 Welcome to Storymakers Roundtable, Creating a Breakout Story. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for about 6 years. And prior to that, I spent 10 years in Washington D.C. working for three small nonprofits where I was regularly the accidental techie. The real presenters of today's event that I'm so excited to have join us are two really prominent experts and leaders in the field of nonprofit storytelling. The first is Michael Hoffman who's the founder and CEO of C3 Communications. They're a leading authority in online video for nonprofits, and they help consult nonprofit leaders on online fundraising, advocacy, and community engagement. They also run the Do-Gooder Nonprofit Video Awards and partner with YouTube to present that annual award program. So he's seen the wide variety of content that nonprofits are creating with their digital stories. Also joining us is Joe Lambert who is celebrating his 31st year as the executive director or as a nonprofit executive director in 2014. And he is the executive director of the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California. And so he has literally written the book on digital storytelling, writing the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, Digital Storytelling, Capturing Lives, Creating Community, and his newest book, Seven Stages, Story and the Human Experience. So we're so glad to have both of them joining us. We'll also have my colleague, Ali Bestikian on the back end. You'll see her chatting out to you and helping answer questions and tweeting. So definitely talk to her if you have questions about the Storymakers competition. And she'll be joining us on the line to share a little bit about the Storymakers competition this year and what TechSoup Storymakers 2014 is all about. Quick look at our agenda. We'll do an introduction of TechSoup. We'll take a couple of polls to help understand where you're at with storytelling because we really want to understand where our audience's needs are and experience levels are. And then we'll talk briefly about Storymakers and then the biggest meat of today's presentation will be in these last couple of bullets, why stories matter to nonprofits, why they are important, and the ingredients, the real recipe for bringing out these breakout stories to your organization. So quickly who is TechSoup? We're a nonprofit 501c3 and we are working towards a day when every nonprofit library, foundation, social benefit organization on the planet has access to the knowledge and resources that they need to operate at their full mission. And so we do that in a variety of ways having been around since 1987 serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations with 11 million software and hardware donations in more than 60 countries. So if you're not familiar with our programs you can find all of these types of things, new software donations, consulting services at TechSoup.org. Now on to learning about you. Take a second and feel free to click on any of these that apply. It's perfectly acceptable to click on more than one if more than one of these options apply to you. But how do you think of yourself as a storyteller? We're asking you to define and self-identify here. Do you not call yourself a storyteller? Are you a total beginner? Have you never created a digital story but maybe you use stories but not digital stories? And when we say digital story we mean video stories, photo stories, stories using maybe mobile media, different types of digital media that are out there. Go ahead and tell us where you're at in the spectrum here. And I'm going to wait a few more seconds so that everybody has a chance to participate. We have a big crowd on the line today. We've already got 300 people joining and I'm sure that number will take up in the next few minutes. So we're really excited to have you all with us. And hopefully you sharing this information with us can help inform a little bit about what our presenters and how they shape their conversation back out to you. So just a couple more seconds and I'm going to close this down. So it looks like around 40% of you have created a few digital stories which is super exciting. We're glad to hear that. And then we've got people who use stories regularly but not digital ones necessarily around 23%. And around a third either say they don't, actually more than that, around half of our audience says that they're either a total beginner, they don't call themselves a storyteller, or they've never created a digital story. So that's really helpful for us. And then we've got a little chunk of prose down at the bottom of that spectrum saying that they've created many digital stories and that they have a deep org culture of storytelling. So that's super exciting. We'd love to hear that. And one other quick poll for you asking, how do you work? How have you worked to collect the stories of the people you serve? So how do you work in your community or in your organization? It could be with your patrons, if you're a library, it could be with your parishioners if you're joining us from a church. Go ahead and let us know. So how are you working to help amplify their stories and collect their stories? And this helps us know again the ways that you are accessing stories, maybe they're not your own stories, maybe they're the stories of the people you work with on a daily basis, if you're a direct service organization. So again, I'm just going to give a few more seconds for everybody to participate in the poll. And again, you can select any of these options on the screen. And we have some people writing in that they do other, that their staff lets them know and their stories available. Some people say that they collect stories through events, blogging, Instagram, tweeting, social media campaigns to solicit stories. Tricia writes that their group uses songwriting for storytelling which is great. It's one of the first ways we've told stories as humans is through music, right? Harvey comments on both a storyteller and a teacher using technology. Rachel comments that they collect stories through storytelling organizing trainings. And they do public narratives. Sarah comments that she works for Public Access TV station. So they encourage people to submit video on whatever they like. It's not often story-based, but they are great. They're a great way to collect stories. Lucy comments that they collect assignments for class. Some people say they work at a university with instructors who assign digital storytelling projects, social media at events, so lots of different ways. This is terrific. I can't read them all off, and I'm sorry you can't see each other's comments, but we can chat the ones that we think are most useful for you back out to the community to share. But just a look at the results. So around 56, 57% interview their clients or we use that as a generic word, your constituents, your patrons, your parishioners, what have you. And around 50% invite their clients to share their own stories. So that's really interesting. So the reason that we're doing this and that we find that stories are so important and that we're running this storytellers' story-makers' campaign to help encourage storytelling is because we do recognize how important it is for organizations that are mission or cause-based to amplify the stories of the communities they serve, not only to help them gain more traction and more support, but to gain more awareness of what's happening in those communities and what their issues are, what their strengths are. And so I want to invite my colleague, Ali Bestikian, who is the Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup, to tell us a little bit about Storymakers 2014 before we get to Michael and Joe's presentations so that we can help you leverage the stories that you're creating and collecting right now. Welcome to the program, Ali. Thanks, Becky. I'm really glad to be here. This is one of the most exciting parts of our annual programming, and I'm really excited to talk to you a little bit about it. Now going on its fifth year and a campaign that I love to be a part of, so Storymakers is really about education and community. At TechSoup, we believe that nonprofits can really change the world through storytelling, but these stories really must stand out and be noticed in order for that to happen. The Storytellers campaign empowers nonprofits, libraries, charities, and social good organizations out there with the tools to tell their stories, get noticed, and ultimately to make an impact. It's a month challenge where we share the experts, say like Michael and Joe, their unique tips and learnings, the latest tools and techniques so that nonprofits can go out there and produce their own digital story, and then ultimately can use that as content regardless if they win in the campaign. So this year, the campaign is from August 26 through September 26 where we will be hosting a series of webinars like this one and interactive events, live tweet chats, all really meant to highlight content and tools to help nonprofits produce a two-minute YouTube video, a short Vine or Instagram video, or a five-photo Flickr slide show for some really great cash prizes. Speaking of cash prizes, this year we have five categories, two grand prize winners in Best Overall and STEM and Youth Stories as well as Super Short Video, Newbie, and Audience Choice Awards which will open up for a period of voting from you, the community, and community storytellers to vote on their favorite stories that come in starting October 1. So come around for that and you don't have to submit a video to vote on your favorite castor vote. And just wanted to give you a snapshot of some of our upcoming events. Submissions open as I mentioned August 26 and will run through September 26. We have a few upcoming webinars. The next one is on August 27 and we will discuss Super Short Videos on Vine and Instagram and more to come. Becky, back to you. Thank you so much for that Allie. That's really great. And we hope you will join us for some of these other upcoming events. In addition to the webinars and tweet chats, there are local events that are happening in cities all around the country and around the world. So when you get this slide deck later on, definitely check out that link to the in-person Net2 locals, NetSquared local events worldwide to see if there are meetups or actual trainings happening in your area as well. So moving us forward now is the time I want to invite our first speaker to the line. And we are doing this as a round table meaning that we will be inviting them to answer a couple of questions back and forth. So we are going to have both Michael and Joe address this question briefly before we get started with some of the meat of their ingredients for this recipe to break out digital stories. So Michael, welcome to the program. We are so glad to have you. What is all this storytelling stuff? And why does it matter? Why does it matter specifically for the social good or social benefit organizations? Great. Well, thank you for having me. And I'm really excited to be here. So storytelling, we are hearing about it all the time, right? There's webinars, but there's conferences, there's sessions, there's books, there's stuff, right? Storytelling everywhere all the time. And I think it's totally warranted and that's because storytelling has power to it. And so when we think about stories like Rapunzel or a little Red Riding Hood that have been able to last in the culture for so long, or even think about something like the Bible. If it was just a list of commandments, it may not have had the staying power as something that has stories. And we're introduced to these stories at a very young age. Stories become part of our lives at a very early time. And it's not just for fun. And so there's more and more research. There's this guy, Michael Gazaniga, which I probably butchered his name, who is a neuroscientist who did some really interesting work. If you have a little bit of extra time, you should just Google him. There's some great synopsis of his research. But he had the opportunity to study people whose brains were, the hemispheres of their brains were severed and didn't communicate with each other. And he was able to do certain kinds of experiments with those people in terms of their understanding of things. And it turns out that stories, he calls it the interpreter, the part of the brain that basically makes sense of the two separate hemispheres of the brain. And the way it makes sense of it is through stories. And that basically our brain requires stories to understand things. And so where this research and where this thinking goes is to the idea that everything we believe to be true, everything that moves us to action in the world is because there's a story in our mind that illustrates that, that represents that for us. And probably not just one story, right? But stories collected together to interpret the world for us. And so when we talk about the storytelling thing, it is central to human behavior and to human life. And it's certainly central to getting people engaged with and active on the things that we care about and that we want people to work on, the issues and the organizations that we work for. So I want to end this piece with just a quote from Marshall Ganz, if you don't know about Marshall Ganz, he is a storyteller who's at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was the communications director for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and took what he learned about getting people active into academia around storytelling. But he talks about it as public narrative and that as a leadership practice. And this is my favorite definition of leadership is really this idea of accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty. But he talks about how narrative is the way that we access moral resources in response to these uncertain world challenges. And so that's where story becomes fundamental to who we are, not only as people and how our brains work, but how we think about our organizations and leadership. And so with that, I'm going to turn it back over for Joe. That's great. Thank you so much for that, Michael. So Joe, I would love for you to answer the same question from your vantage point. What is all this storytelling stuff? And why does it matter? Why does it matter for the social good? I'm getting my mute to work. There you go. For me, that was a great setup, Michael, in a way I think pulling back the perspective on this, the use of storytelling as a kind of core enabling process is really the best place to start. But when we're thinking about how different the world that we're in now is maybe the world of mid-century industrial America or mid-century industrial capitalism around the world, a lot of the idea of understanding was the sharing of data and information. The idea was if you're going to get it right, you're going to break it into little parts and control the little parts by a clear dissection of the information needed to get to somebody else. Story telling, on the other hand, is a kind of bringing back together process, a making whole process. So when we think about story, we're thinking about the things that it does for us in addition to helping, as Marshall Ganz has suggested, in kind of giving us the power to communicate purpose, it also helps with us just working through processes of self-understanding. You know, Roger Schenke, who's a guy working in cognitive sciences, argues we don't tell stories because we need to be understood by others. We tell stories to understand if we're crazy or not, meaning to make sense of the world through explaining our experience to other people. And so a lot of story work starts with how do I understand what happened to me in experience? And how does that changing understanding, that changing level of insight, allow me to communicate something new, something insightful about the way the world works, and particularly useful to the moment I'm in with a group of people I'm with? And related to that obviously is when you hear those kind of stories, it opens up your heart, it opens up your sense of connection to others, and it allows you to persevere through experience. And inevitably doing that builds community. All of us have been at a dinner table where at one moment we're listening to other people talk about very superficial things, and somebody says, like I'll say now, today's the 40th anniversary of the death of my father. And his legacy as an union organizer resides in my body. And thinking about what that means, and my just bringing that piece of intimacy, that piece of information suddenly changes the nature of the connections with all of us in a new way. And then finally it does what we all want to do with our nonprofit. It does provide information. It can say what you do and why you do it. Digital storytelling obviously is a very specific idea. And those of us who come out of theater like myself or traditional storytelling, we don't privilege the digital or other kinds of storytelling mechanisms like the text, et cetera, et cetera. But we know we live in a screen culture. And I'm at the home of an artist named Guillermo Gómez Pena. And he said in the 90s that existential question of the 21st century is TV or not TV, which is the idea that if you don't exist in the screen culture, you sort of don't exist. So we've worked, and obviously Michael has too, helping people try to be part of a screen culture where a lot of information is visual and audio visual. And we need to be effective writers in that. And the process of this obviously is that it gives you these wonderful mechanisms to share. And these short videos that TechSoup is working on as part of the Global Challenge is exactly the way a lot of us are consuming information. On Facebook, on Twitter, we love connecting to the little YouTube video that sort of gives us a really quick overview in both an audio and a visual sense. And these can be used in countless different ways. And with that, I went fast because I want to leave some room at the end. Let's move on. That's terrific. Thank you so much for that, Joe. And so while we have the context set up, we have 350 people on the line with us right now. So we want to make sure everybody's on the same page moving forward as we talk about now the ingredients, the real pieces that make a compelling good story that can help it stand out from all the rest. So I want to mention quickly that we've done this webinar for, or not webinar, we've done this Storymakers' Campaign, Digital Storytelling Campaign for now five years, I think something like that. And so we've done so many events like this that have all of the how-to's and the nuts and bolts, and the logistical things of framing, and lighting, and all of those types of articles and content. And so today what we really wanted to help people do in this first webinar and in the Storymakers' Campaign this year is really to figure out what it is that makes one story sparkle over another because there is so much content out there now. We're bombarded day in and day out with stories and news clips and video clips, and cats on YouTube, and cats on Facebook, and cats everywhere ruling the Internet. So we really want to make sure that you come away from today's event having some key things that you can think about when you're creating your stories that will make it stand out. And so that's where I want to bring Michael back on the line to talk about how you can use Story as the center of your bigger strategy to help your organization, help your cause, help your story stand out. What are those ingredients that can help inspire a breakout story? Great. Thanks. I think obviously there's a lot of different things that can do that, and we don't have, I'm going to spend the next 10 minutes talking about it. So I'm going to just pick a few that I think could really be helpful to cause-oriented storytellers. And so for me the first one is really figuring out who's the hero of your story. And what I would suggest is that if a story's intent is to motivate and empower people to action, whether it's donating or volunteering or clicking or whatever it is or getting up or thinking differently or changing the world, whatever it is you want someone to do, I would say modeling that behavior in the story, having the story about someone like that viewer being empowered is a way to do that. So often the hero of our organizational stories is the organization. The organization did this and the organization did that. And generally that makes for a boring story. And it also often doesn't leave room for empowerment because if the organization is the hero and doing everything and changing the world, then what's my role? What's my role from the outside? And so I want to show you, and so when you start to think that way, you start to think, well how do we make the activist, the volunteer, the donor part of the story? It really starts to open up some new things. So I want to show you an example of that. And this is a video and I'm going to give you, it's only a minute long. And it's a video from Doctors Without Borders. And what's interesting is of course Doctors Without Borders is the most heroic organization I can think of. People who are now fighting the Ebola crisis on the ground doing things that many of us would say, I'm not doing that. That's too dangerous and they're there. And yet they have an awareness of empowerment and figuring out who the real hero is. So let's watch and take a look. This was a video that showed the heroic doctors doing heroic things, but in the end of the day the lights were going off and it took the donor to turn the lights back on. And that was obviously not an advertisement that was made originally for a U.S. audience because they're doing at the post offices or bank draft, which is very common outside of the United States. But as soon as that donor made that donation, the lights went back on. And so we took a situation where it would be very easy to look at that and say, what do I have to do with that? Those guys are just amazing, but I'm over here. I don't have a role to play in that story. And they really made the outcome of the story hinge upon the action of the viewer or who's represented by the viewer in that story. And I think that's really just a tremendously powerful video and a way to think. So thinking about, where are we telling the stories of the people who got together? And really one way to tap into that is the idea of a founding story because every organization was really founded by individuals who empowered themselves because they saw something wrong in the world. So just moving on, I want to come back to Marshall Ganz for a second. So talking about public narrative, I don't want to, you can read this yourself but the first part of this I just want to state is the idea of using public narrative or story to interpret values to others and inspire others to act on those values. And so Marshall Ganz set up a structure of stories that I think is really useful and will be helpful for you in thinking about stories to tell. And it's a three-tiered structure, the story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. And so the way the structure works is that the first story is that personal story. And I think Joe said that really nicely talking about saying about my father and those values and here I am today. So the story of self is really about me or about whoever is telling the story. And the importance of the story of self is to say, why am I here? What have I done? What have I seen? What has happened to me that brings me here talking about this thing? The story of us is a story about community, about people who have come together to do something about that challenge in the world. And the story of now is about why now. And that's often left out I think of stories, but it's important because if you're working on anything, whether it's poverty or international issues or whatever, why is today different than yesterday or a year ago or five years in the future? Why do I as the person hearing your story need to act today? And I need you to tell me that and share that with me because otherwise I won't be spurred to action. And that's often thought of as urgency. So having some urgency in a story that moves people to action. So again, self is about who am I and why am I in front of you telling the story? And that is whoever the story is about. The story of us, how we came together to change the world as a community. People want to be part of community. So that's a powerful thing in the story. And then now, why does today, what's the opportunity or the challenge or the risk or the thing happening in the world that makes us need to act now? So if you recall, this is an old example, but I think still an important one. This is the most viewed social issue nonprofit story in the history of digital stories, I think. It's a video, and if you haven't watched it, you certainly should, called Kony 2012, and it's by a group called Invisible Children. And it came out in 2012, which was two years ago. And it has something like 200 million views and it's 29 minutes long. I mean think about that. We're told over and over again how people only watch short things, but hundreds of millions of people watched this 29 minute video. And what I would suggest to you is that when you watch it, or watch it again, it's a brilliant piece of storytelling. And there's lots of issues with this campaign in terms of their theory of change and other things. But when we're looking at this as the story, the story is incredibly powerful and brilliantly told. And what I would suggest to you is the reason this story resonated so well is because it followed that three-story paradigm, the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now, and they understood who the right hero was. So this was a story of a guy, a white guy from America going to Uganda and seeing something wrong. And then saying to this boy in Uganda, I want to make a promise to you that I'm going to do something about this. So that was two things that I've talked about. One is who's the hero? So the hero here was not the person that they're serving. It was the person taking action, modeling that approach. And then it started with his story of self. This is who I am. This is how I discovered this problem. The second part of the story is the story of us. How did invisible children come to be? How did other people take on this promise I made to this boy? And how did we create this whole movement for change? And it's very well told because they use some devices like showing a Facebook timeline changing over time as a way to tell that story of us. And then the story of now is completely baked in to the concept of this video, Kony 2012. So there's something we needed to do in 2012 that said you needed to watch this video, you needed to download this kit, you needed to do things, you needed to advocate for this issue today in 2012. And so it's a really powerful example of how you can structure a story like this for impact. So if I had more time, we could talk about some other structures and tell you some other ways. One thing I want to point out is on the, first of all, if you have thoughts about this or about other things, you can communicate with me directly, email or Twitter. But also we did something where we looked at nonprofit organizations and how they're using video in particular. And we put that into a report called Intifocus. And that's a useful resource I think in sort of looking at the benchmarks in the state of the art there. And I think maybe we can include that in the email that we'll send out to you, but it's at c3.com slash Intifocus. And so I think you have to focus your storytelling again on your goals and what are you trying to achieve. And then think of those models of stories and look at those examples that will help you get there. So I'm going to pass it over and we can now hear from Joe. That's really great, Michael. Thank you for all of that. And just to recap, some of those ingredients that you identified, I think your point at the end here about identifying your goals first is really, really important. And that's something that people think, oh well, what's our goal? Well, let's just tell a story. But that's not actually a goal. So I think really identifying that goal is super important. I love your tip about identifying the hero of your story. Is it somebody in your community? Is it someone you're serving? Is it somebody who's doing the work? Identifying that hero I think is terrific. And then other ingredients who identified the story of self, the story of us, the story of now. I think those are great tips for people to go back and even just write down on a piece of paper. So who is the hero in the story that we want to create that's going to help us achieve X goal? Where is the story of ourselves in that? Where is the story of all of us together in that? Where is the story of now? I think those are really great ingredients to look to to create a story that really stands out. And we had some people ask some questions and also identify with you raising up the problems that were found in the Kony story. So before we move on to Joe, one person asked, I thought that the Kony story was proven to be false. And I agree that it was a brilliant piece of storytelling, but research into the issue behind Kony himself was questionable. Is that correct or is there more to that story? And do you know the background of that one? I remember the controversy at the time, but I'm certainly not up to speed on it. Yes, the issue there was not that the story was false. The story of Kony and what Kony was doing was absolutely true. The controversy was, one was really around the theory of change of the organization. So just because you tell everyone their theory of change was if more people know about this bad guy then the world will do something about that. And so there was some real criticism I think legitimate criticism of, well, okay, now we all know about this guy but he's still around. And then there was a little bit of a personal scandal. The person in the video had some, you know, had some kind of breakdown and some issues and it became a kind of public thing. So it tainted that a bit. But the story itself is true. There is an organization. They did these things. He did make this promise and this Kony guy was a terrible guy. And the world got to know about it because they told a great story. And so I think we need to separate, you know, again, their sort of overall strategy from the real impact that the story did have. It's very true. And, you know, social good organizations do not corner the market on good storytelling either. Some of the best storytellers are not good people in the world. So we can learn from them as well even if we don't want to emulate their outcomes by any means. So taking us forward to Joe's recipe, let's hear about your ingredients. So what do we use story? How do we use story as a center of our strategy? What are those ingredients that inspire Breakout Story from your vantage point, Joe? You know, what I'm going to do is invert the questions and sort of talk about the model first because, you know, we started the session that this was kind of, how do you make a good story? And the irony is, the piece we just saw by Miniflom Fronter is actually illustrates this little model that in our workshop environments, when we're teaching people who are often very new to just the idea of storytelling or they have the problem that Mark Twain described that I would have written you a short letter but I didn't have the time, right? It is actually hard to do something really tight into a story. So just looking at Medicine Fronter, think about what they did. They brought us into a moment in which an emergency is happening. We don't know the resolution of the emergency. They're not telling us a bunch of context obviously visually in the sense that we knew this was coming from Medicine Fronter. We can build our own context but we don't really know what's going to happen. This is a moment where we're in the story in immediate sense. To me, storytelling is about going to a place in time and feeling what the storyteller feels inside the story. That's why we like film or fiction and other writing that brings us into a scene completely. If we just jump into the scene with our stories leaving what the climax is, meaning the unresolved issue, waiting, and just give us enough context to situate the event, then we'll go into a very long story with this critical scene. Meaning obviously the Medicine Fronter story could be a very long video about the work that's been going on for years in this particular clinic and who's been engaged in the community and who's not engaged in it. But they take us to a decisive moment where the lights go out and they have the lights come back in in the model of the idea of your contribution makes that sort of different. But they told the story as an extended moment and it was precisely the effect of that that made it a powerful story. In many of your stories you can take the kind of context of your work and think about them as where is the moment of change? Where does something go from what it was before to something new? And you can explore that moment and use it to demonstrate the values, the context, the importance of the work that you're doing. And with a lot of stories you really want to get out. You don't really want to have a story that says, and what that meant in the Medicine Fronter, and what that means is send us a check. It's pretty clear. It means send us a check. To me if you've done your story right it only leads to one clear conclusion. I'm going to share a piece in part because the work around adoption rights has been an important part of my story this year. I reconnected after 41 years with a birth daughter of mine. And it's been an extraordinary story. Of course she's a storyteller, filmmaker down in LA who grew up in Mexico, so figure. And we've become really connected in sharing stories. And a lot of nonprofits are working in the space of what's called the adoption triad, the adopting parents, obviously the adoptee, the child, and the birth parents and the possibilities of reunion. And one of our workshops in Denver which we call Snapshot Stories where a single image informs the story. We had someone tell their adoption reunion story. I want to share that now as an example of the foresees in a very easy to make but powerful story that involves one single image, really two, because I will stop it before that. But it's a great way to make an audio visual piece without that much work. So here we go with the video. I'm sitting here staring at these two empty seats in front of me. There's a box of tissues on the coffee table separating my chair from the other two. The landline telephone resting on the desk in the corner looks dated and out of place. Next to the desk I can see a framed map of the United States on the linoleum floor propped up against the wall. I'm staring at these oddly spaced objects who are staring back at me and I begin to feel like I'm one of them. I check my cell phone for the time. It's been forever. It's actually been two minutes. At any moment these seats in front of me will be filled by two people, two faces that I have never seen before. And no matter how hard I have tried, I have not been able to picture in my mind what they might look like. I wonder if I will see me in them. My hair, my eyes, my freckles, my nose that will finally be matched. But my ears won't be able to understand their voices and my broken Korean won't be able to communicate to them all I want to say. It's hard enough to summarize 24 years of life in English. It's been almost a year since I left New York to move to Korea and each day since I've wondered if any of these people I see on the street, in the market, on the bus, are my relatives. I hope they recognize me as their daughter when they walk through the door. The first voice I hear as they enter the room is my mother's. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, she tells me. And although I've only learned a small amount of Korean, I know enough to understand what she's saying. Later on that day we left the adoption agency together to go to a restaurant nearby. My mother and I sit next to each other in the back seat of their car. We smile at each other nervously and I breathe in the silence. She takes my hands and hers and turns me over to trace the lines in my palms with her finger. I'm going to stop the video there. I mean, it basically goes on the credit that this was the payoff photo coming out of her presentation. And again, it's a little more than two minutes, but you can imagine it being piped up to a two-minute format and it would be very useful. So I'm briefly, you know, everybody has been asking in the chat section about links, so we're going to send you a bunch of links. When CDS talks about our work, we talked about it in this kind of spectrum of usefulness from personal growth to education to movement, ability to policy work and research and evaluation. Obviously this is true of storytelling, not just digital storytelling. For those who know the kind of growth of our work over the last decade, a lot of it's grown out of the work of Amy Hill and the program that we have that grew out of domestic violence prevention called Silent Speaks. And really all I want to say about the train of projects, again, Michael and I had more time, we could talk for hours each about the different kinds of projects. But one of the things about digital storytelling processes or community building processes that are participatory stories is that as an old theater producer, I used to think I could produce every show to be successful but I knew that it was about one in ten that was going to actually hit the moment and be a hit. It is still true. When you're trying to get the story just right and you have only one story to use to do that, you're taking some risks and you're going to have to work it very hard to get it right. But if you're collecting lots of stories, and particularly if you can do lots of digital stories as this program that we did with an organization working in public health in Central America, one of those stories will be the one that really changes the story, if you will. And so you're increasing the odds with each of these kinds of projects of having a story that sits just right in the issues as Michael presented of kind of telling from the I story to the we story to the just now, why now story, that you will find that story. These different projects we've done in public health context around big issues of information around HIV-AIDS in the case of our work with the Asian Pacific Island Wellness Center here in San Francisco but on the national and international level, our work with exhale pro-voice around reproductive rights issues and the discussion across the border of perspective on reproductive rights. These claims of projects work because there's multiple voices. And through those kinds of multiple voice projects, you can address sensitive or complicated issues in interesting and effective ways. We also really like the format of calbird.com. I don't know if people are familiar with this particular publication environment on the web for single stories with audio. Sometimes it's more than one picture but often just with a single picture. But for example, we did a national civil rights campaign or in the middle of it right now using this very specific method and it's traveling all over the country now continuing to collect these stories. So these are just a few of the models that we've used and I'll turn it back over to Becky to bring us the questions that are coming up. Terrific. Thank you for that, Joe. I think your story that you shared, the video that you shared I think is really interesting because it has really very simple, very inexpensive production costs. So that's something where the focus of the video was really just one image zooming out from that. So it was really to hear her voice and to hear her story and to hear the powerful experience that she's talking about. And I think that that's something that was made in a workshop so that was a really low end when it comes to the cost investment and production investment that has to be made to create something like that. And imagine if you're doing that with Instagram or Vine and you're using a cell phone and you're really only creating a 10 or 15 second video that it's something that at all levels, whether you're a med-cell and cell frontier where you've got a bigger budget to be able to afford a big company to help you shoot a professional polished film, or if you've got no budget and your cell phone in your pocket and you're trying to create a compelling story that some of these ingredients that have been identified by Michael and Joe today they can be employed in both of those contexts. So it's really just figuring out, so it's identifying, it's using the Four Seas model or it's finding your hero or it's using the story of us, the story of now. So these are just some tools, some methodologies to help you identify really what the heart of your story is and to get to the heart of your story that's going to be compelling for your audience. So I really appreciate you both sharing those different perspectives and ways of getting to that breakout story. And we will share links to these examples and these different organizations that have been highlighted in Joe's deck as well. We'll share links to those in the follow-up email. But I want to go ahead and move us into Q&A since we're not too far from wrapping up today. So Cindy asks, she uses words and pictures to teach. So she's finding it difficult though to share her personal story in the same way to help her organization raise awareness for their cause. So she uses stories to teach, but translating that into something that really helps their organization has been difficult for her. Do either of you want to jump in with some tips on maybe how she can translate her personal story into something that can be compelling for her organization? I mean I'll jump in Michael, you don't mind. One of the ways that we talk to organizations about the relationship between the iStory and the weStory is that the iStory can be a frame. We have a lot of people tell organizational stories where they introduce, it's what Michael suggested about the founder story, they introduce a frame around once upon a time there was this character or once upon a time there was this client that I worked with, that I know, that I'm the author of this experience, and you're building that sense of authentic trust by saying, no, this is my version of this story. And then they switched to telling the story about the client, but it's the framing part that I think allows you then to tell how you helped the way the student was changed or the student's story. I feel very strongly that people appreciate when an author admits where they are in the story. And Michael, you may want to respond as well. No, I think that's terrific advice. And I think the starting point for me would be why do I do this work? What is it about this work that compels me? And just to do a kind of mind map or just write down the emotions that you have in doing that work, the choices you made that got you there to do the work that you do, and through a process of thinking about it that way, I think some will be revealed. And as Joe said, you don't have to necessarily go deep into your own story. You just have to set the frame of who am I to be telling this to you. That's helpful. And to add on to that, we've had a couple of people asking about how do you tell stories for specific causes or for specific actions? So if you're looking for policy change, and maybe you want people to lobby their Congress member to pass AB 26, which is a bill I just made up. If it's something where it's maybe not the hottest sexiest topic out there, or another person asked about how to convey a story about research and accomplishments in evaluation and using these stories as part of a research tool. So maybe they sound kind of dry on the surface. How do you use these tactics and tools and methodologies to make a story that feels meaningful? Well, I think that two things come to mind for me there. One is that the law or the research is really just something that sits on top of human issues and stories, right? So we want to pass a law because people are starving or because something's happening in the world. So we need to get behind that to the human drama that's really impacted by that. So that's one thing I think that's important. And another, I think, again, is back to this idea of empowerment. If you're asking me to help pass a law, show me that that's actually worked at some point before, right? I think that's something I think is not done enough in organizations, which is if the action doesn't really match the impact or the story that you're telling me, then that action won't seem authentic. If you're telling me that there's millions of people with a disease and you ask me to give $10, that's not necessarily empowering. That could make me run away because I think there's no way that the action you're telling me could actually address the issue as you framed it. So thinking about framing the issue in a way that the action feels proportional and appropriate is an important way to think about it. Yeah, I would just add that just quickly to say that the culture of data and of outcome and of show me the statistics is a culture that's an invented story as well as some way. I mean, we all know that statistics can lie and tell stories in the same way that stories can lie and tell stories. So in some ways, we're also learning to have faith in those listening processes that we have in our lives to judge, make judgment about these things. And by having multiplicity in stories, you create more of a balanced perspective. It's one of the things I like about social media is a lot of, I'll let all the stories come out. That's really true. I think that's a good point to make. We also have some questions. We're almost at the top of the hour, so we probably can't get through all of these. But Sandy asks, from you two who are experts in story making and digital story making, what is the best length for a video to be both meaningful and impactful? And I'm sure that answer really depends. But I would love for you guys to give your best opinion on that today. Joe, let's start. I'll just say two minutes has been proven to be our cognitive ability to focus when you read a book, when you watch something. This idea that we always had long attention span, and now we have short, it's actually not right, that actually the two-minute block, I'll listen to you. And if you don't give me a chance to talk, I'm going to begin to think about what I'm thinking about. The fact of the matter is two minutes works in a song. It works in a movie. And it's what TechSoup is trying to do. So I'm going to say two minutes. I'm going to be a little less definitive on that. I think like the Coney video is 29 minutes. We watch three-hour movies now. I think that the way that I think you should think about this is that the relationship between length is the relationship between level of interest coming in. So if somebody has never heard of you, or has no interest in what you're telling, and you're trying to get their interest, shorter is going to be better. And not only that, within the shorter, the first 10 seconds become very important. So we see that a lot on YouTube where if you're not capturing my interest, if you're doing intros or some thing that's not jumping right in your story in the first 10 seconds, you're going to lose me. And at the same time, you know that if you are doing a volunteer training and you say you can't actually do this volunteer work unless you watch this one-hour piece, people will watch the one-hour piece if they want to participate. So depending on their relationship to the subject matter and where they are in that engagement cycle has a lot to do with what works with length. Well that is a great segue. I want to invite anybody who has additional questions to join us in our community forums here at TechSoup.org. We are at the top of the hour so I want to also just make sure that you're aware of upcoming events that we have going on not just around Storymakers but all of our webinar programming. So if you are with a Boys and Girls Club of America, we have an event on Tuesday next week. We have an event on leveraging social media for nonprofits. And then for those of you most interested in tools for digital storytelling, we will have a webinar on the 27th on Storymakers using super short video formats like Vine and Instagram. And so if you want to know about those tools that are already in your pocket on your cell phone or can be very easily or free, join us for that one. And then we are doing a webinar on Giving Tuesday and of your fundraising campaigns and then Storymakers, how to get your story noticed. So the different platforms and tools that are available out there to help get your video out there once you've created it. And then if you're with the library, we'll be talking specifically to you about how to tell your stories. And then we'll have some time talking about how to get grants if you're in rural America. So those are the upcoming events. We want to make sure again that if you are submitting a video or digital story, it can be either a Flickr 5 frame Flickr or 5 photo Flickr submission or it can be a 2-minute video on YouTube or it can be Instagram or Vine super short videos. So definitely check out those resources. We also will be sending you in the follow-up email later today resources to some of our how-to webinars from past years and articles and resources that have the logistical step-by-step process for production and pre-production and editing of videos. I'll leave you with these resources just pointing you to C3 Communications, Center for Digital Storytelling, and our Storymakers campaign. And that last link to Storymakers resources takes you to all of those webinars and resources I just mentioned. And lastly, I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing the use of their platform for today's webinar. We do run these using ReadyTalk 500 which is available in our catalog for organizations to request as well. Please take a moment when you leave this window to complete the post-event survey to help us to continue to improve our webinar programming. We hope you'll join us again and visit us at TechSoup.org slash Storymakers. Thank you all and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.