 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar is Social Media for Volunteer Managing and More. My name is Cammy Griffith and today's presenters are Aaron Bernhardt and Jane Craven. Before we get started I want to say just a quick word about TechSoup. We are working toward the time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. I want to show you a quick screen grab of our home page. If you haven't yet spent any time on TechSoup, I want to point out a couple of things I think you'll find pretty great. We have a learning center with articles and you'll also find all of our recorded webinars in the learning center. You can request donations from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec. We have a couple of newsletters that you can subscribe to. We have a weekly newsletter by the cup and a monthly newsletter called New Product Alert that comes out. So feel free to subscribe to those and then you can stay in touch with all the things that we're doing. There's a bunch of other things on our site so check it out at TechSoup.org. I'm hoping we have our second presenter unmuted. I believe so. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Wonderful. So welcome and thanks again presenters for taking the time to put together your presentation. So I'd like to start Aaron. Would you mind introducing yourself? My pleasure and thank you everyone for your patience with our technical difficulties there. My name is Aaron Barnhart. Some of you may know me from my formal role which was Director of Volunteerism Initiatives with Idealist.org. These days I am the principal and founder of Effective Altruism LLC where I'm doing work to develop tools, resources, and trainings to create meaningful effective engagement to help support rather meaningful effective engagement. I'm also the managing director of the Building Bridges Coalition which is a consortium of individuals and organizations working to promote and facilitate international service. You can learn more about me on my website but for now I will pass the microphone as it is over to my co-presenter Jane. Hi, I'm Aaron Barnhart. Oh no I'm sorry I'm reading the wrong slide. I'm Jane Cravens and a lot of you already know me. There's complete information about me at my website, kodekommunications.com. I've been affiliated with TechSoup for a long time now and as a volunteer, as an online moderator for their Volunteers in Technology Forum and if you want to read more about me please feel free but I really want to get right to the presentation so let's go. Excellent and I'd also like to thank Elliot for helping out on answering chat questions and facilitating the chat questions. We have about three or four other folks helping out with Second Life and looking at Twitter and answering questions there. So there's a lot of other stuff going on in the background so thank you all for helping out in that way. Our quick agenda, we're going to first talk about the definitions of what volunteers and what is social media just so we're all on the same page. We're going to talk about the tools that are available and show you some examples. We're going to talk about getting started and what you need to do for planning as well as going over some resources and having hopefully at least 10 minutes for questions and answers. Quick poll, please take a minute to check as many boxes as apply. What tools are you currently using to recruit or support your volunteers? Take a minute to select all that apply and hit submit. I'm going to skip to results so you guys can see in real time what people are saying. So lots of folks using Facebook. So I'm going to give you five more seconds. Four, three, two, one, and close. Very good. So there you see who's in the audience and we do have around 277 people. So here's a little landscape of what people are currently using. So why don't we jump right in? What do we mean by volunteers? Okay. I think it's very important to do this right up front. What do we mean by volunteers? And we mean anyone who is working for your organization that you are not paying. That is who we mean. So we mean board members. We mean committee members. We mean pro bono consultants, all those people who you aren't giving any money to. That includes people who are assigned by the court or high school to do community service. So that's who we're talking about today. Now your definition can be different, but I wanted to make sure you understood where we were coming from when we used the word volunteer. And next, what do we mean by social media, Erin? That's a great question, Jane. What we mean by social media, we're talking about online tools that allow people to show their connections to each other, share and discuss photos, information, forwarding information, commenting on each other's photos, messages, and status. It's basically an online space where news and ideas and events are spread by word of mouth, trusted networks that we've developed with people we already know in our regular lives, people we've met through online connections. It's a place to develop friends of friends. And for volunteer programs it can be a space to find new volunteers. Recruitment can be active. It can be posting volunteer opportunities through social media. It can be passive. It can be building word of mouth and letting people know what's going on so that they can seek out opportunities to serve. It can be communicating with new current former volunteers and the broader community, keeping them up to date what's happening at your organization, connecting them to a broader movement or the greater world, inviting their feedback and ideas. And then also building community between new current and former volunteers and again your broader community of supporters. It's giving them opportunities to get to know each other, strengthen those bonds and build relationships, become your allies, friend raise which is a term that is sometimes used to help develop supporters rather than funds, and demonstrating ownership in the work of your organization. So again in a nutshell these are word of mouth sites and these are friend of friend sites. So what Aaron is talking about is something different. Some of you are saying well we use our website a lot and we use ads in the newspaper to recruit volunteers and that's great and you should keep using those things. But today's discussion is specifically about social media. And as you see from the slide you have a lot of options when it comes to social media and it is impossible to use everything even with two E's and everything. There's just no way to do it. So we're going to focus on just four tools today. And with those four tools you can use these to adapt to any tools that come around. Facebook is hot today but you know back in the Middle Ages America online was the hot social media tool. Well another misspelling. Sorry about that. But what we want to talk about today is these four tools that I really want to emphasize that you can use what we're going to talk about today with any social media du jour sites that come up now and in the future. And so what does Facebook look like from a point of view of someone who is using it to look for volunteer opportunities or looking to reconnect with an organization they are volunteering with? Well here's how my Facebook page might look if I was doing that. So instead of updates about where I'm getting a coffee right now or that I'm seeing a great band or whatever, here's some pictures from my wedding. Well here's posts from UNDP and from an organization in India called Responsible Charity and the Kentucky State Park. Three organizations that use their sites to talk about what volunteers are doing and that both recruits new volunteers and makes the volunteers feel like, hey this organization really cares about me. Look how they're talking about me. Or maybe you look at a site like Twitter and you see here that this is somebody who uses the site. It's actually my Twitter feed. I use Twitter to look at what organizations are doing with volunteers. And look here's the State Department recruiting volunteers to help with technology in the developing world. Here's information on Crisis Camp. So as you see here are two examples that are a variety of organizations using their Twitter feeds and their Facebook feeds to get people excited about what volunteers are doing and that could lead to more volunteers joining. LinkedIn, here's how it might look if someone were using it to connect with potential volunteers or potential organizations to volunteer with. Dear friend Martin Kaling there with a great resource about volunteerism. Some other great information. Robert Weiner at TechSoup Volunteer. And so I put those three examples there and more LinkedIn pages as well. If you wanted to stalk me you could see what I was doing. To show you that when you use social media from a volunteer's perspective it can look very different. And when you use it from an organizational perspective your message is very different than what you usually think with social media which is hey I'm having lunch with somebody really great like Erin Barnhart. But if we dig a little deeper we can look at Erin Barnhart's connections and see some people that she knows that might be great for our board. So I wanted to just give you a taste of what these pages could look like. And just want to say one more thing about LinkedIn. LinkedIn uses social media but it's actually a professional networking site. And these are three ways that it's used. And it's used a little differently than blogs and Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. But I wanted to make sure that you knew that it is a social networking site in the sense that it uses those tools that Erin just summarized earlier. But you need to think of it more as professional networking focused on people's credentials rather than they had beer last night somewhere. So with that said I'd like to get into some examples. And I promise Erin will get to talk. I think I just talked over one of her slides that she said. But anyway let's dig a little deeper. Let's look at some real examples of organizations using social media to recruit and involve and support volunteers. Peace Corps is one of my favorites because Peace Corps talks frequently about what a volunteer is doing right now front and center. And what do you think this does? This not only makes that volunteer feel good about being recognized, people look at that and say I want to be a Peace Corps volunteer. That's what they do. I want to be involved. So just by talking about what a volunteer is doing in the field, Peace Corps is creating excitement in people who now want to be a volunteer. And it never says, hey, come be a volunteer. But their messages really make you want to do that. I know I have that experience. Another example from Facebook is the University of Oregon Alliance for Happy Atheists. And I put this in because they're a very tiny organization but they use Facebook to energize their current volunteers and to increase their profile just within the University of Oregon. So whereas Peace Corps is trying to reach the entire U.S., this organization is just trying to reach people in Oregon and really just the students. But they're a great example of really energizing people to go, I want to check this organization out. What are they doing? As well as keeping their current volunteers up to date on what's going on. So it's both to recruit volunteers and to keep current volunteers engaged. I think we need to hear from Erin now about Twitter. But I love to hear you talk, Jane. Why on earth would I cut in? Thank you so much for passing the microphone. So Twitter, if I remember correctly from our poll just a few moments ago, it looks like about a quarter to a third of folks are using Twitter in some way. Certainly Twitter gets a lot of attention. It's very popular in the media and popular culture. And we've even heard about it being used in political situations and advocacy situations, protests, communications medium. But how might we use it to engage volunteers? A couple of thoughts. First of all, why consider Twitter? Well, it's one of the fastest-growing social networking sites in the world. As is the case with all social media, it's an opportunity to connect with an audience that you might not otherwise reach. They may not be the people who have signed up to your newsletter who are actively seeking an opportunity to volunteer. But they see you through Twitter. They see you through a friend or a contact or another organization they know. And it piques their interest to learn more. Twitter is a great way to get the word out in a viral, and by viral I mean in a good way, style of communications, which means that the word can spread rapidly. It's very easy for people to pass the word on. And in fact, Twitter is designed to do exactly that. It's about using 140 characters to share any information you like. And certainly it can be that personal, I'm bored going to eat lunch, sort of an innocuous Twitter post that people joke about. But it can also be, this is what's happening now, we need your help. And that type of message, when you've built up your network, when you've built up your credibility, can spread very fast. So why Twitter for Volunteer Engagement? It can be a great place to announce volunteer trainings, upcoming events, to do recognition, share news, share updates. But it's a especially good conduit to finding online, episodic, and last-minute volunteers, especially those that may require little advanced training or little training that has to happen in person in the case of an online volunteer, as well as perhaps not a lot of confirmation in advance. So the online volunteer is a little bit different of an example. Chances are you're going to be working with them by email, by phone, but you can certainly recruit them using an online post through Twitter of getting the word out there and saying, hey, we need a great graphic designer. And through your networks that you've developed with Twitter and them spreading the word and sharing it with their friends and colleagues, you may find that graphic designer a third of the way around the globe and start to work with them in an online capacity. The example I have on your screen here is from an organization in Oregon called Solve, and they have an environmental focus, and they do lots of community service events like beach cleanups, pulling people together on a Saturday to help clean up a playground area, a park, to assist with environmental activities along a river. And these are a lot of activities where they need many people to show up on the day. It requires minimal training once they get there. They're flexible in terms of how many people they need for the day, how many can show up, and what that means is the more the merrier. So for that type of event, Twitter can be a very effective tool. They can say, hey, this is happening Saturday. Come join us. I wanted to show you another example. This is one organization doing that. But even if you just do a quick search of Twitter using terms like volunteer and Saturday, here are how several organizations are using Twitter. So here's one saying, hey, we have a volunteer appreciation and recruitment event. Come show up. And we have another that a training is happening this Saturday. You want to participate? We'd love to have you. Another is they actually need physical volunteers. Please join us this Saturday, last minute. Come by. At the end there you can see there's a story that's being shared about the effectiveness of volunteers. So Twitter limits how much you can say, but it doesn't limit how effective you can be. We'll start to talk a little bit more about how to get started and how to start building that series of relationships and networks that you have on Twitter. But keep it in mind as a potential tool, again, especially for online roles and for those positions where it's episodic relatively last minute and doesn't require a lot of advanced training. And with that I will pass it back to Jane to talk about LinkedIn. But I've got a really high score on my Tetris game. All right. LinkedIn, as I've said, is very different than the other things we've been talking about. Twitter and Facebook are very much about updates, quick updates. Here's what's going on. LinkedIn can be used that way, but the reality is most people don't use it that way. Here are some ways that organizations usually tend to support and involve volunteers. Here's a volunteer and it's actually me who is volunteering with the Girl Scouts. And this volunteer has chosen to include their volunteer role with the organization as a job within their LinkedIn profile. Now why is that nice? It's nice because people when they view that profile say, oh, she volunteers with the Girl Scouts and that's just another way to make Girl Scouts on your mind and make you think, well, gee, if she's doing it, I didn't think she would be interested in an organization like that. Sorry, I think I'm having a power issue. Just a second. Okay, can everyone hear me okay? Yes, we can. Okay, good. Sorry about that. All right, so encourage your volunteers to put their volunteer role with your organization in their LinkedIn profile. It's a great way to increase information about your organization online and it adds credibility. When people see that someone they know and respect is volunteering with you, they might be moved to volunteer as well. In addition, you can use LinkedIn to write a recommendation for one of your volunteers. Here's a recommendation for someone who volunteered with the Aid Workers Network. And yes, I'm the person who wrote the recommendation, but I thought this was a really great example of a way to recognize a volunteer. She was honored. She was thrilled that I did this. And it's something that doesn't really fit on Facebook or Twitter. I think it fits better here on LinkedIn. So that's a great thing you can do. And in addition, LinkedIn is a great way to look at other people's connections and see, oh, you know, this person knows someone at CPA. I sure would like to know that person. And again, it gets into the friend that we've just talked about. And with that, I will turn it over to Erin to talk about blogs. Thank you, Jane. So as you can see, we focused first on two very mainstream social media sites, Facebook and Twitter. And those are the two big dogs in the field right now. As you saw from our slide earlier with the plethora of logos, there are hundreds if not thousands of emerging, increasingly popular social media sites. Don't worry about that. That's a good way to get overwhelmed really fast. We wanted to focus on these because we thought these are the great place to start, and these are where most people are so far. We didn't talk about MySpace. MySpace is largely declining for most audiences. However, there are populations that are still using MySpace quite a bit. So when we get to talking about getting started, one of the things we're going to talk about is finding out where your audience already is. So don't forget about MySpace if that's going to be a useful tool, but we're not spending time on it today. These last two though are a little different because they aren't necessarily a social media site, so much as social media tools. So Jane just talked about LinkedIn, and the second here is blogs. There are two sites that are the most popular free blog hosting sites. The first is WordPress, and the second is Blogger. I have two examples here to show you of what a blog can look like using these free sites. They're very easy to set up. They're designed to be easy to set up. They're free, and then you can make them look very professional with pretty minimal work. The point of blogs is that they can be a great place to share news, announce events, post your volunteer opportunities, share your stories, share videos, share photos, and as well as invite the voice of current and former volunteers. This is a space where especially if you work for a government agency or a very large organization where any time you want to post something online, it's going to take a really long time, or there may be severe limitations around what you can say, when you can say it. Blogs can be your unofficial space for communicating with and about volunteers. It can be the place that you're talking to your volunteers and you're building community without being under the constraints of being the quote-unquote official voice of the organization. Now the example I have here is a Blogger site that's been set up by Mount Rainier Volunteers. And Mount Rainier is a national park. So this is an example of a federal organization that if the volunteer program wanted to start posting information on the official National Park Service site from Mount Rainier, I imagine they'd have a lot of trouble. You go through public affairs. It's a very slow process. It's a federal agency. There are good reasons for all of these barriers. But when you're communicating with volunteers, it makes sense to have a space that is much more fluid. They chose a blog and they've done a really nice job with it. In fact, I encourage you to look them up online and take a look at this. They have videos. They have volunteer opportunities. They have stories. This screenshot makes it look like they haven't updated it in a while but that's because I took this screenshot in September. They keep this up to date. It's a really nice use of a site. There's a calendar of events. There's a discussion space where people can ask questions, share ideas. Again, this is a complimentary site that's made for the volunteer program to build community. The second example here is a WordPress site. And this is from Volunteer Wellington in New Zealand. Again, a very professional-looking interface which is very, very easy to set up. And in fact, both of those free sites walk you through the process. And this is a place where they talk about an upcoming volunteer celebration. This is where they talk about what are the new volunteer roles, upcoming events. They link to their Facebook page which they may use as a complimentary site. They may use it in an entirely different way. They put out a call for stories for people to contribute their voice. And the last thing I wanted to say about blogs, these are also a terrific space to create new volunteer opportunities to tap into the creative side of your volunteer population. You can ask people to be writers. You can ask people to be photographers. You can ask them to be videographers. You can ask them to help you design the look and feel of the blog. And these are the kinds of things that get people's creative juices flowing and help them take on the mission of your organization in a way that's also fun and creative. So keep that in mind. If you're considering using a blog, that's something to potentially think about, to have those volunteer roles available. So with that said, we're going to move on to our second poll here. Now of these four that we've spent a little time with here, which one of these social media tools excites you the most? We've got Facebook, we've got Twitter, we've got blog, and we've got an alternate spelling of LinkedIn. So go ahead and I will pass the controls of the poll over to Kami here, but we want to hear from you. What sounds like it's going to be the most interesting for you? Great. Thanks, Erin. I'm sorry for all the typos. That's all on me. Too many things happening at the same time. I'm being virtually beaten. So here we have WhatsApp. Right, I'm expressing my alternative spellings. So I think you guys should all be seeing this. We've got about 40% of folks that say Facebook's second is blog. You really sold the blogs to folks, Erin. Way to go, Erin. And Twitter, not so much. People aren't loving Twitter. Okay, so we're going to close the poll in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay, there you go. That is fascinating. Great. But you know, that's to each his own. I see a comment here, so I'm laughing. Someone just said, the old people don't understand Twitter. It isn't just old people. I can tell you that when I first encountered Twitter, I was working for Idealist. I was in my early 30s, and I feel like I'm still getting a good handle on this possibility. So you're not alone. These are all new languages and new tools, and that's a great segue to talking about our next piece here, which is how to get started. Okay, so you're now over — oh, sorry. Is it me, or is it you, Erin? Nope, this is me. Okay, go. Okay, so first and foremost, start with your website. Make sure that the website is up to date. This can be the official organization's website. This can be a site you have specifically for your volunteers, but wherever it is that is your very first starting place online. For anyone who wants to volunteer or is currently volunteering, start there. If your volunteer opportunities aren't listed on your organization's website, don't even worry about Facebook yet. Now a caveat to that is if you can't get your information on the website because there's a barrier of some kind, or it's a really slow process, then you can think about developing a social media platform as a complementary site. But it is important that most people, when they first hear about you, are probably going to do a Google search to see if they can find you online. And if they can't find the volunteer opportunity on information online, they're probably going to be a little lost. So the next step is to create that profile on Facebook or Twitter or a blog. And first and foremost, my recommendation is create one for yourself. Don't start with the organization, especially if this is a tool that you're not familiar with. One of the ways that I learned Twitter was to create my own personal Twitter feed, add a couple of friends who knew what they were doing, and start to post. Start to read how they posted. Start to learn the language. And Twitter especially of these tools has a language all its own. If you're familiar with it, you've probably heard retweets. You've heard hashtags. These are all terms that once you get to know what they mean are very straightforward, but just getting started can be a little daunting. So don't worry about that off the bat. Don't feel like you have to be the expert and launch your organization's Twitter feed today. Instead start one for yourself and start to play with it, get familiar with the language, familiar with how people use it, and then start to get a sense for how others are using it. In fact, I would recommend finding fellow organizations that you know and respect, see if they have a Facebook page, a Twitter page, a blog. Find those organizations who do similar work. How are they using it? Can you get some ideas from them and basically learn from their practices? We're also going to talk more about goals and objectives a little later, but I mentioned before that you want to think about where your audience already is. You can do a very quick and easy poll of your volunteer audience, the people who are active volunteers with you. It can be something you do by an email. It can be on paper. It can be using a free online polling service like SurveyMonkey or Doodle. But basically just ask them, are you guys on social media sites? And if so, which ones? You can even ask them, which ones should I consider, which ones should be considered creating a profile on? Get their opinions because one of the number one marketing rules with social media is go where your audience already is. Similarly, if you're trying to find more and more technology, tech-savvy folks to come in and help out with tech-related projects, you're going to want to be using online spaces because that's where they're going to be living. So we talked about creating a personal one, a couple other tools to get you started. Partner with a social media savvy volunteer. Find someone who knows the language of Facebook, knows the language of Twitter, knows the language of blogging. And ask them to come in and be basically an advisory consultant volunteer. This is an especially great role for young people. Young people tend to just by sheer saturation be pretty comfortable with social media tools, but they're very rarely called upon to be the expert. This is a great opportunity to call on a young person and say, hey, we want to learn from you. Can you come in, teach an internal workshop on what Twitter is and how you use Twitter so we can understand what it is? Can you come in and help us set up a basic platform and help me start to figure out what I'm doing? So find a social media savvy volunteer who can walk you through the ropes and help to get you comfortable. Similarly, work with if you have a communications manager at your organization to look at if the organization has an overall profile. If your organization has a Facebook page, how can you integrate more volunteer-related news in there, more volunteer opportunities in there? And then as I mentioned, taking a look at other organization's social media and activities, once you're ready and you've created that profile, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, a blog, LinkedIn, for your organization, for your volunteer program, start to connect with other organizations who do similar work. Observe how they're using it, repost what they post, which essentially is spreading the word. And you start to build relationships with others who will then share what you have to say. Many of these sites, the way that information is spread is that word of mouth, that friend-raising I mentioned. So when you start to post what Organization X has to say, they're going to start to recognize you as an ally. And they may start to post what you have to say. Just as everyone, the individuals who follow you may spread the word and their friends may say, oh, well if Jim likes them, I should probably check them out too. It's about building those trusted networks. Now planning, once you've got a profile up and running, first and foremost create a schedule for your volunteer-related post. Consider tying it to upcoming dates and events. That's a great time to get the word out. But also keep in mind some basic deadlines for how often you should post. A good rule of thumb for Twitter is a minimum of once a day. A good rule of thumb for Facebook is a minimum of 2-3 times a week, and for blog a minimum of once per week. All of these tools are very easy to use, but they can also be a bit time-consuming. And one of the tricks with them is if you're not paying attention to them and letting them sit stagnant, people will stop showing up. They'll realize it's not an active space, and they'll go somewhere else. So try to think about those rules of thumb once a week for blogging, 2-3 times a week for Facebook, once a day for Twitter. Another idea is draft those posts you're going to use in the coming days and weeks. So you always have something interesting to post. If you come across a great story, take a few minutes to jot it down. Leave it on a piece of paper, in a Word document, whatever you use to hold on to the interesting ideas and stories you come across so that when you're ready to post, you have a place to draw from. And that way you don't get to Tuesday, which is your scheduled blogging day, and think, ah, what am I going to write about? You can also write about the same story in several different ways. If you find a great volunteer story about an 85-year-old volunteer who wants to take on XYZ Project, you can tweet about that, you can blog about that, you can use it on Facebook, and just by talking about it in slightly different terms. And then lastly, again, the way that these sites are going to succeed is by having activity there, making sure that people are using the space. So let your volunteers know, your staff, your donors, your clients. Let them know about meetings, through meetings, newsletters, your website. Essentially promote these spaces. They'll only be successful if people participate in them. And on that note, I'm passing it back over to Jane who's going to talk about, oh, actually, sorry, I apologize. First it's about the blog for steps. We talked about blogs being written by others. If you're the volunteer manager, don't feel like you're the only author here. You can talk to other staff members to write blog posts about volunteers, and you can ask volunteers to write them. You can ask clients to talk about what is their experience working with your organization, engaging with volunteers. Again, this rule of thumb of posting at least twice a month once a week is even better, write them in advance. Another important rule of thumb is keep it informal. Use lots of I statements. One of the keywords in social media is social, and it's people interacting with people, even if your organization is in that space. They want to know there's a real person behind that post. So talk about it from your perspective as an individual. Give a name and a face to these posts so that they know that there's someone on the other end of the line. Respond to comments and questions as quickly as you can. Again, that's all about keeping momentum going and making sure people know there's someone there who's paying attention. And then last, I'm thrilled to hear there's a lot of interest in blogging, but just keep in mind you may not need one. Again, spend time figuring out what do you want to say, where do you want to say it, and who are the people that need to get access to your information? Who's looking to hear from you? And so is a blog the right space to do that? Now I will pass it over to Jane to talk a little bit about who owns what. Okay, so I just want to make it clear that you're doing a lot of things online and you need to think about who owns what. For instance, if you create a LinkedIn profile for yourself, that's yours. And when you leave the organization, it's still yours. Whereas a Facebook profile for your organization or for your role as a volunteer manager, who's is that? You need to decide who that is. Maybe you need to have a personal profile and a professional profile. With your Twitter feed, who's is that? There have been organizations that have realized when the volunteer left that they never discussed who owns that Twitter feed. And maybe that person's Twitter feed has a thousand people subscribing and the person says, too bad, this is all mine. So you need to establish with your staff and anyone who is going to do online activities for you who owns what. It's just a conversation you need to have. You don't need to have contract signed and bring lawyers in. But you just need to make sure that's upfront from the very beginning. And what it may require is you setting up separate accounts, one professional, one personal. But remember that volunteers Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter feeds, those are their own. You can't control their content beyond policies like confidentiality. You can't control what I'm going to say about Girl Scouts for instance if I'm having beers with friends. And I say, well, I love Girl Scouts. I had a great time last night. Or, wow, I had a really frustrating time last night. You can't control that. You can tell me what the policies and procedures are and I'm not going to talk about an individual girl for instance. So I bring this up because you just need to know what you can control and what you can't control. And don't panic because remember, you can't control what people say 24 hours a day right now. So don't think that this is creating some new world. It's not. If your policies and procedures are clear, everybody is going to adhere to those. Do you need social media policies in writing? It's something that you should think about. I think it can get overwhelming. You can get a little carried away with it. But I do think at minimum you need to think about what are your guidelines for linking or liking others? Are you going to like or link to every volunteer on Facebook? Is that your policy? Or are you going to say you can all link to us but we might not comment on your wall or we might not allow you to post to our wall because we need to control our content because we are an organization. You need to think about that. Are you going to say no to a volunteer who wants to be a friend on Facebook for instance? Why would you say that? One of the things that we've had many discussions on and online discussion groups for volunteer managers is if a volunteer puts up something that is not just a little controversial but it's actually maybe pornographic and you don't want other people to see that. So you need to think about that. But you need to remember that people's profiles are their own. You can't control their content outside of your policies and procedures. It's just always a work in progress. And what I tell organizations is if you have this conversation with volunteers, a lot of times that conversation is enough for them to watch their behavior online. If you just have the conversation about how do you think we should handle this or that, a lot of times volunteers will immediately go, oh you know what, maybe I shouldn't share this link online. So it's just always a work in progress. Keep having the conversation with your volunteers about what's working and what's not. Involve volunteers in creating the policy and make sure the volunteers know the purpose of your social media activities. Let them know what it's for. A lot of times that will guide them and help them self-censor a lot of times. And just remember that volunteers don't have to be currently serving to stay involved via social media. That's what makes social media really exciting is volunteers who are no longer mentoring a child or helping you at your on-site events may be there online. They may be there to mentor other volunteers to help them in situations. So suddenly your volunteers become online volunteers and I think that's really great. So I think we need removing to evaluate. Now I think it's very important to evaluate what you're doing so that you know it's having some sort of effect. Is your social media leading to new volunteers or more diverse volunteers or re-energized volunteers? And you see the list here, I won't read all of this. How do you find that out? We find that out by surveying volunteers and survey monkey as Erin mentioned earlier is a great tool. You ask volunteers on their application how did you hear of us? You ask them when they sign up for an event how did you hear about this event? You just ask at meetings, hey what's going on on social media? Anybody checked out our Facebook update? And see what kind of feedback you get. Those kind of conversations lead to great reports that you can do for your board, that you can do for other volunteers. But you need to track what is the effect these social media activities are having. And it's very easy to do that. You can do it in lots and lots of informal ways. And so we have lots of resources for you to continue to learn because we certainly didn't have enough time and I want to wrap things up so we have question time. Definitely check out the TechSoup website. It has great information. Erin's website has fantastic information. I hope my website has fantastic information. We've included Beth's blog which many of you may have heard, Beth Cantor. She's got some really terrific information. Beth tends to be somebody who is very optimistic about it all and I tend to be sometimes pessimistic about it all. So we're nice balance for each other. And for policies my favorite place to go is workforceonline.com which is actually for HR professionals. But I think that the policies are really excellent to be adapted for nonprofit organizations and volunteers. And I want to say again, if we don't get to your questions, please post them to the TechSoup community. I'm actually going to go there right after this and I want to see your questions. And with that I hope we can move to your questions. You've been asking some great ones over here. I'm going to jump right in since we have 10 minutes left. Sally's question, as a nonprofit law firm for kids I'm concerned about confidentiality with social media especially Facebook. What are the hazards in this area? Erin if you don't mind me jumping on that. The hazards are the same as they are on site. I'm sure you have some wonderful policies that protect people's confidentiality and those policies are the same online. No one is more likely to be inappropriate online than they are offline. So you need to make sure people know what are the policies with regard to confidentiality. And you can't just train people once. You have to remind them again and again and again. So that's really important to do. You need to sit down and look at your policies and make sure people understand them and have frequent conversations with your volunteers about exactly what a violation would look like. Don't just talk about it in theory. Use a real example and say, here is exactly what a violation would look like. Don't do this. So that would be my answer to that question. Great. This one's for Erin. Marty asks, I'm curious how many volunteer managers are in my boat. My sponsor in parentheses, local government, doesn't allow access to Facebook. I'm working on it but all ITC's is how to control access. So it sounds like the primary problem is not only do they not say yes, use Facebook to talk to your volunteers but you don't have access to it during working hours. That's a significant challenge. And I know for many people working for for-profit and government organizations that access is limited. First and foremost, I would try to appeal to them and explain how you're using Facebook, explain that it's used for volunteer management purposes. It can even be, if they would agree to it, that you say between the hours of 10 and noon will you allow access on this computer? Give that a go first. If they still refuse or if they say no sorry, blanket policy, then I would say see if you can find a great trusted social media savvy volunteer and turn to them and say, you know what, we can't set one up for ourselves. We're running into all sorts of barriers but we think it's important to have a space for volunteers to talk to each other. Would you be willing to lead the charge on this? Again, they're not the official voice of the organization and you would need to make that clear. But you would basically be saying, we want you to be able to talk to each other about what's going on. We're happy to send you information by email that you can post there. It can't be the official voice but would you be willing to keep the ball rolling there? And so I would suggest seeing if you can find that great volunteer or a group of great volunteers who would be willing to be the guardians of that site away from the organization as an unofficial space. I just want to add one thing. Your volunteers are going to do this without you or not. It's up to you to decide if you're going to be involved with it or not. So what Erin said, it's very important. They may do this unofficially. So that's a good piece to go to somebody who's saying no, you can't do this and saying look, they're going to do this. We can either be involved with it or not. Great point. This is a question from Twitter. I always wonder who the person is behind the organization for Facebook pages or Twitter stream. Why not add the social manager's name to the organization's profile? Is that what people are already doing? I'm happy to field that one, and Jane you can add to it if you'd like. That varies quite a bit. I'm a big believer in adding your name if you can or just even your initials. When I worked with Idealist, we started a policy of all blog posts had author's names. We wanted people to know who wrote this, who said this. And I know that many Twitter feeds in particular are so limited for space, but someone might throw their initials on the end. So I'm a big fan of that. I'm a big fan of having in your information section, these are the folks who Man and Woman are Twitter space. Here's their initials so that you'll see who they are. It's not required. It's up to you and the culture of your organization. But again because people want to know there are real people on the other end of the line, I'm a fan. Jane did you have anything to add? No. Okay great. So Jackie, I'm curious if, this is a question from Jackie, I'm curious if you are aware of any program software that would allow a very busy person to preset several messages at once rather than trying to stay online constantly throughout the day. So Jane? That's a great question, and I believe that there was some attention in the chat to answer that. It's a good question to ask over on the TechSoup community boards. Yes, there are programs that do that rather than start listing them all here. Do go have a look at the TechSoup community board and we'll give you lots of lists of those programs. Great, and I'll try to include maybe some links in the follow-up message that can point to some of those tools. What's a good way to get people to follow you on Twitter? Erin? A good way to get people to follow you on Twitter is to follow them first. That's the easiest way to get started. Start to read what they are posting. And I mentioned that there is a lot of terminology in the Twitter world, and one is called the retweet. And what that means is you post what they said, almost word for word, and you put the letters RT in front of it with their Twitter name. So basically you are giving them credit. You are saying this is what someone else said that I think is great and people who know me should hear about it. The more you start to do that, people start to realize, oh, this is someone who is interested in what I have to say. And then as you start to post information, other people are going to find that as well. It's a very interesting space. It very much is word of mouth and viral in the sense that if you are posting information that is interesting, you are following others, you are reposting what they say. They start to build those relationships with you. You are going to start collecting followers without even doing much work for that. I will just say an alternative to that. I actually don't follow a lot of people on Twitter. It would be too overwhelming for me. So if you make your Twitter feed, if it is focused on current and potential volunteers, if the information is vital, if it is essential, if they need it, they will follow you. Just make sure there is information on your website, in your print newsletter, in your email newsletter, in all those places that you have a Twitter feed, and the followers will come. One last question, and hopefully you guys can answer it super fast. I mean we have a lot more questions, but only time for one more. How do you balance social media that is general to the organization? The organization has its own Facebook page versus a volunteer specific page. Does this overwhelm and confuse people or take away from the main page of the organization? So which of you would like to take that one and answer it in one minute? I would say it is not going to take away. It is going to add to it. All of these social media sites, the reason many of them are popular is you are going to reach different people in different spaces. So if you make a complimentary site that is volunteer focused, I say go for it. Jane? The same thing, it is not going to take away. People relate to the organization in different ways, and your volunteers are going to love to be able to relate that way. Fantastic. So I want to send just a few seconds on this slide. Jane, can you talk about the community forums one last time? Yes, please go to the TechSoup website. Click on Community. Click on Forums, and get over to the Volunteers in Technology forum, and let's continue this conversation today, tomorrow, next week, next month. Keep asking these questions, and let's answer each other's questions. Fantastic. Well, thank you both so much for this great presentation. Apologies to those whose questions didn't get answered, but hopefully you will repost them in the forums, and we will probably take those questions and put together a blog post of some sort to answer them in mass. So we would like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar was made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helped nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas, and increased collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So again, you will receive a message from me this afternoon with a link to the recording, the PowerPoint, the audio, and all of the URLs we talked about today. So thanks again for taking time to join us. Really appreciate your time, and thank you Erin and Jane. You guys are amazing. I love doing webinars with you. So have a wonderful day, and feel free to email me if you have any questions, and good luck with your social media and volunteer managing. Take care everyone. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye. Thanks. Thank you. Please stand by.