 Hello everyone, and welcome to this first webinar in the Baby Steps webinar series, The Heart of a Good Story is You. I'm Ellie Bizdeekian, and joining us here today we're very excited to have Matthew Rowe from Dirty Rubber to discuss a little bit more about why storytelling and why it's so important for you as a storyteller to be empowered in particular ways to capture and show your organization's mission in practice. Here at TechSoup we believe that storytelling not only builds but is also the currency of community. These images are the winning photo submissions of TechSoup's annual digital storytelling competition where for the last four years we've been able to cultivate a community of nonprofits and storytellers that are now out there contributing rich content to the various landscapes and communities they touch. What do you think about when you see these images? Where do you go? What emotions do you feel? Understanding the heart of a good story leads to better content, better visibility, visibility of your message and of the work that you're doing in the field. I'm really very excited to be discussing all of these really exciting concepts coming up in a few minutes. But before I get ahead of myself, I did just want to back up and take a moment to acknowledge our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk, whose platform makes all of our webinars possible. If you are connected to audio by phone, please note that all lines are muted. So if you have a question or comment, please share those with us in that lower left hand chat box window where Becky will be capturing your questions as we go along. If you lose your connection at all today, don't worry. You can simply reconnect using the confirmation email that was sent to you before this event or dial the number that Becky will chat out right now. This webinar is being recorded and will be sent out to all of you later today with the slides and all of the resources and links we discussed. If you hear something worth sharing on this webinar today, tweet it out at TechSoup or at Dirty Robber using the hashtag Baby Steps Comp. Again, I'm Ali Bazdikian. I'm an Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup Global where I work with Becky Wiegand on chat to program educational events like this and help produce our digital content. I've been at TechSoup for two years and before this I got my start in nonprofit communications as a fellow at Mother Jones Magazine here in San Francisco having studied broadcast journalism at the University. Also on the call today, we are so thrilled to have the talented Matthew Rowe. Matt, it's really great to have you with us today. I'm very excited to be here. I was hoping maybe you can start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself and what you do at Dirty Robber, but then we'll get more into what we're all working towards with the Baby Steps Campaign for Early Childhood Education. We'll discuss your own process of story making with the banner film for the campaign and then really get into the why of storytelling. Matt, do you want to take it away? Absolutely. My role at Dirty Robber is I am a junior creative director which is essentially a fancy term to mean I write. What we do at Dirty Robber is a company that specializes in short form content. That shows we do branded content. We do short films. We were actually nominated for an Oscar this year for a short film that we did called The Scottish Boys which is set in Afghanistan. My role at Dirty Robber is to generate ideas with the other creators and directors who execute on their ideas to develop scripts, to develop pitch packets, anything that goes into the creation of one of our projects. So that's my role at Dirty Robber. What we've done is this Baby Steps competition that Ali mentioned just a second ago. We have done in partnership with Further by Design, the Kellogg's Foundation, the Bay Area Council, and TechSoup. And the petition is about early childhood development which is the age for children between 0 and 5 that specifically is the largest period of growth that we go through as people. We love particular period of time. The competition. Hey Matt, if I could just jump in for a brief moment. We're losing you on the audio a little bit. I think you're going in and out. Okay. I'm on my landline so I'm not sure what to do. Let me see if this helps at all. Is this any better? It sounded a little bit better briefly but keep talking. Okay. Sorry about that. If it keeps happening let me know and I will simply repeat what I'm saying. So the competition is designed to have parents, educators, caregivers, family members to film themselves interacting with their child or with their student or with their family member and showing us how they interact with their child in a unique and specific way that helps engage the child. What we wanted to do with the video was essentially raise awareness. Raise awareness of early childhood development. Raise awareness of it as a concept and most importantly raise awareness of how critical it can be in helping our children grow to be healthy and successful adults. We actually have the video here. I'm going to load up for you in just a second to watch. It's only two minutes long. What I think is a good idea here is if we watch the video and then I will speak about the sort of generation of the video, about how we developed it, how we came to this place and sort of maybe walk through the process that we want through to get to this video. So I'm going to go ahead and load that up now. And like I say, it will take about two minutes to play. So just give it a watch and then we'll talk about it right after. Remember, but there was a time you couldn't walk. Just trying to was an adventure. Was a step you can't remember, but someone helped you. Picked you up, comforted you, helped you take your first. This winter, Invest Early invites parents, families, caregivers and educators nationwide to answer one question. This is what I do with my child. What do you do with yours? The Baby Steps Competition asks you to submit videos that capture a snapshot of how we care for children during the first five years of their lives. For parents and families, we're looking for short videos taken by iPhone or by camera, whatever you have that's able to capture the simple everyday things you do with your child or family member. For care providers and teachers, we want to help you generate videos by capturing all the creative things you do to inspire your students. Whether it's reading, singing, playing or coloring, the Baby Steps Competition will be running from December 2nd to February 2nd and will be recognizing winners based on four criteria. Their emotional value, their educational value, the creativity of the activity and the quality of the video. Go to babystepscompetition.com to learn more about how to enter and see why we believe the first five years of a child's life are vital to investing. The banner video for the competition, the announcement video if you like for the competition and its base and how to enter and all that sort of critical information. So what I'd like to do now as I said is maybe talk about the process of how we arrived at that video. So one of the very first things to bear in mind when crafting a story is that very often you are not crafting your own story. And by that I mean you are working with and for other people. And very often what you are dealing with is you're dealing with multiple bosses for want of a better phrase. You're working with various groups who all have information, all have a vested interest in the story or in the project itself. And so one of your very, very first jobs as the crafter of the story is to identify what needs to be said. And I know that that may be slightly redundant, but when you are dealing with multiple people and multiple groups it's really, really the critical first step to get everybody on the same page to agree to what the story is that you're telling. Because without that you end up going around in circles. It's very hard to make sure that everybody is being represented. It's very hard to take all this information and turn it into a compelling and emotionally engaging story. So the very first step, once you assess the lay of the land with the various elements involved, this is literally the most critical step. You have to identify a clarity of purpose, right? Without sounding too much like it's marketing you essentially have to identify what it is that your story is selling, right? What is the concept? What is the message? What is the point of the story being told? So with the baby steps competition, the video that you guys just watched in particular, what we were dealing with in early childhood development is an incredibly complex philosophy. It is a very broad, very comprehensive way of looking at how to deal with children at that age. And so the initial conversations that we had with the various partners with the various elements, there was a lot of discussion about what parts of early childhood development are we going to focus on, how are we going to best communicate the complexity of the philosophy and the worry there is that you get bogged down in trying to relate too much information and never ever getting people engaged. So one of the very first steps that we as a team took that was such a huge step for us to be able to make that video is we agreed upon a single purpose of the video. It wasn't necessarily to jump into the various sort of mechanisms of early childhood development to discuss in detail or in length some of the issues of it because you couldn't make too many videos. What we wanted to do was raise awareness of early childhood development as a concept to the general public because it's easy to forget when you're embroiled in a story, when you're dealing with a particular thing that very often by the time you get to writing or crafting the story, you have a pretty good understanding of it but when you came into the project you probably didn't and you've got to remember that most of the people that will be watching your story or engaging with your story, they don't have that, they're like you when you first started working on the project, they don't necessarily have the breadth of information that you do now. So it was one of the great moments for us when we were developing this video is when we all came to the realization that if we are simply trying to raise awareness of the importance of early childhood development that as a single point of focus allows us to do so much more than trying to incorporate multiple different purposes for one of a better phrase. So the very first thing we did was clarity of purpose. Now once you have your clarity of purpose of your story, what is the story supposed to do? It allows you to look at who you want to watch the story because again when trying to craft a story that people are going to watch knowing the kind of people that are going to watch it is critical to how you end up writing the story. So when we realized that we were trying to raise awareness of what early childhood development was, it was a pretty easy jump to go from that to parents, to educators, to caregivers, to family members because these are the people that are not only going to care the most about early childhood development but ultimately are the very people responsible for early childhood development. So once we have the purpose to raise awareness, finding our audience became that much easier. Now before we even put pen to paper on writing our story, we have two of the three key criteria maps out. We know what we are trying to do and we know who we are going to try and tell our story to. So once you have got those two elements locked in, the third element and this is the big one for me is the simplicity of the story. It can become very easy to get wrapped up in trying to be clever with how you communicate your story, with how you tell your message. And very often you can find yourself, especially I find when you first start writing stories or crafting messages, it's so, so easy to get caught up in how clever you can be or how unique a way you can tell the story. That's fine but none of that matters unless your story itself, the nuts and bolts of the story is really, really simple to follow. So if we look at the banner video that we just watched, it's broken essentially into two components. The first, so 55 seconds to a minute, tells the story of a child walking towards camera. It is the simplest story you could imagine. So to give you a genesis of how we got to that point, the simplicity of that, once we had the clarity of purpose, we wanted to raise awareness of what early childhood development is and how it impacted what it can be, once we knew who we wanted to watch this video who we wanted to engage this video with and ultimately who we wanted to have entered the competition, developing a story that would capitalize on those two things became a back simplicity because for us the competition, the Baby Steps competition is about, sorry, I'm going to call up, early childhood development is about helping children from zero to five. You are talking about taking the very first step in nurturing and growing a child, right? And so with that imagery and with that language and with that sort of discussion going on amongst the creative group and coming to the conclusion that the competition is called the Baby Steps competition, it occurred to us that literally showing a child taking their very first Baby Step, the simplicity of that would be a really great way of introducing this much larger concept of early childhood development. So the story of this child walking towards camera, falling over and their mom coming in and helping them, that is a very simple story. The reason why that is so important for us is because the simpler the story, the more you allow the emotion of the story, the more you allow the purpose of the story to become the dominant factor. You aren't trying to be clever, you aren't trying to show off, you are in a way getting out of the way of the story and allowing the power and the beauty of this moment and this child walking to be the story itself. By going that route, by making it that simple it becomes from my money that much more engaging. Yeah Matt, what you said right there I think is really powerful. Oftentimes as storytellers you need to know when to move out of the way of the story. I think that is a really powerful concept. Absolutely and it is very much a learned skill. It is one of those things that you have to trust. At some juncture you have to trust the work that you have done, the story that you have developed and obviously you almost never develop these things in the vacuum, you are working with other people. So the tune of people that have developed this idea that are executing this idea at some juncture you have to trust that is correct. Once you get to that place, you step out of the way and you allow the story to unfold I think you end up almost always with the strongest examples of storytelling. So I just want to recap ever so quickly for me the three critical areas of storytelling to the short forms of storytelling is you have to identify a clarity of purpose. You are going to be working with multiple groups, multiple people, everybody bringing their own ideas and opinions to the table and as the sort of craft of the story your very very first job is to disseminate all those various voices and help guide them into a single focus voice. This is the goal of our story. Once you have done that it becomes so much simpler then to look at that goal, what is our goal? If our goal is in our case to raise awareness finding the audience becomes so much simpler. Now we have our goal, raise awareness. We find the audience with people we want to be aware of the topic. In this case it was educators, parents, caregivers. But whatever story you'd be working on once you have the clarity you find the audience. Now once those two things are locked in the next next step, and this is the biggest step, the hardest step and ultimately the most important step, you have to allow the story a level of simplicity. That doesn't mean you can't be innovative in the way you tell the story. I'm going to talk about a few other commercials that I haven't, I didn't write sadly but are very successful commercials that are innovative whilst telling simple stories. You can be innovative in your approach and often that will come in partnership with, you know, if you're making a video, you can come in partnership with the director, if you are writing a story with the editor. How you tell your story is a separate question. But the story itself, the more successful stories are the ones that are simple, that allow the story to be the prominent factor. So those for me are the three key areas of telling particularly short form stories and are certainly the rules that we use when developing the banner video for the Baby Steps competition. I'm going to talk about right now a pretty unique part of the experience that I just went through on the Baby Steps competition and it sort of reinforces why it's important to have those two steps I just talked about. When we were shooting this video we were obviously working with a lot of children. You saw that there were, you know, up to 15 to 20 children that we filmed for that spot. I don't know how many of you are parents or interact daily with children but from zero to five children can be unpredictable shall we say. And obviously when you're working on a set with a finite amount of time and a very clear goal in mind about what you want to achieve it can be a little more racking when, you know, the children turn up because they're going to do whatever they're going to do. And that's great and that's what you want. You want that spontaneity. You want that joy of life that only a child brings to you. So again one of the reasons why we were so rigid about simplicity of story, about making sure that we didn't get too clever with what we were trying to do was that meant that when the children came and we were filming them and they were doing what they were doing, when they ended up doing whatever it is that they wanted to do because they're little children and they're going to do what they're going to do, it was okay because we had set the parameters up so that no matter what the child did, if the child walked towards camera, great. If the child couldn't walk towards camera he could only stumble, great. If the child couldn't walk at all but only crawled, that's fine as well. The main thing is that we had created the parameters that allowed us to stay very focused on telling a simple story and that whatever the child gave us would still work within those parameters. That was just a very unique experience. They say have a work with pets and children. I think they only have a work with pets and children and I find it to be the most fun you can have. So I think they're lying. But it can be a little bit unpredictable and so again the more simple the story, the more focused you are going into the execution of the story, the more focused you are on what you're trying to do, on who you're trying to reach and how simple you can make it when inevitably things arise. And obviously for this particular video it was children but if you are working on a different story or if you are making a commercial or something, there are always going to be exact moments that you can't possibly prepare for. And that's why it's so critical, so, so, so critical to have those three things locked in, quality of purpose, know your audience, simple story. Those three things will allow you to surf over any waves that come unexpectedly. So I want to move away from the video, the baby steps competition because obviously that's a very specific focus. And I want to sort of talk a little more broadly about storytelling and about how to do successful storytelling. We are obviously living in an era where the web is becoming essentially our go-to source for almost all information. There's more and more TV and film being directed towards the web. Obviously Netflix is exploding with its own content. Hulu, Amazon Instant Video is doing their own content. The web is becoming sort of where we live for story. One of the things that I found very interesting over the last few years, and obviously because where I work we sort of specialize on short form content, what I've noticed is that traditional commercials are buying. Very rarely on things like Hulu, on things like Amazon Instant Video on YouTube do you watch 30-second commercials. More and more what you're seeing is you're seeing minute-long commercials or sometimes 90-second, two-minute long commercials. I watched the Super Bowl this year and I was stunned to see how many of the commercials from the Super Bowl ran longer than a minute. What we're seeing is we're seeing a move towards instead of simple 30-second commercials to introduce the product, sell the product and move on, you're seeing these essentially branded content spots where the commercial is designed at creating an emotional engagement with the audience to take us on a two-minute journey to tell a two-minute story and to give us a satisfying ending. I find that to be really very interesting. I'm going to talk about three commercials ever so quickly that I think are really, really important because one of the questions that we sort of deal with when telling stories is what does a good story look like? How do you tell when you've got a good story? And the reality is that it's very, very hard to figure that out. And often you don't know until it's finished and people are responding to it whether or not you've done a good job or whether or not it's a good story. But one of the things that I find very interesting is, and I think this is important for where we are in terms of working with not-for-profits and working with sort of non-traditional storytelling entities, is that the most successful commercials over the last few years, and I think commercials, it's wrong to call them commercials, the most successful branded content that I have seen over the last few years have had nothing to do with production value, they've had nothing to do with how much things cost, they have nothing to do with anything of that nature which historically have been sort of benchmarks of good storytelling. What we're seeing more and more of these short-form branded content is how – I don't want to sort of harp on about the three things I talked about earlier – how clear the messaging is, how specifically targeted to an audience they are, and how simple the stories are. Because the other thing about the web is that it's a direct link between you, the user, and the interface. So marketing can be targeted much stronger than towards you specifically as opposed to on a television show where they – if you watch a cop detective show, the commercials are very often geared at sort of males 18 to 35 because that's the largest demographic to watch shows, cop shows or whatever, you're seeing nine more and more because it's you directly interfacing with your own internet and it has a memory of what you've watched, the commercials are getting far more specific and far more synced to you. So I'm going to talk about three spots that I think are incredibly successful storytelling branded content. The first one is a spot called Embrace Life. There's a link there for you guys to look at. And I do really strongly suggest that if you have a few minutes when we're done, you go and watch these spots. Embrace Life was a PSA that was built by a company in England. They were approached by a group called the Sussex Safer Road Society and they basically said, we want you to make a PSA on why it's important to wear safety belts. But we don't want you to make a PSA because PSAs never work. We want you to do something completely different. And what follows when you watch it? And I'm reluctant to talk about this one in particular because giving away anything in the spot will ruin the experience. But what follows is 90 seconds of spell binding storytelling. But again, it comes from the three very simple principles. They are very clear on their purpose. They want you to know why it's important to wear safety belts. They have a very specific audience that they are geared towards which is ultimately everybody. And I know that might sound counter-intuitive but there is a simplicity to, and this is the final point I'm going to get to, there is a simplicity to everything that they're trying to do that allows it to be so universal. So they have a very specific goal, why you should wear safety belts. They have a very specific audience, everybody, and the story they tell is very simple. It is about a man playing with his family and he is driving and then an unexpected twist happens. And the reason why this one is what I started with is because having worked in production, having done stories at a low budget, I can tell you that this spot was done for hardly any money at all. It costs next to nothing and yet it is an incredibly compelling, emotive, brilliant piece of storytelling. And it just further proves that if you have a really clear goal in mind you tell a very simple story and you execute it well that you can really, really affect change. Again, I'm really reluctant to talk about this one because it really is such a great watch and I cannot recommend strongly that you watch it. It's absolutely brilliant. You can see that it won a Camelion which is a big award for advertising. It is a very big hit. The second spot I want to talk about which I'm sure is probably far more familiar to a lot of you is the Deer Sophie spots that were run by Google and Gmail. And these spots, the concept is really very, very simple. It's a matter of father whose wife is just about to give birth and he opens up a Gmail account for his Deer Sophie at Gmail.com and he writes her an email every day or every other day until she turns 18 and it charts the growth from the adorable child that you see on the screen to when she's a 16 or 17 year old girl. And this one is interesting because this is not a cheap commercial. It's not an expensive commercial. It's somewhere in between. And it's again, it's an incredibly effective branded content spot. It's an incredibly effective story because it does again the three things. It is a very clear purpose. They want to show you the power, the stability, the lasting power of Gmail, of Google. They want to show you how the cutting edge of technological involvement in our lives. It's a really simple concept that they utilize brilliantly. Again, the audience is very clear. It's directed at parents, it's directed at millennials, sort of 18 to 35 year olds who are either about to start a family or thinking about having a family. And the story is incredibly simple. Let's just simply show a child getting older. What's incredible about this spot and also about the embraced life spot is the innovative way they do it. If I were to pitch this story to you, I want to do a commercial in which I show a small child getting older and how that affects me as the parent. That's not necessarily that interesting or that clever. If I can say what I'm going to do is do it through the prism of my email capacity, of my involvement with Google and Gmail, all that it has to it. Well, now it's elevated slightly. It's intriguing. It's an innovative way of telling the story. It's simple. It's still a priority of purpose. It's still going incredibly specific audience. But it is innovative in its approach. The third spot I want to talk about and this is the top end. This spot costs lots and lots and lots of money. I've got it here at the Olympic Moms. It's actually Thank You Moms. It's the name of the spot. It is run as you can tell during the 2012 Olympics by P&G. It's a brilliant spot about showing four or five different children from being very young. One of them wants to be a runner. One of them wants to be a swimmer. One wants to be a volleyball player. One's a gymnast. And it just shows you the different children and how their moms, every step of their lives, they wake them up early in the morning. They make them breakfast. They take them to their first practice. When they hurt themselves, they bandage them up. When they fall off the beam, they help them get back on top. They drive them to the various meetings. They help make their costumes. They basically show you over two and a half minutes or two minutes these moms interacting with their children, their children get older, their children get bigger. And of course the finale is these four or five kids now at the London Olympics winning their events and essentially the backbone to that success is their mom. It is, again, an unbelievably successful story. It is, again, clarity of purpose. They knew exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to say thank you to their moms. Like literally that's the title of the spot. That's what the spot's about. It couldn't be clearer. Now obviously from the clarity of purpose, who is your audience? Well that's pretty obvious. It's from moms. And the simplicity of the story, literally they're just showing moms helping their children. It's no different in terms of concept to the Baby Steps competition video. This is about parents helping their children. That's its goal. What's amazing, again, is the innovative approach that they take to achieving that goal which is this is where it gets Hollywood. They have lots of locations. It's set in Asia, it's set in Brazil, it's set in London. It's all over the world. They have beautifully shot footage. It's a very expensive spot. The reason why I wanted to show you these three branded content spots in particular is these are three incredibly powerful stories. In the question of what does a good story look like, these three spots look like good stories. They couldn't be more different if they tried. They couldn't cost different amounts of money if they tried. They couldn't have more different styles if they tried. What they all do share in common is they all know exactly what they're trying to do, who they're trying to reach, and they allow the story to be the dominant factor in an equation. That for me is proof in the pudding of how successful stories look. Successful stories look like that. For me it's one of those things where branded content is becoming more and more the norm I think for how we're going to receive a lot of the stories that we see. For me the way you make those stories successful is you have to engage your audience in a way that perhaps previously you didn't. Because if we are all moving much more towards a web-based interface with how we receive our stories, whilst they can focus those stories much closer to us as the user specifically, the issue that they are going to lie into is that the web is essentially an infinite space. Unlike television where there are parameters and checks and balances that if you are a brand or if you are a company you can essentially pay for your way onto television. The web is an open space that we have to use to dictate where we want to go. The reason why it brings that up is that in an infinite space finding an audience is incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. And so whilst we look at these three spots and two of them are massively recognizable brands. You've got Google which is arguably the most recognizable brand in the world and P&G which is very, very famous. The very first spot, the Embraced Life Spot, is for a regional English safety belt PSA. It couldn't be less glamorous if it tried. But it is incredibly effective and became incredibly popular and became incredibly famous because it was so well done, because the story was so simple, because its clarity of purpose was so clear and because they knew exactly who they wanted to watch that spot. And I think that for me those three as a sort of sampling of the market, if you like, a great example of how good stories in this sort of branded content era are about not about cost or about main value, they're about connection. And I think that those are the three key elements, clarity of purpose, know your audience, and just the story that will help tell good stories. The final step that I want to talk about in terms of crafting a good story is the storyteller which is to say you. Very often you are going to be the lens through which the story is crafted. Now what do I mean by that? Essentially as I said earlier, you are very, very rarely writing a story for you, or very rarely are you writing a story in which you are the ultimate yes or no sort of power. Very often you are working with other creatives. You are almost always working for at least one other boss, often multiple bosses. And it's really, really important that you and your point of view, that you allow your point of view to essentially shape the story itself. Earlier I mentioned how once you have the simplicity of story locked in, you sort of have to get out of the way and allow the story to do what it's got to do. But before that you have to, another sort of thing that is very easy to do in the initial stages of crafting a message is to simply try and please everybody around you. If you are working for multiple directors, if you are working with different branchmen, your grant funders, if you are working with different people who are important in the process, very often you simply want to make sure that they are happy, that what they want is recognized. And obviously that's a very important step, but the reason why you are telling the story, why you are the person crafting the message is because you have a point of view. You have a message that you need to craft, and it is really, really important that you don't lose that. And that's true of anything that you write. It doesn't matter if you are writing a commercial, if you are writing a novel, if you are writing a movie, you have to remember that you are the lens through which this story is going to interact with the world. You essentially are the conduit for the story because without you it doesn't go anywhere. It simply exists as an idea on a page or in a useful, so you are the one who will turn it into a tangible, watchable, readable, engageable item. And so when I say that you are the lens, you shouldn't forget that. I'm not suggesting that you go rogue and ignore the people that you are working with and don't listen to the influences of your bosses or your fellow creators. What I'm saying is that you have to recognize when you have, you have to recognize when you know in your gut what the story needs to go, where it needs to go, how it needs to be constructed. Essentially what I'm trying to do here is reinforce in this process that you are an incredibly valuable part of it becoming a created, existing object. As a writer, it's very easy to, when things go well, you find that a writer is very often the very last person who is back. I speak from experience. And it's very easy to get lost behind if you're making a commercial, the director takes all the praise or the product itself gets, that's a great spot by Google. Nobody ever thinks, wow, who wrote that spot for Google? The reason why I sort of bring this up is because you have to recognize that as the conduit between the item that you are trying to sell, and I don't mean to be sort of marketing or advertising. No matter what you are doing, no matter if you're writing a script, a novel, a commercial, whatever you're writing, you are selling either a concept or a brand or a very specific object, but your job is to sell the story to the audience. And so it's really very, very important that you don't ever forget that, that you allow who you are and the experiences that you've had and the influences that you exert to shape the story. It's a really hard thing to do, it's a really hard thing to learn, but it's something that as you're going forward you shouldn't ever stop. You shouldn't ever lose sight of that. So that is sort of, for me that's sort of like an overview of how the process that we go through at Berthier Roberts used to craft these short form stories that we do. I think that pretty much covers the overview of it. So yeah, I feel like just to recap ever so quickly, I've said it a hundred times so I'm sure it's pretty logged in. Very first step, clarity of purpose. You've got to make sure that all the various interests are on the same page, that there is an agreement on what the message is going to be, on what the story is going to be, because once you've got that clarity it's really easy to find who it is who's going to watch these spots, who's going to read this novel, who's going to whatever it might be. Once you have the clarity of purpose in the audience in mind the next important step is the simplicity of the story. Do not allow the story to get complicated. You can tell it in an innovative way, but you can't allow the story itself to become too complicated, because when you do that you are robbing the story of its power. You are robbing the story of, you aren't trusting the story to do what it's there to do, which is engage an audience. Once you've got those three things, you have to sort of take a step back and allow the story to do its job. Before you do any of that, the very, very first thing is remember that you have to embrace that you are the lens through which this message is being crafted, that your point of view, your voice is critical to the success overall of how a story is shaped. Those are sort of like the big things for us. Thank you so much, Matt. That was really informative. You brought some really great examples of effective storytelling to the table today. Those of you in the audience, do you take the time to watch a few of those clips when you received the post-defined email later today? They are really good and very thought-provoking and heart-string tugging. That banner film, Matt, your team really did an amazing job with that. It's quite moving and really gets at the heart of what the Baby Steps campaign is all about. Now I'd like to speak quickly in the time we have left to why digital storytelling. Matt, as you started to get at it earlier, for me the most obvious answer is that we are visual creatures. And as we saw in the banner film, stories are moving. That's just how we experience and process life. How did social media become the goliath that is today? It's really simple. Photos and videos are extremely engaging, and people want to see them. As I mentioned before, stories are the currency of community. And really, any Instagram feed is testament to that. We follow people we don't know personally, but feel like we know them intimately. We photograph breakfast, road signs, sunsets, moments spent playing and learning with our children, championship moments. These are the things that really matter to us. So it's these moments that are sort of the time stamps of our lives that show we accomplish things in life. But as Matt pointed out, without a storyteller to make sense of those random moments, those moments are static. They are fixed in a moment in time. As a storyteller for your organization, your challenge is to capture and consider the many images around us and arrange them in an order that speaks to your audience to inspire others to get involved in your mission. Technology has really made it possible to capture and share many of those moments in an instant really, and oftentimes to a widespread and distributed audience. Many of us have gone mobile to capture and engage with the rest of the world. Nowadays, you don't necessarily need to put aside a huge budget or go all out to start telling stories. I mean, bless your heart, if you get to work with some of the best of the best like Matt and the Dirty Rubber team. But I mean, there are many positive reasons to work with professionals, but I do want to stress the idea of starting within reach. Just start somewhere by taking inventory of the technology at your disposal right now. If that's purchasing a few apps for your smartphone, think about putting aside a small budget for a handheld device or a flip camera. Just take a manageable baby step towards digital production. You can start by interviewing your community or donor members at your next conference using your smartphone. You can record technology events live and publish to YouTube directly with an app called YouTube Capture for example. There are many ways that you can start telling your own stories now. There are opportunities for storytelling everywhere all around us curating that and funneling it back to the community you serve ultimately fosters trust and mutual respect between funders, donors, board members, and community members. I would encourage you all to think about ways to transform content that you already produce whether those are case studies, data sets, maps, timelines, charts, transform those into opportunities for storytelling. Ask questions. Get out there and spotlight members of your community doing interesting things. Capture clips at conferences and use them as assets on social media in your reports and proposals. Storytelling really is at the core of what we do. It should be incorporated into ways we communicate with each other on social media in the work that we are already producing as nonprofits, libraries, and charities. Storytelling really builds community and opens doors, opens opportunities for conversation, and really is a powerful medium. I would like to now open the floor for questions directed towards Matt or myself. If the audience has any questions at this time we will take it now. But I did want to go ahead and thank you all for joining us today, especially thanks to Matt for being an amazing presenter and to his team, as well as everyone else involved in making this webinar possible, especially our platform sponsor, ReadyTalk. We do have one question for you, Matt, before we wrap it up here today. The question is, what inexpensive equipment would you recommend for capturing stories outside of the few apps I mentioned or your smartphone? What's your go-to recommendation for inexpensive equipment? Are you talking about writing software, or are you talking about cameras? No, just camera, just for capturing the story specifically. Honestly, there is a camera called the 5V Canon camera. It is the industry standard sort of go-to low-budget camera. I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but the great thing about the 5V is that it is relatively inexpensive to purchase which is obviously critical, but it also works if you ever get lucky enough to have the money to render the fancy lenses. They all work on the 5V, but it's not necessary to have them. For me, if you're talking about, hey, what could I go and buy right now that I could then use right now to make something a 5V with 100% be my answer. That said, I've been looking at the specs of the new camera on the new iPhone, and I've got to say that the new iPhone camera is pretty spectacular as well. So I would say that those are the two sort of everyday objects that you could buy to really start capturing footage and start telling stories. Great. Thanks so much. Do you have any recommendations on apps in particular, or apps that you personally use to kind of capture and share quickly, small clips? You know, I don't have, what I use is there's an app called Snapseed which is a free app that has filters and allows you to basically do very simple Photoshop-esque things to your image. Snapseed also has a video component which the name is escaping me as I think about it, but there is a similar thing that you can add filters and color effects and stuff like that to your video clips. And it's a very, very involved app. Like you can literally pick specific parts of the frame that you want to be saturated and then another part to be desaturated and stuff like that. So it's a really great app. Great. In the last three minutes that we have, one last question, and that is really, how do nonprofits go out there and convince funders to provide support for storytelling in a way that shows dollars and cents, and that their project actually has benefit to the community? How do you make that pitch to a funder? Yeah, that's a great, that has a million dollar question. How do you get to somebody and get them to agree to fund something? For me, it's the simplest thing I can say to you honestly is it's about two things. There is no better way of getting people involved in whatever you're doing, getting an engaged audience and telling a story. It's very, very simple. It's a fact. I don't think anybody is going to argue with that. But for me, the critical thing that you have to do when you're engaging, when you're talking to funders is my experience, my time at 10, is the two things they care about are your passion, right? Because again, you are the person telling the story, so they really care that you care. And they want to know that they're going to have the widest reach possible. And that goes back to nothing gets an audience quicker and nothing gets a bigger audience than a brilliantly crafted story. And again, I will just re-emphasize that Embrace Life Commercial was done for NexaMusting for a regional PSA and it's gotten 30 million views on YouTube and won countless awards. So that right there is proof in the body. And that one in particular is such a great, great clip. It really ties out your heart's thing. Yeah, thanks again to you Matt for being super stellar. And I wanted to thank you all again for joining us today. We hope you'll join us again on December 12th, same time for our next webinar in this Baby Step series where we're very excited to discuss sewing stories from your community, what goes into the process of pre-production before you push record in capturing your story. So thank you so much Matt. Thanks again everyone, and have a wonderful day. Thanks everybody.