 Okay, for those of you who are just joining us, it looks like we've now got 13 people in the session with me or 14 people in the session with me now. We're gonna go ahead and get started at 202. So go to wait one more minute. So come on in, make yourself comfortable. Feel free to introduce yourself here in the session chat. If you click on the session, this is session, and then click on chat, you'll be able to interact with other people in the room. Also, if you have any questions or if you wanna join visually as well, you can turn on your camera, turn on your microphone. I have room in this room for up to 19 other people to join me on camera. You're not obligated to though. I know sessions like this, you might not want people to see into your home or see you working from home. So no obligation at all, but if you'd like to join me here on camera, I welcome that. Again, I've got room for 19 other folks to join, but if not, we'll go ahead and get started now. Let me go ahead and share my screen. And I think they've opened this session, not only the people who are just Knight Foundation grantees, but who are also Perspective Knight grantees or other people that are joining the session. So if that's you, you're welcome to be here and drop in questions as well. If you've fallen, of course, into any of those buckets. But I'm gonna start just talking about communications in relation to being a grant recipient for Knight Foundation. So at Knight Foundation, one of the things that we really care about is help amplify your story. So one of several of our communications philosophies is that as we help you amplify your story, we'll actually be able to attract other people who are innovating that we can potentially invest in in the future. And so, whether that's through a press release or some sort of other grant announcement, anything we can do to say, hey, Knight Foundation is supporting your organization's work and really putting your work first, but Knight support second in terms of priority, but also just in terms of how we're talking about the announcement, that allows us to find other people, other innovators like you to invest in. So you'll kind of see that theme throughout this whole presentation, as well as when you're working with Knight as well. And yes, again, as the chat says, if you want to come onto screen, like Hitall, I believe has, feel free to turn on your video or your audio and you can ask any questions throughout the session. Feel free to interrupt me as well. You'll see that Jacqueline put a question into the chat. We'd love to have you drop in questions in the chat as well. So let me navigate to the next screen. So if you have a grant for Knight and you're joining us for this particular part, we'll start with talking about the Knight grants. What we want to do is help you talk about your grant in the most effective way. So regardless of what grant level you're at, whether you received a $20,000 grant or $2 million grant or more, we want you to be in touch with us before you publicly talk about your grant at all. I would recommend in general that you budget at least three business days. If you're mentioning us in a press release or anything like that for us to turn around approval just because we do get a lot of approval requests. But our involvement in your announcement in general will depend on the level of your grant. So if your grant is under $250,000, we usually let the grantee lead when talking about announcing their grant first. So you all can decide the cadence of the press release, the timing, generally stuff like that. We let the grantee decide and then we just support in whatever way we decide is most appropriate. For grants above that, so $250,000 and above, we much more prefer to approach it as if it's a joint grant announcement. So either we'll co-author a press release together, co-author a blog post, we might take on media outreach together, we might take it independently and we'll work with you on a case by case basis. So really how you work with night about talking about your grant will be tailored to the size of your grant as well as what we decide together is the best strategic approach. So at some point, once you decide, hey, I'm ready to publicly talk about my grant, your relationship manager, which I think in most cases here is probably Lillian Corral. We'll put you in connection with communications, with the night communications team and then we'll meet with you, talk about your plans, what you wanna do and then come up with a specific plan tailored to you. But again, these are the general guidelines, just talk to us before you actually talk about your grant on a public scale. If it's just a mention in a press release, give us at least three days to turn it around, if not more. And again, this will all depend on the size of grant. For approvals, whether you want a logo approved, you want a mention improved or anything like that, some people have a wall on their public space installment that they want to include night's logo on or night's name on. All of those can either go to Kenny Ma or Directive Communications and I put his email address here or simply communications at kf.org and everyone on the communications team will get it and one of us will respond to you. So those are the most efficient ways to get a hold of the night team for specific approvals or if you wanna start those conversations if your night grant relationship manager has already kind of made that introduction for you. This again, I put Kenny's email here. So if you wanna take a screenshot of this particular slide, this would be a site that I would recommend that you just take a quick screenshot of. Again, you can contact Kenny at Ma at kf.org or communications at kf.org. We have a team, our whole website which has the comms team, guidelines and different resources that we have available is at kf.org slash communications. I just realized I included an extra dot there right before the backlash, so sorry about that. But kf.org slash communications, our website will have everything you need and if specifically you're looking for our logos or our branding guidelines, you can also find that at kf.org slash logos. And yeah, so that's it specific to, thank you for dropping that in there into the chat. That's specific to talking about your grant with night. The next part of this session which I know was super quick, the first part was only eight minutes. So I wanna pause now to see if anyone has any questions. The next part of the session that I just wanted to talk about is how to think about talking about your grant or your work in general. I think one of the things that we have an advantage of here at night is just understanding how to talk about things strategically. So I wanna leave you all with any strategic tips but if any of you have any questions now, feel free to either drop it into the chat or unmute yourself and I'll pause for a minute or two so people can hop in. I feel like I talked super fast. So if I did, please let me know. And I can also repeat anything I said if anything wasn't clear. But wanna make sure you at least get a screenshot of this page. Our production folks have dropped into the chat, the emails as well as the links. And then let me just go back here to this previous slide. And here's the general guidelines that we provide people. And again, as I mentioned earlier, this does feel a little more general but when you actually start working with us, when our boots are on the ground and we're talking about communications, we're gonna come up together with a much more tailored strategy and a plan for talking about your work on a public scale. Okay, so let me then move into talking about how to tell your story. So, oh, you only see the title slide. Okay, does everyone else only see the title slide? It should say telling your story right now. Do you see that? You see that, okay. Ray, I see a head nod for someone. So Ray, I would refresh your screen, sometimes hop in. This is just like a hop in function and sometimes it just gets paused. So I would just refresh it and then hopefully it'll work. Okay, so while Ray is taking care of that, thank you, Alexia and thank you, Don. We'll talk about telling your story. So one of the things that I really enjoy talking with our grantees about and just other nonprofits or other folks working in the industries in which we work is about how to tell your story because you, no matter what field you're working in, you have a story behind your work that someone's gonna find interesting. Whether that is the press, whether it's your community or all of the above, you are doing something cool, you were doing something innovative and there's a story to tell and there's people being impacted. So as you're thinking about that, I think the two modes to think about is first of all, how you're being innovative or the innovation that's just going on behind your work. Think about what you are doing as a smart city technologist or someone in data or whatever category you've fallen that's innovative and different. And then the other thing is to think about the community impact. In my opinion, the press tends to really respond to stories or in my experience, I guess, more than my opinion that have a human element to it. So you can talk a lot about data, for example. I think data at a very high level, you can talk about understanding all sorts of demographics of what citizens are doing, but the moment you are able to layer in an analysis or an understanding of what this means for people, either on a small scale or on a large scale, that's really when there's a story there to think about. So again, I'm kind of approaching this from a higher level just because I know there's such a broad swath of people doing different things, but I really think that there's interesting stories that everybody has to think about their work. So then as you've figured out, okay, this is our story either, the story and then also newsworthiness, which is a bullet point that I should have included here but I didn't, but maybe just write it down for own notes. What's timely about what we're doing? So oftentimes when we're working with grantees, we'll ask them to identify anything that's happening on their calendar that we might be able to peg a grant announcement to or peg a blog post to or anything interesting that's coming up. So even if they don't have anything on their own organizational calendar that's coming up, maybe they know of something in their community or something on a national scale that might be directly related to their work. So that also helps motivate and build a story as you're talking, as you're thinking about how to talk about your work. So generally at night when we work with our grantees, we look at storytelling in four different arenas. First in the press release. So a press release is just, as you know, a very effective way to get the facts to the press and just share about the facts either this is the facts of the grant, this is the facts of what our organization is doing if you're not talking about a grant. Here's the facts that you need to know to be able to write a quick news brief about this. Blog posts though, are also a really effective storytelling method. And at Night Foundation, we have actually found that oftentimes if we pair a blog post with a press release, you can actually have a really beautiful synthesis of being able to not only share the facts behind what's happening, but add that human element that I mentioned earlier, adding that narrative, adding the why behind it. I think it allows you to share a little bit more color than maybe a press release would. And that's something that we found really compelling too. And when we share press release and blog posts together, we always make sure that the information is linked, that they're all on our website, that if you're on one piece, like if you're on a press release, you can easily find the blog post in Marys Versa. The third thing that we often consider, but not as often as press release or blog posts is maybe pitching an op-ed to a publication. So for example, if someone was doing something really impactful with the data that could potentially change, let's say the way an entire industry or an entire city's functions. And there's really a compelling argument that they would like to make. So more than just the news and more than just talking about the color or the narrative behind the story, but in addition to that, being able to make an argument for a reason why a community should get behind an initiative or why a government bodice should support an effort or anything like that. Anything that gives you a little bit more of a persuasive gist, then that might be when an op-ed is appropriate. And the good thing is you can pitch op-eds to your local publication or to even national publications and get published as an author in that publication. And now you're viewed as a credible voice in the arena. So sometimes again, when there's more of an angle, like a persuasive angle that we think our grantee can take, we'll advise them to draft an op-ed. We might co-author an op-ed with them and then we can help them pitch that as well. And then the last thing is social media. So Night Foundation, we have a rather robust following on our social media platforms. And one of the things that we really like to be able to do is to help elevate the work of our grantees, specifically the night-supported work of our grantees on social media. So you can always send us, as you get to know us more as we're working together on your grant announcement, that's usually then an open door invitation to send us things that either you think we might be interested in sharing or ask for help for sharing. So we actually have a grantee now in our journalism grantee who just sends us DMs on Twitter, pardon me, with things that they think we might be interested in sharing. So I think that usually we're more than happy to help when we're able to fit it into our workflow and invite you to do the same. And then the last little note that I'll leave you with is something called the joy of missing out. And I can't take credit for this. I've actually heard it from a woman who does nonprofit communications training. And I heard it several years ago, but that's just something that I think as you're thinking of your own storytelling, just to think about the joy of missing out. So you might have often heard of the fear of missing out. People talk about that all the time. I suffer from foam on myself on a regular basis. But I think sometimes in communications we find ourselves stretching ourselves a little too thin and trying to do too many things and really being strategic and particular and a little choosy about what you're doing. First of all, it can make your efforts go further. And second of all, just make sure you're not doing too much by really digging into a couple areas and not trying to do everything all across the board but doing what you think might make the most sense strategically. You can have really effective communications efforts. And again, I feel like I'm talking at a super high level. So I really would invite you to ask questions. Now we still have about 40 minutes left. I have one more slide to go through but we have about 40 minutes left before I'm supposed to end the session. So I'd encourage you to ask questions, turn on your video and audio if you'd like or drop questions into the chat because I'd love to use the rest of this time just to kind of workshop together to talk through stories and talk through maybe how we can help you. And yeah, as the prompt says you can drop any questions here. So the last slide, after this session is over so probably next week after the whole Smart Cities lab is over, I mean. So probably early next week, we'll send you an email inviting you to participate in training with a man called Mark Fest and it's called Elevator Speech Training. Mark Fest is the former VP of Communications at Knight Foundation. I think he left about 10 years ago and he started his own program where he helps people actually come up with their own pitch. So their own Elevator Speech. And you might have heard like give me your Elevator pitch he'll actually help you develop that and practice it. Several of our Knight staff have gone through it. Several of our grantees have gone through it and I would really highly recommend you do. So we're happy to provide that to our grantees on a first come first serve basis. And we provide that with no cost to you as long as we have slots available. So again, we'll send an email for that early next week so that you or your organization can sign up but you'll hear about it here first so that you know to look out for it early next week. So yeah, I just wanted to make sure to note that and again, we'll send that email. Okay, so I'm gonna stop sharing my slide right now. Can you figure out how to do this? Okay, there we go. Hi, good to see you. Hey, Tal, is that how you say your name? Okay. So I see a question here from Meredith. So I'm gonna answer that question from Meredith and or at least begin to answer that question from Meredith but hey, Tal, if you have questions or if anyone else does bring them in here. Again, we've got plenty of time to go through them so want to make sure we get to those. So Meredith who asked these questions do you have an example of a grantee or program or project that has done a great job with storytelling in your view and why? I do and so Knight Foundation, before I share this example, I do wanna say pull back a bit and say Knight Foundation funds them three program areas. We fund in journalism, in the communities which Smart Cities and this program area falls under and in the arts. So I'm actually going to tell a story about a journalism organization but I think all of the examples that they've done can actually be applied to your work as well. So I think the organization I'm thinking of is Report for America and we actually had a similar convening to this at the beginning of the year for our journalism grantees and Report for America actually came and talked. They are actually have been done a very good job of talking about their work and sharing the work that they've done. So actually if you go to their Twitter account Meredith, I think there would be a great example. They of course I think have a larger communications budget so they're able to produce videos. They're able to, they have a whole cohort of individuals they work with and so they really do a good job of adding the human element of stories. It's a similar program to Teach for America. They're putting reporters in newsrooms, young reporters in the newsrooms. So they're actually able to talk really well about the human impact. And again, that note I made earlier, the human impact can make such a big difference in terms of people really grasping onto your story. So that would be a quick example. I'm happy to dive more into that if you would like. And then let me just answer on one's questions. Do you prioritize one social media tool over the other? So yeah, I think over time you'll understand where your audience is. I think for us at Night Foundation as an example, we know what type of posts we'll do really well on which platform. And we also know the kinds of cadence we need for posting on each platform to have success. And that I think is anecdotal to each organization. I'm happy to share the insights. I will share the insights for Night Foundation right now but I think as you spend time with your organization on your platforms, you might find a little bit of a different cadence. So we know at Night Foundation, when we post about journalism items or data or technology or misinformation on Twitter, that stuff takes off. When we post about communities on Facebook, people really grasp on the things about communities, especially the more hyper local we get. And then third, we know the Instagram and the arts kind of go hand in hand. So we cross host all of our information on all of the platforms, but we will really lean into Twitter for the items I mentioned or we'll try to beef up the arts on Instagram and stuff like that. Dawn, thanks for joining us as well on video. Do either of you have any questions or anything you'd like to discuss? A little bit project specific, can you hear me okay? Yeah, it's a little soft but yeah, I can hear you. So we got funding from Night for Documentary Film and it's about public libraries. It's about half history and half contemporary, half libraries are dealing with challenges now and serving their communities. What I don't know is has Night funded documentary films in the past and worked with the filmmakers on the rollout or will this be something new for you guys? Sure, so that, let me actually talk to my colleagues about the specific documentary element before. We've definitely funded documentaries before and we've funded in the library space. I think generally when we have funded projects like this before the storytelling projects, we let you do your own thing. What we wanna talk about is our support for you doing your own thing. So we don't need to be part of building the rollout or even part of the film project. We just wanna talk about how we can amplify your work and amplify talking about the fact that your documentary is a night supported effort. Does that answer your question? Yes, and if you have any examples of films that you've worked with in the past, I'd love to see some of those. Yeah, I'm happy to do that. Don, could you drop your email address in the chat if you're comfortable doing that or you can DM me? Here, this is where, I'm also a night foundation. So if you wanna DM me, the one that says this is where you send me a DM with your email address and then I'll do some digging and I'd be happy to email to you. Okay, thank you. I will save this. Okay, so I see a question from, wow, lots of questions coming in. Oh, hey Amanda, haven't seen you for a while. Okay, so Saeed, have there been any grantee story languages other than English? So Saeed, that's a great question. We, in Miami particular, I can say we do a lot of funding in the Spanish language. I know in our other communities, for example in St. Paul, there's a huge mom community. So we definitely have grants that we have made to non-English speaking grantees. I think for, or not not English speaking grantees, but for grantees who are working in languages other than English, I think it's probably a better way to word that. In terms of the products that Knight is producing, generally it will still always be available in English and then maybe we'll work with a translation company to get it translated into an appropriate language as needed. But still because the mass majority of people who we're working with are reading or writing in English, that's usually what we tend to default to and then translate as appropriate or as needed. I'm not sure if that answers your question, so if you want to follow up with any additional questions, feel free to. Julia, when Knight give grantees access to media outreach lists in specific markets, specifically Knight community ones, an additional media outreach partner outreach is really helpful too. Julia, that's probably on a case by case basis as we decide is, so I guess short story, yes, as long as we can talk through the strategy behind it, I think that generally what we do is try to work with grantees and Julia, your name is Reggie Obell so I know we've worked together I think. So, but I just can't remember what organization you're with so I'm sorry, but I think as we're working together, you know, like oftentimes I'm building, rebuilding media lists from scratch, not always but I'll work with an existing one and try to flesh it out, update it a bit and so there are some regular people who we try to target from the media regularly in our communities based off of relationships that we have. Usually with grantees, if I'm not gonna do that outreach directly myself on behalf of the grantee, I usually send them that information or make recommendations of who they should reach out to in a specific city or do sometimes send them a list, again, of recommendations of people who had to reach out to. So again, it's very much on a case by case basis, same with partner outreach lists as well. I think it really depends on what the need is and what we're able to provide that's accurate and up to date. So I'm saying that kind of like this because I'm not sure if I'm fully answering your question or if I targeted it rightly, but yes, long story, yes, but we would want to work with you specifically to talk through what you're looking for and how we can best support that. Yes, yeah, that would be great. Okay, Amanda, what are your measures of success for your digital engagement? Is time spent, number of clicks, et cetera? What is your overall approach for the measurement of the communications data? So this is funny because this is actually something that we talk about a lot in terms of understanding how to best evaluate our work behind communications. I think you're probably gonna get sick of me saying it depends, but it really always does depend on the effort. For example, how we might measure what we consider to be a smaller grant investment versus a larger grant investment in the success of that or kind of the scale that we're using for that might be different, but generally we're looking for engagements, we're looking so that includes clicks, retweets, likes, et cetera, specifically clicks, how long people are, or how much people are interacting with our content, and then on social media, we're also looking at impressions. So at a very high level, but we are looking at all of those things and just trying to understand, get a very high level sense of how our efforts are. We look, or how our efforts are being successful, or whether or not they are being successful, we try to look on a quarterly basis as well. What are some national press themes slash angles that you're seeing in the smart city space right now that grantees might be able to take on to? I would actually love it if other folks in this room, if you wanna put something in the chat or if Atal or Don, you have any ideas to put this into the chat or answer now, because I think Angela versus me answering that question, I think you have 30 other people here who are working in the smart city space that are gonna be exceedingly more knowledgeable than myself. So if anyone has any thoughts, again, the question is if there are any national press themes or angles that you are seeing in the smart city space right now, their grantees might be able to take on to. I personally think while we're waiting for folks to answer, there's a lot of questions, digital inclusion and equity. I think the themes actually behind the panels that we've had today are things that are major national conversations. I think digital inclusion and equity, like Amanda said, broadband access, I know we just have that. City tech services and COVID recovery is an emerging thing and it's a huge theme on one. I agree, especially around COVID recovery and preparing for future disasters, I think. People are thinking about a lot in this space. I also think that what I was gonna say is that I think people are often thinking about what's happening with data. And I think people have been thinking about that for a while, but safety and security behind their data or behind their information privacy is a big conversation right now. And along those lines, I think you could even probably include a little bit of misinformation in this industry too, or quality of information. Any other thoughts that people wanna share with Angela? And thanks, Amanda and Admin for dropping those in. Health, equity and access, misinformation around health amid COVID, yeah. And that's been a huge one that we've seen even outside of our smart cities work. For those of you who don't know, we currently have an open request for proposals for combating misinformation in particular in communities of color. There's been a tremendous amount of misinformation. So if you are doing that kind of work, you might consider applying for that RFP as well. Don says, I'm finding a lot of interest in changing the negative perceptions about government and what it can do. What's the future of public change, perception that private is better than the public? Yeah, agreed. I've seen that a lot as well. Awesome. Well, again, here to answer any questions you may have. When I'm just sitting in silence and hearing my own voice, I tend to talk to fill the space. So I'll be quiet for a minute in case anyone wants to drop in any questions or hit all or don if you wanna talk as well. Yeah, for those of you who don't know, Amanda is with A80 Cities, which is based in Canada. And yeah, I'm sure it is, Amanda. I'm curious to hear a little bit about how Knights changed, how they support grantees or their own focuses during the pandemic, or since the pandemic. Sure, particularly with communications or just in general? Either one. I assume your field is communications. Yeah. I was gonna say, it's a little more tricky for me to talk about just general grantee support. I know that in general, we tried, especially toward the beginning of the pandemic, we tried to give a lot of flexibility with our grantees, but yeah, I think in general, one of the things that I've just noticed and respected about my colleagues at night is that they try to really respond to the moment. So right now COVID is the moment and I've just even seen that in our grant making work and also just in our communications work, we actually had to totally pivot how we were doing, well, we were doing all digital communications in addition to doing all digital communications prior to that though, we also added a whole line of live programming which is led by our communications team by myself and my colleague Alejandro that we haven't done prior to the pandemic. So we realized that there was a need for reaching people and an opportunity to reach people with live stream conversations. And so at the beginning of the pandemic that started at four times a week and now it's once a week, thankfully it gives us a little more space to breathe but you might have heard of this through the weekly email that we send with live content. And so I think that's one of the ways that for cons we've responded to the pandemic, but yeah, just in general our general operations with grantees for communications have always kind of been on a digital platform. We've always done kind of zoom calls with them, done outreach to the press, even traditional press usually is by phone or email. So those kind of things haven't pivoted maybe our timelines have but adding the live programming definitely has been something that's been awesome but has been a comms pivot for us. Just to follow up, do you know if there's gonna be after the name of it that the big annual night convening that usually happens in the beginning of the year? Yeah, so we sent the date out for the night media it saved the date out for the night media forum. I think we sent it out last week or the week before it's going to be, let me see if any of my colleagues are able to jump in if they know this before I'm able to find it, I would appreciate it, but it's going to be either at the end of February or the beginning of March, February 22nd, 23rd and 24th. So, and again, it'll be virtual and I believe it will be on this platform as well. And also, I know we're in an online session now so I won't expect any of you to hang around here or till three Eastern, if there are no additional questions, we can, I can give you some time back so I don't want for us people to stay in here, but I'll be hanging out here for a little bit longer. Thank you, Rachel. Good seeing your words, Amanda. And again, I do want to emphasize to everyone our team, oh, thanks Marta. Our team really is more than happy to help with anything. So, if you do have any questions, I personally like talking through strategy behind things. That's something I really enjoy. I think the vast majority of my communications colleagues do as well. So, thinking through what might be the most effective way to talk behind about your work or talk about night support for your work is something that we enjoy and are happy to help with things through. Great. Well, I'll hang out here for a couple more minutes. I do want to say, I was given a talking point to say, so let me pull it up so I don't miss it, that the next session is going to start at 315. So, you can just click back on to the stage icon on the left side of your browser, and it's on equitable recovery for public spaces and city planning. And yeah, again, this session that I just did is going to be recorded. All of our sessions will be recorded and we'll put them all on our website, as well as for those of you who are in this session and might have missed the session with my colleague, Vicky, that should also be recorded and that's going over flux, our grants administration system reporting, things like that. So, yeah, again, I think in general, I'll speak for Vicky as well. We're always happy to help. So, any way that we can be a resource for you, especially talking about your work, more than happy to be that. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Take care. Thank you, Archie. Thank you. Have a good day. Okay, thank you all. I'm going to sign off as well, since it looks like most people are headed out and see you on the main stage shortly.