 Say welcome. Thank you so much to all of you that have joined us live or watching or listening to this recording. We are so glad that you're here for another episode of The Nonprofit Show. We have Julia Campbell back. Julia is a social media specialist and is going to share with us today in this 30 minutes that goes by so quickly about the realities of social media. Before we jump into the conversation with Julia, we of course want to make sure that you know who we are or I am if we haven't met yet. Julia Patrick is the brainchild of The Nonprofit Show and is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd with the glasses to go with it. But CEO of the Raven Group and again just really honored to serve alongside Julia as the co-host. Grateful for our continued supporters, our sponsors that you see on the screen and for our listeners that would be Bloomerang, the American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy, Nonprofit Nerd, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and the Nonprofit Atlas. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We are so appreciative of your support. To have conversations like the one we will have now, welcome back Julia. Thank you so much for having me Jarrett. I've really loved being on the show and I am just so impressed with everything that you've built and the community that you've created. So I really appreciate being here again. Well, we are lucky to have you and thanks again. Tell us about your podcast because as we talk about podcast, I know that people will want to know where they can listen to your Nonprofit Nation podcast. Yes, I am in love with my podcast. It's like my third child. Actually, my third and fourth children were my books. So maybe it's like my fifth child. I don't know. Okay. But if you go to nonprofitnationpodcast.com, you'll see all the episodes. We release Wednesdays and I'm thinking of going to twice a week because I love it so much. So the format is really, I find people that I think are interesting and doing really cool things that the nonprofit sector can benefit from and I talk to them and ask them how they do it. So my audience is primarily marketers, developers, fundraisers, executive directors, but there are some episodes that I believe pertain to everyone. We did one with Ian Adair on mental health and wellness, Miko Whitlock on digital wellness. I love Miko, too. I've done episodes on artificial intelligence and diversity, equity and inclusion and how to build a more diverse board. And I mean, really, I've just been having so much fun with it. And occasionally I will surprise people with a little standalone episode that I do just by myself. That's really like a step by step kind of thing. But I've been really enjoying it. It started in August of 20. What year are we now? August of 2021. And it's been a passion of mine for a while and I finally just kind of launched it on the world. It's gotten a great reception. So. Oh, that's absolutely. Thanks for sharing. And for those of you to check that out, I think that would be great. I will add it to my queue. I am a podcaster listener. Typically when I'm walking exercising, that kind of thing. So perhaps this is one of your five children, your baby. Tell us about this, how to build and mobilize a social media community for your organization in 90 days. Yes. So in 2019, Kivie LaRoe Miller and Antoinette Care, they run the Bold and Bright Media publishing company. They came to me and they said, we really want a book on social media that is almost ever green. And we know that's kind of impossible to do. But we know, Julia, you could do it if anyone could do it. So the book is really about the principles and the framework that you need to create to make your social media strategy successful. So there's a little bit about how, you know, best practices, but it's really not a step by step. This is how to use Facebook. This is chapters on Twitter. This chapter is on LinkedIn. It's much more about how to cultivate and how to clarify what you're doing, how to captivate your audience. It's set in like three parts. And if you follow all three parts and you follow the exercises, you will create a playbook and a strategy for your organization in 90 days that you can then adapt. Because in my philosophy, and I know we'll talk about this later, the platforms are not nearly as important as the foundation that you're setting and the infrastructure because platforms come and go, trends come and go. But if you focus on building a community and less on using social media for promotion and marketing, then you're going to have long term success. That's really my philosophy. I cannot imagine an evergreen book, so to speak, for social media because I feel like in the next 25 minutes, something on social media will change. Oh, 100%. Absolutely. So the book really, I will update it, but it's all about getting buy in from the staff. Where are you finding this content? How are you learning more about your audience and what they want? How do you evaluate which platforms you need to be on? How with all of these shiny new tools coming at us and all of this information coming at us from every angle, how do we effectively analyze and evaluate what is best for our tiny organization? And then there's also a lot of time management and setting up your day, setting yourself up for success, the four principles of social media management that I don't believe will ever change, the four things you need to be doing. And no matter the tool, the strategies that you need to be thinking about, and I always think about audience first, community building first, build a community that would go with you anywhere you went. So for example, I know that, say for example, Jared, that you were not on Instagram, that you decided to build your platform on LinkedIn. People would follow you there. People would go there for you, but if you said, hey, LinkedIn's not working for me, I'm going to move over to YouTube. People would follow you. So we get hung up on the platforms and the specific nature of each of these tools. But it's really about that community that you're building and that connection you're making with people and where you're taking them on your journey. And that's really what I wanted to do with this book. I also wanted to give people the confidence to know that they can succeed. I know how overwhelming it is. I talk to students and clients all day about just overwhelm and they don't feel confident and they don't feel like they can fit it in with everything else they've got going on. And the answer is you really can. You just might have to do it in a little bit of a simpler way. So where do we find this book before we move on? You can find it on Bold and Bright Media. That's the publisher. But you can find it on Amazon. You can find it on Barnes & Noble, really anywhere books are sold. I'm hoping it'll be in your local bookstore, but you'd have to probably call and find out about that. OK, well, I'm going to pick up a copy because it sounds like it's definitely worth having in my in my hands. Let's move into the criticalness, right? How critical is it for us, the nonprofit organizations, to invest in social media? Now, the word critical is very interesting because I don't believe there's a one size fits all for critical. So I know the power of social media and I know the power of online fundraising and online marketing. But what I don't want people to hear is that it needs to replace things that are working. So social media needs to fit into your overall strategic plan and your overall organizational plan, and it needs to be baked in. It's not something you can kind of like tack on. So if you don't have a board that's fundraising, it's not going to work. If you don't have a person that is going to actively be managing and monitoring the channels, even if that's, you know, one hour a week, whatever it is, it's probably not going to work. So your nonprofit has to be pretty well functioning to be adding these kinds of things onto it. And if direct mail is working for you, great. If events are working for you, fantastic. If you feel like you want to connect with a brand new audience and potentially reach out to new and younger donors, then social media could be the right avenue for you. And what I always say is that we think about social media in this weird bucket that's sort of off to the side of our work. But think about how it's integrated into our daily lives. Even if you don't use it personally, you know, someone that does. There's absolutely no way that every single person that you know, every person in your database, every person on your email list does not use it. I mean, social media is a revolution in human communication. It's changed, you know, for better or for worse. And we can argue that it's changed the way we talk to each other. It's changed the way we look up information. It's changed the way we express ourselves. It's a revolution on par with the industrial revolution. So to just kind of put it in a bucket and say, oh, social media is over here. Is really not understanding how especially younger generations do not see it. They would never call it social media. They would just say, oh, I open my phone and check TikTok. Like it's not a thing. It's just in our lives, it's like in our veins. So I think we need to get out of this mindset that it's kind of pushed over here to the side. Wow. Now, that was a mindblower. And I agree wholeheartedly, you know, I have and I talk about this often, but I have an 11 year old son and you're right. He's not going to call it social media. He's like, oh, mommy, just saw this on YouTube. Yep. You know, and that's a that's where he gets a lot of information. So the critical word, as you said, is a little different. And as we move into the next platform, you know, this. And I feel like you touched on it earlier, Julia, if you're building your community and you switch to another platform, your followers will follow you. Yes. So tell us how we should see our platforms and which ones that we should be active on. Sure. There's two main components of this question. One is I just want to one point that I want to make is that I want you to understand that and nonprofits to understand it's not enough to have a social media strategy. You have to have a platform specific strategy because what works on YouTube is not what works on TikTok. Long form video really works on YouTube. Doesn't work on Facebook. Doesn't work on Instagram. You couldn't post a five minute video on Instagram. You just actually physically couldn't do it, but it's not the culture. It's not the language. It's not what works on that platform. So you do not have to be everywhere at once. And I always recommend for small nonprofits, less is always more. And the trend now that I'm seeing like the trend used to be you go to a website and they have all the little buttons at the bottom. Now I'm only seeing like one or two because people are saying, OK, I don't need to be everywhere. My people aren't necessarily everywhere. I don't like being everywhere. And my organization strengths are best suited to these two platforms or even these one platform. I would probably have two. I'd probably diversify a little bit, but we don't need to be everywhere and we don't need to be everywhere all the time. And the second piece of this is you need a framework to evaluate new platforms as they come at you. So when your board member says, oh, we should be on Pinterest or, you know, I have a 12 year old, we should be on TikTok or whatever it might be. We should be in Clubhouse, whatever it might be, like name, name, name a thing. I'm sure that your board members have said this to you and I'm sure they're throwing all this out at meetings. You need a framework to evaluate it. And when organizations ask me, where should we be? I say, well, that's like asking me, where should I buy a house? OK, I don't know because I don't know. Maybe you like to be cold six months of the year. So move to Boston. Maybe you want to live near a school. There's a lot of questions. So the questions you need to be asking, what are my goals? What am I trying to achieve? Where is my audience? Who are the people I want to attract? Not even the people just in my audience right now, but the people that I want to attract to my cause, to my issue. And then what are our strengths? I mean, if you are doing anything with animals, anything in the outdoors, like a land trust, a museum, anything that has something physical that you can take pictures of, you should be on Instagram. But otherwise, you know, maybe Instagram doesn't work for your organization. So maybe you should focus on Twitter. So you need a way to evaluate these platforms before jumping in the water wholeheartedly. But there's nothing wrong with experimenting, but I don't want people kind of spinning their wheels and thinking they need to be on every platform because I used to do that. And trust me, it's exhausting. You can't you can't maintain a deep and meaningful presence across 10 different platforms, unless you have a team of marketers to do it. Just as you said that, I took a deep sigh, a very genuine deep sigh of, we cannot be everything for every platform. That is exhausting. That's exactly what you said. My question and you you talked about this is, what is our measurement of success? So how do we? I heard you say we need a strategy for the platform, not for social media at large. Yes, that's great. And one for Instagram, one for TikTok, one for whatever it might be. So then how do we measure success? What should we be looking for? That kind of goes back to your goals. I mean, I've worked with organizations like libraries where they're not doing individual fundraising, but they want to increase membership or they want to increase attendance at events. They want to increase people inquiring about their programs. So you could say website traffic, you could say inquiries on your website. You could say email signups, building your following, the number of people that are watching your Facebook lives. General engagement could be a metric. If it's fundraising, it's going to take you a little bit longer if you've never done it before, but that would be a metric. I think that fundraising shouldn't really be the only metric on social media. They're just not designed that way. Like, yes, there's a donate button, but it's not designed for us to just ask for money. It's designed for us to showcase our knowledge and and build a community that way. For me, I measure website traffic, blog hits and email signups. That's what I measure. So sure, not every post is going to be asking someone to sign up. But if you look at it cumulatively, if you look at it week by week and month by month, it should be helping push the needle on something that you want. And sometimes nonprofits want thought leadership. They just want to say, oh, I've got 17,000 Twitter followers so that when they talk to a reporter or a donor, the donor is much more likely to respond or fund or whatever it is. So building up your platforms, if you want to be a thought leader, maybe you want to publish a book, maybe you want to release a new program. That's never a bad thing. But it always goes back to how do you know success? Like, how would your organization know success and how can social media help you get there? And those are the metrics that you're going to measure. That's a great response. And I love hearing what you had said previously is. And I remember, too, seeing like three, five, seven different social media links on a website. And now it's pared down to, here's where I am. Here's where I am. And, you know, it might change. So I used to be super active on Twitter. Now I'm kind of active, but I'm really liking Instagram more. And LinkedIn is just exploding in reach and engagement and people building their businesses on LinkedIn. So you're never going to really be 100% wedded to a platform. But recognizing that you can break up with them if they're not working. Like no one that says you have to stay on a platform that is not working and that you hate. Of course, correct. We can always say these measures of success are not being hit. Now, what about the management of these platforms, the content, the comments, which is really the content, you know, should we be doing this in-house? Should we be hiring a social media professional or a marketing, you know, communications team? What does that look like? So I'm just writing them down because I always forget them even though I talk about them all the time, the four pillars of social media management that if you have 20 minutes a day, if you have a full-time person, if you have a whole team, they're the same four pillars. One, research, research, listening, what's trending? It's like you said, you spend the morning getting the pulse of the nonprofit sector, trying to figure out the guests. What are people interested in thinking about your audience? That's a huge piece for nonprofits that I don't think they do enough. So research and listening. Then the second pillar is the content creation, like actually creating the content, unless you're outsourcing it, which I don't really recommend outsourcing all of your content. You can certainly outsource some graphic design you can outsource some copywriting. But I do believe there should be someone in-house that is response somehow overseeing all of the four pillars. And the third pillar is community management. This is where you're going to go in, address the comments, answer the DMs, answer the questions. This is also where you're going to follow other people, comment on other people's things, find other organizations that are like-minded or you want to connect with, follow them, comment on their stuff. Then the fourth pillar is measurement, which we just talked about. So creating the reports, talk, I think creating a report is so much more than just creating a report and presenting it to your boss. I think we should be talking about this at staff meetings, talking about this at board meetings, showing people, no, it's not just tweeting what I had for lunch, which if one more person says that to me, I don't know the last time anyone tweeted what they had for lunch, is not what people are doing, but that's a misconception. Right. Well, measurement can help address the skeptics and help address misconception. And you can also prove to the staff and say, hey, remember when we shared that great story that took like three weeks to get permission to share? That exploded on social media. We need to do more of this. Or you can go to the other departments and say, oh, remember when you wanted me to post this ugly flyer? It didn't. You would probably wouldn't say ugly, but you want to be to post this flyer. It didn't really do so well. So how can we change what we're doing? So if you have those four pillars, you can you can outsource certain things and you can make that fit into your day or 20 minutes or an hour, however long you have. But those are the four pillars that you have to be considering. I mean, that's really what makes it work. And that's the people you see succeeding. They do all four of those things and they do them consistently over time. It's sort of like building an exercise program that you do consistently over time. And sure, if you miss a couple of weeks, you're not going to immediately lose all of your progress. But being consistent, you know, thinking of it as a marathon and not a sprint is really the best way to go. So for me, I just don't feel I think that if you don't have an inside person who can do it, your expectations really need to be tampered down because you're not going to be able to achieve as much as you can. And if you outsource it, what I've found, I mean, I do strategy and campaign creation and content creation, but I don't do the posting. I would I don't go into the accounts and post. You need to be doing that. Like the nonprofits need to be doing that because they need to be responding to the questions and the comments and anything that happens, they need to be seeing, oh, this post is doing really well. Maybe I'll put some money and boost it or maybe I'll put some money behind it. Maybe I'll create more content like that because it's all just evolving. It's not a static thing. It's not like you buy a billboard and you have someone put up the billboard or you buy a newspaper ad and somebody, you know, puts the ad in the newspaper. It's not it's not like that. I think we see it like that, but we need to change our thinking around it. Well, and that engagement is so important, whether it's, you know, staff, board, committee, committee members, volunteers all over before we move on. And again, we're we're coming to a close here. I know you wrote them down and I'm thinking our viewers and listeners might want to hear them again. Would you repeat those four pillars, please? Yes. Number one is research and listening. Number two is content creation. Number three is community management and outreach. And number four is measurement and reporting out. Love it. And back to that ugly flyer. We've all done it, right? We have all done it. And you are you're so right, Julia, that we could say, wow, look at this and the numbers, the engagement, the activity. I've seen that in my own social media. Again, my age, I call it social media, but in particular, my Instagram, photos of me get a much higher engagement than a photo of something else, right? And so while it's sometimes hard to constantly post photos of my face, that is the ones that receive the most engagement. And so therefore, that that measurement of success. Exactly. And I I know that the marketers out there and the fundraisers out there, they know in the back of their head, they know, oh, this appeal letter is going to do really well, you know, or maybe this could be reworked or marketers know, oh, this post is going to do well. We just kind of have that intuition. But then sometimes things we don't think are going to work do work. So we need to go back and analyze. How can we do more of that? Because our audience is telling us something there. That's right. And the audience is different per platform. So if it's working on this platform and your audience is telling you it's working, do more of that for each platform. Julia, you are amazing. Thank you. I'm so glad that Steven made sure that we got back together. Oh, yeah, good guy. I love him. That's a good guy. And you were saying that you just interviewed him on your nonprofit nation podcast. And so that's the live soon. That'll be live soon. Yes. OK, live soon. Check out Julia Campbell. Phenomenal. So glad to have you in our sector, in our world and here on our episode. Julia Patrick will have a lot to listen to as we move forward. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd. Again, if you missed today's episode, or you want to go back and listen to it or you want to share it perhaps with someone on your team. This is where you can find us. Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV and Vimeo. These are the platforms that we run and where you can find our almost 500 episodes. So, Julia Campbell, thanks for making that happen. Jarrett. Yeah. And of course, thanks to our sponsors, Blumerang, which huge shout out, Steven, for bringing Julia back to the table. American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy, nonprofit nerd, your part time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader and the nonprofit Atlas. We are so extremely grateful to have your continued support. And thanks to all of you for listening and watching and being part of this episode. You've got some social media work to do, so get to it. And until then, stay well so you can do well. Thanks, everybody.