 This session is called Design for Non-Designers. You aren't a designer, but you still need to communicate visually. What are the best practices to stand out on social media? How do you bring awareness to your mission and amplify your message through social media? This session covers how you can use highly visual mediums like photos and video to stand out across different social channels. You'll learn how to minimize the time spent on creating content that will grab attention, and you don't need an agency or a degree in design. It is my pleasure to welcome our presenter for today's session, Veronica Belmont. Veronica is a senior product manager, podcaster, and technology evangelist living in San Francisco. At Adobe, she is a senior product manager and evangelist on the Adobe Spark team. She works to help social media creators, marketers, and influencers bring their brands and creative ideas to the masses. Veronica has also worked extensively as a public speaker, start-up advisor, and presenter for companies of all sizes, including IBM, Sony, AOL, Discovery Digital, and more. So thank you, Veronica. I'll hand it off to you. Hello, everyone. I'm Veronica. I've been with Adobe for the past three years on the Adobe Spark team. And yeah, I love talking to people working in the nonprofit space. I love figuring out how we can help you get your story out there to your social media followers and accounts. Yeah, and I'm super excited to get started. So please feel free to leave questions in the chat pod. Bailey, I said she can interrupt me at any time if there's a question about a specific part of the presentation, or we can just save those for afterwards too, whatever you're most comfortable with. I'm happy to do that either way. And then potentially, if we want, we can do a little Spark demo at the end if we have some time. So let me start presenting. It's just going to take me a moment to get everything set up here. All right, perfect. And you should start seeing my screen in just a moment here. Let me know. If you see it, you should see it full screen. Does it look good? All right, I'm going to assume since nobody said no in my ears that I should be good to go. All right, so I already gave a little heads up about who I am. So I don't think we need to go back on that. But for those of you who aren't familiar, Spark is really a system, and it allows people to create really beautiful social graphics in mere moments. You're going to have access to fantastic photos. If you don't have something yourself that you're creating on your mobile device or on your desktop, we have access to fantastic Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stop content, and it really just gives you an opportunity to use templates as a starting point for creating whatever you need to make to tell your story. So why does design matter? I wanted to take a moment to think about the last post that you commented on that you shared or even more powerful one that actually encouraged you to do something, to take some kind of action. Chances are it was really well designed and told a great story. You know, images are backed by data that people are more than 650% more likely to engage with posts that have images. This is huge. Humans are hardwired to prioritize visual information, and great graphics are going to affect how your audience understands and actually retains the message that you're trying to put there. So in the context of your nonprofit or the company that you're working with, this really translates into better ROI on those campaigns that you're working so hard on and your fundraising efforts. It's expanded engagement and interest from the communities that you're really trying to reach that you're really wanting to actually connect with. So a fun and memorable social media account is going to build your fan base and followers, and that's going to translate to all of those other KPIs that you're working towards. So you can see this example of these two separate social media posts on the bottom right. We have one with an image. And just by adding that image, it feels more effective. It feels like a stronger story that you're trying to tell. So what do you actually need to do this? What is it going to take to actually accomplish some of these goals? Well, you, you don't need a ton of resources to make good design happen and good social content happen. All you need is really a plan. And so today we're going to walk you through some of these best practices and takeaways that are going to guide you through. But the first one is show, don't tell. This is a huge one. I think it kind of goes without saying that being able to capture someone's imagination with an image and then pulling them into the rest of the content is really a great way to get started. So grabbing attention with a really clear image and then following up with more descriptive copy in the actual posts is probably my number one piece of feedback that I give to a lot of nonprofits and even small businesses that I work with. Because when people are scrolling through their feed, you're going to have mere seconds, seconds, nanoseconds sometimes to grab their attention and pull them into the rest of the content. So you can see this is a gorgeous post here for the library, for the New York Public Library. I actually got this in their specific feed. So you can see that image eye catching and then if you go to the content of the post, that's where you're going to get all of the information. And you'll see later examples in this presentation of ways that people try to kind of flip that story and it's not super effective, unfortunately. So I want to talk about the power of copy because sometimes you can't escape having copy in your visual post. Visual hierarchy, content hierarchy is something that we talk about a lot within design organizations. You may be able to, I don't know if you've seen these kind of memes online where they have a bunch of text on a page and they can actually make you read it in the right order based on where the text is positioned and sized within a graphic. I don't know if you've seen these. It's kind of fun. Maybe I'll try to pull one into the chat later. But that's because our eyes have a hierarchy that they follow when they're looking at text content on images. They naturally go up to the top left and of course the biggest text is always going to be the most eye catching, the most obvious text first. Another thing to think about is color and contrast. You want to be able to choose a color temperature for the overall image. So sometimes that's a warm color temperature. Sometimes that's a cool color temperature. And you want to match those within the same image because otherwise it can be very jarring. You want that text to pop too. Ways that you can do that is by slightly dimming the background of your image or fading it or giving it a slight blur. That's really going to help the text be much more crisp and visually pop. I also make use of white space. I've got some great examples of this later in the presentation too. But notice too that in this particular image, there's a little bit of blue space and white space here from the blue sky and the smoke. That's going to be a lot easier to see versus using the darker landscape footage on the bottom side. And then these are great images too on that kind of show how that visual hierarchy flows on different types of content. Obviously the Wonder Dog rescue image here on the right hand side is using white space to its like optimal ability. I love this particular image. I think it's super effective because you're seeing exactly what the call to action is. You're not being kind of distracted by the imagery. I think it's really strong and it's clean. And type and color also super important. I love this graphic because it's using typography in a super interesting way. So these are just as important to really help convey a tone, convey a mood. Some of these images use type to draw attention to either a feeling or something that the business is trying to get across to their users. You don't need a lot of copy if the type is doing the talking. So this is one of those examples of situations I see a lot on social media, especially with people who maybe don't have a ton of experience. This is not a very effective way of doing copy on imagery. It's a lot. You want the copy to be the teaser. You don't want it to be the whole story. Sometimes you see posts that have the entire CTA or the entire caption, like actually in the image. That's not going to really help your users. It's going to take them more time to try to figure out what you're trying to say in the image than actually grabbing their attention. And as you can tell, it's just not very visually appealing either. So in these examples, the text and type are really the stars. As we discussed earlier, making the background image a little bit darker or blurrier is a super easy and effective way to keep the focus on the relevant information without making everything too busy and too distracting. I really especially love the Wildlife Conservation Fund Gala host here on the right hand side. It just uses imagery in a fantastic way and those colors are just completely popping out of the text of the image rather. And that's a great example of that cool color temperature that I was talking about earlier, that green and that white against that like soft gray background is going to be a really wonderful way of, you know, getting that message across. And this is easy to like I want to point out that this is just so simple. Like once you start seeing these and recognizing how the hierarchy works and how some of these these color tricks work, you're going to notice it a lot more and you're going to really be able to incorporate it into your own content. So authenticity and consistency are other key parts of building a social profile online. This is something that we talked about and kind of help a lot of small businesses and nonprofits figure out on their social profiles. Building your brand's voice before you get started on social is great because means they're going to have that consistency over time. So why is that important though? It's because viewers will immediately recognize your content as they're strolling as they're scrolling through their feeds and hopefully they're going to stop and actually take some time to look and read the content that you're writing. And this is one thing that I think scares a lot of small businesses, a lot of nonprofits and a lot of personal accounts too. It's totally okay to start from scratch. And this is something that a lot of actually a lot of Gen Gen Zers do pretty regularly with their content. So if they're doing it, you know, it must be okay. They're actually starting from scratch. So they'll decide that they want to go with a completely different aesthetic on their social profiles. And so they'll just wipe them clean. They'll start from scratch, clean slate, delete everything. And to me, as someone who has had the same social profiles, you know, I joined Twitter in 2005. I joined like Instagram in 2006. And I've never once done this. You know, I'm not a small business though, so I have less reason to actually want to do it. But the idea of it is really scary to me. And it might be for you too, especially if you've spent a lot of time trying to like figure out what feels right for your nonprofit or your organization. So don't be scared of that. It's totally okay. I think it's more beneficial to start from scratch and find a vibe for your nonprofit that's going to be consistent rather than try to build off that you've already started on. So Pencil is a promise here. They do a fantastic job. They've got a really consistent color, color palette that they're using. They've got a design system that travels amongst their posts. They've got these great highlight icons at the top. You can actually do these in Spark, super simple. And it's a great way just, you know, when you go to your main profile page, users are going to see the highlights and it's going to build more on to that brand recognition that you've been working so hard. This is another great example here, consistency of imagery. We've got that subtle brand color highlights across these different posts. What I love here too is they've actually got some user generated content that they're pulling in. So this is a great way to build, start building a community of users out there. If you're using user generated content in your own accounts, people are going to feel like they're a part of your story. And that's huge. It really goes a long way towards building a relationship and getting people to say, well, I want to post content about my favorite nonprofit because there's a chance that I might actually get featured on their page. And that feels really cool. That feels like you're paying attention to your users and followers. And not only that, but it helps you bring more content into your feeds. And so you can take that content and you can put your logo on it. You can make sure to tag them in the actual content of the post itself. So, you know, give that recognition, make them feel special, make them feel heard and also have an opportunity to, to, to increase the amount of content that you're posting over time. Because it's not just about visual consistency. It's about the amount you're posting and when you're posting that really is going to go a long way building that social account over time. And so Spark actually gives you a really great way to do this. We have a brand manager built into, built into our service allows you to import your logos. You just set it and forget it. It's going to actually pull out the colors of your logo to create a color palette that is, you know, based on your brand colors. And custom typefaces. So if you're working with specific fonts and typefaces that you've downloaded from the internet or that you've gotten from a designer that you're working with, you can pull those into Spark. And use those on the content that you're creating to make sure it's consistent automatically, which is really nice. And it's all in the name of design velocity that ability to start creating content really quickly, really efficiently, and across a larger team so that everybody working towards your social accounts is going to have the same look and feel the content that they're posting. Now, Nike, obviously not a nonprofit, but I think they do a really good job of following these specific platform rules. Now, this is a little bit more esoteric, but different types of content ask for different types of imagery or copy, and you'll start learning this the more and more you start posting across social platforms. One thing that I see a lot of organizations do is posting identical content across their various social feeds. This is easy. It's definitely one way of kind of maximizing the content that you're creating. But it doesn't do you any favors for the platforms that you're posting to. So for example, Instagram, obviously probably the most visual platform of all of them, you want that content that visual content to be like first, I grabbing gorgeous, you know, all the things that we've talked about previously in this presentation. But LinkedIn is a little bit different. Yeah, you still want some great content to grab the attention of your followers there, but it's more informational. It's really about making connections. It's really about like talking about, you know, getting people to come work for your organization, hiring practices, that kind of thing, highlighting employees that work within your nonprofit. So you want to kind of tailor the story depending on which social platform you're working on. And I do think it's important to kind of figure out where your users are and focus your attention on a specific platform, and then, you know, kind of tailor those stories for the other platforms as time goes on. Like for me, for example, with my with the podcast that I do, most of our conversation is happening on our forums. So I spend the most time kind of communicating and posting there. But I do spend a little bit of time posting on Instagram and Twitter, just to make sure that those users that are, you know, maybe haven't found us yet might see our content there as well. So this is kind of going back to that on that white space discussion that we were having earlier. You want to make sure you let those images breathe. And that that's again that that like you might not know what that means until you see it. But sometimes we when we take images one or when we pull images from the Internet, we're kind of centering the subject. And that is kind of how we were taught to take pictures. But when you're posting for social, you need to be able to think about where some of that copy is going to live. So as you can see, because we kind of use the golden rule here of thirds, we left a little more space to add that copy. So this is especially true if you're taking your own images, pulling in your own content from your mobile device or from your desktop when you're creating post for social, because you are actually in charge of how that image is going to be composed. So when you're taking them just think about that a little bit think about the golden rule of thirds. So positioning your subject, you know, to the left hand or right hand side of your image to make sure you leave space for that interesting text. And of course when you aren't a photographer and you're pulling content from elsewhere. We've got a lot of access to great images that you can use within Spark itself we have free image search, and we also have access to Adobe stock so you're an Adobe stock subscriber. You're going to have access to millions of images that you can use. And it's a really great way of kind of freshening up your content, especially if, like me, you don't have, you know, an eye for photography necessarily. All right, so let's talk a little bit about design inspiration. This is places that we love on the Adobe team to look for when we feel like we want to get, you know, kick in the butt for for new ideas for for design for content that we're creating. Now the noun project is I am obsessed with the noun project. I use icons in the noun project for everything. You can use them for logos, you can use them for presentations, you can use them for social content. The noun project is great. So they even have an app that you can download that will allow you to search for all sorts of different icons, and you can change the color based on hex codes or based on a color dropper. And so it just gives you an opportunity to to pull in really fun photography into the work that you're creating. Design inspiration.net just has a ton of different kinds of content that you can look at, especially from the advertising space. So if you need content inspiration for ads that you're creating or for infographics design inspiration.net is a great place to get started. The hands actually is an Adobe company. But again, tons of different assets and just ways of getting I love this for color palette ideas, like the the woman drinking tea in the bottom right hand like I never would have thought of this particular color palette. But that's one way that you can get some some color inspiration some design inspiration from other sources from great designers out there who you may not previously have had access to. Now, once you've started creating your content, how do you actually start generating that momentum to continue to build and you know communicate with the audience that you're creating hashtags are really important for content. I think we all kind of know that at a really basic level but at the end of the day they really do drive drive engagement across social platforms, including the right hashtags is vital to creating an effective social strategy and the data really proves that out. According to some recent studies tweets with one or more hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted and a post with at least one Instagram hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than posts without a hashtag. So that just right right off the top is is going to increase your engagement on social posts. And that's because you want to reach this audience that is out there that already exists that just doesn't know that you exist yet. So why do hashtags have power. So for one, increasing that engagement and building brand awareness. Well research hashtags have the power to attract like minded followers as I was saying, and they can help you grow your reach and reinforce the story and mission behind your organization. And also they can create compelling campaigns. You have a fundraising goal are you promoting an upcoming event for example hashtags are a great way to generate excitement and boost your involvement from your followers around the social campaigns that you're putting together. So we have got some tips and tricks for for really maximizing your hashtag usage. So one, do your research, make it a regular practice to watch which hashtags are being used by successful organizations and influencers in your space. This can even be your competition. This is something that like I've done in the past and it works really well. So streamline your process with a hashtag generating tool. A quick Google search can point you to a range of free and paid options on there's tons out there, and going to your content and look at similar brands in your space, and show you which hashtags are being used and and this is just a super easy way to get kind of a high view tap out there. Step number two, be authentic. Always choose hashtags that reinforce your organization's voice and avoid hashtags that feel pretty inauthentic and risk your post on being found. So to avoid this trap you want to aim for hashtags that ring true to your brand voice and goals, and also that you can find no more than 500,000 of on social. So a great example that actually, you know, I don't know if it's a great example. So I'm pretty obsessed with tick tock right now. I'm not sure how many of you out there are using tick tock as your as one of your social channels to promote your brand. They have these like hashtags that everybody uses. It's really smart for brands, but it kind of waters down the goal. I think was brand trying to achieve. So those a lot of videos will just grab that hashtag because they're trending, but they're not making content around that hashtag so you can see how that might kind of start to dilute the message over time. And tip number three, it's great to create a hashtag around a community initiative. So, you know, this is a really great example. If you want to create a feel good initiative that community will rally behind and ask them to document their participation with a curated hashtag you're going to start generating a lot of content. So an example of this feed an organization that aims to battle food insecurity here in the US and a recent initiative the group encouraged followers to collect food donations by hosting educational dinner parties. Participants were asked to share photos from those dinner parties with tag. And by the end of the campaign feed raise enough money to provide 2 million meals for families in need. And they also kind of some big people to to post content with that hashtag like grease witherspoon Jessica Alba. So these are just some examples of ways that you can build a campaign. So here are some tools that make building a posting cadence really easy buffer for example Hootsuite later Graham is a great that's a gram specific sprout social and if you're using Pinterest tail end. Some of these have those hashtag tools that I was talking about I think buffer does I'm sorry Hoots actually is a really good job of pulling in suggested hashtags. But these are also going to help you build that cadence and that's a really important part to like we have a playbook that I'll share some link to at the end that kind of give you a content calendar that you want to start creating for your organization. Because you don't want to just post willy nilly users will actually want to expect like when you're going to post content and start looking for your posts. And the more they see your content the more they're going to recognize it the more they're going to feel like they understand your story and the social story you're trying to tell online. Collaboration Spark has built in tools for allowing collaboration in your projects and this is important for helping to build that consistency as well because if you have multiple people working on projects. It's going to take some of the some of the pressure off of your social team and this is a great way to for a design to kind of collaborate with the people who are running your social campaigns. So being able to invite people into your projects for either review or for collab is is really convenient. So what are the overall key takeaways from this presentation show don't tell. I think this is probably the biggest one let your visuals be the thumb stoppers make content that's going to make your followers and viewers say oh hey I love this organization I want to take the time to read what they're writing and possibly follow up on their Maximize the use of copy make it short and sweet follow that visual hierarchy and play around with type colors and spacing I think those are really great ways to add some design to your content without necessarily being a designer. And then finally consistency curate your social channels understand which channels are going to maximize the story you're trying to tell and have that brand consistency and voice. So you can be true to your brand and the message and story that you're putting out there in the world. So we've got a lot of great resources over at spark dot Adobe calm. Yeah that's me with the Adobe spark creative fitness challenge. It's just some free video content that we put up there to start learning how to use spark and learn how to create that consistency by creating social content calendars. We've got a great blog that also will highlight content on our community and tell you what people are doing right and how you can follow along. And then we also have our spark playbooks and these are three different books that we created for different kinds of content whether you're trying to be thought leaders in your space, whether you're trying to build an engaged audience, or whether you're just trying to start from scratch and figure out what story you're telling. And that's it. Thank you so much. If you want to get in touch with me I'm at Veronica on Twitter and Instagram, or you can feel free to send me an email at Belmont at Adobe calm. Now if we have any questions I'm happy to jump in there. Thank you Veronica. I learned so much today. So we have a lot of questions. So let me. You already answered this all bring it up on stage so we can just do like a reminder. What's a healthy frequency for posting content. How much is too much. That's a really great question. I think it depends on the platform for for Twitter I think daily is fine multiple times a day is fine Instagram daily feels really good. And for other places like LinkedIn for example, I think weekly is fine. I feel like that kind of jumps into those platform rules. I think it's also beneficial to look at what other nonprofits or organizations in your space are doing and kind of see what feels right. Because there's going to be a point where there's too much you don't want to overwhelm your audience but you also want to make sure to keep that conversation going. Great. Thank you. So the next one. A lot of my images are promoting programs. Do you think it's a smart decision to include a blurb of the program or do you suggest that we leave that in the caption. I try my best not to make the blurb too much. So this goes back to some of the earlier images that you are showing us. Right. Yeah, I think it's finding that balance. It depends on if your programs. So I don't know too much about the kinds of programs that you're creating. But if I see that you work for a library. So if you have like weekly programs, for example, you could have a special look and feel for that specific program. So say if you have like a weekly like storytelling night at the library that could have its own kind of like banner. And then you can change up the images under that banner or in that post every week. So people would say like, oh, this is the storytelling post. If I go to read this caption, I'm going to get more information about who's speaking that week or what stories we're going to hear from. So it's kind of like giving making a separate branding for each program that still has the overall branding look and feel for the library itself. I'd be happy to show you some examples of that kind of content on the future. But yeah, I definitely think like minimize the text and and put the information in the in the caption itself. Okay, great. So this one is quickly jumping up in popularity. So what's the best way to ensure your pictures are texts and texts are accessible for people with disabilities like those with low vision or color blindness? That's a really great question. Thank you for asking that. I think there's there's a lot of great, I don't know them off the top of my head. But if you Google image accessibility, you're going to learn about how like contrast and color work in images for people who have low vision or color blindness or that kind of sensitivity. Yeah, contrast is a really big one. I think having a strong contrast between the text and the color of the background is going to be huge for accessibility reasons. And then certain colors, you know, thinking about reds and greens specifically for colorblind users is going to be important. So, you know, having that in top of top of mind is is really important. And I don't know what the specific guidelines are off the top of my head, but I think a really fast Google search will will give you those guidelines and then you can just follow them your image creation. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. There's also I believe there's there's ways that you can upload images and they'll do like almost a machine learning or AI, like, look at the image to see if it's accessible. That's one thing that you can do too. That's really cool. So this one, I'm going to grab for the second part of the question. Can you talk about maybe like the best time of day or like a day of the week to post content on Facebook and on other platforms. Yeah, oh gosh, that's tough. That's another one we have that in our playbooks and off the top of my head I can't exactly remember. Some of the rules of thumb are that like mornings when people get to work, different platforms are more successful. So, like, I think people are looking at Facebook during lunchtime quite frequently, especially if they're in the part of the like workforce and their buffer and hootspeed specifically will actually maximize your posting schedules for those those times based on platforms. So that's that's really helpful so you can actually get get those platforms that you're using to kind of control the content and when you post to make suggestions for when the best time of day is. And then you can also see like a timeline of engagement so you can see when your users specifically are engaging with your content. And I think that's even more powerful because it's very specific to the users that you're trying to reach. So instead of just looking at the macro trends of the social platforms looking at the micro trends of what your users are doing with your content is going to be more beneficial over time. Yeah, and it goes back to what you're saying to you about like knowing your audience, because I'm sure that plays into it a lot too. Like, if your audience is youth in the community versus, you know, outreach for like senior citizens like it's probably going to differ. Absolutely. This one is there a best practice rule for minimum maximum size of text knowing that people are going to be viewing on different devices like cell phones versus tablets. You know, no I not that I know of I haven't really seen that come up and in any of the design conversations that I've had. I think there are rules like Facebook used to have rules around text size on an image. There was it was called like the 20% rule like text couldn't take up more than 20% of the total image but that wasn't really like a comfort or like accessibility rule. That was more of a more of a like, they don't want you to advertise in their images kind of rule. But yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that necessarily I think it's going to work regardless of these design practices that we've gone through in this presentation are going to work regardless of whether it's web or mobile. Okay, cool. Thank you. Susan asks in the chat pod how did Veronica get her first name is her Twitter handle do I work for Twitter. No, early adopter. I just started on Twitter, like, really the first year they were working, and I actually had a previous handle. And then one day I was like, I'm just going to check and see if my name is available and it was and I've just had it ever since and same with Instagram. Never give that up because you won't be able to get it back. I can't get it anymore on any new platforms either so I'm not fast enough anymore. Actually a Facebook slash Veronica as well. That's pretty cool. Okay, so Jessica asked, do hashtags matter on Facebook and LinkedIn. They do. Yeah, for sure, especially on LinkedIn. I think a lot of hashtags are. I mean, especially both, but I see it more effectively on LinkedIn. I think that's more hashtags, yes, but also tagging because they have the tagging feature. So using both of those I think is is is going to really help. Okay, let's see here. So this goes back to what you're saying at the beginning of the session around starting a new on a social media account. Do you recommend scrapping an entire social feed to start a new design or just going with a rebrand. It depends on how much you care about the past history of your content and how you feel that fits into the overall aesthetic of what you're trying to do. So sometimes brands will have some fun with a rebrand. And so you can start doing like a countdown on your social feeds like every day start alluding to it or showing a little bit more of the rebrand. So I've seen companies and nonprofits do that with a lot of success and it's fun. It builds anticipation and gets against your followers excited about what's to come. But if you're trying to tell like a whole color story with your page, this is super popular on Instagram, then going fresh might be the best way to start. So color stories, I think are easiest to see on accounts like Glossier, for example, some of the more consumer brands like Sephora, Urban Decay, Glossier. They do a really wonderful job of color stories, mostly because they're selling cosmetics and so color is a big part of the story that they're trying to tell. So if you go look on Glossier's account, for example, on Instagram, you'll see that they incorporate that pink blush color into all of their content one way or the other and Urban Decay is the same way with their purple. Even on their user generated content, they find content that matches that color way. So and you can go back in time and see it like kind of shifting and morphing and they do a really beautiful job of curating that. So if you want to do that, if that's something that's important to your brand or your mission, then yeah, start from scratch, redo it. But if you feel like it's more effective to kind of build up an anticipation and excitement around a rebrand and kind of go from that point on, that's also totally great. Like either will work. I like I said, I just feel really stressed out with the concept of deleting all of my content and starting from scratch, but I'm not a nonprofit. I'm not a business. I'm just a person. So it's a little bit of a different use case, whatever you're comfortable with will work fine. Thank you. So this one, can we remind folks about where nonprofits look for fairly priced or free stock photography so you mentioned several resources before. Right. Yeah, so spark has access to free photo search right now which you can use for all of your promotional content ads that kind of thing and that's coming from from Pixabay. So there's a number of free resources out there. If you search for free stock photography, that will help. Maybe Terry has some more information about what Adobe offers and within the company itself. But yeah, within Spark, you can access, I mean, millions of images from our free photo search. Yeah, and more on that coming soon. We put in the chat a trial where you all can access free stock subscription for a limited time. So we'll repost that and you can all utilize that. I believe it's a month time period, but that link will show you more information. Okay, let's unsplash as well. Another another really good source as as Paul noted in the chat pod. Cool. So this one, how can I find the best image sizes to use on each of the social media channels? Are there different templates? Yes, this is super important for creating content across different social platforms. They all have their optimal image sizes for importing. And this is really important because your image could look fine on your desktop or on your phone when you're creating it. But then when you upload it, sometimes those platforms, they actually like kind of smush it. They downres it or they they process it in certain ways that can make it look a little more pixelated if you haven't put the correct image size up. So in Spark, we actually have, you can either start from scratch for specific platform templates where you get a blank slate that you can start creating from and it's the correct pixel size or the content that you're looking to create. We also have a resize button. So the resize will actually take the template that you've already started to create and you can change it for different social platform aspect ratios. And so that's really easy if you're trying to use the same image across multiple platforms. You can just press with one button and it's going to take your content and fit it to the correct size for the other platforms that you're trying to make. So you can just duplicate the content that you've already created for Instagram, for example, and take that duplicated image, resize it for Facebook, like horizontal images, and it's going to look great. So that's one way of kind of like taking the burden of like having to figure out what the best sizes are for each platform. So we make that super easy, but yeah, there are definitely best sizes for each platform and we try to take that hard work out of the equation for you. That's really cool. Okay, so this one, what is the cost for Spark? I think Terry was answering that question in the chat pod as well from the Adobe team, but a Spark standalone subscription is $9.99 a month. There's also a yearly subscription rate and you also get it with certain Creative Cloud packages as well. Yeah, so one thing I was putting in the chat pod for everybody was you can get a free version in the link that I provided. And then also through TechSoup we have a discount on the Creative Cloud all apps membership. So you get a 60% discount for year one and a 40% discount year two and the paid version of Spark is included in that. So that comes out to be $19.99 per month for year one, $29.99 per month year two and beyond. So that's a little, I'll blur it there. And there is a free version of Spark as well. There is a watermark, but you can actually remove the watermark from your images and there's some limitations on premium assets that you won't get with the free version, but you still can create tons of gorgeous content with the free version as well. Yeah, I've seen a lot of nonprofits utilize the free version and they put together some really great stuff so everyone can take advantage of that and it works out really well. Let's see, any other hints on reaching a senior population? You know, I've gotten that question before and I think that's going to be figuring out where they, what networks they're using and the answer to that question is probably Facebook. Like I don't want to make a sweeping generalization here, but I think in terms of which social platforms seniors are using the most on Facebook is probably the answer. But I would do, I would do like a bit of a, you know, talk to them, figure that out like if you're doing in person meetups or however you're communicating with your audience, you know, send out a little poll, figure out what platforms are using. Maybe it's email, maybe it's newsletters via email. That's also something that you can do quite easily create graphics for email newsletters in Spark or create Spark pages which are links that you can update and create web newsletters using that. Beth says her grandma's group likes the tic-tac. So yeah, tic-tac, sure. I didn't know that was big among the senior community, but you know, things change all the time so I think that's really great. So yeah, figuring out what works best again, just figure out from your audience what platforms they're using most frequently and focus your attentions there. Great. So this one, I'm color illiterate. How do I create a palette of complimentary colors? Oh, this is fun. So in Spark, you actually will give you access to different color palettes that you can choose from. And in our templates, so if you upload your brand, we'll create a brand palette for you. But when you're actually designing in templates, we'll give you the template color palette and then we'll give you other color palettes that you can choose from. So it's just really nice to not have to think about color palettes. Like I said earlier, that's not something that super comes naturally to me. So our design team has actually created palettes that you can choose from. But there's tons of different palette creation tools on the web if you Google them. This is not something that you might have thought to Google previously, but there's a whole world of like palette color palette lovers out there on the internet. And you can find some just unbelievable color palette combinations. You can either pull in like one color that you're really interested in, and it will they'll recommend like, you know, a palette of five colors that go super well with that color that you've chosen. So yeah, think outside the box a little bit and look at designs or advertisements that you like use the color dropper on your computer to pull those into your editing tools, or just pull from your own logos and and figure out like what you can create from there. Love it. Okay, next one. Can you tell us more about the playbook functionality in Spark? Yeah, it's not really functionality. It's actually some some tool, some PDFs and web tools that we've put together. When I have a little more time and see if I can pull open the playbooks right now and post them into the chat pod, because I think they are super fun. Yeah, here they are. They're built in Spark pages. You can also download them as PDFs. Okay, there's the Spark page. So feel free to hop in there. And this will give you the links to the PDFs for these three different playbooks that we have that can really help you start telling your stories around different goals. So we have content calendars in those playbooks that basically give you prompts for each day for how you can reach your audience. These are geared towards towards like kind of like B2B or B2C organizations, but I think they can help you start thinking about the kinds of content you can create as a nonprofit too. That's really great. Thank you for that resource. Jose asks any tips when it comes to brand rebrands? This is something that you might want to talk to with a designer about not definitely not my area of expertise. But yeah, rebrands can be really fun. So typically you're going to work with a design or a design team, and they're going to come to you and talk to you about like what your goals are, who your audience is, what you're trying to achieve, figure out what your voice is. And then they're going to make suggestions for for your brand. So that could be logos that can be a new color palette that can be fonts and templates that you have on 10 type. Why can't I think of the word? Anyway, you know, different, different fonts that you can start using for for your content, and they'll put the whole thing together for you. Or if that's something you can do internally, that's great as well. Typography. Thank you, Isabel. I don't that word totally like escaped my brain. I think I'm ready for my second cup of coffee this morning. But yeah, that's that's one way can do, you know, for nonprofits, you might be able to find design teams that can can do a nonprofit price, or maybe you can find someone in the community that is willing to help you. So yeah, that's that's a that's a great place to start. Thank you. Okay, so we've got a couple more minutes. If you're hitting severe burnout and need to take a break but don't want to lose followers, any emergency help ideas. Absolutely. And this is all about pre schedule and content. And this is something I don't think people take advantage of enough. You can actually bulk schedule your content. If you are spending the time to upfront create a content calendar for your organization, then you know exactly the type of content that you want to create for the week. And so if you have like a handful of people, one person, two people working on social content, they can actually spend like Monday or Friday can be social content creation day. And they can actually plan out exactly what they want to post and schedule that using tools or scheduler tools. So every day at the right time the content is going to be posted it takes all that overhead out of the equation. And you know there's always going to be fresh content up there every day. So you don't have to always spend like a couple of hours. You know in the morning thinking about right what do I want to talk about today what's going on on social platforms. It's already done for you. And for me that's like, I, you know I can't believe I don't actually have that in the presentation that's a really great thing to add forward is like scheduling content is going to save a lot of strife. Okay Veronica, do you see any other questions that you want to touch on before we wrap up or any closing thoughts for the group today. No, I think I think you know we kind of covered a lot of the the most important bits like this is creating social content should be fun. You know it's interesting how like in a lot of organizations. People get kind of like pulled into that role. We did a poll one time when we were out in in New York talking to nonprofits about like who within the organization is actually responsible for social content. We got some crazy answers we got, you know, as interns because they were young and understood social media. We got like finance officers we had people in marketing which makes sense we had people in all sorts of different departments who were, you know, coming together to try to figure It's a full it can be a full time job for a lot of organizations, it can be tough. So I think figuring out who is, you know, it might seem like a, like a somebody that could be a side job for someone but you have to think about it as being like, it's a marketing role. It's a whole whole different job from from what someone else is doing, and to really kind of like make that matter and be able to build it up to its most potential you're going to need someone focusing on it. So that's probably my biggest overall takeaway tip. So yeah, I love the session. Thank you so much for all of your great questions. Feel free to reach out to me moving forward on on social or via email, and I'm really happy to be able to do this today. Thank you, Veronica.