you have a sense of it, there is a sample content calendar right here. This is what I do when I'm promoting a conference 6 to 8 weeks in advance. I will send you this link. I see this sounds like this, a link issue. I will correct that. When Tracy is speaking, I will send you an updated link to the chat window. But in this particular case, the continue one, you can see what my sample content calendar looks like. I even have it color coded on my Google calendar. So I see I have seven tweets every day. I create an event page on Facebook. I have a Facebook update. I post on community calendars and I'm looking at third as in the date here. And then you can see the dates that I am sending an email. You can see dates I'm posting a blog. You can see dates I'm doing a Facebook update. On any given day on that week, if I have seven tasks on any given day, I have three to four. It's super easy for you to see this and manage it when it's one or two things and you're not over one. But imagine if you had all of these things in one document in one list, it could be very overwhelming. So with that, I'm going to continue on to the very first step of when you decide to do an event which is creating your registration page. And Tracy will take us into that. Thanks, Ritu. So now you'll want to ensure your event registration page is working as hard for you as possible. And really that starts by having an event page that captures the spirit of your race. You'll want to include your logo, scheme, color scheme, registration details, and spending any time upfront increases conversion when traffic comes to your page through social sharing. Next, you'll definitely want to make sure the event page is shareable to social media platforms. And you can see here we piloted just the social sharing area here where people can actually connect to see which of their friends are attending on Facebook who's signing up, as well as just being able to share the event page through Facebook, Twitter, email. This is really a great way to help make sure that your event is being amplified to everybody's social networks. And you'll also want to make sure that your branding is just consistent across your webpage, other platforms that you're promoting it on. Regardless of where you're hosting your event registration, you can always create a Facebook event page as another way to build community and get people excited. This just lets your attendees see, again, who else is invited and also share your event with their social networks on Facebook. And in the description, you can always include just a line about RSVPing so people can easily show others that they're attending and also share the fact that they RSVPed. This is the place where you can really build excitement over time. Incentivized ticket purchases, you can run many contests, hold weekly giveaways, leading up to your fundraiser or gala. You can post interesting facts or highlight exciting features about your events. And then you'll really just want to look at all of your touch points and ensure that all of them are driving your audience back towards registration for the event. You can include shortened links to your page via Bitly for Twitter. And although it might not seem social, you'll definitely not want to underestimate the power of email as friends can forward your invite on to others and hence turn something that was a one-person invite into a many-person invite. And it's really important, again, that all of your posts drive back to registration because people have so many choices and distractions when it comes to events to attend these days. And you don't want to make it hard for them to register or find out where to go. Interest is often not high enough to overcome a tedious sign-up flow. So most event platforms can make it really simple for everything to be integrated like that. And now I'll pass it back to Ritu to talk about how to actually promote before the event. Ritu, before you jump in, sorry, I just want to jump in quickly and just raise up a couple of questions that have come up from the audience in the past few slides so that they're still relevant in our brains. So a couple of people asked, Elizabeth was asking, do you tweet once an hour? How often do you suggest you tweet? Is there a magic number or a certain number of times per day? And either of you can take that one. We're actually going to talk about the frequency and what kind of content to post on each platform in just a moment. Okay, great. Gwendolyn also asked, is the app that you use to host the registration page? Is that using Eventbrite? People are just curious what platform makes it easy and which platform you're using and some of the examples that have been shown. I would like to answer that in order to make sure that this is an education program and we're at the co-host always very committed to education. What I would say is there are several different registration platforms out there that have different fees. They cater to different audiences. They have different features. Eventbrite is definitely one of the most well-known ones though are several other ones. I highly recommend that you obviously take a look at our co-host here Tracey's platform, but also in general take a look at three or four different platforms, see how they charge, what they charge. And one of the things that I can as an educator recommend for you is that one of the important features you want to look at an event platform in this time and age is this event platform social friendly. Does this event registration platform allow you to easily and intuitively share your event very extensively with the social platforms, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and whatnot? I hope that answers your questions. Yeah, I think that's a great start. We want to make sure that no matter what platform you're using, you're finding something that's going to support your needs and that's going to support the ability to leverage these social channels to your benefit. So we can go ahead and move on. We do have other questions and we will make sure to try to get to as many as we can in the Q&A. Thanks, Ritu. Certain short thing and one thing, we are available. At least I am for sure and I'm sure Becky will also make time and I'm assuming that Tracey will too. If you have questions, keep them coming in chat or on Twitter and we'll stay back after the webinar and answer them to make sure that any testing questions you have have been answered. So not to worry. Moving on, we're going to talk about two or three key platforms which is where you will see most of your audiences congregate. We'll start with Facebook because that is where a lot of the nonprofit audiences are congregating, people that are interested in these causes, and also generally speaking that's one of the biggest platforms. So you may be asking based on what I mentioned in my content calendar, posting one to two times a day is okay on Facebook. What do I post though on an everyday basis? Especially for those of you who are posting six to eight months in advance, many of you are going to make sure that your event is at least a couple months out when you start promoting. So what you post on Facebook is basically regular updates and pictures about performers, VIPs, auction items, partners, even attendee stories from the past. Find something fun, find something interesting, find something valuable, find something that is of value to your audience, whether it is what to expect in terms of the theme, how to dress, who all are coming to create, a regular drum beat of all the different things that you can be posting. And again on Facebook post more pictures and videos. Cute stuff absolutely helps. If you have a sense of humor or anyone on your team, find a good, healthy, and clean sense of humor and bring that onto Facebook that does really well. Whether it's cute cat pictures and memes, whether it's cute dog or baby pictures and memes, those really do very well. And this is far sparingly in between and not just all of that, but they add to a nice variety on your messaging. As attendees register on your event registration platform of choice, you want to invite them to RSVP on Facebook when you create the Facebook events. The way you do that is on your event registration platform you will have a confirmation email system where you say, hey, thank you for registering. We look forward to seeing you. You can also include a line and say, hey, don't forget to RSVP on Facebook and let your friends and the community know that you are going to support this great cause. And as a bonus, we are giving an extra bottle of champagne. We are giving an iPad mini raffle. Whatever it is, find something of value. We are giving you a better seating. Find something that your nonprofit can come up with. If you have resources, a good item. If you don't have resources, find something fun that doesn't cost you but is of value to the audience. We have seen our numbers jump 40 to 50% when we offer a nice incentive. And it doesn't have to cost money. So that's a very good way to get people to RSVP on Facebook. And then you get in front of all their friends and family saying, hey, I'm going and they're like, oh, where is my cousin going? Or where is my friend going? And they're interested in joining too. Finally, Facebook, be sure to tag attendees, VIPs, partners, and others, whoever you are connected to. Make sure that you are connecting with them and tagging them as appropriate if you are able to. That really helps amplify the message. So why do we keep emphasizing shareability? Just wanted to go into a little bit of stats about why it's important. We've seen every day over 5,000 Eventbrite events are shared on Facebook and over 1,500 are shared on Twitter. And the power of social media really becomes evident when you consider these numbers. Each attendee will have an average of 130 social media friends. And people are three times more likely to get a ticket or registered mobile when they see that a friend is attending. Through the connections of those friends, amplifying even more, each attendee has the potential to reach nearly 17,000 other social media users. So that's when you take that into account across all platforms, really, really valuable. We've also seen that each additional share drives about $3.23 extra in ticket sales. So there is a monetary value to it as well. And why do social media marketing work to increase ticket sales? I mean, it's not too complicated. People just want to go to events with their friends. The overwhelming majority of Facebook shares about you can see here on the right 60% of them are made after the share has already purchased a ticket. So your attendees are telling their friends that they've gotten their ticket and that inspires 20% more additional ticket purchases. So ensuring that members have the option of sharing after they make that purchase is a key behavior you'll definitely want to capitalize on. And another thing that we've seen is just there is a fear of missing out, FOMO, and when people see friends attending events they want to share in that experience. Absolutely. We see this all the time internally too. One pro tip here for those of you who are still in the process of selecting a platform. I recommend when you're choosing a platform that you choose a platform that makes sharing easy. And the way you tell that is when you register for an event and you hit the submit button. If it pops up a window right away that says, hey, signed up, thank you, click here right now to share on your Facebook. That extra step in a registration platform has a very significant value because people don't go back often times and promote, but as soon as they have actually made a purchase or commitment, they are much more likely, as you can see in the slide, they are 60% more likely to click on that and say, yes, why won't I share that I signed up for black and white ball or something like that? So very important when you're choosing a platform that that functionality is available. We've definitely ever since our platform included that functionality we've seen our numbers increase pretty significantly. So thank you for sharing that, the importance of social sharing, helping us understand why that's important and pricey. Moving on to Twitter. Twitter is another major vertical that you're going to see a lot of people engage in the nonprofit and for that matter other sectors. So on Twitter, if you're on Twitter, I recommend easily posting 6 to 7 times a day. You can post every hour. You can post a couple in the morning, couple in the afternoon, and couple in the evening. When to post whether it is on Twitter or another platform really is dependent on the answer of when is your community most likely to be online, number one, and also checking their devices. For most people out there, and this is again, you have to do your own testing and see if it works, but in general in professional audiences across the board, the key times to post on any platform are when your audience is down. So morning time right around the commute time when people are taking a train or a bus and they have half hour to kill or waiting for their transportation. It is right before lunchtime. It's almost time to eat, but it's not quite and they're kind of jittery and they're killing time and then well into the lunch hour. Another slot of time that works really well is right around 3.3.30. It's been post lunch, work bus, 2-3 hours of work, and then they've got eating to take a little break and they scroll on their phones. And then finally around the time of ending the work time and commute time. And then one more time again is a big bus around after dinner period when people have finished their dinner arrangements and meetings and they're now again available. Now these are just very general guidelines. You have to test and observe in your own daily life when are you most likely to be online and free to look at it. Now we'll share with you some tips and tools later in the presentation on how you can make it easy and kind of pre-schedule a lot of things. But I just wanted to give you a sense of when to post. If you were to post limited two or three times, you want to post at a time when your audience is online. If you post six or seven times and you can do that, that's great. Moving on, if you only have a little bit of time on Twitter, one, you post at the right time. Two, you reach out to influencers. You identify people in your community who have the right reach and influence and you engage with them. In general, retweet and thank people extensively. Use a direct message campaign when it is appropriate but be very careful in that not to spam. And finally, when you're creating an event, keep in mind a hashtag for your events. For our events, all our events have the hashtag pound, s, m, p, which is our name, social media, four, and pay non-profit. It allows you to really capture and catalog all conversations pertaining to an event. Use the hashtag for your event that's no more than five to eight characters. Beyond that, it starts to take too much space. You want to choose a hashtag that has some meaning, whether it is a shortened name for your organization or cause or the theme of the Gala and then you can always use 12, 13, 14 at the end to demarcate with the ears if you want to demarcate your conversation. So those are some best practices for promoting your events and in general your non-profit on Twitter. And finally, we're going to look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where a lot of professional audiences go. It's either your donors or your constituents. In that category, you want to spend some time on LinkedIn as well. You want to participate in industry groups. There are groups in LinkedIn and that's where the money in magic happens on LinkedIn, in my opinion. That's where you get in front of the right audiences. That's where you establish your thought leadership. You can also create your own group but know that it's a lot of work to create and cultivate and manage the group. So if you do decide to create a group and if you're at that point for some of you who are advanced, you want to pre-approve and invite all your event attendees to LinkedIn that way they're not waiting for you to approve. In general, use some exclusive content on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook for that matter. But people like to see some exclusive content for those platforms because they may only be on that platform and have that connection with you. And that gives them an incentive to go check out each platform when they know that it's not the same content. A couple of pro tips for just engaging, just some highlighting some advanced practices engaged with influences across the board on different platforms. Create and promote an event hashtag. Write and place guest logs with aggregators. And aggregators are people who touch many different organizations in the same category. For us, TechSoup is an aggregator because TechSoup serves a lot of different nonprofits under them so when we do an event we often reach out for an example to TechSoup to help us spread the word because they serve many of our audiences. Design means and visuals, like I said earlier, it's a great way to engage with people and get them to comment and like and smile. So it becomes more of a conversation and not just broadcasting to them. Finally, create a social media evangelist and committees. And that looks like basically asking 10 of your top most engaged community members to be formally called evangelists for your nonprofit. So whenever you post something you send them a weekly email and you say, hey, we're doing this event, you are our evangelist committee. You're going to help us reach broader audiences so when you post a blog, a tweet, a Facebook, we write down all of those options in an email and we send it out to these 10 people to share, comment, like, and help you pre-seed and amplify the conversation so you can manage organically the Facebook feed which is showing some of the messages, the lower priority. So this will help you get there. By the way, I did test the resource or the Bitly link and it works for me but I will test out a non-Bitly link and send that over to you through chat window shortly. Moving on. Great. So now I'll be moving into what to do with social media during the event. So as Ritu talked about earlier, you will have created a hashtag for your event or maybe you'll just be using your own organizational hashtag. So you'll want to just make sure that you're prominently displaying that so that your attendees can make sure that they're linking to it in their real-time dialogue. You can use screens to display the conversation where everyone can see it. We've put here tweetchats.com and twitterfall.com that are free services that can help display tweets about your event. And people that – that way people that can't attend can still follow along on the day of the event. And that's just one way to keep people engaged. And one thing to keep in mind on the day of the event, you will be pretty occupied trying to ensure all of the offline activities associated with your fundraiser or conference or Gala are going off without a hitch. So it'll only make your life easier if you don't have to think about what's happening online. So you may want to consider enlisting the help of a social media savvy friend, a volunteer, a staff member to help you manage the social waters. There is a degree of trust involved with having someone else handle your social media. So you'll want to meet with them a couple of days or weeks ahead of time just to make sure that they're properly briefed on how you want your event to be portrayed publicly. A couple of things just to keep in mind. First of all, you'll want to go through voice and tone. Is your event fun and quirky? Is it professional and formal? Definitely review what your voice is and how you want whoever is managing that social media to respond to praise, complaints, questions, etc. You also want to make sure you've agreed on what's okay to retweet. Is it okay to retweet great quotes that people tweet during the event or just favorite them? Be clear on what's okay and not okay to retweet. Next, you'll also want to have a pathway to channel feedback. When issues come up, be they positive or negative, what's the best way to channel the online feedback to you, the organizer, on the day of the event when you're not always easily reachable? I mean, even for random things like it's too cold in here or there are enough paper towels, you'll just want to make sure there's a way for that to get back to you. And if your conference is on a set schedule, it's also not a bad idea to, as Rita mentioned, schedule tweets in advance just to maintain your sanity. You can also use during the event an opportunity to share exclusive content to the event itself like video clips of your philanthropic cause. You can link to online versions of the speaker presentations or have behind-the-scenes material that a normal attendee wouldn't have access to. And finally, the end of the day can often be a rush. So if you're busy tearing down or packing things up, it doesn't mean the conversation needs to die at that point. You can also schedule your thank you tweets. You can schedule your recap tweets and your photos. All of that can be planned in advance so you don't have to think about it at the end. Moving on to something that's even actually a little bit more interactive than Twitter, mobile event apps. So these are a really great way of building a sense of community at your event. In the crowd of people at larger events, it can often be difficult for your attendees to meet the people that they want to make connections with. The app is a really fantastic way for them to not only discover the other guests who have actually made it to the event, but also message them in real time so that they can coordinate live meetups. And if you're worried about costs, the event apps often have freemium models so they don't have to be expensive. So you'll just want to consider, as you build that, what should be in it. You want to have a schedule. You'll want to have presenter listings, social media. You'll want to have a map of the layout of your event if it is, for example, a conference or something with multiple rooms as well as news in a place for people to provide feedback. Another way to leverage the interactivity of the app is you can use it to hold contests as well as interactive Q&A. It's also a place that has real estate for your sponsor so you can potentially get extra revenue from sponsorships through your app. Now, passing it back to Ritu. Thank you Tracy. Moving on to give you more options for engaging your audiences during the event. So there are several options that especially given that many of you today that are joining us are in fundraising and GALA-based events. I wanted to point out a few tools here that you can use to really make your attendee experience even more engaging. You could use tools like BitPal, Options by CyLiller, MGive, Tax2Give. These are all different ways you can engage your audiences in a more social and mobile way. I'm going to give you a very quick example. BitPal was used here. Again, we're not paid by BitPal to say this, but I know from personal experience that BitPal supported this particular event in leukemia and lymphoma society. They had this live thermometer on the wall which was amazing to see it go up. Everybody had a smartphone and the audience members that did not have a smartphone, a smartphone through this company was provided to them. Their fundraising was about 80-90% more than the last year. And when we kind of dissected it, we found that the reason was that people were able to really stay engaged throughout the entire evening and not just at the beginning and end. They were really engaged throughout the evening checking on their phones, competing with their table mates and other people. So it actually extended the life of the auction for entire evening instead of just discrete 10-20 minute windows before and after. So this is just one example. We've given you four providers here that we know of and we've seen the work of. There's several others. Do your research. Find the one that's the right type of strength for you and also the right features for you. But these simple tools can really enhance your social fundraising experience. Finally, about 30% of you do some form of training or conference. Those of you that do training and conferences can use live polling apps like live polls everywhere. And the links are again on my page that I sent to you. You can do a live poll. So for example, today we did two live polls. We asked you what kind of events you organized. We also asked you what is the approximate number. So when we are speaking today in a conference, we can keep that in mind to highlight more gala events because, guess what, a lot of our audience is based in Gallup or doing work in that kind of space. So similarly, those of you who work in your event planning area, you can use these tools whether it's fundraising tools or engagement tools and really engage your audiences and keep them connected and present. So some tips in terms of how you can engage your audiences and how can you really do well in social. Number one, set up a social command station. Make sure to have a spot designated for your live tweeters to go and set themselves up. Have a nice vantage point for taking photos near a photo station. You want to make sure you engage with tweeters that are tweeting around in your events. You want to set up a step and repeat banner and create a photo station. Those really, really make it for a fun event. What they do is they make people take these cool pictures and share on their very own without prompting. And that's a very easy thing especially at Gallup and Fundraises to get the word out about the gala taking place and creating better awareness for your cause. You can do Instagram video logs. You can do mobile tools which we already shared with you. And then you have a list of all the different resources that we are referring to. Great. Passing the mic to Tracy. Thanks, Ritu. I know we're getting close to running out of time, so I'll go through this pretty quickly. The last thing that you'll want to just be thinking about after the event is how to tie it all back together with data. And this is important not only for your own event planning success, but also to share back with your sponsors to prove the value of your event to them. For the sponsors, you'll want to just look at high level social metrics such as the number of retweets on Twitter, increase in Facebook likes, repins on Pinterest, etc. to evaluate the impact of your social activities. And for yourself, you'll want to know exactly which marketing channels we're driving the most sales. Where were your efforts actually paying off? And that way you can adopt your marketing strategy as needed for the future. You can create unique tracking links for each of your sales sources so you know exactly was it the volunteers, was it your staff, was it your sponsors that were driving ticket sales? You'll want to monitor that throughout the entire promotion process just so that you can adjust the strategy as needed. And you can also pay attention to the time of day and days of week that you're seeing the most registrations in social chatter from and time any of your promotions accordingly. Your registration data can really provide a lot of clues to show you where your visitors are coming from and how you can best reach them and connect with them. And finally, you can a lot of event platforms also capture this data to get the entire end-to-end picture that will go from email campaigns to Facebook all the way through to the final ticket sale. And you'll want to just review what not only brought in sales but also donations as well. So wrapping everything up, we talked about today which channels first of all are right for you and your organization. That's the first thing you'll want to decide. Also, encourage early ticket purchasing to get the wheel in motion. And finally, encourage post-purchase sharing. And also you'll want to make sure that you're giving attendees reason and tools to engage before, during, and after your event. And also you'll want to analyze which social media efforts are most effective. Thank you, thank you for that Tracy. Really terrific overview. And I know this was quick for a lot of people. And if you're just brand new to social media, we'll be sure to include some resources for those of you who are new in the follow-up email that can give you some places to start. But let's go ahead and dive into questions. We have a lot of them. So Retu, we have a question that asked about your spreadsheet earlier on in your calendar that you developed. So do you do that the whole week on a calendar? Or do you do that how much of a time frame do you think is manageable for people on a calendar like that? I basically created a calendar, a list of all the activities that need to happen in 6 or 7 columns that's 7 weeks in advance of an event. And I put every single activity that I have on the calendar. That way I spend a couple hours up front but everything I need to do on an ongoing basis for the next 7 weeks is almost 2 months is on my calendar and I never miss a step. Great. And so one of the questions that people ask, what if your organization still sends a paper, posted, mail, invitation for events? How do you engage people online if they're learning about the event through their mail box, physical mail box, mail mail? I think that's still the case with mailing formal events where they send actually a postal mail which is fine. You will send your postal mail as your first step but then I'm assuming most of these organizations either have or should be really cultivating community. You still follow through in engaging those people, posting pictures of that postal mail, hey I hope all of you got this today. And then start the 7 or 8 week whatever is your calendar clock from that point on. And if you have a longer time period say 6 months or 8 months then you have a little sparse, 3 or 4 activities a week compared to 10 activities a week when you get into the 6 week zone. But you start with, again, you follow the exact same steps that we just followed through. Great. So Sherry asks, this seems like a lot of work for a small organization with a really limited staff. How do you recommend doing this? Is there a way to make it a little more efficient and control the content and messaging so it's consistent? Especially if you can only do it for a second here or there a couple of times a day or a couple of times a week even. My suggestion for that is I shared my magic sauce with you. Basically we are a person in a half team but for the most part it's one person team. We do 15 events in 13 different cities, 3 different countries. And I do marketing. I do event production and all of this. I also do a lot of curating. I think the magic sauce that I want to point you back to is one is your editorial calendar. If you don't have that you are going to get pulled into every direction possible and you will stop the balls like you would believe it. But if you create a good editorial calendar you spend the first upfront time of 2 to 5 hours of creating that, creating a strategy. You only have 2 or 3 little things to do on a given day. And you can also automate a lot of those things through Hootsuite or something and you can deliver even with a 1.5 to 2 person team. So I definitely encourage people. It's very easy to get caught up in the social flow of wanting to do everything. But unless you have a good calendar and strategy in place it's very hard to stay focused and disciplined. Great. And I think it's great that you mentioned Hootsuite. There are a lot of tools like that out there that can help you. If you have only 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes a week even to do it, you can schedule out tweets in advance. You can schedule some of your social media posts. You don't want to have it all automated and appearing as if it's mechanical, but you can make it more efficient by having those planned out ahead of time and they just automatically launch and publish for you without you having to physically do it 6 times a day or however many times. Another great question is from Phyllis. Their organization serves battered women who are moving forward with their lives and they have a lot of issues involving privacy, confidentiality, and safety. So they tend to be really hesitant when they are considering fundraisers to increase awareness and get donations. But they are really dependent on donations. So how do they use social media to create these effective events without violating some of that privacy or putting things out there that maybe they can't post the address of the event because of a potential risk of somebody showing up. So how would you recommend doing that? And that's for either of you. Yeah, this is Tracy. I think social media can still be a really important forum for just growing awareness about the cause. You don't have to name specific people. You can also use it as a forum to collect donations. You can share news about the general space as opposed to talking about individuals and use it as a place to drive potentially registrations either to your event or just to grow awareness. And maybe if you are hesitant about publicizing the location of the event, then I guess social might be not the place to actually invite people to the event. But it depends on your comfort with that. Great. We had some questions asking about ticketing apps. Do you guys have recommendations for any apps or programs or cloud software that can help people actually print off tickets for their events? And does an event bright do that as well? Rita, I wasn't sure if you wanted to take that. Oh, I was going to let Tracy. There are several different ticketing registration platforms that actually have their own apps that plug in into Facebook and other platforms. But I'm sure Tracy has more industry recommendations on that one. Yeah, absolutely. The one I'm familiar with in the past we've used Boomset but there are quite a few. Boomset also prints like name badges. There are a lot of different partners. I would recommend as well. I saw someone had a question on polling apps. And with that we've used Slido and SurveyMonkey is a free one. SurveyMonkey doesn't actually have an app feature but it's good for post-event surveys. So there are a lot of – I am most not sure if I want to push one partner over the other, but there are definitely a lot of printing opportunities out there. Terrific. And with that I'd like to say thank you to both of you for taking the time today. We are just about at the top of the hour. So I want to wrap this up with inviting you all to attend other webinars that are presenting that are coming up. We have just started our Storymakers campaign which is our annual digital storytelling event and challenge. This year there are $13,000 worth of cash prizes available to the best digital stories in 2-minute long short films that you can even film on your cell phone and also even 6-second or 15-second Vine or Instagram videos that you can submit. So if you are interested in potentially winning some prizes and getting the word out about your organization or your cause or the heroes in your own community, feel free to check into some of our upcoming Storymakers events. We also are doing some webinars on Giving Tuesday and End of Your Fundraising coming up on September 4th. And again those Storymakers events that you'll see listed there. And then we'll have an event focused on how to get grants and funding for rural America and small communities on September 18th. So we hope you'll join us again for one of those events. Thank you again so much Tracy and Ritu. And thank you also to Allie for helping on the back end. Lastly I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing the use of this platform to make these webinars possible for you on a weekly basis. They provide the use of ReadyTalk 500 which is what we use today and that's also available for discount in our catalog. Thank you so much. And please take a moment to complete the post-event survey that will pop up on your screen once you close out of today's webinar. We'd like to use your feedback to continue to improve our webinar programming. Thanks so much everyone and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.