 Hi everyone. Can you see my screen Susan? Yes. Perfect. Hi. I'm Susan Tenby and I'm going to talk to you about the events piece of community management and ways to kind of bridge the online and offline so that you use events as a way to punctuate activity that's happening with your online community and to bring your community together between your events. So me, I'm Susan Tenby as I mentioned and I am a social media and community builder. I have been with Tech Soup for I'm embarrassed to say 17 years so quite a long time doing online community and offline community building the entire time and you can reach out to me after this event or at any time at Susan at caravanstudios.org Caravan Studios is the division of TechSoup and at SUZ BOOOP that's Suze Boop on Twitter and you know the my title with Caravan is Community and Partnerships Director but really a lot of what I do has to do with events and I also manage so I do a lot of on on the ground events and I also manage all these online channels that you see right here mostly primarily Twitter and Facebook but these are just the places you can find us so we have public good app house Facebook group we have Caravan Studios non-profit Facebook group we have a Caravan Studios and safe night app Twitter account you can see the rest of what we have this is just a sampling of the community online that we manage between events and the kind of events that we run for Caravan this is the main event series that I run for Caravan which is the apps for change demo series and it started a couple years ago we have approximately six events a year sometimes a little bit more and these on average I have about 150 RSVPs with about 30 people 20 to 30 people on the waitlist which translates into about 80 attendees in the real room they're all live streamed and as you can see these are events that showcase apps for social benefit these are demo events where people from the tech sector and engaged community members and app developers who have built public benefit demo them to a group of people in the room that are half nonprofits and half technologists who care about social benefit and public good technology and what you're seeing in the upper right is some online excitement from these events on Twitter using that hashtag apps for change demo and the other series of events I run is I run a monthly event called OC tribe which stands for the online community tribe and that's an evening event the other events I was talking about or morning events and this is a monthly meetup that's been around since 2006 and it has about 50 RSVPs online which translates to between 15 and 20 on the ground attendees it's run by volunteers entirely and it's really a networking event whereas the other one the previous event is an event to showcase social benefit apps and try to get people to use them more this event is very much a networking event for people who do the kind of job that I do which is online community and on the ground community management and these events start at seven and there are kind of evening networking events with a short presentation the man you see presenting in that photo is from Adobe and these are ways for us to showcase our sponsors but also ways for junior and beginning community managers to talk about what they learn and to share best practices and share their expert tips with a friendly group of other community managers and this group actually yielded $21,000 of sponsorship money last year so even though it's a volunteer run group it's been pretty helpful for us getting sponsors and these are the online channels that exist for that community between events so we have a YouTube a Facebook group a Twitter handle sorry a Twitter hashtag which is OC tribe and the meetup group itself as you can see over 2,000 members and although those events are very different they are some there are some similarities which you can expect with most events in general and so this kind these kind of similarities you think that these types and all events have in common are for example you might have noticed that in both events even though the numbers were scaling very differently 50% is a really good expectation for a free event so if you have a hundred people on your RSVP list 50% is a good is a good day so might be 40 people that show up just so that you know free events even though there might be free beer do not always yield 100% attendance and actually in all my years of throwing events and they've all been free we've never had anything different than 50% sometimes 40% attendance so just to expect that and also the ways that you can kind of expect across events the best attendance would be to send at least three reminders don't be afraid to over remind people because if you think about your own behavior on the web you're you're gonna appreciate a reminder you get we all get so many email that we really do appreciate getting over reminded and you want to remind people across channels so you want to send Twitter reminders and Facebook reminders and reminders within the meet-up or event bright or whatever event tool you use and some email because you know you want to meet people where they're at and some people are only on Twitter and some people are only on Facebook for example and you want to make a graphic for your presenters to help them share the meet-up widely so that might be you know we call those assets visual asset and in that you also want to craft some prefabricated tweets and some Facebook message and some email sharing messages and don't fall into the trap of including too many because then people just get option paralysis and they don't really know which one to choose so it's best to just kind of include two tweets a link to a tweet they can just hit the retweet button if they're feeling a little lazy they don't want to do their own tweet and the same goes for Facebook maybe one Facebook post and a link with a Facebook post to share and with that you want to make sure that your Facebook message is set to public so when people share it they can share it widely with their networks without having to have some kind of restriction on where it can be shared and similarly when you ask them to share you want to make sure that in your tweets you mention all the critical information in the tweet don't just include it in the graphic I feel like that's a common stumbling place where people include all the information in the graphic as if it's a poster but what they don't realize is that when people are viewing Twitter through a listening dashboard or you know some sort of XML reader those images often just look like an image link so that all the critical information is lost so make sure you include the date and the time and the topic in your tweets and also finally you want to create an atmosphere not only that's easy for your presenters to share but you want to create a shareable environment so you want to pick presenters that know how to share on social media it's really critical because otherwise you're very much working on your own so it's much it's much easier for you if you pick presenters who have a big audience and know how and what the best strategy is for sharing their own talks and you want to make them you know hold them accountable for it so as I mentioned you want to give them some pre-crafted messages to share and coach them on speaking not only about their product so it's not going to be a sales pitch but it's actually you want to coach them to speak to the audience that they're speaking to but also remind them to and get their agreement to share at least three times with their network so what you see here below is one of my speakers from the OC Tribe event Nicole Banks I had her present not only from her own share it not only from her own Twitter account but also from the Twitter account of her company and Albert Chan spoke at OC Tribe and he has a large he is his own brand and he has a group called Albert's List which is a very popular with tens of thousands of members job sharing tech group so I just got his commitment to share on his own account and to use our trackable links so I could see and I gave it's important to give them the right hashtags so you can see that he used our own hashtag but he appended some other additional hashtags to catch some other people who might be following for example the hashtag SF and the hashtag events with a hashtag social media so that that's an example of you know picking your presenters who really know how to share and holding them accountable so that they really help you with your work of filling the room and one of the documents that Susan referred to earlier is a pre event checklist so this is for the people who are helping you put on the event this is the equipment so things just so you aren't kind of stuck on the on the day of the event going oh my goodness I forgot my tripod so you want to it's just easy to have this you won't forget anything if you have this list on hand and like for example we note that we need two iPads one for Facebook live and one for the timer of the event so just making sure that you fill out a checklist you have it as a template and you use it for every event and it's a physical tech checklist that you can share around and similarly the run-of-day sheet so you want to create an agenda that has the flow of the event so that you are so that you are working with a group of people who know exactly the timing of everything going on you're not just kind of operating on your own they know that by the time on this event for example for 1040 rolls around the welcome announcements are going to be completed and the demos are going to start so this is to share with not only the producers of the event but all the presenters and anyone who's kind of behind the scenes so that we also included that and here I'm going to show you a little video because volunteers are similarity across all events and they're critical to your event success so I'm going to just share a little one-minute video really good experience I found out about the media manager finishing school I kept it up with Crystal, I'd seen her in a few other events and seeing a TV manager was tough with mine I ended up getting a job as a TV manager at Infinity Live for a TV company and I'm totally loving it and it's so nice for the media and that was really just paying it forward because when I moved up here about three years ago I did have connections did have an hour and this was one of the first media groups I found I tweeted a lot at it and volunteered for the group and that ended up getting me noticed by the community manager and me who brought me in so that was a video from my volunteers at the OC tribe online community media group and as you can see you know it ended up getting her Crystal a job at Google starting out as a volunteer so you really want to make sure that you help your volunteers grow skills that are portable for them and that are valuable and marketable so that they can find the volunteer role valuable and help share it out so volunteers and recruit more volunteers and retain them and you want to make sure that your volunteers really have autonomy and ownership of your community and of your events and you want to keep in clear contact with them so that they're engaged you want to have kind of regular volunteer meetings like whether it's monthly I do kind of quarterly just to get their feedback what's working for them what's not and I send out every single meetup of volunteer lists like this which these are the needs that I have these are the things that I might need like I need somebody to buy name tags something that you might not think about but you just have to kind of put all the needs out there and let people sign up for the roles that they want this is really critical and I also as Susan mentioned included something like this for you but just to remember all the pieces so that you're not stuck on the day of the event without any people to do cleanup for example and sponsorship I just want to talk about sponsor love for a second don't be shy to mention that you're looking for sponsors sponsors want to tie themselves to events that are successful with happy volunteers so at the beginning of your event and at the end of your event looking for sponsorship open for sponsorship opportunities mention it on your meetup or event pride page create a sponsorship kit so that if somebody is interested you can quickly just send them something like hey right away I can actually send you this kit so create it ahead of time like a pdf kit with a video like that maybe or something along the lines of a presentation for your sponsors and you want to highlight your sponsors at the beginning of your event and in slides when people are walking in the room and in voice when you announce so you can see me on the left here giving my sponsors some sponsor love and then I announce my sponsors as they come in in a separate dedicated email through the tool through like meetup.com or event pride or in a separate email giving them that kind of benefit and amplification and then again thanking them after the event on social media and finally make sure that you create unique value for your sponsors whether it's coming in and doing a focus group with the special membership or providing swag or asking your members for to fill out a survey but provide them with unique value that they wouldn't get by just attending your event and back channel super important so the hashtag that I showed you earlier OC tribe during all my events all my all of my events always have a dedicated hashtag so people can follow along between events and also during the event itself using a tool like tweetwall or twitter feed or twitter fall these are these are tools that help you show the back channel for the people watching remotely while they're watching on facebook live and they can respond to questions and answers using the hashtag but also a lot of these people have these hashtags now put into their hoot suite or whatever twitter listening dashboard they use so that they can be a part of the community between events that's kind of what I was talking about the pillars to hold up the community between the on the ground events and remember to have purely social events like happy hours so that you're understands that this is a networking there's value in attending and build in networking as well to for that matter into your events because that's why people come in real life otherwise they would just watch it online but the reason that they would come on the ground is to talk to other people so that's really important as well and the video from the live event that I mentioned is really great for archiving so you can do things like create bite-sized videos like one minute videos to repurpose they're great for seo you can edit together kind of a montage of people talking about your event itself and use that in your sponsorship kit you can get these you can caption these videos so that you can people can watch them as you know 80 percent or you may not know but 80 percent of video is not watched with sound so you can caption these videos and make them into sponsorship videos or videos about what you're doing and curate playlists on vimeo and youtube to share around and finally you want to make sure you recap your events using all of these elements so tools like story fi help you put in the videos as well as the hashtags as well as the compilation of the tweets from and facebook posts and advertisements from other people all around the web and to one easy to share link that is a story essentially and that not only is good for seo but it helps you kind of share your event between events and give a final boost of amplification to thank and reward your speakers and with that I am done with my part of the presentation and open for questions great thanks so much Susan you shared a lot of really important content and I want to address a couple of questions that we got in one is the folks that don't attend your event per se but they watch it in the recording how do you both identify the metrics that you're using and how do you collect that data and then try to make the event better or try to reach out to those folks who maybe couldn't attend so often when people are attending the event virtually they still have rsvp'd on on the meetup site so I I always send a wrap up survey I use kind of like a survey gizmo type tool either survey gizmo there's survey monkey there's jot form but I use an online survey tool and ask them the important thing about serving is that you ask very very limited amount of questions otherwise people get survey fatigue so I might ask eight questions to get their feedback and in terms of collecting the data I just kind of I capture how many people signed up versus how many people attended versus how many people online if that's the kind of data you're asking about yes thank you thank you thank you for clarifying that another question we got I know you're actually really good at this can I see you do it how do you get sponsors if you were just starting out and some of the folks on this webinar are brand new they haven't had these types of events or you know they don't have the amount of experience you've had how do you get started with asking for sponsorships and then you know with the recruitment retention and recognition part of it uh-huh that that's um uh recruitment recruitment and recognition of volunteers or sponsors um sponsors uh sponsors okay so yeah I mean I when I got started I I literally passed around a hat like a literal hat and said you know our time is voluntary uh but we do have to pay for the food that you're eating and we'd welcome you know and be grateful for anything that you can contribute if you want to toss in a buck but you know as time goes on and you you have regular events you know at the beginning of every event you tell people you know this is this is a volunteer run event we have to pay for food we we are open to sponsors we'd love uh to talk to anyone who's interested in having you know a bigger profile in this event and we do make announcements out on social media that we have sponsorship opportunities and then once we get a spot we talk to people that come from larger companies and ask them if they're willing to host an event and then usually with that hosting comes paying for the food and drink so that's a nice easy way to kind of get it's like a sponsor starter kit and then you can say hey you know we had our event at Twilio and they are a sponsor and now you have some sponsor logos to thank people for and then once people see that there's you know it's the same concept of nobody wants to dance alone at a party once they see there are other people dancing there are other sponsors on the docket then they want to be a part of it and then you can kind of reach out to different companies and you look at your attendee list before every event and see who comes from larger organizations that might have a budget and then you just reach out to them and then eventually they come to you great um perfect in terms of retaining sorry this is the part two of that question in terms of retaining them uh i would say you know just make sure that you religiously thank them you show their logo you um reach out to them like have a regular check-in even if they don't initiate it and say i just wanted to give you a heads up of what's going on in the oc tribe community lately and here's some people that you might want to reach out to about your product and um let me know when you want to come and give for example a panel presentation at our at our event that kind of thing okay thank you thank you and the other question we did have it's almost the same exact question but about volunteers so again some of these folks coming in are just right at ground level they're just getting started with doing this how do they recruit volunteers for these particular tasks and i know you have some great handouts which i've included in the course but what was your strategy when you first got started be pushy don't be shy you know just tell people you know hey i'm doing this on my own i'm looking for volunteers have you enjoyed this if you find it valuable please you know i asked you know nina who's our intern at caravan studios knows that i you can vol you she was vol and told to help me you can help you can kind of be pushy and say to people you know if you want to attend we'd look i need everyone's help yeah this is a group effort and after a while people will come up to you and say you know this is this is great how can i how can i help you and also this is really important in your rsvp registration form always include an open field that question that says do you want to volunteer yes or no and if they say yes and they have to include their email address and then you reach back to them because a lot of people you know they see the value and being a part of the smaller community as crystal mentioned in the video you know it ended up eventually getting her a job at google so you know there there is value you just want to make sure that you're transparent about the value you're providing thank you and actually nina is here with us today so she was nodding her head as well and i i think in this dialogue that we're having about volunteers you demonstrated very very clearly in your testimonial you know crystal speaking about her experiences of volunteer and nina was nodding her head as you were saying you know vol and vol and told but but folks that get involved if they are treated properly and like you said you retain them by doing certain things for your volunteers most specifically thanking them and being sincere and being authentic and i think you also used the word transparent about what they ask is what they will be doing and giving them autonomy to complete the task um do you have like volunteer roles that are specifically laid out for volunteers yeah i do and i have a regular volunteer kind of uh manage the volunteer managers kind of meeting and so it's kind of for the core members i have like a council a leadership council um in a way of saying it uh with my volunteers and i as i mentioned i regularly meet with them i take their ideas and i implement their ideas like hey what do you guys think like should we do kind of a speed geeking session or should we do a party i take their ideas and i implement what they suggest so that they have ownership and um you know i also figure out who's good at what because some people you know there's what i always say about volunteers is there's a role for everyone even the painfully shy volunteer don't put them as a greeter put them as somebody you know who helps you with something else like maybe they help with the tech stuff but there is a role for everyone you just kind of have to figure out and be intuitive and i also try to have coffee or a drink with all of my volunteers i always try to do an after hours check in like i did one yesterday with a former volunteer i'm always trying to keep them engaged thank you um before we sign off i'm giving folks another minute to to chat in any other questions they might have but i want to also tap into something you said i've been taking notes in case there's anything else i can add to you know the course archive um but you said something that i think is really important um as a volunteer manager and folks that work with interns or volunteers or as everyone on this webinar starts to go out and begin these community events um you made it personal and i've seen that first hand susan because i did it some of your apps for change events and you know each person individually and you know them by name and you do make it personal and i think that that's something that folks that are going to do this do need to understand they do need to invest some time um in developing volunteers but that it's such a worthwhile investment because in the long run as we can see from your testimonial those are folks that are going to carry your your vision of this and your message forward yeah it's really important and and giving them the tools to do it on their own to scale it like crystal moved to colorado and she actually was talking to me about starting her own oc tribe so it's kind of you want to give them the tools so that they can grow you don't it's hard to kind of let them go because obviously of your own selfish reasons for wanting to keep your best volunteers but you have to give them a clear career path of the latter so that they can you know as you mentioned take portable take their skills and make them portable so that they can grow in that role thank you thank you um susan you have covered a tremendous amount of information and you've also answered answered a lot of questions um i really want to thank you for your time and the amount of effort to put this together and to join us today we are very grateful for your time and expertise also all of the learners that are on this course are folks that watch this recording we thank you for attending and if you do have questions you can reach out to email susan i had forwarded that out to you and i will also put it in the course so please do reach out to her with any other questions or you can also reach out to me as the administrator of the techsuit course platform we thank you and susan you're awesome thank you for your time today thank you so it's really fun thank you very much good i'm glad you had fun and i hope everyone on this had fun as well all right everybody bye bye