 been involved in digital engagement activities and organizing for nonprofits, and what the past 12 plus years of that, including social, since social has been something that's developed and really changed every type of digital communication from email to web to other forms of involving folks in our campaigns. And as was said today is Catherine. Welcome Catherine. What's your relationship with social media? Thank you. As the slide says, I do communications for a statewide legal aid funder in Massachusetts, but I've been doing this kind of work for six or seven years, both in public health and legal aid. Awesome. Well, I am excited to talk about all this work we're doing today. As I said, social media has actually been a topic that has long fascinated me in part because I originally was a community organizer and somebody who was really organizing our communities and specifically within the LGBTQ community around social justice work and specifically in education with K through 12 schools. So as social has developed and involved, I've actually found it's incredible way to work with my communities of students and educators and even parents around the mission we're working on. And it's a great way of not just marketing, but also reaching folks and engaging. So I'm looking forward to talking about that today and with you Catherine. We also want to just mention for folks that Idealware is your nonprofit technology resource and this is one of many trainings as well as resources that are available for download both free, discounted, and sometimes at cost. So check it out at idealware.org if you have not visited it before. So what we're going to talk about today are first and foremost where we should all be starting with social media and really any type of campaign or communication marketing program is around our goals. What are we trying to achieve? We'll talk about how we figure that out and how we can help you make some decisions around that. We'll also talk about what social media engagement means because social media like all forms of communicating with our constituents is about much, much more than simply emailing updates on our work or asking them to donate. And we'll talk about practicing engagement and how we can actively, proactively practice engagement to keep our constituents engaged in our work but also primed for the next ask we might have of them. And then finally, we'll talk about some next steps that you can take to get started in revamping or improving your own social media work. So first and foremost, and sorry, we may need a little help from you in reading out some of the comments here, but I'd love to hear from you in the comments about how do you as a user, as a constituent or, excuse me, not a constituent, as a just regular person use social media in your day-to-day lives? So if you can share that in the comments, not necessarily your organization, but how do you as an everyday user on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Pinterest or YouTube? What are you doing? And hopefully we'll get some answers there from Sartre while you're doing that. And while people are kind of typing in answers, like personally, I use it to ask questions of my friends. Like I do two or three questions a week and have a good conversation with them, especially people that are at a distance. And then all of the things that I run at my house, like house parties or other things, it is a great way to run events personally. That's awesome. Thanks for that, Sartre. And what about you, Catherine? How are you using social media personally? Well, I might be the exception to the rule in the sense that I rarely use social media in my personal life, but I would say that I get my news from there quite a bit, mostly from Twitter, these things. Yeah. And actually, I think that's a really good point. Social media usage for the everyday user is changing, and it's changing drastically right now in the last couple of years. And so we are seeing people decrease some of their usage or refraining from like posting and sharing as much, but still getting news. So thanks for that, Catherine. I would definitely say that the perspective within legal services for professionals, especially lawyers, is very common to use it as Jack puts here, reluctantly and sporadically. The usage of average legal services lawyers is very different than the usage of our clients. Our clients often ask questions, legal questions on social media to their friends, where our lawyers would never do that. We've got a comment here from Ashley about sharing life updates, sharing pictures, and we've got one here from Deseret over... That's where they get news from Twitter and kind of motivational stuff on Mondays to kind of move the week forward in the right direction. And then Hannah here has that she recently had a great explanation. It is a way that I can curate my life for friends and family. So it's kind of that newsletter that people send out as a yearly update with holiday cards, but more on an annual or regular basis. These are all so great. And this is all obviously completely true. There are a variety of ways folks are using social media. Individually, some of these are true. Some folks are doing multiple of these things. Personally, I'm posting too many pictures of my dogs, this one being Luca. But we're doing all these things. We're posting updates about our friends and our family. Sometimes a lot of folks are actually talking to brands. A few internet research found that 82% of folks will research or brand on social media before buying or looking into the company further. We're sharing pictures and videos of what's going on in our daily lives, obviously curated when we're marketing ourselves. So especially think of LinkedIn or now YouTube with a bunch of young folks who might want to be influencers. Learning about things and of course, hopefully having some fun. That last one, actually, I like to point out and I wonder if Catherine, if your decision was more recent or if this is from the legal field, if you've never quite used social that much. But we are noticing a trend in social media that folks are resorting now to more private forms of communication on social channels. And so we see more folks locking their Instagram accounts than previously. We still see more folks joining Facebook groups, especially private or invite only Facebook groups. And we see more folks using direct messenger, especially young people, both in Facebook messenger and Instagram messenger, but also utilizing third party apps like WhatsApp and other communications that are direct forms. Catherine, is your change more recent or have you for whatever reason always shied a bit away from social? This is a decision I made about eight or nine years ago. But I would say since I've been working in legal aid, it's really kind of reinforced that for certain people or people in certain professions, they do make that decision. And that's something that with our advocates and supporters who are attorneys, we see that a lot kind of reluctance to engage on personal accounts. So we have actually gotten into more activity on LinkedIn for that exact reason. That's so good to think about, especially for all of us as organizations who may have similar concerns or limitations. If we're trying to reach specific audiences and social is the place where they don't want to engage or they want to read, but not necessarily to converse publicly, then we need to adapt our communications for that and either reach them through the channels that they're going to be most likely to respond to or utilize other channels for specific groups and use the public channels for those we know will engage. So how do we kind of break through all of that social media interaction that's occurring, especially when you have cute pictures of puppies and babies and family events and nights out drinking or having fun? It's a question that has been asked now for the whatever gosh what are we now going on 13 years, 15 years now since social media really took off. But it's a question the answer of which is changing drastically and that as social has evolved so has the what needs to be done to be effective at social. And there's a lot of tricks that you may have heard of over the years of ways that we can get people into engage like asking people to like our post or asking people to retweet it. But even those tricks are changing because as more people adopt those tricks and strategies to get engagement, the more that social networks are clamping down on what types of posts will actually be shown, trying to find that what they call the great content. And so that's ultimately true with all of the things that we're posting on social media is that what's going to be most successful, whether it's a private channel or public channel or Facebook or Instagram, or any other consideration, it's going to be about content that is truly engaging and interesting to your audiences. And so you'll have to think very carefully about what type of content does your audience want from you, and what is the content we want to share to them, and how do we make sure that those overlap as much as possible. So we'll talk a lot about that today. First and foremost, let's talk about goals. So Katherine, I don't know, in fact, this is kind of fun. We get to interview you almost. I don't know your involvement as a communications leader in your organization with setting the strategy for usage of social media and your larger communications plan. I assume you'll start with goals. Can you share a little bit about how you come up with those goals? Sure. So I am the person who is kind of in charge of deciding those goals, although I work very closely with our organization's executive director and we have an advocacy coalition that we also work really closely with. So I think that really what we're, our organization is in a unique condition in the sense that we're a funder primarily. We have this smaller organization that deals with our advocacy on a statewide level, but we don't deliver direct services. And we also don't do fundraising. So in some ways we don't have to deal with some of the challenges related to those kinds of goals on our social media accounts. But because we are really the advocacy voice for legal aid in the state, you know, we, our struggle is increasing engagement with a number of different audiences, attorneys, the public, other supporters of ours in the social service community, things like that. So I think that usually where we're starting from is thinking about how can we get people engaged to take action on our behalf. With the legislature being the primary audience here in Massachusetts, that's we want people to take action contact their legislators. So I think that most of our goals are oriented around that. So that's always kind of where we start and we have some data, you know, about who's sending emails on our behalf and that kind of thing. So we kind of start there and see who's taking action now, who do we want to take action, how can we make that happen? That's awesome. The first thing we pull the next slide here. There we go. So I'm actually happy to hear you say that because I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. And it's also some of the things that we think about where I work. So while I do consulting still, including training like this, I'm also a full-time communications director myself for a national organization called Listen. And we create safe and inclusive K-12 schools for LGBTQ youth. And so what we're often thinking about with our social media strategy is what are our larger goals overall outside of campaigns? And then we think of specific campaign goals that relate to marketing of a specific program or service that we offer. So as an advocacy slash service organization, we do have all those things that we have to also consider including fundraising. But we first and foremost are looking at social media as an opportunity to communicate and engage with our constituents around our programs and services and not market them. So we have to think about what does that engagement look like and what goals do we want to set. So the way we do that and ultimately the way we choose what social media channels or networks we're even going to use is by starting with smart goals. I think we all know these terms by now so I'm not going to necessarily spend too much time on this, but wanting to make sure that our goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. So for GLSEN, the organization I work with, that may be a goal related to increasing or acquiring 10,000 new social media followers on our Facebook channel in the next year. Something that for us would be considered a smart goal and is attainable, very specific, definitely measurable, relevant because our constituents are necessary to get our work done on the local level and timely because it's something we have to continually do to engage new folks in our work. So how do we define that? Here we go. So for you to define your goals I would think about what do you want to achieve with usage of social media. This should be of course connected to a larger communication strategy or a larger plan that you have and goals from our social media should probably be one part of our larger communication strategy that's also going to consider email, web, possibly offline appeals or offline communications and events. So some of the common things that we see that nonprofits are trying to do is they're trying to build their community. So this could be building a community of people around a specific issue in order to do something else like raise awareness or in the future advocate for an issue. This could be about building communities so it's a network of support for one another or could be building a community to educate on specific issues. So this is where we might also have more than one goal. We might want to build our community but to what end, what purpose. Are we trying to provide information and educate folks on an issue, change opinion or gather information from our constituents or might we be trying to promote our services. So offerings that we have whether that be legal support, legal aid, legal advice or some other type of support that our organization may offer from helping people refinance a house to getting their banking and accounting in order to even an organization like ours which might be offering educator trainings or student leadership conferences where youth can attend. And finally that ultimate goal that everybody I think wants to do although maybe not some of y'all if you don't have to fundraise which would be amazing for you. But most nonprofits need to fundraise and most nonprofits are utilizing or wanting to utilize social media for raising funds. And so while this is possible I do want to make clear that social media is not the go to network for raising money. Raising money on social media is still fairly new. It is increasing drastically year by year and it is becoming much more accessible especially with implementation of donations via Facebook and via YouTube and now via other social networks. But unless you have built a community or have a well-known brand it's going to be really hard to sometimes raise those funds. I actually I should say the third exception to that I think because we saw with the immigration debate that recently happened was or if your issue is timely and you can catch that wave. There was a lot of folks donating to an organization they had never heard of and I think 2 million was raised across Facebook for organizations working on immigration based on the issue being being so popular and so well-known the last several months. So if you are wanting to raise funds let's not start there let's make that in addition to your other goals and let's remember like every other form of communication social media is not going to be the free solution that's going to make money pour into your doors. Nor is it going to be the free easy solution that's going to get you a hundred thousand new constituents really easily or enable you to inform everybody and change opinion about every issue or to have like a million people knocking down on your door. That all requires not only good goals but great campaigns and marketing and engagement efforts to ultimately reach those goals. So goals are where we start but we need to build a path towards deeper engagement. So a few quick comments here. I put information about each of the speakers into the chat as there were some questions about that kind of our background. Hannah pointed out that it was 20 million that was raised on Facebook which is incredible. I really strongly agree with what you're saying about building community because that community of people is really what is going to help you long term. Amanda Palmer has a beautiful book on the art of asking and it's really about the way that she built up a community of individuals that participate in her music and has followed her on social media all over the place. Absolutely and thanks for the correction Hannah and also thank you for all those comments and questions. Please keep sharing them as we go throughout and in fact I want to step back for a minute and give you a little background for the request there but while I'm doing that if you could also share in the comments any other goals whether one of these or something more specific that you think would be right for your organization in utilizing social media we'll take a second and gather those and then just to answer that question on some background I apologize I skimmed over the intros because I didn't want to waste time and bore you with us but so I am Chris although I'm a digital engagement expert have been working in this field for nonprofits for over 20 years and have been working with technology and nonprofits for those full 20 years specifically communications and social media for the last 10 before that community organizing a student resource and training development I've worked with over 200 nonprofits around the world after opening my own communications firm and recently returned back to listen where I'm now the communications director I still need training and training and support efforts for about a thousand folks a year on digital engagement network and I've helped develop campaigns from the first ever great apes giving day that's raised over a million dollars for great apes conservation around the world glistens the day of silence that I created or helped create nearly 20 years ago that's involved over half a million students a year and 5,000 schools around the country and none of that would have been possible without social media Catherine did you want to add anything else are you good uh yeah I think I would just say that I work for Massachusetts statewide legal aid funder and we also have a kind of a sub organization that focuses on advocacy for funding for legal aid and that's called the Equal Justice Coalition okay thank you and if anyone has any and we've got a question here on channels this Desiree mentions that they use Facebook Twitter YouTube and even some email marketing along with their website found that YouTube works really well for drawing a continual audience what other outlets do you suggest to draw more of an audience or should she stick with what she's got currently that's a really great question and I you know Catherine I'd love to hear your answer as well I think my first thought is I think it depends on your goal I think we need to be very careful now about not being on social networks just because they exist but because they're going to help us reach our goals ultimately and that means prioritizing and deciding which networks you're going to be on and which ones you're going to utilize in different ways so the way that I typically manage that is I suggest a one two three strategy and that one is that you have three primary social networks that are going to most help you reach your goals that can be less than three but no more you should be able to always know your three primary networks where you're spending the majority of your time and then you have secondary to that some what I could call backup networks there's secondary networks that support your primary but may often have a life of their own so for us we consider youtube a secondary network where we host video that we can embed on our website that we can share across social channels but for which there is a secondary community that we can also build but we don't invest in in the same way as our day-to-day communications on facebook twitter or for us instagram and then the third one there is what I call the the sit and wait and that is that every time you hear of a new social network in the world go register your organization's name because if that blows up in two years uh like it has like we like glisten has seen multiple times unfortunately over the years uh somebody else will take your name often and then it can be a big deal to get it back or to make sure that it's a unified name that's consistent across your social channels um so I just call like we register we sit and we wait to see if that site ever blows up and become something if not at least we have our place at the table anything else there kathrin you might want to add uh well i'd say that's great advice i think the for us one of the primary questions has been what what's the audience we're trying to reach with each different channel and we do have some as you said that are secondary we do have a youtube account where we host video for other kind of other purposes but um as we tried to engage more advocates in our cause we realize we're talking primarily to private attorneys who are looking probably to make who are essentially focused on in some ways making professional connections or in law firms that are interested in good pr uh so we have expanded to linkedin just in the last year or so and we also in the last couple years have created the more a couple more visually oriented campaigns and so we do have a an instagram page now and then that's just new within the last couple years that's great sounds like something we would have suggested as well sorry yeah definitely i would also consider reaching out to some of your users or some of your target audience survey and figure out what they're using different demographics including age geolocation will have different technologies that they use in some areas of the country nobody uses twitter in some areas it's very active same thing is true of some of the geolocation things like swarm or four square so asking your users what they use to connect with them is very helpful absolutely agreed well let's talk about that path to deeper engagement and how we use those channels depending on which ones we select to actually engage our constituents meaningfully in our work so what we really want to be thinking about and what we're talking about here is that it's not enough that people follow our channels and like our occasional posts and that may sound familiar to some of y'all because that is very common it is incredibly common that a nonprofit or even brand pages or accounts on social networks receive a lot of likes but don't often receive a lot of comments or questions or message private message inquiries or click through the forms and actions being asked of them in completion of those actions and it's not enough to put out content that folks are going to be liking because one anybody can do that right but two that's not going to sustain our organization it's not going to connect folks to our work and it's not going to ultimately change the needle on our mission so the thing to think about is what could engagement look like for you and your organization could it be conversations that folks are having on a Facebook thread where people are asking questions and answering each others or were your staff or team or experts are chiming in with their own answers or directing them to resources on your website does engagement for you mean private messages to your social network accounts where folks are asking for support legal advice or even resources or referrals or does engagement for you mean the resharing of your content and adding their own personal opinions and sharing it with their networks so it's more around brand or information awareness one of the ways I actually like to look at this is as a pyramid and like any engagement pyramid remember that you can flip this and it's also a funnel and we're really trying to connect folks with the either the deepest actions that they can take the most meaningful actions both for them and for our organization and we're doing that by first connecting them with our brand so step one in any engagement campaign and all of our work is attracting new followers or acquiring constituents depending on how you want to describe that we're not going to be able to get a hundred people to sign up for our next legal advocacy training or webinar if we don't have a thousand people to invite so we got to start there so thinking through the content on each of these levels about where you can get folks involved I'm going to show you do I have a little pin here I think I have a little pin and see if it works so getting folks involved on attracting followers first and foremost on actually listening and responding to them so this is actually engaging them in our work and this is where we think about how do we keep them connected so you may have seen or heard of through a lot of the research that's out there but it typically takes folks a few times of touch points with our brand before they're going to really recognize us and feel connected to our work the more touch points we have with a constituent the more likely they are to say or feel connected to our organization and the more likely they are to engage in the next thing that we put in front of them and so if we can get new followers and instantly turn them into folks who are listening and responding and starting to engage with our work then we can find the next way to more deeply interact with them whether that's bringing them on to another forum to complete an action to take a webinar or an event to attend or ultimately something deeper and this could be a donation an advocacy ask a volunteer sign up depending on what level of engagement you're looking at and so each of these levels are pretty similar to what we would consider brand awareness which is down here at the bottom all the way up to engagement in the middle and ultimately getting folks to take the action that we want them to take whatever those full goals that deep goal is that we have I think the biggest thing that I said at the beginning that I would just repeat is to remember that the greater value their action is to us also the greater value it will be to them as you know it's much more meaningful for a constituent as far as their relationship to an issue or an organization to have attended an event or volunteered with them then it is to like a Facebook post and then hopefully that's pretty obvious but then if you think about the next levels of what's in between them following you on Facebook and showing up for an event we want to think about what are the ways that they could engage with us and then we want to cultivate that engagement by creating the content that we know is going to make them ask the question or send the email or click the link or watch the video or comment on a post do you all use this kind of model at your organization Catherine? Yeah I think that we do I mean in legal aid one of the things that we find is that people don't actually know what what legal aid is and what it does how it's different from the public defender system so on a very basic level our broadest message is always kind of about what legal aid is so we do any kind of campaign first and foremost as sort of broadening our audience and making clear what it is that we do and then we have kind of built from there and right we're ultimately looking for further engagement and people who will take action on our behalf but I think we view every campaign kind of through the lens of broadening our audience and making sure that the information about legal aid and the programs that we fund is accurate and is reaching more people Terrific yeah I think it's I think you mentioned a great point when you were saying that I was like when we're developing campaigns we often we'll think about each of these levels and we try to think about what's the content we're going to be creating that will acquire new contacts with every new campaign we do that will engage both existing and new contacts in every campaign and ultimately what are those deep actions we want them to take so yeah we're doing all of this at the same time as well I think we're also we definitely flip this into a funnel and use this for our metrics reporting and analysis so we don't just track the number of people who ultimately signed up for a webinar we track everything that got us there from the views to the click-throughs to the registration page to the completions of those registrations so that we can find weak points in our process to focus and strengthen in the next campaign and the one thing that we try to do is we try really hard not to shout at people because shouting people or even talking at people on social media can feel like shouting and it is a turnoff and it is a turnoff for constituents to hear from a brand that is telling them to constantly do things or telling them what they should think all the time what is much more effective is often asking questions and finding those opportunities to provide information in educational ways that people will most openly listen and learn so you can think about instead of shouting finding that real value at every stage through that pyramid from starting at the base I am sorry go ahead I think that leads into a really good question that we had here a second ago which is on engagement and limited resources so we all want to ask questions but if you have got that limited time to respond how do you deal with that how do you make that possible are there chapel bot alternatives or what are the best practices there if you are making engaging content but then you don't really you have very limited staff in being able to respond to that stuff that is a great question you know Katherine I suspect it sounds like you might not have a huge staff there how do you do that well I think that is a really good question I guess I would say two things one is that you do sort of have to think about that as you are planning a campaign and at least kind of budget in some time for it because I think that you know in communications reputation management is such an important thing everything you do is representing your organization so you have to make sure that you are responsive and I think particularly for legal aid programs that deliver direct services that is something they have to spend a lot of time on and be very aware of the other thing I would say is as you do that kind of work and you get a sense of how people are engaging with you and what questions are coming up you can find ways to maybe put those resources in one place so then you can direct if you are getting the same question over and over again you can instead be directing people to your website or a place that doesn't need to be monitored constantly that way you can just save yourself the time of having to respond to similar questions again and again absolutely I agree wholeheartedly I think we do the same thing with campaigns we plan time to actually manage the conversation that we tried to start and so we are also very conscious about when we try to start conversations we don't do it at five o'clock right before we are all about to leave we start them in the morning we also recognize and kind of start to figure what the post life is for any post or any social network and that ranges per social network Twitter is pretty vast and is pretty much dead within three hours or expired archived within three hours Facebook has a more of a 24-hour shelf life and if it does well it could actually have a 48 or a 72-hour shelf life if a lot of people are asking questions or commenting or conversing or sharing I think the other question there that was asked was about like is a chatbot useful and I think first and foremost it depends on where is your engagement happening if it's happening publicly on post then a chatbot is not going to help you that's time management and it's assigning the proper resources to follow up with those conversations and per Catherine's point reputation management is not only crucial but we also need to realize that it's not just the person asking the question that doesn't get a response it's what our lack of a response to a question signifies to the hundreds of other followers who see that we didn't respond and then the other way that we think about messaging and communications or response and engagement is through our private messengers on Facebook and Instagram if you are noticing and you might be that those communications are increasing or if that's your preferred method of engagement for whatever reason legal privacy or whatnot then a chatbot might be an answer chatbots are not free and they're not simple they start free they require a lot of work that said they are incredibly and going to be increasingly incredibly important for responding to a large number of constituents in a short amount of time or resources if you don't have the staff or power to create a chatbox look at Facebook's Messenger platform and as Catherine was saying you can determine those frequently asked questions and you can actually set them up as a drafted replies that you just have to choose the right reply depending on the issue and just hit send so that can also be an easy way of a more automated human response system sorry any other questions we should address in the moment no you've got it okay so just returning to this pyramid again just reminding folks that we're looking for value at each of those areas I don't think we need to linger on this too long but it's really for each of us to think about what the value is of each of our work of the information we're sharing of the opportunities to engage of the services we're offering and the ways people can work with us so just to that point I want you to take a second and if you could in the comments think about what are you offering your social network and I think it's Seth Godin who said this and I'm going to or it could have been based off so I get them all confused and I'm going to totally probably butcher the exact wording of it but it basically was a comment on standing out on social media really it's about brands standing out in the world which is what makes you and your organization unique what service or information or otherwise are you offering that makes you incredibly unique and so I'd love to hear a couple examples in the comments while you're doing that I'll use ourselves as an example and listen we are a national leading education organization creating safe and inclusive schools and specifically we focus on lgbtq issues although of course support and work with bullying harassment discrimination against all marginalized groups in society but what makes us unique is that for 28 years we've been the leading voice on lgbtq issues in education we have the largest amount of experience and the largest body of research in the world on the experiences of lgbtq youth as education experts combined with this history of experience and research we are uniquely qualified as education experts on the experiences of lgbtq youth how about you what are you doing Catherine any thoughts here on what makes your organization unique and what you all provide sure what I would say is as I mentioned earlier our organization is primarily a funder and advocacy voice for legal aid that means that we're able to work on behalf of a number of the programs that we fund I mean those programs you know as the previous question kind of indicated are always limited in terms of resources and staffing they're delivering vital legal services on a daily basis to people who really need it and so sometimes they don't you know have resources to hire communication staff or to to work on campaigns to get the word out about what they're doing so I think that we're able to support those programs we also do a lot of research and other advocacy and we also bring in funding kind of to do statewide programs so I think that I view our work as supporting the daily work of the programs that we fund and that's particularly important for them when they're when their resources are limited that makes total sense to me I think it's you know that reminds me of those resources limited and I think we got a question about that already and I realize every time I'm talking about social media and especially when I'm conversing with somebody like you Catherine and we're talking about the different ways we use social media I start to remember that we're probably overwhelming people so just a reminder that these are all the possible things we could be doing when we share ideas and whatnot we don't expect that you are going to do all of these things it's probably not possible for most of us to lead conversations on posts every single time we post a Facebook or even every day possibly not every week so take what you can and what's most useful from these sessions and leave behind until another day what's either too soon or too much for right now and also consider your priorities and the value that you're bringing to folks because we do have to balance the values and the desires of what we want our constituents to do versus what our constituents want to do with us so my development team really wants Facebook folks to donate a lot of money to us our Facebook followers don't necessarily want to donate a lot of money to us they want to get free resources they want to get advice many times they're students looking for support from one another so we have to think about that and balance that out both in the number of types of communications we send but also in the information we're sharing in the ways we ask we also want to think about not just what you do but how you do it so social media as I said before is not simply a a megaphone to yell at our constituents or even to just send out random updates about what we're doing but frankly that's how most of us are using it that's how a lot of nonprofits use social media today and so we need to think about how do we use it in a way that's accessible to our constituents that is important and informative and meets their needs while also matching ours but it's also going to be in a way that is human because when we're not human online people can tell and people are less likely to communicate with folks that are not human and just to note human does not mean that we have to talk in social slang or emojis or whatnot our brand can still shine through and our brand's personality can still shine through in our social media post and be professional or be a legal aid or support it could also be more personable and social-esque by using emojis and having fun that's more of a brand consideration than it is what we're talking about right here what we're talking about here is are we actually asking those questions are we actually encouraging people to do things in a way that's going to sound like one person talking to another or does it sound like an advertisement that we might have put in the back of a newspaper 10 years ago we also need to go back to that what value are we providing so I'd ask some questions about what each unit values our organization's brought and I think we discussed that pretty well and that value can be in knowledge it can be an access to resources it can be an access to support or information and it could also be a history that you have with the community a relationship that you already have existing so we talked about your goals and how we need to think through our goals and what we're trying to achieve before we actually jump in with social media now of course we're already are in social media so we can start and reevaluate our goals today here at Listen we do this every year at the beginning of every fiscal year which for us is in July so we just did this we think before we go into the back to school season and we reevaluate our communications and our social media strategies and how our campaigns that we develop throughout the year will utilize and support those strategies and we also talked about thinking through what are the considerations for our goals what values can we provide folks or what about what information do we have that is of value to our folks and what our constituents want where are they in on social network what channels do they use what type of information do they want from us and the one other thing I would add before we get into the how to practice engagement proactively or practically is also thinking about utilizing metrics or existing past work to take a temperature check of where our followers are at so I think it was Catherine was actually talking about polling or actually maybe it was you sorry talked about polling our constituents and asking them what social channels there are incredibly effective for sure another way to look at this is to look in your Google analytics and to see where your social media followers are coming from when they visit your website that doesn't necessarily mean that's where your constituents most likely are but that does mean that's where you are most effective of bringing constituents today to your website and that could be impactful for determining or helpful for determining which sites you focus on the other thing you might do is look at benchmark research that exists in the world around specific communities as I think SART was actually talking about there are there is a difference of what social networks people use based on their own identities and backgrounds and even geographic location across the country I would even say one of the biggest ones we've seen especially for Twitter is also time zones there's a huge difference of folks the way people interact based on where they live in this country okay let's dive into this next section here we are going to leave just a quick comment that we have here on what organizations have that they can provide and I think this is across the board very important for legal services organizations we had from Jack here that we have the ability to respond quickly to emerging legal issues and problems that our clients have and encountering them in plain language often demystifying scary issues and process and that plain language part has been one of the biggest successes of Northwest Justice Project's YouTube channel we try to take things like juvenile record sealing or dealing getting our security deposit back or foreclosure and make that as simple as possible the law is really designed to mystify individuals and we have that power in legal services to demystify it and empower people I so appreciate that especially as somebody who's often trying to think of how to share really complex information and issues in concise and accessible ways not only is that true for just the need to do that to reach our constituents it's even I think it's amplified by mobile social and the way that we interact with digital today so just to that point Pew Internet Research is actually found in a study they did on Internet user behavior that you have about five seconds of visiting a web page to keep a user there the user will click a link view a web page and within five seconds they will determine whether or not to take the action or read the web page when watching a video on social media you have three seconds to grab their attention they will decide within the first three seconds whether or not they're gonna watch the video or not based on what information was given to them in those first three seconds and the worst one of all probably especially for y'all as legal folks is that the majority of users read less than 80 less than 80% of words on any given page or post we skim we all read fast and we skim content and we make deductions or deduce the information that's being provided to us based on the way that we read things and there are actually tricks that you can do in the way that you present information on a web page and email and even in social media that will make information more accessible and in addition to being concise it's also breaking it up into multiple paragraphs if it's long so that it's easier to read you'll see that commonly on LinkedIn with one sentence or two sentences max per line so thinking through all of that great commentary I appreciate that Sark and I just drop into the chat a link to usability.gov's site for writing for the web it just re-emphasizes some of those points and talks about how to make things much easier for people to read online that's terrific I actually don't think I've seen that I think I'll share that with my team I appreciate that so let's talk about each of those steps that we're trying to do and engaging our constituents and how we might do that better so number one attracting followers what can we offer folks that's exciting and there's two things to think about here there's both how do we attract new followers on social and there's also to think about what the algorithms of social mean for our new followers and particularly I'm talking about Facebook here a channel I think most of us probably use but Facebook has one of the most stringent algorithms that determines what content others will see and so Facebook page might have a thousand followers but every time you post only two to five percent of your followers will see your post and who those two to five percent of your followers will be and those are your existing followers not even others but determining who what that two to five percent will be uses a Facebook algorithm that takes into consideration the recency of the last time they engaged with you the type of content that they're talking about on their page and what you're talking about on your page so if you're out there talking about a specific issue and I talk about a specific issue and you're following my brand you're more likely to see my post if you've recently talked about the same topic to a bunch of other criteria kindliness when did you post it you're going to see a post from today more likely than a post from last week all these things matter but when it comes to new followers is that new followers are much much much more likely to see your post than anybody else who follows you because the recency of them following your page makes them a key target to see your additional posts the more posts we create where that follower does not comment like click share watch or engage the more post of ours that they don't engage with the less likely they are to see future posts so thinking about your post we're not only want to attract new followers but we also want to keep those we just got engaged and keep them hungry for more oops I lost our slides one second while we're doing that Catherine do you want to answer that question how you're while I'm opening this back up of how you attract new followers to your pages sure well I think for us one of the things we're always considering is kind of our annual calendar we run a budget campaign that kind of starts to pick up speed in November and really runs through the time that the state budget gets signed in July so I think that we're often thinking about why we're engaging people for what purpose as I mentioned earlier one of our primary constituencies is attorneys private attorneys so we try in the past have tried and had some stuff appealing to as I said a law firm's desire to get you know positive PR or attention for the pro bono work they do and the natural competitiveness of law firms so for example we have an annual lobby day and we have law firm teams from you know 30 or so of the of Boston Florida law firms and each team has a captain and for many years what we've done is we hire a photographer who takes photos of each firm's team and then you know we share those on social media they really engage with those quite a bit because they're demonstrating just how many people from their firm are taking time on another day to support good causes and along with that we also do a we call it I walk for justice campaign where people can share this little plaque where they write why they're participating in the lobby day and the first couple years that we did that it was something that we had to put a lot of work into getting kind of VIP to do photos as well as having our staffers and different volunteers doing it but in the past couple years the law firms have really taken that on and it's become a thing that they do really without any encouragement from us so I think that we're always thinking about what motivates people and why they would want to be involved in our work and so I think that that's and that does vary throughout the year so perfect yeah we have a bunch of ideas up here to read through I think we also we implement and utilize a lot of these tactics from I think the ones that I found the most useful for us is the cross referencing of communications from one channel to the next so we will often we'll do that Facebook album of photos that you were talking about there Katherine and we likewise find that photos are the most one of the most engaging things we can share we'll also send out those post event photos via email to folks but we'll link through to the Facebook group so or Facebook album excuse me so we're sharing the Facebook photos and also reminding folks that we're on Facebook where they can follow us or tag themselves both having the effect of their followers also seeing that activity and potentially reading reaching even more people and I think we all know the friend effect if you are seeing information about an organization that your friends are connected to you are much more likely to learn or engage with that organization than an organization that contacted you out of the blue for which you have no relationship to we have also found that it's the really offline ways that we engage people and social is one of the biggest drivers for us in engaging in getting new followers online so we do a lot of events trainings conferences and speaking opportunities through our national network and so we ensure that every time we're doing anything that we're also promoting the various ways folks can engage with us or follow our work and social is always one of those ways and sometimes that means offline incentives so asking people through a campaign or even an offline activation to share something on social utilizing a campaign or organizational hashtag or even tagging our accounts and just by involving them will often get followers from that and of course they're promoting us so their followers will often see that and also follow us so some examples of that in action include some of these organizations here really thinking about attracting followers here we're in that first level or really the foundation blocks to the growth of the pyramid that we're trying to engage folks across can be as simple as our Harvard Extension School actually talking about their new Facebook page it's explicitly for the Extension undergrad program to Arcus Foundation so this is actually partners supporting each other and so this is actually a foundation that was supporting the work of the Wildlife Conservation Fund and the Whitley Fund for Nature and utilizing shared content so this could be asking our partners to share our resources to tag us or even cross-sharing programmatic information or resources where it makes sense and supporting one another in gaining new followers it could also be cross-promoting social channels so we'll often post to Instagram and on occasion when we know that photo is really really amazing we'll share from Instagram to our Facebook page not only engage and we do that explicitly not like just reposting it on Facebook but sharing it from Instagram to Facebook one that's a setting in your Instagram account from your mobile devices that's easy to set up and do that cross-sharing but it also promotes your Instagram account through your Facebook followers where you probably or might have a larger list of followers so in this last example with raising special kids they use a lot of Pinterest boards in which they will cross-promote on their Facebook and Twitter accounts likewise on our website all three of these are screen shots from organizations websites and there's a variety of ways of doing this from putting it in the footer or the sidebar or the header but how do we connect people from our website to our social media channels where they can find more possibly current or engaging content or find a community of people who believe like them and that they can talk to so any other ideas as we start to move on here about how you could attract additional followers or ways that you found successful today in attracting followers to your pages we've got all your comments on that one is that we've definitely this is from Hannah that we've definitely seen that animation with regards to videos has been very successful in legal services in particular Northwest Justice Project has also done a lot there but she asks a follow-up question here which is do you see success with regards to boosting posts or paying for ads with regards to things like Facebook or Twitter I love that that is such a good question ads and boosted posts are sometimes questions we don't always get in these sessions yes yes and maybe so there is a benefit of using boosted post and advertising so boosted posts can be used to take an existing post and boost the number of people who will see that post that defaults to your followers so basically you're saying okay Facebook I know you're only going to show this post to two percent of my followers but it's such a great post I want you to show it to more so I'm going to pay you 40 bucks now you'll show it to another three percent and they'll give you those estimates when you go to fill it out they will choose additional followers based on the same algorithms they already used to determine who's most likely to care about the content the topic recent see and so forth but it can help more followers see it the problem with boosted posts is when you do it as the way to be seen so you should be boosting posts that are already successful that are already great content not boosting posts because it's not being seen and you want people to see it or engage with it so because of that we advise folks not to boost posts within the first 20 hours 24 hours so give it a day if it does well on its own it's potentially worth boosting and that's also while you'll see Facebook sometimes will give you those messages that this post perform better than 95 percent of your other posts boost it and that's because Facebook doesn't want you to pay them to show bad content they want your best content to be shown and they determine that based on the number of ways people engage with that content advertising can be really great for finding new followers so long as you're specific for who those new followers are so remember when you're thinking about your audiences every one is not an audience audiences should be very well defined and if you're paying money for new followers you want to make sure that they're they're really well defined to be your most engaging constituents for instance I'm assuming most of us are US based organizations if so we don't want followers from the UK so don't pay for that right? okay so if there's other ideas people have feel free to share them in the comments and we've got a few more here kind of mentions that the ATJ commission in Texas does like an ATJ genes day that has members of the Supreme Court posing in genes and that those get a lot of hits like shares there's also cross posting between um different social media channels has definitely worked for Desiree here let's see I've gotten one or two but I'm still reading through them now so no problem those are great in a minute actually I loved that first comment and I forgot who said that was from but um I've actually often found that it's the it's often things I wouldn't necessarily have thought of that end up being really great content and just to give you some random examples and and you can take and consider how you might change this to meet your needs but um we did a behind the scenes post at a summit I was doing and I went in the day of and we were just setting up and the auditorium was empty and the set was being built on stage and I took a picture from the the stage view of the set being built and the audience being empty and said something like in a few hours this place will be filled with a thousand students, educators and parents working to blah blah blah and I think that got retweeted a hundred times like people there was nobody even in it and people loved it because it teased what was to come um and likewise I've done videos with staff internally where we'll go around and I'll plot out I'll say okay everyone we're gonna all answer this question like who's an educator who made a difference in your life think of their name and then I'll go around and I'll take short five second video snippets of each of them on my phone saying answering the question and then I or somebody else will go on Instagram stories or now Facebook stories and we'll do we'll ask the question in the first video and then we'll upload each of those snippet videos as the follow-up answers and we find those types of things are incredibly incredibly engaging and I think it's because like the examples you shared earlier they're human they're us talking to each other as if we're humans and people respond well to that so there's another comment here that they tend to do best when they have a coordinated effort with other pages and other constituents that getting a base of individuals to share something early on and opt into it helps them a lot that makes sense if you can getting celebrities or talent often help too when they reshare your content well let's move along here to the next section so we talked about followers the next level of that engagement pyramid is around listening and responding so I'm actually learning and listening to from what people have to say and share and responding in ways that makes sense so this can be actually listening to something like a tweet where somebody posted and tagged us and we're simply responding and engaging making sure that that person knows how awesome they are it could also be actually finding those who aren't tagging you who are just talking about your name or talking about you by name or talking about you by issue and engaging with those so we often will find educators sharing various LGBTQ inclusive lesson plans and we will work to amplify those where appropriate and find that those can be incredibly powerful for us because it's our community speaking likewise Arcus Foundation example here with a great moment captured by one of their grantees the great apes survival partnership or grasp another way we can see here down below asking a question when somebody comments so I do not think this is realistic for all of us it depends on our commenting abilities and the level of staffing but I do have a like a wish list kind of policy around commenting that my staff uses here and that is that we try to respond to any meaningful comment and we try to always respond to at least three comments per post and the way that we do that is way and why we do that is for a couple of reasons and in a couple of ways first and foremost is that the more engagement a post gets likes clicks shares watches and so forth the more likely people are to see it both the people who engaged with it the people who their friends who could have seen that engagement and additional followers because that post is being engaged with more Facebook is going to show it to more people so if we can keep that engagement going particularly within the first 24 hours we know that Facebook will show that the more people will have overall more views and hopefully overall more engagement so by responding to people's comments and questions we're actually part of those numbers that are increasing the engagement on our posts the other reason we do it is as you may have seen on Facebook is that the top comments will show on Facebook when viewers are looking at something that has a lot of comments and so by commenting on the comments that we want to most be seen we ensure that those are top of the list when new people come and look at that post and so the first thing new people are going to see is us engaging with our constituents answering and asking questions and for a lot of us we don't have questions being asked or answered from us so we'll often start the conversation and we may not always get a reply and that's okay but it enables us to start those conversations so folks know we're listening they know we're watching and that we're not just yelling at them other ways we can listen respond some examples here everything from utilizing photos that people have sent in or shared with you with their permission of course sharing across social channels to actually asking folks specific questions or an action to do so great apes conservation work much to my frankly dismay we found that birthdays of apes were something that people really really enjoyed they loved saying happy birthday to apes so we often with our different organizations would actually post pictures and share updates around birthdays and as you can see here with center for great apes 400 and something shares there is not too bad not too shabby so thinking about this and kathrin if I can turn to you for your thoughts and how you're actually listening and responding to folks while others are sharing in the comments we'd love to hear from y'all as well any questions y'all have at this point or how else you today are finding successful ways of listening and sharing and responding to folks sure well I think you know I agree with everything you said I think and one thing that you brought up earlier was how important it is that you know if you get a comment on your social media account or a question not only is that person interested in getting a response but other people can see that kind of interaction happen and so you're you're demonstrating to people that you know if they later have a question or a comment in the future it'll give them more confidence that there's a real person there behind the account who will answer their question and kind of make them feel heard I think that's really important yep and I think just generally speaking you know we get comments in all kinds of ways sometimes I'll get emails about our website or stuff like that so for some of the things that aren't that can be edited or updated I think that it's really important to me always to make sure that if someone gives a feedback on an email for example we send out five or six emails throughout the course of our budget campaign if we have an issue with one of them I really make an effort to correct it so the next time it gets sent out you know that issue might be fixed or it incorporates something that someone else has made a comment on obviously can't do can't please all the people all the time so we're not going to always be able to make those changes but I think you know people are sincere and they write in to us with good questions and good advice we really make every effort to accommodate them and I think that the people who take the time to contact you are the ones who care an awful lot and so I think that's the those are the supporters that you really need to kind of engage with because I think you know and I've heard stories like this just talking with friends of mine about for example I was an AmeriCorps member once and and a friend and I had both discussed how we had contacted the AmeriCorps alum network and gotten back a personal email from their their executive director when we had kind of sent in some negative feedback so I think that we both appreciated like hey this guy even though he was getting criticized wrote us both back you know to say to explain what had happened and I think that for that reason you know I'm still a supporter of that network and I think that that personal touch really makes a difference I wholeheartedly agree yeah I think you've hit on what is my favorite point which is that social media is about building relationships and talking with people and not at people I see too many YouTube channels and too many Facebook posts that look like something that would have come off of PBS from the 70s and they don't encourage that interaction in that back and forth people want to connect with you absolutely well I think that's a great way to move us on to how do we actually better connect and encourage to those interactions with every communication that we do and so there's a bunch of ways we can do that from some of the examples that are provided here I think one of the ways that I have found personally is becoming has always been effective but I think is I'm seeing an increase in the effectiveness is this story sharing storytelling and utilizing stories to either convey that information to share knowledge or to even give examples of support or services that are available to folks other ways of doing that besides first person story sharing can also be about highlighting folks in our community or work in our community by sharing their stories of course with permission there's other ways that we can make connections with folks with social media by using specific social channels like groups or hashtags there's also things like Twitter chats and now Facebook live events and other ways where we can create actual social events that will gather people around a specific issue at a specific time or at a place and involved in that work so three examples here one on the right are and I am anti violence campaign done with the anti violence project where we created of course some fun signage but we actually utilized our hashtag in in real life piece in the sign so again engaging folks in the digital experience offline and we found that we did this in particular because we found that every year our photo booth folks weren't using our hashtags or they weren't tagging our account when they were sharing their photos and so we really wanted to create both a hashtag that was going to be kind of fun and engaging but also one that they couldn't forget and they couldn't forget it when it was so easy to remember and when it was in their picture and so that one certainly started to work on that first night there or the New York public library actually put photo booths in the libraries and encourage people to take photos with characters that would randomly show up each week from different books and loved novels or tech soups example of a Twitter chat way of gathering people around a specific date and time around a specific conversation some other interactions that are seen here are up in the top we actually have originally a photo but also some videos that were around the Portland stage community company's work and showing kind of the behind the scenes of how things had worked so educating people beyond just promoting an upcoming show but actually showing them what went into a show or the Monterey Bay aquarium having a little fun they often do these name a quote or provide a quote for what's happening in this photo or the my 2024 campaign a campaign that was developed in 2014 asking LGBTQ folks about where they saw themselves in 10 years really was actually a pretty engaging campaign that involved folks both in conversation on social media but also in the my 2024 website other examples are the Q&A so there's actually some of these screenshots were captured over the course of the last couple years we've kind of captured some of the best examples we've seen but there's also some new functionality in different social networks in which you can do this in multiple ways you can do an open Q&A like the coolest place I would see eliminated stand is blank you can also do polls now both on Facebook and on Twitter with Instagram stories you can do both polls in the story or a Q&A and we've seen really incredible and increasingly creative uses of these to both reshare other people's answers or for us to provide resources or answer questions folks ask of us and so I think about how you could use hashtags your Facebook channels or the poll technology in any of these to engage your audiences more Catherine or Sar any comments or additions you would add to that section about ways that you've seen successfully engaging folks more deeply well one thing that we've done more recently in a campaign I think legal aid programs do a great job generally of sharing their success stories as it relates to victories one on behalf of clients but one thing we started doing the last couple years is to start sharing stories of our supporters legal aid attorneys as well as private attorneys and others who believe in legal aid and are dedicated to the cause and I think that we started profiling them in the same way that we've talked about clients in the past and those personal stories we've found to be really popular I think again there's the sort of professional pride that people are taking in that kind of thing but also as we've had attorneys and even one kind of non-traditional legal aid client who a person who'd been helped with his non-profit incorporation paperwork she had those stories on from our Facebook page and we see a lot of kind of people's family members and friends commenting about how proud they are of this person who does this good work and that kind of thing so that was that was an angle that we hadn't really considered because it would be building our network through friends and family of our supporters and I can paste a link to that campaign in the chat please do yeah I actually really love that how you thought about thinking about like not just the normal speakers but who has a different angle to our work whose story is equally valuable and important that's great I think that anytime you can get your audience involved in choosing your future content if you ask about a legal question that you would like to see some resources for or the topic for an upcoming video that individual person who has put that forward becomes a super fan for you it's going to share that it's going to be bought into your organization it just creates this culture of sharing where they feel really appreciated absolutely you know as a org working on inclusive schools we'll often ask a bunch of questions like what a teacher who made a difference in your life or even a book an LGBTQ inclusive book you wish was in your school's library and we find that those crowd sourcing conversations are really we get not only a great conversation but we get valuable information back so definitely well let's jump into the last section here I know we're at about 11 minutes left and I want to leave a little time at the end for Q&A so I'm going to rush through our end here but this is the one that I think is the one that we all do a lot of and I often find that as organizations we do a lot of the asks the donate money take this action sign up to our newsletter and we do a lot of the read this article here's a funny post here's something engaging that it's the things we just were talking about the ways that we interact and constantly engage and cultivate our community that are often the hardest so these final actions we're asking people to take to attend events register for a class volunteer get involved in competitions those deep touch points as we call them will be much better served when we've engaged constituents along the way and we've communicated and involved them in conversation then if we just ask these outright so we can do some of these some examples here can be asking people to welcome our new executive director so Beverly Tilary took over as the executive directory of the anti-violence project we did a kind of a welcome letter and asked folks to share with her we actually just did that recently with a major donor a celebrity who donated some money to us we asked folks to to send messages of back to that celebrity telling them how meaningful their donation was to our work and found it was a really easy way to involve folks in really deep actions that were also much more closely connected with what they wanted to do this could also be something as doing a poll asking people to vote on a shirt you're coming up with or as start with sharing even actually as taking a survey or telling us what resources are needed we can use graphics and links to engage people into other actions they can take off social media so this could be an advocacy action if your organization does that or fundraising if you all do that or event attending or volunteering so it's getting people connected off social and back in this channels where we can actually engage with them I think the big thing I would look at here as we see in the different examples is how are you using visual graphics or video elements things that we know work really well on social and we know people love to see how do we use those to support our actions so we're not just talking and our text is being bypassed as an uninteresting post so I'm actually going to jump into the end here and wrap us up so we can save a few minutes for questions what are you going to do with all this information and I think that's the first thing we need to think about it's a as I said earlier you don't need to do everything you don't need to be on every social network I would take a little audit of where you are now today with your social media usage and how it integrates with your campaigns and supports your overall communication strategy and I think about how you can develop further or future content based on the pyramid where you're reaching people who are new and you're attracting new followers where you're listening to folks who are asking questions of you or wanting certain things of you and you're starting to respond and engage the constituents in a meaningful way where you're interacting more deeply by having conversation points or touch points around specific topics or opening up lines of communication to talk to you and where we're ultimately asking them to take actions that they've already been primed for and that are not going to be out of the blue or jarring because they've built up a level of experience in relationship with us that they're ready to take that action. I think it's also thinking as you go through this I was thinking about this when Catherine was talking that this can all seem overwhelming I think for a lot of folks especially when we're new to this or when it's more than we're doing today and so while we do our day to day social a lot of that may be around specific programs or campaigns or events that are coming up but sometimes either those things repeat year to year or maybe season to season and other times it's something that's more evergreen of a resource or service that you're offering and promoting and especially for those evergreen ones but even for the campaigns that are annual or seasonal how do we document what we're doing in such a way that we can easily edit, change and update and reuse stuff we've used from the past so we're not starting from scratch every time. Another way of thinking about this is how do we develop a calendar to outline these communications so that we're thinking through our content strategically. This can be as simple as just drafting something like this where we're just saying okay every morning for one hour I'm going to check social media and I'm going to respond to people's questions and I'm going to comment and like and send little hearts out to the ones that were amazing. Every Monday I'm going to share a powerful image and every Tuesday I'm going to ask a question so it doesn't mean that we have to actually write all the questions out yet but we can draft kind of the content model we want to employ in our weekly communications. It could mean that we actually draft out the specific communications we're sharing day to day and that's largely going to depend on your organization and the resources available to you. You do want to collaborate where you can to avoid duplication so we can create a forum and ask questions and get best practices from others and so we actually do have a social media policy workbook forum that's available on Facebook through Idealware where you can actually ask questions from others or talk to others about some of the policies that you might be implementing to support your work and this workbook Idealware social media workbook is available for you for free and so there's a link that will be emailed out to y'all Catherine I'm not sure if you have the link available or sorry and you can post it in the comments but if not we'll definitely get it out to folks it's available on Idealware's website as well and this will help you think through the very things we just talked about today and figure out a plan for implementation for you as we wrap up in the last five minutes here and start to answer some questions is define for yourself what is the one thing you're going to do next is it download this workbook and start to fill it out is it to meet with an executive or a leader at your organization or a partner at your organization to collaborate about how you can change your social is it to learn more about how you're doing something today so you can make a better decision about what you can do tomorrow with all that I see start has shared out the workbook via the chat thank you for that start and let's open this up floor up to questions and see what folks might have to ask that we haven't answered so that that plan has a good outline for somebody that's got a few hours a day if I if I'm a smaller Oregon I'm going to start with just giving somebody an hour a day to work on what two tasks would you really prioritize for them ooh that's a good question Catherine I'm putting you on the spot you want to answer that before I do sorry could you just repeat the question real quick if if an org has one staff member at one hour a day what kind of two tasks would you kind of prioritize for them to work on so they're very low budget they know they should be doing this they want to give it a try where should they be putting that time to start well they make the case for why they need a communication director right that's a great question I think going back to your earlier point it is the most important things inside what you want to accomplish I mean I think that if you could so I mean our perspective that a statewide organization is going to be different from a local organization who's delivering direct services so I can't say exactly but I think the the most important thing would be able to demonstrate to like you said demonstrate to leadership that there's value in this and that it would be worth investing more time in it so you know if you have or hosting an event whether it's a training or some sort of fundraiser and you're able to demonstrate at some point that you're able to attract more more attendees through social media or if maybe if you're delivering direct services and you want to show that people are hearing about things that you're doing or your services or something through social media something where you can really show that your message is getting across and that could actually be as small as you know local news coverage of a success story for your program I mean if you can say that on Facebook your reach for that was you know 500 people or something like that I think that that's really vital but you know for us we have operate a number of social media channels now but that's something that's been developed over a lot of years and I think that first knowing knowing your audience and knowing your if for example you're trying to engage people through more personal connections and maybe Facebook is the place to start but I would say you know start with one channel and really invest in that and like a certain type of content whether it's news articles or success stories or you know event info and kind of focus on that until you really build up your audience a little bit that's great I think the only thing I was actually trying to think of this of what I would answer I think deciding like only to do two things is very difficult for me I don't think it's about how many things you do I think it's about the level of work and investment in each of the things you do so we can create an entire plan or strategic plan for our social media communications or we can start simple and just outline the things that we need today to keep going until we can create the plan so I think those first things that you we need to be everyone should be doing even if it's a small scale is defined today what's the purpose of your use for social media what's your goal and define today who's your audience if you're not sure go to Facebook insights which are free analytics on your Facebook page look at who your followers are and then the second tab that says look who engages with your content you'll get really clear demographics geographic location gender and age are in both who follows your page and who engages with your content most and those if you can't go further and deeper to change your followers today I think meeting their needs right now is the most important the third one there I think is just a requirement even if you can only do a couple stats it's measuring your performance it's measuring your KPIs for key performance indicators that could be the people who the number of people who see your content so views or impressions that could be the number of people who follow your content could be considered reach and these are technical terms impressions and reach or that could be the people who engage in your content which would be determined by your engagement rate which is the percentage of times the number of times people engaged with your content like click share view whatever divided by the number of followers or impressions depending on the social network your engagement rate usually hovers between one and three percent and you'll want to just make sure that that you want to get that engagement rate as high as you can the higher your engagement rate the better the content any other questions there sir another one over how do you deal with negative comments or or trolls when you start to put something out there and then you get somebody who's really just causing trouble I can answer that one because we get it every day we are a LGBTQ equality organization and as you might imagine we get a lot of hate we get folks who just troll us just to get in a fight just to fight and we get people who really hate us and who tell us as much we also get people who just are misinformed ignorant to certain issues who we want who may say things in ways that are incredibly offensive but who aren't actually trying to troll us and so we have a true engagement practice we kind of use what I call green yellow red light so green light are the absolute best comments those are the ones we reply to the ones we like so we engage with that constituent directly yellow means that it's okay it's not worth our reply or even our like sometimes but it's there whatever and then red means there's a problem and red means we need to handle it we handle red in multiple ways it can be trying to correct misinformation and inform somebody of something or connecting people to resources to help them better educate themselves on an issue and sometimes politely starting a conversation or giving them information that they may not already have that's frankly rare it's it's what we would hope for but on social it can quickly blow up into a fight and as brands we don't want to fight on social media so if somebody is being truly trolling or offensive Facebook has an amazing way button called the hide feature on a comment and hiding a comment limits its visibility only to its their friends so it limits the damage of a potentially offensive comment it also hides somebody who's just trying to pick a fight from somebody else who's reading your post who might easily engage in that fight if it's outrageously offensive problematic threatening whatever we do take it to the next level and we'll delete block and sometimes report excellent we are at about three minutes after we've covered all of the questions I wanted to just thank both of our speakers today it was great to have you Catherine and Chris this has been a really good webinar our next group of trainings is up on LSM tap and I'm also going to drop a link to our YouTube channel this will be up within about a week or so probably earlier we have over 200 trainings from the past that are there that are archived all free and available thank you both so much for coming out today we've had a lot of really good engagement in this webinar and I look forward to seeing more organizations out there on social media if you want any help with regards to this stuff please feel free to reach out to our presenters and also reach out to myself directly this is one of my passionate areas I love working on social media I think there's a lot we could do to really inform and empower clients online