 Good morning and thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar, Video Storytelling Made Easy with Adobe Spark. And our presenter today is Courtney Thomas. She is the social media community manager for Adobe Spark. And we are so excited to have her present today. I'm your host, LaChica Phillips, and I'm an associate program manager here at TechSoup with the NGO Source program. And we are excited. And we also have here, facilitating with Chad is Whitney Thomas. She's also, she's a program manager here at TechSoup. And we are really excited to be here and excited to bring you this information, this wealth of information today. But before we jump into that, I just want to make sure that everyone is comfortable using the ReadyTalk platform. So by the way, if you haven't noticed, all lines are muted. So every caller is muted. And if you have any questions, we encourage you to use the chat box at the bottom right hand of corner of your screen. If you notice, I just sent another message and you'll see that, you should see that message there. I also want to let you know that if you lose internet connection at any time, you are able to rejoin us using the same link and the same login details as you did before. And for upcoming webinars, you can go to our website at TechSoup.org, click on resources and then webinars to see all of our archived and upcoming webinars. And by the way, once this webinar is complete, you will receive an email with today's presentation along with any links and any relating information to help you make your videos with Adobe Spark. Also, we are very social here at TechSoup and we love social love. So if you're on Twitter, we love to connect. Feel free to tweet us at TechSoup or use hashtag TSwebinars. And I want to share a little bit about our mission here at TechSoup. Our mission is really simple. It is to build a dynamic bridge to help nonprofits around the world to gain effective access to technology and technical resources for good. And we provide and facilitate donation programs in over 230 countries and territories and over a million organizations. And if you are aware, our offices, our headquarters rather, is located in San Francisco. And this is the perfect time where we like to find out where all of our learners are joining us from today. So go ahead. This is a great opportunity for you to test out and try out the chat box. This is a great opportunity. We want to know where are you? Where in the world is your nonprofit? And so I'm seeing them coming in from all over. I'm seeing Florida and Texas and Canada. I see Honolulu. This is awesome. Any international shout-outs out there. I don't see any yet, but we know you're there. And we thank you for being here today. So again, at TechSoup, we partner in order for us to really perform our mission. We partner with companies like Adobe and Intuit, Microsoft, and other technology providers so that we can provide the best and the most cost-effective resources for organizations like yours. And these partnerships allow us to provide solutions ranging from hardware to software, cloud-based resources to training, and even individualized services. But today we are teaming up with Adobe Spark for the next 60 minutes to help us to understand how to create compelling videos using Adobe Spark. So be sure to stick around for the entire webinar because we will have Q&A section at the end of Courtney's demo. And I'll just really bring before Courtney comes on, I want to say that in addition to her role at Adobe Spark, Courtney manages her very own brand called Next Big Thing with Courtney and Dara Social Media Digital Marketing. And today, again, she's going to help us understand the key components of a great video using Adobe Spark. So Courtney, take us away and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Lashika. That was such a great introduction. I appreciate the shout-out for Next Big Thing. I hope everyone can hear me okay. And right here I see where all of you guys are from. So this is incredible. Thank you so much for joining me today, us today. I'm really, really excited to share Adobe Spark with you all. And here's a little bit why. Let's go to the next slide. I'm going to tell you a little bit about me before we jump into Adobe Spark and how amazing it is. So as Lashika mentioned, I'm the social media manager at Adobe Spark. But prior to that, I have a pretty wide background in nonprofits. So the next thing on my slide is Next Big Thing. I'm a web series producer at NBC The Show. Feel free to follow us, comment, like. We, that's a self-made work labor of love. So I consider us a nonprofit at the moment. But I also am an actor by trade. And if you have any theater organizations out there, holler shout-out. I think no sound. How are we doing? Anyone here? Yes, you're sounding fine. We're going to take care of this learner that can't hear. Right now, everyone should hear the presenter speaking. And we're going to manage that from the back. So Courtney, take us away. Perfect. So I see a couple of theater shout-outs payment. Hey, Pita. Hey, Colleen. So yeah, so I study here at Howard University. And then I headed over to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, which is a nonprofit theater organization. I worked at the Paley Center for Media in their development department, which is another prominent nonprofit organization. They are located in New York and LA. I recommend looking up. They're incredible. And then of course, the Lorraine Hansberry Theater is the theater where I started asking my very first asking lessons, singing and dance lessons happen there. And they're continuing to work into the digital media age, and I'm working very closely with them. So what all of these organizations that we have in common, and I'd love to see what you guys are working on and the different types of nonprofits that are represented, I think the thing that we all have in common is that we have to accomplish a lot with very little. And it's almost as if the request is thin this hay into gold and make me happy, which is fine because we're doing what we love. And so there is a little bit of a trade-off there. So I'm really excited to introduce you all to a tool today that will help alleviate some of those budgetary constraints. So the first thing you'll need to create an impactful message for your nonprofit is a smartphone, which hopefully most of us have. I didn't want to necessarily point it out, but you could also use the web. If you're going to do a digital marketing platform, I think a smartphone is the way to go about it because there are some social media platforms that are better or more easily accessible via mobile, but totally up to you. The next thing you need, of course, is Adobe Spark, which I'll tell you a little bit about. But only design experience is just a plus in this case. I know that we are also working in nonprofits. We're tasked with viewing about four to five jobs as one person. So I don't expect you all to have design experience on top of whatever else you're doing in terms of accounting or raising awareness. It's just too much. It's just too much. So here are a couple of marketing must-habs as well. This will help you contextualize the tool that we're about to jump into. So the first thing you want to do before you hop on social media or any platform for that instance is you want to have clear and measurable goals. There are a plethora of options and results available to you on each social media platform. The only way – don't try to boil the ocean. The only way to really get the true value that you're probably looking for out of digital marketing and social media marketing is to decide as a company, as an organization, and as a brand, what do you want at the end of the day? What is your final goal? And then you can start to work backwards and you'll usually find something in the social media realm that can help you get to that end goal again. And of course you want to have a clearly defined brand, things like a logo, a color, things that provide a consistency to your audience so that they – when they see your content, they recognize that it's you. And that's where the payoff comes, where you forge this communal and sometimes often emotional connection with your audience. So you want to make it easy for them to find you and recognize you. You're needing a little help for all the branding talk I just discussed. There's a blog for that on top of Adobe Spark being a great tool for graphic design and social media content. It is also a blog that we want to give as much help as possible to our users in order to know what are the best ways to use Adobe Spark. We're coming up with new ways every single day. It's very exciting. I highly recommend taking a look at spark.adobe.com.blog and just seeing if there's any branding, design, or questions that you have that could be answered with a quick how-to. And we're using Adobe Spark to build out the blog, to build out a lot of the content and the graphics that you see. So everything we do, we do it with our products. You can get our voucher of approval for that. So now, let's do a couple things about social media. Again, not sure what everyone's expertise levels in social media are, but I'll just go through a quick one-two, some great points that we've learned along the way that I'd love to share with you that will help you at the end of this put your Spark content onto social media well. So what does social media help nonprofits do? What it does is educates and builds awareness with a low buy-in. Access to social media platforms are free. That's exciting. Now, I give that with a little bit of, you know, here's the, like, asterisk. Of course, the better engagement these days, the algorithms that we're all hearing about, it is optimized for paid promotion, but there are a ton of organic hacks that if you need to still achieve a certain amount of results, you can still do it. But that's a whole other webinar for another time. The other thing that social media can do for your nonprofit organization is it can create a community around your cause. So social media feels like a community because we are right on our phones. We access it whenever we are lonely or bored or in bed or have an extra few minutes. And it usually is something on the phone that makes us laugh, makes us cry, you know? So you can do that community building on your own page and deliver a very specific message that your audience wants to hear. So that's an exciting opportunity. That's where I see most brands, why most brands are heading towards social media because that sense of community actually leads to a better result for your call to action. People are more motivated for a sense of community than some of our more traditional media outlets, you know, our traditional advertising waves. And of course, it converts your audience into supporters and advocates because you're reaching out to them several times a day. And not too many times, of course. I think two to three posts per platform is a very sweet spot. But with that constant brand recognition over time, that's what ends up leading people to remember your brand and to contribute to the brand in any way that you specify that you would like a contribution. It could be a like, it could be a comment, it could be a subscribe, or it could be funding. You can go wherever you'd like to go. But five to seven brand impressions is usually what it takes. It's an impression for anyone who's not familiar. An impression is a social media stat that is measuring how often an image or your content is being flashed across a screen. So that could be a phone screen, it could be a mobile, it could be a web screen. That number is not unique though. So for instance, if one person pulls your content up four times, you have four impressions. And it's a different measurement depending on the platform. On Instagram, I think they call it reach. If you want to know the number of people that saw the message. So what are the options? I have a few typos on this slide so please forgive. You have a few options in terms of where you would like your content to land. And these are the ones that I would recommend depending on your organization's needs. Before I jump into these though, please know that not all of them are necessary. It is a lot to manage a social channel. You're managing a community. And each channel is its own community. And there are certain personalities that tend towards one platform versus the other. So you want to have your content later to that event. You want to nurture each community. I just want to call it, I don't even want to call it an audience anymore because there's something about that term that removes what the goal is. So I like referring to social media, quote-unquote audiences, truly a social media community because that's how we're interacting with one another on there. So Facebook, I put the term older. I put myself in that category, you guys. I am someone. I went to college right around the time that Facebook was first making its appearance. I was very resistant to it. But here I am giving a social media workshop. So never say never, right? But it does tend to be older and age. And it does tend, I'm a single word, it tends to be used more and it has a higher engagement rate by women. Instagram tends to be younger and more female. Twitter is going to be more media heavy. There's more minority groups on there because it's very information heavy. A lot of social justice causes will find themselves on Twitter. But it does tend to have more of a 50-50 ratio. So that's great. LinkedIn is an interesting platform because it is no longer just a platform for job seeking. People that have jobs are on LinkedIn and they're consuming content every day. It does tend to lean male. I think that makes sense considering that probably more work environments tend to be more male dominated. So I think it does reflect that online. And then YouTube also tends to be quite male dominated as well. Now I'm talking about social media and these apps and platforms, but please do not ever underestimate the power of emails. I think a while ago someone was saying that email is going to die. It's so back then. Now email, I get some of my best engagement for video views for my web series when I send out that email. It has to tend to be a little more personal because we are very personal about our inboxes. I know I am. So keep that email list going. And the great thing is for platforms like Facebook is you can upload your email list and you can advertise specifically to those users on Facebook. So you can start to increase the amount of impressions for your brand so that they can – that's where you start to see those ads like when you say it on – you say it around your phone and then suddenly an ad appears. You can start to have that effect for your nonprofit. And then, of course, websites. Of course, you always want to have a landing page for when people want to look up your information. That's usually the first thing any brand or company starts is their website. And definitely look into SEO. That's something that still I have to learn about myself as well, but it really does make a difference. Search ends in optimization is what SEO stands for. All right, this slide got a little off. Another important piece about social media is that this is where people are spending their time and they are making their decisions on where to send their money to social media. That's why you'll see a lot of very huge brands start to engage influencers. And the reason for that is because people talking about you is more powerful than when you talk about yourself. I'm more likely to believe probably an influencer that probably looks like me. I like a lot of her posts and, suddenly, she has a Samsung phone that's having great images come out. And I want my brand to look like that. Suddenly, I'm buying from Samsung. And they usually, ethically, they have to tell you that it's a paid advertisement or it's a sponsorship, but it works. I don't know if you guys follow this woman, young woman, Color Me Courtney on Instagram. I've been following her for a couple of years, very fun and flashy. I know the slides are going off the screen. They're going to go back in just a little bit. But now I just saw her on a Windows commercial. So she's using the graphics and she's using the computers for her images. And it does make me think to myself, maybe I want to buy as Windows, whatever they call that. I'm a Mac user personally, so it's not working too much, but that's the effect. I'm getting the sound is cutting out. Can you guys, look, can you hear me good? Yes, hi. I can hear you just fine. I just put a note in the chat that for people to, if they have an issue, to try refreshing your browser or you can try dialing in. And Wendy gave a great idea. She said you can actually dial in via Skype if you are having audio issues. But I also am seeing notes from people saying the audio is perfect. Audio is perfect. So I'm just going to say, if you are having an issue, please refresh or I'll post a telephone number to Dowling, but Courtney, feel free to just take this away. All righty. Yeah, let's take it away. All right, moving closer and closer to Adobe Spark. So these are the different types of content for the most part that you're going to see on social media. Gifts and memes, hilarious. I call it catnip for the millennial generation. If you want some quick engagement, get a funny meme going. If it's a popular gift, add it to some relevant point. You'll see your engagement go up quickly. Pictures, art, poetry is a big issue. Comeback, videos. This was just for you all. Feel free to screenshot this. I got this list from Cara Dowdle. She is a video and founder actually of her own marketing and communications strategy firm, and it specifically specializes for politics and government. So I had the opportunity to watch her speak, and she gave some great summaries on social media. I also recommend that you follow her. Her handle is falling off the page a little bit, but it's at Ms. M.S. Cara Dowdle on Twitter. Great, and then just some more social media advice. I just want to make sure that you guys are off in a way for social media because it can be rough out there. Text over images to help message your, to help your message spread is always good. I think adding a logo with your handle so where people can find more of the content that you're putting out is always a great idea. And people of course love inspirational quotes, graphics and memes and just added that as well. That's the example there. But the biggest trend that I'm seeing in social media that we're going to focus the majority of this webinar on is on video. So video is getting swell times the engagement of other types of content on social media. I think we're just living in that kind of a world. I love consuming video content myself, so I don't need too much of an explanation as to why that's so. I think this is especially the case on Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram they're still trying to tinker their algorithms so that images will always be at the forefront. I don't know though, they may need to embrace video because it's here. So the big thing about video is you need to capture the attention of your audience or your community within the first three seconds. And that's just because we all have very short attention spans. It is what it is. And the three second rule is something that's measured on the back end of these platforms like Twitter and Facebook. And that's when someone is considered having viewed the content. Because we do absorb content very quickly, images and words. We always assign some meaning with the color, with the words and like, just the placement. It all says something in one second. So if you can capture someone for three, you're actually winning on social media. Sounds really easy, but it does tend to get a little hard to pack in the punch for three seconds and keep it moving after that. So it says that most people watch video with the sound off on social media. This is true. I'm sure we can all raise our hands for having watched some video probably even this morning on social media without actually turning on the sound. And that's a great sign because that means that that marketer or whoever milked that video out, that they told the story so effectively through their visuals that words and sound and music were not needed to convey whatever they were trying to convey emotionally, contextually, et cetera. I'm going to say that perhaps I think I have a few videos that I'd like to show you all today. And if the sound doesn't work, that's okay because it should be strong enough. And obviously with captions, they all have captions, it should actually convey the message. So I can show you the videos should the sound not work and we can decide that here today. All right. And yes, cute kids and puppies also work. And people do share them stories that move them because they want to make their friends laugh and cry just like they did. All right, so we all know now that visual content is what fuels social media. But with all the content that I just named, you're probably thinking they're like, how in the world am I going to make all of this? So we have the Adobe Creative Suite. I hope you all have it and love it. It's been around for a while now. It's been a go-to for artists and designers and anyone that wants to make an impact eventually. But now there's a new set of apps for those that are accidental techies like myself or those of us that just, you know, I studied something else in school and if I had the means that I could go back to school and study all of this again, I would, but unfortunately I can't, I'm working. So here's Adobe Spark. Where it's represented here, you see three companion apps that you can download on iOS. Android is coming. The data is coming out very, very soon, I promise. In the meantime, anyone that is an Android user, I encourage you to use the web. You can go to spark.adobe.com and you can access all of the creative materials that you would make in Spark Video, Spark Page, and Spark Post on the web. What is the cost of Spark? Great question. It's free to begin with. So what's the cost of the free? Our logo would be on the bottom right-hand corner. So that would be the free version where you can make whatever you'd like. It would just have our branding on it. If you would like to buy us, we do have a branded option which I'm going to walk through very thoroughly with you. That is $9.99 a month. If you don't already have the Adobe Creative Suite, if you do have the Creative Cloud Suite, then you already have access to the Adobe Spark premium branded features, and I will go through what the difference of that is. It's pretty great. I use it for Next Big Thing. Watch me walk through my Next Big Thing account. Otherwise, $9.99 a month, or you can do $99 for the whole year. I have CS6. No, thank you for adding the link in there, LaChica. Let's get more specific into nonprofit work. What do you share for your organizations or your types of organizations on social media? Of course, I'm just giving you guys a rough outline. Tailor this as much as possible to what your organization's outcomes and goals are. The first thing I would recommend is a mission video. Tell the world what your nonprofit is doing and why. Why is this important? And again, explain it as much as you can within the first three seconds, just because of more than likely how long someone's going to be paying attention to your video. And then, of course, if you can capture them the first three seconds, they'll probably walk the rest. So again, focusing on your intro, your grabber, or your hook will give you a lot of mileage in the end. Another great idea in how what type of social content to share is to a visual that promotes an upcoming event or fundraiser. So this can be a save-the-date, a fun design. That can be an event recap video. I have one that I'd like to show you all today as well. And any type of informative content, like infographics that are relevant to what cause you're working towards. Inspirational quotes by leaders. I don't know if you have any celebrities or anyone influential. I have a theory. I think every single person knows someone or they know someone who knows someone who has a solid amount of influence in your community. You just have to find it. And then when you do find it, you want to leverage that relationship. Luckily, most influential people really do want to give back in some way because they have been given so much. So this is a great way to give them some content to share. And you can quote them. You can use some great visuals that they probably have from extensive photo shoots that they've done somewhere else, and they're really great for the photo. And they want to help you out. The possibilities are endless. Those are those little hacks I was telling you about for organic reach. And then anything interactive. Anything, anything, anything. Each of the social media platforms, they have a bunch of features, like Instagram has the stories with the highlights now. And Facebook, they're trying out their live highlighted story options. And of course, Facebook Live Video is one of their biggest pushes for the year. If you start to engage in those features on the platform, the platforms will actually boost your, boost your engagement in the algorithm because you're helping them out by showcasing one of their new features. So anything interactive, like a quick poll in Instagram stories is always fun. I just posted one in mine and you see the show like, are you registered to vote because you have a special election coming up or not a special election. We have a California primary coming up on June 5th. So that was a fun poll. Everyone's voting. That's exciting. And here are a few examples that I wanted to show you. These are graphics that were made in Adobe Spark posts. Now Adobe Spark posts is where you'll hear described mostly as your way to make stunning social graphics in seconds. Quick, slick, all the good stuff. It looks like it was probably made by a graphic designer and that it took, I don't know how many iterations and cost hundreds of dollars an hour for their time. These are templates that are available to you for free in Adobe Spark if you would like to remix them. And I'll actually pull some out for you guys and I'll show you the remix feature. Super easy. But to walk through these 18 essentials to include in a holiday care package for local homeless shelters, if that's part of your cause, I give because. Giving Tuesday. Amazing time to be posting to social media. If you don't normally post on social media, as an on-profit organization, you should still get on during Giving Tuesday because even people who are wanting to make donations that day, maybe they're not even on the social media regularly. So you still have a chance to catch a great audience and their whole intention for that day is to give. And that's the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. And of course a holiday before I drive is to get more inspiration going. Now here are some infographics that I made. I'm working with another nonprofit called College Bridge Academy down in Atlanta. And I'm getting, helping them get started with some social media strategies. And their whole purpose is to find mentors for students that are on their way to college. They've gotten the scholarships. They've passed the classes. It's not a financial need. It's a need to have someone in their lives that will check on them and just to make sure that they're doing well. And it's probably been in their shoes and can advise them when they reach those bumpy points. So I'm excited to be partnering with them. And here are a few graphics that I made. The images that you see, I found in Adobe Spark's app. We have some free photos. Every feature that you see, every image, every color, every font is all copyright free in Adobe Spark. So I'll walk through how I made these but I'll read off the stats. Young adults with mentors are 130% more likely to hold leadership positions. I chose the image because it looks like a young woman probably working a great job. She looks stylish. She looks fresh. She looks ready. She looks sharp. So that's the goal is. That's the emotional goal. I'm saying it's a mentor, a young student. They'll likely turn out like this young woman. The one to the right is my favorite though. This one says, young adults who have a mentor, 81% more likely to participate in sports or extracurriculars. So I thought this was a great image of movement and strength and possibility. She's getting ready to dunk the basketball into the hoop. And right next to him, I have the words that I know I want my audience to think. It's exactly this type of support, this mentor that got him to the point where he's about to win. And you can see my next big thing, logos are in the corner. So that's super important as well. And here's another graphic, calling all mentors, something that we're going to post on our social media channels and do some live Instagram stories and interview the students and that's them up with mentors. So that's kind of the way that we're thinking to be interactive in our work with this nonprofit organization. Now, the moment we've all been waiting for, I'm going to show you a Spark video. And it's by a nonprofit called Choice Humanitarian. And let me make sure the volume is up for you all before I begin this playback. All right, here we go. The one that was made by my colleague, Amy. And I remember seeing it when it came out and I thought, oh yeah, it works for Adobe. It's all this money and it can do it. That's great. Good job, guys. And of course, when I started working for her, she shared with me how they made it. And she said, nope, I made that. It was shot on her iPhone. And she used the words that you see across the screen are it's an inspirational quote. And she broke it up so that each slide, it enhances the message of whatever the text is at that moment. And it was a really powerful video that did well for that organization. So here are a few basics of the structure of a social video that works. I'm not going to go too much into detail because I am not a filmmaker. So I'm not going to guide you guys too deeply on this. But this is just a general layout of if you're not sure where to begin or how to do the recap. You want to start with a hook or a grabber. And that's something that wakes people up and it makes them want to watch it. That can be sirens. It can be movement. It can be a reveal. I took a fiction into film class in high school and the teacher explained it perfectly by using Billy Wilder films. I don't know if you guys remember that filmmaker from Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. But part of his success is that each of his films in the very beginning always had some sort of a grabber. In Sunset Boulevard, you see cop cars racing down the street. In Some Like It Hot, you have that same movement happening again with a car coming down the street and then it goes directly to a coffin and then two very grisly looking men and of course you're wondering what happened. So those are the type of grabbers that you want to try to get your audience wondering, wait, what happened? What did I miss? What do I need to catch up on? Those are those extra seconds and viewings that you'll get on social media. And then of course there's a setup. This sets the status quo, something to aspire back to, maybe a time when things are happier and simpler. A lot of exposition can happen here as well. This is what's heading to the climax. It's establishing the stakes of the story that you're telling. This is where you can give a zoom in, a 360 on the community, maybe that your organization is focusing in on helping. And then of course all of this gets to a point or what I like to call a climax. The accumulation of all of what we've just said. You almost want to leave the audience with the question of oh my goodness, how could things get any worse or how could it get any better so that there's a switch or a payoff? It could offer a solution. It can be, this is where the emotional connection plays off here with a resolution. And it falls directly into the call to action to your audience, to your community. What can you do to beat a resolution and the happy ending to this story? So that's the overall effect you want to give them. Here's some additional notes for optimizing for storytelling. Whenever you're watching anything from now on, whether it be a movie, a show, a music video, or another nonprofit content on social media, pay close attention to why something works and what was working for you. Take notes of those moments. Even if it's for three seconds, go back, maybe look at the colors that were used and maybe the speed with which the camera was rolling. Figure out what was working for you so that you can recreate that for your content as well. That's great. You don't have to do a lot of guesswork. You learn what by your second birthday? You learn by your second costume birthday party that it's all been done before. It truly has. There are ways to evoke the emotions and the pull that you're looking to get. It's out there. It's on the Internet. All right, now we're going to do a spark demo. We've got 20 minutes, so let's roll through this. So for next big thing, I made a recap of an event that happened in San Francisco for Google.org, and they were raising awareness for a school in the East Bay called Roses and Concrete that's doing work to educate children on technology and art. And I'll leave you there. I'll let the video speak for you. Speak for me. All righty. So that was the video that I made as a recap. I worked with a PR company that invited me to the event. It was filmed on my iPhone. I have another little tool that I like to use, a gimbal. You can get that at Best Buy. You can get it on Amazon, actually, anywhere from like $100 to maybe $200. And it's basically a phone stabilizer so you can get that scanning effect without any bumps in it. But now I'm going to share my screen with you all so that I can show you exactly what I did with it. And then I'll bump into Adobe Spark and show you how I constructed that video. I'm going to share my desktop. I don't get to see the chat while this is happening. So Ishika, if there's any issues, just let me know. But otherwise, I wanted to show you all what happened. And this is what I think can happen for any nonprofit because I was amazed to watch it happen myself. So the event happened on Friday night. Zendaya, famous actress. I think she's got about 13 million followers. She was in the greatest showman. She's got the press behind her. That's what I mean. Find that influential person. She's from the East Bay. And that's why she knows about roses and concrete and she wanted to give that back. So I posted this at 8 a.m. on a Monday, on the following Monday. And I knew it was going to get a lot of likes because I had the words, I had the music. I was like, I think people are going to like this. It did so well. Zendaya liked it. And then she shared it. And that, of course, 13 exposure for this organization and for even my small organization, Next Big Thing, was huge. It was interesting because I made this video so quickly and as you can see, we're at about 52,000 views now from March, 1.4,000 likes. This is a kind of exposure that I think your nonprofit deserves. It was interesting though because I was able to turn this video around so fast. I did it over the weekend while I was carrying for a family member. The recap from Google came out and it was like a five paragraph essay. And I think her people must have automatically retweeted it because it's Google's event. Why wouldn't you retweet their recap? But I noticed later in the day as I was checking on how our video was doing that she ended up removing, she un-retweeted the Google recap and our state at the top of her page for about two days. Best exposure we have ever gotten from Next Big Thing. In general, that's the difference that I'm noticing with Adobe Spark. I've gotten a few more shares from people with these larger audiences because they're seeing the quality of Adobe Spark. Incredible. This is another video that I made as well. This is a much simpler make process. I just added the captions for a young woman who was reading a poem that really moved a lot of us that evening. Now Zendaya didn't reshare this one but it still did 11,000 views on its own, 819 likes, and 80 retweets. We did not put one dime behind promoting this, not one single solitary dime. This is completely possible for your nonprofit organization. Just find the relationship, find those shares, and find those moments, and you will have these results without needing to put a dollar behind it. All right, so that's our page. Now let's bump into Adobe Spark. So this is Adobe Spark when you log in, I could go through all the credentials but I won't bore you all. And if you have upgraded to Adobe Spark Premium for the branded features, you're going to have this option, Manage Brand. I think if you are not already signed up, there's still an Add Brand option here. So I'm going to pop into that and show you all what that looks like and what is the difference between Spark for free and Spark Premium branded features. So what you can do with Adobe Spark Premium branded features is you can add your logo. So I've uploaded these. These were made by a graphic designer before I discovered Adobe Spark. If I had to do it all over again, I would definitely just use one of the icons that are available in Adobe Spark now thanks to the Noun Project. I'll show you that real quick. And you can upload them transparent. We have our brand colors and they offer a palette of other colors that, you know, because once you have a brand color, you don't want to beat people over the head with it. You want to have things that complement that color of brand. So it's an overall palette that you're providing them. And of course, fonts. These I have mentioned before are all copyright free. We are adding new ones in as we speak. And you will be available to add your custom font in this summer. I don't have an exact date that I'm allowed to say quite yet, but it will be as soon as possible. I promise you. So what happens then is they call it a brandify. When you put all of your elements in, we create, or Adobe Spark creates templates for you based on what you want to make. You could just want to make a real quick quote. You could want to make a slide cover for a PowerPoint presentation or a YouTube video cover. You can make a Pinterest ad. Let's see what else they have for us. An event header for Facebook, a Twitter post. And as you can see, Adobe Spark has all of the sizes of all the social media platforms that you need. So you don't have to worry about figuring out the exact amount of pixels that are required. We got you covered on that. You can also make your business card and print that off of, I don't know, Mu.com is one of my favorite ones personally, but you can do that as well. So those are the post templates. We also provide video templates and page templates. I haven't gotten too much into Spark page. Let me just do a quick brief demo. It's essentially if you want to write an article or give a good recap that people can slide through and it looks like a web page, you can create this here. And this is a sampling. And you can go in. I wish that the page was remixable. This is just an example of a structure that you can use. But this is where oftentimes I'll make a lot of post content in Adobe Spark and I'll need to lay it out in a way for people to consume easily if I'm sharing it with them, maybe it's a social media kit or something like that. It's a little better than I like to send over a PowerPoint because it's a link that you can auto generate and you can share it with whoever you would like to see it. A custom link option is coming very soon as well. We're hearing all the requests. If you're already using Adobe Spark, you have some requests, feel free to comment those as well because we need to collect them wherever we can. And yeah, every time that you update anything about that Spark page that you've made, you have the option to then update the page but you don't have to change up a link. It'll update it to the one that you maybe shared in an email five weeks ago and you added a new image. If a person happens to open their email five weeks later, they'll get the updated version through the link. It's a lifesaver. You can also embed the web pages that you make through Spark page on the back end of your WordPress site, et cetera. All right, so let me go back into the project and walk through some of the key features as it pertains to that video. So I wasn't thrilled with my options for the cover of the video. If I was just going to do a plain title, if I wanted the image to look a certain way, I knew that I wanted some video effect in that. And so I actually made a Spark post for the cover. Now I'm on desktop showing you all on – sorry, not on web – on your mobile phones. This is where you'll have the option to use the two-finger dragging and you can actually re-center the photo. Because I am on desktop right now, it's not working for me, unfortunately, but I promise on mobile it does do that. So this is the final – and this is the video, actually. Let me bump back out. And then here's the cover that I put together. And I'll just show you the elements. As you continue to design an Adobe Spark, you're going to get very familiar with all of the elements that it takes to put together a beautiful-looking graphic. It's very simple. This is a transparent TNG that I got from the Internet. I just looked up Google.org and how I added it. There's an Add button. And you can add text. You can add a photo. You can add an icon. This is where I was saying earlier if I had to do it all over again, I would have just made my logo from Adobe Spark. So I'll show you. We have a crown as our logo. Look at all the different crown logos and you can change the colors of these. If I had to do it all again, I would actually choose this, but it pops right in. And then I can change the color of the icon. It's going to have a few suggested colors. This is where we're using AI and it's suggesting a color for me based on the colors that are already being used on the palette. Probably suggesting this tone because it's matching up with the concrete here. But just to show you as an example, it says I stopped sharing. Hang tight. All right, hopefully you guys can see me again. Don't know what happened. But yeah, so I wanted to change it to white so it was more visible. And then maybe I would want to – I'm recreating my logo essentially right now. Let's say I just wanted to add some text. And I recommend adding your handle so that people can find you easily. And click done. And there it is. And I saw – I was able to peek over and someone said, how did I do the transparent lettering? So this is auto-sharing up as a backing that I actually use very frequently. So this is a very intelligent product. I'm glad that it auto-did that. And what you want to do is just change the shape of the backing. And if you scroll up as a pretty deep in one, you can change the backing shape so that there's no backing. You can change it so that there's a clean, like a background like that. Options are endless. Another fun one is this one where you get a little bit of shadow behind it. And you can shuffle the shadow. You can't see it very well on this backdrop unfortunately. Maybe it has to do with the color. Let's shuffle that. There we go. That's where you can see the backdrop a little better. But it's as easy as this. I'm on my computer with no design experience showing you all this right now. You can resize it so that it fits. It fits however I want it to. And that could have been – that could have been my logo. I'll never see that 50 bucks again. So that's an example. Again, got this logo from here. And actually this is an example of the backing that they auto chose for me in that slide because it's right on here. And of course, you notice that I have two different colors happening in this text box area. I have my primary colors that I set up. And your next big thing is in a secondary color so that you can have multiple colors in just one text box. So you can highlight what's important. I wanted people to see next big thing above anything. So I'm going to leave that here for now and head into the video option. And the great thing about this, you can't see it on web, unfortunately. I have it so that the words screen in in a fade in effect, those effect options are available on mobile. You'll see it when you log in and you start adding – hit the plus sign, add your design. And one of the six menu options is the one on the bottom right-hand side. And it says effects. And you can have your text move or you can have your photo move. And that's going to be a big – I hope that's going to be a big push for the team coming up to add different types of animations and text because that's where the fun is on social media. That'll be my recommendation anyway. So heading back onto the project. Oh, we're running out of time. I wish we had more time together, you guys. So let me just show off some key features of Adobe Spark. And then I will flip back into ReadyTalk so we can answer some questions. I have some time to run over if you guys have time, so no problem there. So all I did was upload – this is important. I uploaded the .mp4 output to add this to this slide. And when you are in Adobe Spark Video, you have different options for how you would like your slide, each individual slide layout to be. So this one I have the cover on, so let's not use that as the example. But for this one I chose a text option. But I could have done a title and text option, so this is where it's auto changing for us. And I'll show you actually where I did this. Let me change it back. But it'll auto change all of the things. So most important thing is know what you want to say before you head into Adobe Spark because it's going to give you a ton of options. And you can just put the information in there and kind of let the design – let us take the design wheel in a way. And show you some suggestions. And there's actually a suggestion wheel I'll give you a look at as well. Now I pulled it. I wanted it to be a caption. You can drag and drop this caption into nine different areas on the screen depending on what makes the most sense for you visually. For us, since we have all of this text and these images are happening up here, I chose the bottom left corner. I'd like to use the phrase the eye has to travel. I don't know if I have any Diana Vryland friends out there, but that's a very famous saying that former editor-in-chief of Vogue during some of its most prominent years used to say. And it's basically giving the idea that even on a static image, even in a video that is technically moving, you want to have something visual happening across the screen that allows the eye to travel. The eye always wants to travel. And that's all I was thinking about when I was creating this video. I chose the moment of all... This was a four-minute dance scene, and I happened to choose this 8-second... I wanted to choose the moment of their most impactful movement and then move on to the next one. Again, this was a video that they had on their YouTube that I was able to use, you know, it was free. And actually, fair use is what I would claim this as. It's promoting their organization, so I took it from their organization site and repurposed it for my own. The footprint option is another great way to keep your audiences eye-traveling and your attention flowing. And in this case, I'm using two-pox record footage from the old, old MCD interview where he's talking about the concept of the roads that grew from concrete. And then I have these larger captions quickly summarizing what's happening all over the event. It was almost like a little marketplace of stands and booths with children doing amazing work, so I just wanted a quick recap. Of course, we had Ms. Indaya in the house, so I chose the moment where she was, like, cutely dancing on stage, and of course, her serving at the... I think she's on the after. Yeah, she's on the after. I carved it for this one. And then another feature I want to point out, this is the title and text option for a layout theme. So I think we've gone through all of the layouts here. But another one that I want to point out, if you have a list of points that are being made, I do recommend the split screen option because it has that pop-up buoyancy effect. So again, it'll take away some of the monotony of having to read off a list to your audience. Again, it's a short, Apprentice brand audience on social media. People are engaging with it very quickly, so you want something that pulls them in. And I think the split screen effect is a great way to do that. And then, of course, my call to action at the end of it was Learn More and Get Involved at rosesandconcrete.org. Adobe Video will also keep in a credit and an outsource slide for you with your logo branding automatically on it. And any changes that you want to make in this slide, you would just go back to your managed brand and you can change the way in which logo appears on your template here in the video option. Okay. I think that's about everything for now. I'm going to unshare my screen and go back into ReadyTalk. So I can see what you guys are talking about. Thank you so much, Courtney. This was a lot of information. We do have a couple of questions. I want to get to really quickly. Did you have other slides? Just the ones that we can end on. I'm just still trying to make my way back into the conference. Okay. So while you're doing that, I have a quick question to ask, a couple of questions if we can get time. But so Marla is asking what if you are a small organization that does not have the resources to have a high-profile artist? What do you do? A high-profile artist is a hard thing to sign. I totally agree. I would try to find some of those influencers in your community. So those are people that maybe would automatically consider high-profile, but they are high-profile in your specific town, city, or community. Maybe it's a school principal that has most of the town's emails because they've been educating the children, and they have a poll on who makes the difference. So, yeah, it could be a preacher, anyone that has influence in the community. I was just at a social media conference in Atlanta, the Social Shakeup, and an influencer, Chris Straub, I asked him what his one piece of go-to social media advice is, and he said, remember that everybody is famous to somebody. We're all famous to somebody. So maybe it's not like we're on red carpets or anything, but there's somebody who's following you. They're not following you. They're following you on social media that is wanting to hear from you and wants to hear your message and is interested. Don't disregard those people because that's how you build on that for a larger community or a larger audience. Great. Thank you. One last question. Someone said, what is the name of that phone stabilizer that you mentioned? Did you say it was Nimble? What is it called? It was a gimbal. G is in Garden. I, M is in Mary. B is in Bear. A, L is in Lamb. A gimbal. Oh, perfect, perfect. And one last thing. The file format for the video through Adobe Spark, is that... What format is that? .mp4. Okay, okay, perfect. Yeah, the outputs are always mp4. .mp4. Okay, perfect. .mp4. .mp4. Okay. Okay. And so I think we, I think we are out of time. Did you want to mention something about these action items? Yeah, I would love to get in touch with the social, with the organizations that are on the line right now because we love to speak here at Adobe Spark. People that are using our tools. So we can be your first influencer. We have a reach of about over 100,000 across our platform. So if you make a post, I would love to share it. So here's the action item. I would love for you all to download Spark, Spark Post specifically. And post to Twitter or Instagram. This is something to get you guys in the talk of what's happening. This is kind of where our heads are at in terms of branding on social media as well. Send out a graduation wish or an inspirational quote inspired by your nonprofit. Add the effects to make it a video. And post it and hashtag Adobe Spark so we can see it and find it. And I'd love to see, I'd love to keep in touch with you guys' organizations on social media, on Instagram or Twitter. And let's just keep it going and engaging with one another because I hopefully would like to share something from each of your organizations one day because maybe there's someone in my audience that really cares about what you're doing. So I'd love to help with that as well. Thank you so much, Courtney. We are out of time. We really appreciate everyone joining us and being here today. And if you are late joining, I want to let you know you will receive an email later today with the slides from today, the links and all of the information with the recording. You will get that later today. So we do have time if you want to go ahead and chat out something that you learned today. Are you going to take advantage of that action item? I mean, that's a great opportunity for your organization to put together something and to have Adobe Spark to follow that or retweet that. That is an awesome opportunity. So I hope that some of you will take advantage of that. Also, we hope that you can join us on our next webinar. It's coming up on next Tuesday, May 31, right after the holidays. We want to talk about the five clear steps to get your nonprofit cloud ready. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? And what does all of this talk about being cloud ready? Well, we're going to dive right into all of that with one of our very own right here from TechSoup. And so we hope that you can join us. And as always, we are so grateful for our sponsor, ReadyTalk. And again, thank you so much, Courtney, for all of the information that you provided today. And thank you so much, Whitney, for assisting and facilitating Chuck in the back end today. And for everyone, all of our learners today, thank you for joining us. Make it a great day. Bye-bye.