 Welcome to Storymakers. Get your story noticed. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for 6 years, and prior to that worked for small nonprofits for about a decade in Washington, D.C. and in Northern California. Also joining us today is Bailey Rosser. She'll be our first presenter, and she is joining us from YouTube's Los Angeles office. And she is in charge of a team that helps manage the audience development strategy. And so they help people expand how they reach your audience, and expand how you grow your audience on your YouTube channel. And they are the writers and creators of the YouTube Creator Handbook. So she'll be talking to us and sharing her tips and insight into how you can do that with your stories to help get them noticed. Also joining us is Kimberly Bryant, the CEO and founder of Black Girls Code, where they're working to expand technology and STEM career field opportunities to young girls of color from 7 to 17. And she's going to be speaking specifically about how they've really been successful at rising above the noise with their stories, and how that has helped positively impact their community that they serve, and helping to continue to bring in additional funds because of their great and compelling stories. Also you'll see assisting with chat is Ali Bestikian who is an interactive events and video producer here at TechSoup. And she'll also be coming on the line just for a couple of minutes here at the beginning to tell us a little bit about TechSoup's Storymakers campaign this year. So a look at today's agenda, I'll introduce TechSoup, then have Ali come on just to talk about Storymakers for those of you who don't know about it, or maybe you've heard about it and are interested in participating, she'll give you a little bit of info there. We'll do a couple of polls to gauge where you are at with storytelling, and in particular if you've already have them created and where you're sharing them. And that will help inform our presenters and a little bit of what they speak to today. Then Bailey will join us to talk about how to optimize your reach on YouTube and give us some audience development essentials, where you can focus your energy to make sure that your videos are seen and clicked on and shared. Then we'll talk to Kimberly to share about how they get above the noise with the Black Girls Code, video production and work that they do. And then we'll have a little bit more information about upcoming events with Storymakers and how you can submit and time for Q&A. We may have a little bit of time for Q&A at the front end and then a little bit later toward the end of the webinar. TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit. We are working to serve you other nonprofits and public libraries around the world with helping you access the knowledge and technology resources to operate at your full potential. We've been doing this since 1987, serving organizations in more than 60 countries around the world and delivering now more than $4 billion in IT expenses. With that I'd like to go ahead and have Ally join us on the line to tell us a little bit about how Storymakers connects to our greater mission and how you can get involved. Thanks Becky. And thank you all so much for being with us today as part of our 5th Annual Digital Storytelling Challenge Storymakers 2014. We hope you all really take away some key learnings from both Bailey and Kimberly coming up and ultimately are inspired to create and submit your own story. You have till September 26 to visit techsoup.org slash Storymakers to submit your 2-minute YouTube video, a short Vine or Instagram video, or a 5-photo Flickr slideshow, say that fast, for some really great cash prizes. We'll have two grand prize winners of $5,000 in Best Overall and Best Time Youth Video as well as winners for super short and newbie videos awarded $1,000. And then we'll have a period for community voting starting October 1 where we hope Entrance really power their networks to vote for the Audience Choice Award also $1,000. So please come back and visit our Storymakers page to vote on your favorites. Becky, back to you. Thank you very much for that Allie. And we do hope that if you have digital stories out there that you will share them with our campaign so that you can hopefully win some of these great prizes too. So on to you, our audience. We know we pull you at the beginning to get an understanding of whether you're from a nonprofit or a library when you register, but we like to take the people who are on the line with us and get an understanding of whether you already have videos and digital stories created or whether you don't yet. Maybe it's a goal for you. So feel free to click on your screen. Let us know where you're at with a digital storytelling process. Today's webinar is intended to help get your stories noticed. So it does somewhat assume that you may come to this event either with a story in your pocket or a bunch of stories in your pocket, or that if you don't have stories that this will help you once you do and that you're intending to do so sometime hopefully in the near future. So I'm going to give just a few more seconds so that everybody has a chance to participate. So go ahead and click on one of those options on your screen. We have some folks asking what is STEM? And I did chat out that it's Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. And that is helping young people access those career fields. And so that's another reason why we invited Kimberly from Black Girls Code to join us because it is one of our prize categories this year to award organizations that are telling the bulls that are doing great work, but also telling great digital stories about how they're helping young people access those career fields or learn more about STEM fields because we want to see greater representation in those areas. So I'm going to show the results quickly. So it looks like about 43% have already created a story, or have maybe some in their pocket ready to go which is great. 30% no. 11% are well on their way and about 16% are hoping to someday do it. And so we hope that even if you don't have a story ready in your pocket today that what you glean from today's webinar will be useful to you if and when you do put those out there so that you can help optimize the reach and impact of those stories. One other quick question before we hand off to our first presenter, what platforms do you use to share video with your audience? So those of you that have video already, go ahead and let us know where do you share them? Do you post them to your YouTube channel? Do you use Vimeo? Do you share them on Facebook? Do you use Vine or Instagram? Or one of the other platforms, BlipTV, Flickr, Mixbit? Do you host them on your website? And if you're answering other, feel free to chat into us what those other ways are that you're sharing your video with your audience. So I'm going to give just another second for everyone to participate in that. Go ahead and click those results, and that one lets you click multiple. So I'm giving just a few more seconds. So showing the results, it looks like 82% share on YouTube and around 77% share on Facebook, 52% on their own website. So those are the biggest categories and that's similar to what I would expect. A couple of people commented that they also share via their email list. That's great. We know that often the best way to expand your reach is to share it on multiple platforms or channels. So it's great to see that a number of these are being utilized. So I'd like to go ahead and welcome our first presenter to the line today to share some expertise with you on how YouTube helps organizations and video creators share their stories. And just to mention a little bit about Bailey, she has helped write the book on this literally on how to create and spread the word and develop your audience for YouTube. I feel like we're really fortunate to have her join us today to share some of this insider tips that are often shared only with really big organizations with really big following. So we're really thrilled to have you on and to share a little bit of that today. So welcome to the program Bailey. Thanks for joining us. Awesome. Thank you. Hi everyone. Really excited to be here. Just to quickly introduce myself, my name is Bailey and I am an Audience Development Strategist in the YouTube Space LA. I focus on working with creators, people that are creating for the YouTube platform both from an entertainment perspective but also brands and nonprofits like yourselves. The slides that we're going to go through today are going to talk about some of the very essential best practices and strategies for connecting your stories with your potential fans or people that are potentially interested in your causes, etc. A lot of the examples I will say do come from what you might think of as traditional YouTube comment, entertainment videos, comedy videos, things like that. Just simply because those are the examples that I have at the ready. But all of the best practices that we're going to talk about here are definitely applicable to whatever type of content you're creating, whatever type of stories you are trying to tell. And we've got a couple of really awesome nonprofit specific resources that we'll call out at the end. But I'm just going to go ahead and get started first and foremost by talking about why these best practices are really important. Why is audience development essential? Why can't you simply just upload your videos to YouTube and expect us to do the rest? And the first reason is that YouTube is an incredibly big place. 1 billion people visit YouTube each month. You all likely know this, but there are 7 billion people in the world. So that's one seventh of the entire world's population. These are unique visitors are coming to YouTube each and every month. It's a pretty staggering statistic. And those 1 billion people, well, they're watching 6 billion hours of content. So for every one person, they're watching 6 hours of video on YouTube every single month. But this is just the one side of supply and demand. In addition to there being all this viewership and all these people that are seeking out video content and stories to watch on YouTube, there's also an immense amount of stories being uploaded. 100 hours of video is uploaded each and every minute. So in the last minute that I've been talking, 100 hours have been uploaded. And if you wanted to watch everything that was uploaded in the last minute, it would take you about 4 days to do that. If you wanted to watch everything that was uploaded in the course of an hour, it would take you 8 months. If you wanted to watch everything that was uploaded over the course of the week, unless modern medicine really advances, we probably wouldn't be able to do that because it would take about 170 years. And this number is continuing to increase over time. Just a few months ago, this number was only 72 hours were uploaded each and every minute. So not only are lots and lots of people uploading video, but more and more people are coming to YouTube to share their stories each and every day. So what this means is that it's really important that all of you as storytellers and as YouTube video creators, really exciting to see that the majority of you are telling your stories on YouTube already, it's really important that you use the strategies and best practices that we're going to talk about to connect your videos to those potential fans. One billion people are coming to YouTube. That means that no matter what type of content you are creating, there's going to be a potential fan or a potential audience member out there for you. It's just a matter of how can we do a good job of surfacing these stories to the right people. So first I want to set up a little bit of a framework for how we can understand some of the different optimizations that we're going to talk about. And it's this audience path or audience funnel for channel growth which really has four stages. First and foremost, you have to get your video discovered by an audience member. And that's really where I'm going to spend the majority of my time today talking is about the different optimizations that you can use to help get your video discovered. Then hopefully you're creating really great content so those users and those viewers are going to watch the video. But then if you really want to foster what we call a sustainable audience on YouTube, an audience that's going to keep coming back and it's going to know that your YouTube channel really is a destination for great content, we've got to get them to watch more. And I'm going to talk about a couple quick tactics you can use to help people to watch more of your videos and eventually become a fan, somebody who's going to evangelize your videos by sharing them with their friends, but also hopefully evangelize the causes that each of you are working on. So we're just going to get started. And the first few slides are a little bit interactive so it's hard to do since you're all sadly muted so I'm going to ask that you participate via the chat module in ReadyTalk. The first thing that we're going to talk about and look at is thumbnails. Because when a viewer comes to YouTube they're looking for visual information. YouTube is a very visual platform and that's how our viewers and our audience members are making their decisions. So oftentimes the first piece of information that they look to when they're making this decision is the thumbnail. So of these four thumbnails A, B, C, or D, just go ahead and chat into the box which letter you think corresponds to the best thumbnail of these four options. And I'll give it just 15, 20 seconds to – all right, that is some solid participation. All of you are chatting in. You guys can't see it but I can. We're getting a good, healthy mix of B and D. And I'm going to go ahead and guess – oh, and Edith Campbell actually just came and gave me a nice little piece of information. She said B because it gives the most information. And that's usually what I hear when people choose B is that people choose B because they feel like it provides the most contextual information because it has this fun with hand shadows book. And assuming that that's the subject matter of the video, that is nice to have. It tells me a little bit more information that this is going to be about hand shadows and also that corresponds to the visual imagery. For those of you that said D, oftentimes the reason that I hear people say that D is the more compelling option, like Virginia Larger said, is because it's more compelling. It's more fun. It peaks curiosity. It's interesting. It's slightly more visually compelling. It draws you in, whereas B is a little bit more distant. And I think that that's really good to take note of. Now I'm going to quickly make one adjustment to these images. And now given this – I already sort of gave it away with the green arrow but you'll likely all agree that at this size, B becomes no longer an ideal choice. And the reason being is that they're trying to convey this textual information on the cover of the book in B that becomes really illegible. It's hard to see what exactly is going on in the thumbnail now at that size, whereas D is still very legible. It's very visually compelling and it still draws you in. And so D is the ideal choice, I would say, of these four options. So just to speak to what the full list of thumbnail best practices are, first and foremost, it's really important that you use a clear and in-focus image. So D was really great because it was a nice close-up of Michael from Vsauce. It's an edutainment channel. It was a nice clear, in-focus image of his face. And he really is the subject of the video. He's a regular personality. So it was nice to see that interesting, compelling, in-focus expression that drew us in. High resolution. So anyone that is part of the YouTube Partner Program, which is to say that you're allowing your videos to be monetized, have the ability to actually upload a custom thumbnail. So as opposed to just selecting one of the three automated frames of your video that we suggest as thumbnails, if you're part of the YouTube Partner Program, then you can actually upload a custom-designed image. So you could pull a still from your video into Photoshop and amp up the contrast and the saturation and add text that could be legible or just customize that image to make it really clear and nice high resolution. That's really important. And then having the subject matter, whether that be a personality or say that you create food-related content, a close-up of the food images, whatever the subject matter of your video is, it's really important to have a nice clear close-up image of that. Because thumbnails, as we saw in the visual example, really do appear in all different sizes across the YouTube platform. So having those nice clear close-up images is really important. Now visually interesting is a little bit hard to nail down in terms of very specific tactics. But this is like that expression on Michael's face in that thumbnail. That was really visually interesting and compelling. And it posed a question sort of in your head like, what's going on here? What's he doing? And it drew you in. Thumbnails are really like little tiny marketing posters for your video. And so you should spend some time considering how can I pique viewers' interest with the thumbnail image as opposed to just selecting the most obvious choice of the still frames from the video. And then if you just like imagery components that are really important, making sure it has that high contrast that makes it more visible at different sizes. Visual depth. So the image that we saw with the handshadow had a clear foreground and the clear background, legible at all sizes. And then finally, this is something that we're going to talk about a little bit later on as to why this is important. But it's really important that your thumbnails are accurately representational of your video. It's important that you're not in any way misleading or trying to do something about bait and switch with the audience members where you're giving them one thumbnail but then really delivering a video that doesn't live up to that thumbnail. That's really important. And we'll talk about why more a little bit in a few slides. So given that, I'd like to pose this question. And again, you guys can go ahead and just chat in here. What would you guess that the title of this video is given the thumbnail that we saw? Oftentimes, I hear fun with handshadows because people saw the cover of the book or how to make handshadows. And I forgot to delete an animation on this slide that actually removed that red bar. But what the title of this video is, is how much does a shadow weigh? You can see that the shadow aspect corresponds really well with the title and the thumbnail, but that how much does a shadow weigh sort of defies your expectations a little bit. There's a nice story being told with the thumbnail and the title. And so because this webinar is about storytelling just as much as it's about getting your stories discovered, I would urge all of you as storytellers to think about how can you make your title pop? How can you tell a story with the combination of your title and the thumbnail and the way that Vsauce does here? Again, the title of this is How Much Does a Shadow weigh? Usually, if I just had that title, How Much Does a Shadow weigh? The most intuitive thumbnail, for me, would be like scales with a shadow on it. And that's very obvious and directly aligned, whereas I think that the combination of this really visually intriguing, compelling thumbnail image and that compelling sort of question-posing title really draws you in in a much more powerful way than a simple title would. So I'd urge all of you to think about how can you bring this storytelling aspect to the way that you're packaging your videos, the thumbnail and the title. But that's not always the easiest thing to do. It's much easier said than done. And so I want to look at what is a more straightforward example. And as I mentioned, these are all what you might consider traditional YouTube style content. This is a parody video from the channel Barely Political, but they're doing a lot of things that are really best practices on the platform that you can transcend over to the content that you're creating. They created this Miley Cyrus parody video for their series Key of Awesome. And what's good about this title is really everything. That's why I've highlighted each and every portion. But the first thing that makes it a successful title is the fact that they have the highly searchable keywords up at the beginning. Miley Cyrus, We Can't Stop. Obviously, people are going to be searching for that on YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine. That's something that you all might not know. And so having whatever question people might be coming to YouTube search asking in your title or those terms that will be what people are looking for via the search engine is really important because that's going to be a way that a lot of potential viewers discover your content. Now, to the point about accuracy, it's really important then that Barely Political, even though they have Miley Cyrus, We Can't Stop at the very beginning of their title, they've indicated that this is a parody video. They're setting expectations properly. They said that potential viewers know, hey, I see this thumbnail. This could actually be Miley Cyrus for all I know. I wouldn't put it past her to have a thumbnail that looks like this. But I understand that it is going to be comedic. It is going to be parody. It's setting expectations properly. And then finally, the thing that makes this really successful is the fact that they've indicated to the viewer that if you like this video, the title alone starts to push you down that audience funnel. It says Key of Awesome, number 74. So if I like this video, I then immediately know that there are at least 73 more for me to enjoy and appreciate, and it starts pushing me down that audience path for a sustainable channel growth. So this is what I would say is a more straightforward way of titling. It's more intuitive, a little bit more boring for sure as well. But I would urge you to make sure that you have searchable qualities that you are being accurate in that where and when possible you include that serial information. Great. So next step, when we are talking about metadata, so the information that we are putting around our video to help connect it to the right search queries, show up in suggested video in the right places, are descriptions. Descriptions are really powerful in that you are helping the viewers make decisions based on the information that you are providing them. But you are also sending additional signals to the YouTube search and discovery systems that say, hey, my video is about X Y and Z. So here are two examples of how a description appears on YouTube. The first screenshot is a screen grab from the amount of the description that shows in YouTube search results. So this is for a comedy wrap battle between Harry Potter and Voldemort from the channel Indie Mogul where we can see that the first two lines of the description are really good because they tell us exactly what we can expect. If I am on search and I see this video, that description line will help me make the decision of whether or not I am going to watch that video. And then down below, we have a snippet of what this looks like on the video watch page. So on that page where you actually have the video playing above the description and this is what we will show with the button above the button that says show more. So I am going to click forward. And this is what shows when you click that show more button for Indie Mogul. You have the full description. Up top, again, we have that contextual information that will help the user decide whether or not they want to watch this video in the first place. Then, again, thinking about that funnel, they do something really intelligently with their description where they include this link to a build episode. They are already encouraging people to watch a second video just by putting that link in the description. And then the other thing that they do really intelligently is this is a really fast, quick wrap battle. And so you might miss some of the jokes. So they included all of the lyrics to the video in the description so that way from a viewer's perspective this adds value and that it helps me go back and sort of better understand what they were saying. But also from a search and discovery perspective, it's important that now the search engine knows that this video isn't just about Harry Potter and Voldemort. It's also about Cedric Diggory and about Dumbledore and Hogwarts Express and Hermione, etc. Not necessarily to the same extent it's about Harry Potter and Voldemort because those keywords are in the title and in the description and likely in the tags. But now it's more likely that it would show as a search result for those types of keywords. So when you're thinking about your descriptions, think about not only how can I describe the video and also use links to push people down that funnel, but is there additional information that I can be providing that is simultaneously useful to the viewer and also useful to YouTube's search and discovery system? So a great example that I like is for how-to videos, for example, or tutorial videos, you can include the textual instructions in the description in addition to the video tutorial that you have in the video content itself. Or in the instance of like a beauty video, a makeup video, they might use the different products listed in the description, something along those lines. So just to recap some of the best practices with regards to metadata, it's important that you have keywords first, both in the description and in the title. So in the title, Harry Potter and Voldemort were the things that were foregrounded, Miley Cyrus was foregrounded in the barely political example. It's important that it tells a full, compelling story to the description and the title and the thumbnail all pair well together really well, including the episodic information if you have that available. Make sure that everything works with the thumbnail like I was just saying. And again, it's really important that it's accurate, that it is accurately representational and isn't misleading in any way. And then finally, trying to push people down that funnel with links in the description. So now those are the two main things that you can optimize in order to better get your video discovered, thumbnails, titles, metadata. The other thing that I would quickly shout out as well is that collaborating with other channels on YouTube is a great way to get your videos discovered too. So for those of you that are making like content, I would definitely try to reach out to one another and co-create content and really appeal to one another's audiences. But we're going to start thinking down the funnel a little bit. We'll assume that someone's watched our video and they like it and they want to watch more. I want to talk quickly about why that's important to you as content creators before I actually talk about what I think is the best strategy to do that. And that's because of this concept called watch time. So watch time is the primary indicator to YouTube of video quality that we are using to determine when and where to show videos in search results and in suggested video. So back in the day, the primary currency on YouTube really used to be views. A video would get a lot of views so it would be much more likely to show up in search results or in suggested videos. But that was not always the best user experience because of this inaccurate thumbnail or inaccurate titling. So someone would use, we'll say, a salacious or a very compelling image in their thumbnail that might draw a lot of clicks only to have the video not actually be content that lived up to that expectation of the thumbnail. And so that's a really bad user experience. Someone clicks on the video, watches enough that a view actually gets logged and that video gets big viewership, but then they leave very shortly after because they're disappointed with the content. Watch time by contrast is a way for us to understand when someone actually clicks a video, are they watching it? Are they watching the whole video? And it's actually something more than that as well. Watch time is not only the amount of time that someone is watching a single video, but then watching a second video and a third video and a fourth video. And these are in terms of absolute numbers. So someone watched three minutes of a first video, then three minutes of a second, third, and fourth, and that's a 12-minute session watch time. And what this does for you as creators is the better job you do of keeping people on YouTube engaging with videos and growing this session watch time, the more you're going to be rewarded in terms of good placement in our search and discovery systems and YouTube search results and YouTube suggested video. So that's why in addition to it just being a helpful practice to help provide links to people to watch more content, it's not only good to the viewer, it's also really good to the sustainable growth of your channel because it will help more people discover your videos as well in the long run. So just to recap, watch time is the length of a viewer's session, not just the duration of a single video view. And it matters because to YouTube it's a primary indicator of video quality and it's a key metric used by search and discovery systems. So the primary tactic that I want to talk to you guys about in terms of developing watch time and growing watch time is this really cool YouTube-specific tool called Annotations. So this is a screen grab of a channel called How It Should Have Ended. They create animated content. And what they have at the end of every video is this graphical little layout that they've created in the video itself. And then they use Spotlight Annotations which are these transparent overlays that they put over the graphics that they made in the video itself that then allow the viewers to click through to additional videos. So if I'm watching the How It Should Have Ended Harry Potter video they've suggested that I watch the How It Should Have Ended Star Wars, How It Should Have Ended Avatar, etc. as well as asking me to subscribe. The one thing that this video does really well and I would encourage you all to check out this channel and really get a feel for how they do this in the video itself is in addition to having the clickable links they also pair those with a scripted call to action. So audiences on YouTube are very loyal to the channels that they are fans of and they will very gladly take the actions that you would like them to do. But oftentimes you've got to be very explicit in asking them to take that action. If you want them to subscribe to your channel you can't simply just provide them a subscribe button and expect them to do it. If you have whoever is the personality of your channel or the main voice of your channel or even a textual call to action on the screen saying, hey, if you like this video be sure to subscribe for more and then use this clickable annotation that will allow them to do that. That will make the annotation infinitely more powerful and more successful in terms of a strategy for getting your audiences to watch more, pairing them with that really important call to action. So when using annotations there's a couple things that I want to call out and those are no fly zones. So it's really important that you avoid the top and the very top because if you embed your video across other platforms then your title will actually drop down in this section which then would not allow you to click that annotation. And in the bottom if you are enabling ads or advertising on your content you are a part of the YouTube Partner Program. Any annotation here will actually conflict with that. The other thing that I want to call out is something that I don't have a slide for today but it's a scalable annotation that you can apply to all of your videos all at once called in-video programming. And in-video programming is really great because it allows you to feature either your channel or one video and it will promote your channel and that video across all of your content library. So you don't have to manually go in and add these annotations to each and every video that you create. So really powerful. Just to recap some of the best practices with regards to annotation, link to more content, link to subscribe, make sure that you avoid the no fly zone. One thing that I didn't talk about is that oftentimes a lot of creators will use annotations throughout the video. And this is not desirable. If you think about your own experience as a YouTube viewer if you come and you discover a video and you click on that video and you start watching it it's not likely that you are going to want to move on and go watch something else 10 seconds into that video. You are going to want to wait until the end when you are ready to move on to more content. So where and when possible try to primarily use annotations at the end of the video to direct that user's session and pair those with calls to action because that really does help their performance. And then finally check out this tool in-video programming available underneath channel settings in your YouTube channel. Really powerful, really cool. And all of the best practices that we talked about in addition to many, many, many, many more are all available at youtube.com slash creator academy. This is the evolution of the resource that my team and I create which is the YouTube creator playbook. The creator academy is great because it has best practices not only for these very tactical things like thumbnails and titles and annotations and playlists but it also has great resources about like how can you make videos that are shareable and that are interactive, things that discuss the actual content of video and how you are storytelling on YouTube as well. We also have lots of great boot camps and prepackaged curriculums that we often send out to the creator academy. So definitely urge you guys to check this out. Recently revamped, really great resource. In the follow-up you guys will also be receiving a link for the YouTube playbook for good which is a YouTube creator playbook specifically for best practices and strategies for nonprofits. And there are lots of awesome examples of nonprofits that are being really successful on YouTube and have great both audience development strategies as well as storytelling and creative strategies. So you guys can expect to see a link to that nonprofit playbook as well. And with that, I will kick it back to you, Becky. Thank you, thank you, thank you Bailey. I learned a lot for our own channels in that presentation. I had no idea about the in-video programming, so that's really great to know. We have a few questions, so I'd like to pause just for a couple of minutes and have you answer a couple that relate to your section in particular and then we'll have more Q&A after our second speaker joins us, Kimberly. So Kelly asks, do you make your thumbnails on paper? When you are creating your video, do you map it out ahead of time, what your thumbnails are going to look like, or do you create them from screen grabs of the video itself? What do you recommend? Definitely depends on the type of content that you are creating. So I would say that a best practice that a lot of really successful YouTube creators have is to when they are creating a video to shoot the video and then to stage like a really nice still image and then take their digital camera and take that really nice visually well-composed still image with the DSLR and then use a tool like Photoshop to enhance that image and make it a little bit more polished. So I would say that the people with the most time and resources to dedicate to a YouTube channel usually do map it out independently as opposed to just grabbing a screen grab from the video and editing that, but definitely bandwidth is different. I would just urge you, whichever method you are using, try to make sure that the image that you are choosing does map back to these best practices that we talked about, clear, in-focus, close-up, and visually compelling. That's great. And for those who are not familiar with YouTube's channel and editing processes when you upload a video, it automatically will create a couple of thumbnails based on things it grabs that YouTube algorithms think are visually stimulating. And so you can always default to those, but your points here make it so clear that it's really ideal if you use the best practices that Bailey is letting us know about today. One other question, and then we'll move on to Kimberly, and then we'll have other questions for Q&A after. So Joyce asks, does the watch time analytic favor a longer time-length video? Or is it as it seems a user's overall watch time tally? So the watch time's favor length? Great question. And this is often when we get, when we start talking about watch time, and it is a little bit tricky. So this is what the slide where I had the, it looks like four video players was intended to communicate is that watch time is not just simply about the amount of time that someone is watching one video. It's about the amount of time that you're keeping them engaged on YouTube overall. So if you have a 20-minute video and someone watches 10 minutes and then leaves, you're actually better off having six 2-minute videos that keep them around the entire duration, and then they've had a 12-minute watch time. But even though we're talking about search and discovery systems and algorithms and all these complex things to optimize for, what I would really say is just do your best to keep people engaged on YouTube. Make content that is the right length of the content. Don't try to over-inflate it just to generate watch time because that it eventually will not be a good strategy for you because likely people will just leave because it's harder to keep it compelling when you just start to stretch it out arbitrarily. So focus on making videos that are the right length for your audience's attention span. And I'd say that you can look in YouTube Analytics at the Audience Retention Report to see just how much of your current videos people are watching, where they're engaged, and where they're leaving and moving on. And use that to inform your editing decisions and your time-length decisions in the future. If you have a 5-minute video that people are really only watching 2 minutes of currently, maybe you think about making a 2-minute video in the future, and then just encouraging them to watch a couple more 2-minute videos after that. That's great sage advice. And I think a lot of your tips, what I like most about them is that they can be used and employed no matter where you're creating videos and sharing them. So making a compelling image for someone to click on can be just as useful if you're sharing it on your own website as it is if you're sharing it on YouTube. So engaging titles, and I like all of these content ideas. And for those of us who are using YouTube, a lot of really terrific tips on optimizing our channels and using all of the benefits that YouTube has to offer in the editor and channel settings. So with that, I want to go ahead and invite our second speaker, Kimberly Bryant from Black Girls Code, who's going to be joining us to talk a little bit about how Black Girls Code has kind of risen above the noise, so to speak, and had their stories heard widely and have created a lot of impact for their communities as a result of getting their stories out there. So a bit of a case study here, but to talk about how they've done it well. So welcome to the line Kimberly. We're really glad to have you. Hi Becky. It's great to be a part of the webinar today. I definitely learned a lot myself just listening to Bailey's presentation and hopefully to share a bit about the story behind Black Girls Code and how we really used that story to drive engagement and to drive, really focus on our organization and the work that we're doing. So thank you for the opportunity to share. So I'm going to start a little bit by giving a background and history of our story with Black Girls Code. We are a nonprofit based organization based here in the Bay Area in San Francisco, California founded in April 2011. Our primary focus is to teach technology workshops to girls from underrepresented communities from ages 7 to 17 and to provide access to role models and mentoring in a culturally sensitive environment. The story making process has really been a part of both our founding story as well as our organizational story from the very beginning. To tell you a little bit about that, I founded Black Girls Code really because as a mom I wanted to find a program that would nurture my daughter who was 10 at the time who had an interest in computer gaming and video gaming design. I really wanted to be a video game tester. And I was trying to encourage her to think a little bit larger, to think about the opportunities to be a creator and not just a consumer of technology. I didn't really find too many organizations that really were girl-focused and girl-centric to kind of nurture that talent. And so from a founded perspective my story became part of Black Girls Code story and learning really that because there wasn't anything there we had to create it. And we've told that story continually as our organization has grown from a pilot class in 2011 of about 10 girls to reaching over 3,000 girls today. And I really do believe one of the things that benefited us as an organization is that we did really infuse storytelling and story making throughout our journey over the past three years because that really has made our community feel bonded to us. The feel that they are also part of our story of success if you will. And we've always used that to our benefit across multiple platforms. So as you'll see in some of the slides that Becky is sharing, we do have a YouTube channel and we populate it quite regularly with impact focus on the work that we're doing in the community. And we also use it to really drive our community to act. So when we do fundraising campaigns or when we have competitions we heavily rely on our YouTube channel and the stories that we're able to share there to drive our community to act in whatever way that we need them to. One of the things that we've really found much success in as we've grown the organization is one particular example that I want to share and dive into a little bit which is called our Summer of Code. We launched our first Summer of Code campaign in 2012, the Summer of 2012 with the very, at that time for us, a lofty goal to reach 500 girls in six different cities. And we wanted to do that only in three months during the summer. Now when we started this campaign we also really felt the need to raise money to in order to meet the goal. So we engaged our community as a part of the plan which included an Indiegogo campaign. It included an ambitious effort to create a BGC documentary series that would really travel with us as we went to these six cities. And we also engaged our community in telling their stories along with us. So if you look on some of our Facebook pages from 2012 and also even in our YouTube channel, if you look in the history there you'll see quite a few videos where we actually had our students or people that were coming to our workshops to share their stories about why the Black Girls Code mission was important to them. And we tapped into every social media outlet that we used. So that included YouTube, that included Facebook, that included Twitter. We used everything, Instagram, every single social media platform that was of access to us. We really used that to tell the story. So as we built out this Indiegogo campaign one of the things that you'll see if you go back and look at that is that we really engaged the audience frequently at different intervals and different methods. One of the things that was most important I think in the success of that very first campaign and even the second campaign that was even more successful for us in 2013 was that we constantly looked at different ways to engage the audience. So in some cases that may have meant as Bailey went over having a more in-depth documentary video which our videos, the longest one is probably about 12 to 18 minutes long but we also have shorter ones, some that were maybe like 6 minutes long, some that were 3 minutes long, and some that were even just a preview video which were of a range between 30 seconds or so to 90 seconds. We really tried to find different links in terms of these stories that we uploaded to YouTube to capture the audience and then either to point them in a different direction or to use that to engage them to do some type of action or activity. Another thing that we did as we told this story is use different mediums. So we didn't only just use the YouTube channel and the videos that we were creating to tell our story. We also did it very visually in terms of using lots of images and lots of pictures. So if you look at any of the different assets that Black Girls Code currently has across the web and in any of our documentation you'll see lots of imagery. And this is imagery. I think the only time we really used stock images is when we started out. But one of the things that we found extremely helpful for us was to continually to make sure that we tell our stories and pictures. So even if our community is not with us when we go to want a workshop in London or if we go to Miami, they can see images of what's happening that day through the pictures that we take and the pictures that we share with our audience to see the work in action and to see the benefit of their support in action. So using that as a medium, we've also done lots of blogging both internally as an organization as well as with engaging our community. Be that volunteers, be that parents, be that interns, be that students that attend our classes and really going to them and asking them to share their stories and the impact that Black Girls Code has had on their lives. So all of those different ways of engaging our audience and engaging our community have really allowed us as a very small nonprofit still today to have a tremendous impact far beyond just the outreaches of our immediate community. So I think one of the key things in the story making process for us has been understanding what our vision is. Our vision as an organization is to reach a million girls of color by the year 2040. And we say that a lot. We tell that to our community a lot. But as we tell this story piece by piece, step by step, we engage them on that journey with us by using these tools. So using the YouTube channel as an option, creating a documentary, creating pictures, reaching out for verbal stories and written stories from our community. And that has really helped us to continue to grow year by year as an organization and to see our impact extend exponentially that many nonprofits are not able to really have it really done as well. And I think that's truly because of our ability to tell these stories that people can really find an attachment to. So that tells you a little bit about some of the things that we've done and really had great success with doing particularly in these two summer code campaigns in 2012 and 2013. I definitely would encourage anyone that's interested to look back at our Indiegogo pages for that information and see some of the stories that we've told. As well as to look at our YouTube channel because you see all types of things there in terms of what we've done from a campaign standpoint. When we won awards, we try to utilize our YouTube channel to have that message get out. But this is a way to really continually keep our community connected to what we're doing as an organization by utilizing stories and painting a picture of where we're going as an organization. So I hope that's helpful. That's really great Kimberly. And I want to just take a second to congratulate you because the impact of your storytelling and the work that you're doing in your communities is evident when we see that just this past week, Google has decided to donate $190,000 to Black Girls Code to help expand their program. So for a very small organization, they really have been able to rise above the fold and get really tremendous recognition that they deserve for the great work that they're doing. So we were very pleased to see that announcement in the run-up of this webinar. So congratulations on that. We would like to switch to Q&A in just a moment, but I want to first just remind people to submit your stories if you have them. Feel free to use the tips that are in this webinar and the prior webinars that we ran on the Storymakers campaign both this year and in prior years. I'll point you to some of those resources right after Q&A, but just a quick reminder of our deadline for submissions. So looking at questions, Kimberly, since you're still on the line with us, I'd like to have one for you first. We have Kelly who's a librarian who's wondering how they could bring a coding program like Black Girls Code to their community because they want to know if they could pull out laptops and allow them to watch the videos and assist where they need to. How could they bring a program like that to their community to share their own stories? Sure. I'm happy to answer that question for Kelly. Black Girls Code, we are a chapter-based organization, so we start pilot projects in many of the new communities where we're looking to expand the program. So we're always looking for program partners to connect with, to really organize a pilot that would launch in a particular city. Current pilots we have are in Miami and Dallas, Texas. So we have a process that we go through to launch a new chapter in the city, and I definitely will welcome anyone that's interested to reach out via our website to our sanity mail just to consider that. But there are also other resources that are there now that people should look into tapping into. One of our partner organizations called Code.org that launched the Hour of Code in 2013 last year has done a tremendous job of pulling together resources online that are really packed with information that you could use right in your library today to get kids interested in coding. But there are lots of free resources similar to that out there. I would look at scratch.edu. I would look at Mozilla for lots of tutorials and also lots of curriculum. There's a variety of information out there that's ready in terms of being able to really pack a lot of information that you could run a mini coding workshop right away in here in your library. But then also feel free to reach out to me as well. Becky- Terrific. Thanks for that. So we also have a question from Claire who asked what kind of human resources went into doing all of the outreach, gathering the stories, editing them, and sharing them on the web. How much of an investment is it for an organization, particularly a small one, to do that? That is a great question. For us as Black Girls Code, we were very, very lucky that one of our earliest employees had a background in marketing and a background in communication. And so in the early days of our organization it was just myself and this one employee who was a communications and marketing outreach resource for Black Girls Code, and we literally did everything. So I will not tell you that it doesn't take a lot of work. It takes quite a bit of work to do that amount of outreach. And I would invest there. I was looking at to do this over again as a startup. I would absolutely hire a good marketing person. That's often a resource that small nonprofits are told not to put energy in and not to put money in. But that is one of the things that definitely helped us to move ahead of lots of the other organizations that are working in this space. I do believe is really having that strong marketing resource and expertise on our team and really building your organization around utilizing social media and social platforms and resources like YouTube from the beginning. Because that is where everyone is now. This is where they spend their time. So utilizing that in your organizational DNA so to speak from the beginning will help you to really get moved through the noise and have your mission heard and really have resource folks in the community that are going to be some of your strongest components. Becky- Terrific. And we can see that the rewards pay off when you get the attention of big donors. And your Indiegogo campaign from last year, I don't know if people noticed but there were almost 1100 people that individually donated to support that campaign that raised more than $100,000. So it clearly seems to work well. We have some other questions. I'm going to throw some resources up on the page. You won't be able to click on them now, but you will get these in the follow-up email. Really quickly before we wrap up, Bailey, if I could have you jump back on for a second, we had a few people ask about what's the best length? How long do people really watch? And if you are looking at a short story, are you looking at 2 minutes, 3 minutes? Are you looking at 15 seconds? Do you have any YouTube info on really what people want to watch lengthwise? Yes, I have what will be the least satisfying answer ever. Sadly, it all depends on your content. These days on YouTube, honestly, some audiences have the stamina for 40 minutes of content or almost traditional TV links or full feature film links on YouTube. And then you have those that still will only watch a 30-second video. So what I would urge you to do is just get in there, check out your YouTube analytics for your channel. It's really powerful data. Honestly, when I talk to people that come from the traditional media industry, and I tell them all the data that is available in YouTube analytics, their jaws sort of drop. Because it's about as much as a TV production company would have if they had a full Nielsen report, full data for their TV shows. That's what you have for each and every video that you create on YouTube. So check out your YouTube analytics. Look at those audience retention reports to really understand if your audience is engaged with the full duration of the content that you're creating. And just use that to inform your content as you go. The one sort of best practice that I recommend for people who haven't ever posted content before and they're just getting started, make a video, send it to someone who is not familiar with the content at all, a friend, a family member, and say, hey, when are you getting bored during this? When do I lose your interest? Are there points that are less exciting than others as opposed to just relying on your own instincts? You sort of get a little bit too invested and it's hard to get that distance. And use that as a good gauge early on and then use the data to make those decisions going forward. Terrific. And with that, I'm going to have to go ahead and wrap us up because we are at the top of the hour. I'd like to invite you to our upcoming webinars. So we have another webinar next week for those of you who are joining us from libraries today specifically for you and how you can tell the stories of the impact of your library and the stories from your community that you serve. After that, Thursday we'll be having a webinar with the CEO of GrantStation who will be sharing tips on how to find support and get grants for small and rural communities. And then we'll be doing a website webinar on how to free yourself from a website that's holding your organization hostage. And then on the 30th we'll be Skyping out at the office with Skype and learning how to use that in a business environment. A quick look at all of the Storymakers events that we've held through the course of this campaign and some that are still coming up. We hope that you'll look in particular at next week's webinar if it applies to you for your library, and also at in-person events that are happening around the world from our net-squared local communities. So those are in-person events where you can learn more about storymaking. So feel free to look there and then keep an eye out for the judging and announcements of the winners of this campaign. But again, we hope that you will take a moment to submit your stories before the campaign closes on the 26th of September. Thank you so much to both Bailey and Kimberly today for sharing their expertise. And thank you to Allie, my co-worker here on the back end for helping manage questions. Lastly, thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor who provides the use of this platform for us to present these webinars to you on a regular basis. We're using ReadyTalk 500 today which is available in TechSoup's catalog. Please take a moment when this screen closes to complete the post-event survey so we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.