 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. My name is Kami Griffiths, and today's webinar is Social Media Decision Making. I'd like to thank presenters Laura Quinn and Tex Dworkin. Before we get started, I'd like to tell you a little bit about TechSoup. We are working towards a 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. Here is a screen grab of our homepage. For those of you who don't know much about TechSoup, we've got a lot to offer. There are articles in our learning center, donated products from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec. There is a community forum where you can post questions. We've got updated articles on our blog every day, a special program for libraries, and a bunch of other information you can sign up for our newsletter. So check out TechSoup.org. Now I'd like to get started and welcome Laura Quinn from IdealWare. Can you please introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, I'm Laura Quinn. I am the Executive Director of IdealWare. IdealWare is also a nonprofit. We're a partner organization of TechSoup. We provide information to help nonprofits choose effective software. So we have tons and tons of free reviews and articles and reports as well as conducting a seminar series of our own. So definitely check out IdealWare.org if you haven't. And I'm excited to talk today about our social media decision making guide. Thanks Laura. Now TechStorkin is from Global Exchange and also Do Good Biz. Can you please introduce yourself? Yes. Hi, I'm TechStorkin and I'm the Director of Social Media for Global Exchange. Global Exchange is a nonprofit organization. We're an international organization that is dedicated to promoting economic, political, and environmental justice around the world. I'm also a consultant. I work with Do Good Biz. I focus on the media and the social media and marketing needs of mission-driven businesses and organizations. So I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. I'm glad to have you. And again, I'm Kami Griffith. I'm the Training and Outreach Manager here at TechSoup. And we've been doing these webinars for over two years. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to share, bring these people together who know so much to share with you guys. I'd also like to thank Becky Wiegand who is answering chat questions and Andrea Berry from IdealWare also for answering questions. Now I'd like to move on to the agenda. Let you know what we're covering in the next 55 minutes. We're going to start by talking about the Social Media Decision Guide. And then we'll talk about tools that organizations have found successful and this is based off of the research that Laura did in developing the Decision Guide. We will talk about Global Exchange and hear from Techs about her experience bringing in social media to her organization and how they track their impact and how she was able to get buy-in from her leadership. And then Laura will be talking a little bit about the differences between Facebook and Twitter and the time commitment that you can expect to invest in social media as well as talking about photo and video sharing tools, and then ending with 15 minutes of Q&A. So let's get started. Laura, can you tell us about the Social Media Decision Guide and how nonprofits can utilize it? Absolutely. So here is the lovely cover of the Social Media Decision Guide. So this is a 60-page or so guide which helps folks to think about what social media channels, so things like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, photo and video sharing tools are likely to be useful for their own organization. So it has a bunch of narratives. It has worksheets to guide you in thinking through your own process as you look through the narrative. It has research results and actual data and a directory of consultants. And this is all based on about six months of fairly intensive research into what nonprofits are actually doing with organizations. So I just got a question as to what this actually was again. So it's the Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide. We will certainly, as a follow-up to this session, we'll send you out a link to where you get it. It's free. So just a little bit about, I'm going to be sharing a fair amount of research today, so I thought I'd share with you our methodology for this research so you can judge for yourself as to how it applies to you. So we started with a high-level survey. So we distributed it among a bunch of primarily nonprofit technology lists to ask nonprofit staff members who are already using social media to answer a survey about how effective it was for them. We then, based on the people who responded to the survey, we pulled discussion groups and case studies. So more than 290 people gave us more detailed information as to exactly what they were doing with social media, how much time they were spending, what they were doing with it, and how it was working for them. And we also did two last smaller surveys, one of frequent Facebook users and one of frequent Twitter users to get a little bit more of a sense as to how they thought about nonprofit things. The Facebook survey was pretty solid in terms of methodology. The Twitter survey, we had a really hard time getting beyond our own audience of nonprofit technology folks, so the vast amount of people who answered that survey were in fact in the nonprofit technology space. So that is just a quick look at the nonprofit social media guide. So this is obviously a long link and we'll send it out again, but certainly we'll follow it up. Great, Laura. So in your research, what tools do organizations find most successful? Happy you asked. So from our high level research, just some points of comparison. So in our high level survey we asked people about three particular things. How effective did they find these tools? So you see at the bottom the tools here, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, video, photo, blogs. How effective did they find it for reaching out to new supporters? And this was the category in which the most people found that things were successful. Facebook and Twitter, probably the highest rated, followed by video sharing sites and blogs. So it's kind of some interesting comparisons here. You'll note, and also I'm going to show you three graphs. You'll note that there are some people who think it works and there are some people who say they know it works. We didn't actually ask them how they know, so this is more of a level of confidence than an actual, you know, we have tangible results. But it is interesting to note how many people think it works that don't actually know. We also asked about enhancing relationships. So this is about the same level of people. So by the way, these are people who are actually using these tools. So this means 80% of people actually use, nonprofit staff actually using Facebook felt it was effective. Either they thought or they knew it worked for enhancing relationships with your audience. So there are some people finding some real results here. From this survey, our surprise was Twitter, which got ranked very well. And I'll talk a little bit later about Twitter and some of the things it's particularly good for. Just to compare to those two things, here's fundraising. How effective are these tools we ask people for raising money for your organization? So you'll notice that the numbers go way down here. So Facebook was the most effective but not by, it was not comparatively very effective. Very few people knowing it works and you feel like raising money is something that you probably know if you're doing it. So Dalton asked, will you define no? It's sort of ambiguous. It is in fact ambiguous and it was that way in the survey. So this is exactly what we ask people in the survey. If you're using Facebook, do you think it works? Sorry, do you know it works? Do you think it works? Do you think it doesn't work? Do you know it doesn't work? We did not ask people to specify how they know. So as I mentioned, this is kind of more of a kind of a level of confidence than an actual, you know, statistical measure. So we then delve down a lot more in our case study to find out specifically what people were doing and what particularly was being useful. We'll talk more about the specific tools. But here are some of the things that people were finding specifically useful from social media tools. So driving traffic to website was the thing that was most mentioned. So this 21% means that 21% people who were involved in the discussion groups or the case studies mentioned it. And these are mentioned spontaneously. So we didn't specifically ask them. We asked them what results do you see and this is what we got. Feedback and discussion. Attracting specific new constituents, one that to my mind was really important in that. So this is for most people kind of the core of the mission. So they are attracting volunteers, members, event attendees, etc. Less people mentioned building an email list, attracting partners, sales, or clients, attracting donations, getting press coverage, but enough mentioned it that there were. There was obviously among the more than 300 people that we gathered data from for these things. There were a lot of miscellaneous one-offs, but these were the ones that were really came to the forefront. So that's what, at a high level, some folks are, the results that people are seeing from social media. Excellent. Wow, you talk fast. Thanks Laura. No, no, no, it's great. It's great. There's a ton of information. Everyone should check out the guide. I'm going to move on and ask Tech, you've had to make some of these decisions yourself at Google Exchange. Can you tell us which of the tools you're using and why you chose them? Sure. First of all, I just want to make sure that I can be heard. I saw a few comments in the chat that I wasn't able to be, oh good, it's much better. Great. So here's the tools that we use. We use our blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. And we've been using all consistently for about a year now. So we're actually fairly new. I think we're an interesting case study because we are mid-process of figuring all this stuff out. We're finding out what works, what doesn't work. But where I started as the social media director almost a year ago was in first identifying what our goals are, and then secondly, deciding what tools and social media outlets to engage in. So that's where I started was what are the goals of the organization and which tools can help us meet those goals. I also wanted to find out where our constituents are and how they're receiving their information. Going into it with a mentality that social media is not free because time is money and it's going to take us some time to get all this working. So I want to make sure that the tools that we choose are going to cut right to what it is that we're trying to accomplish. So our goals were to drive traffic to our website, to strengthen our relationships with our current supporters, and then reach out to new supporters, potential supporters and our target audience. We were looking to create ways to have more of a two-way conversation as opposed to in the past where we just put information out on a website and it was sort of one way. I wanted to make sure that we were tapping the internal expertise that we have. We have a lot of people here at Global Exchange that specialize in very specific fields of our work and we weren't really tapping that. So I wanted to make sure that we made the most of our expertise and sort of transferred that knowledge and sent it out and accomplished our goals through the social media communication channels. And I also wanted to find the specific tools that enabled us to zone in on particular issues as opposed to just promoting our whole organization. I really wanted to focus on the tools that would enable us to find very targeted niche topics. For instance, Twitter, when you have hashtags and there's an event going on that's current and happening right now, we're an activist organization that focuses on human rights and when there's something happening right now, Twitter and the hashtag is a perfect way to galvanize an entire audience, make sure that we're all on the same page and really join the conversation and become an active member that is associated with that particular action. So Twitter worked really well for our needs. I also wanted to find social media tools that would help us tap our best, what I call salespeople. And that is people that have taken trips with us. We have a reality tours program. It's basically socially responsible travel and there's no better salespeople than the ones that have gone on our trips and can share their experiences. So I wanted to make sure the tools that we chose would enable the folks that are really excited about the work that we do to be able to transfer that excitement and share it and thus become our best salespeople. And another example is we have Fair Trade Stores. Well, if we've got happy customers and they're excited and exuberant about buying Fair Trade socially responsible products by all means, let me find tools and provide them to our audience and our constituents so they can help spread the word about what it is that we do because of course as most of you probably realize, you're going to believe your friends and your family more than you're going to believe a company or an organization. So word of mouth marketing basically. So what tools can help us achieve that? So that's why we ended up with the blogs and Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. Oh yeah, I forgot to move the slide. Sorry about that. So yeah, so that's basically why we chose what we chose. Great. Thank you. And these links will go out in the follow-up message as well so if you wanted to check out exactly what they're doing in each of these avenues, please do so. And then I'd like to find out if you could tell us about tracking the impact and how you got your leadership to buy into using these tools I hear over and over again in people's comments when they registered, that's an issue for some. So can you tell us how you tackled that? Sure. Well, first of all, there's two kinds of buy-in at a nonprofit organization that I think are actually equally important. One is the buy-in of your leadership. And of course you need to start there because if you don't have the blessing of your leadership then it's not going to trickle down into a strong foundation in terms of programmatic work. So the first thing, when I sort of pitched the idea of us having a social media person that was dedicated just to social media, the first place I started was with our executive director. And I'll be honest, we've had an 8-year relationship and there's a lot of trust there. She trusts my expertise. I trust her willingness to trust me. So of course that's where I started. But beyond that, it was getting the buy-in of our staff because social media is not something done by just one person. I mean one person can be responsible for overseeing all of the processes but you need buy-in from everyone that works with the organization because ultimately staff people are the content providers. Even if it's just the idea like, hey, I just wrote this article. I'd like you to blast it out on Facebook and Twitter. So getting buy-in from both on top and surrounding you, they're both very important. In terms of getting the staff buy-in, what I found to be true is that don't force the idea of social media on them. In nonprofits, people are, as we most know, they're overworked and underpaid. And if all they smell is, oh my God, more work, there's no way this is going to happen. Well, I didn't force it on anyone a year ago. I encouraged, I trained, I worked together with people and described it in the context of us all learning together. Let's learn together what will work and what won't work to achieve all of our goals and all of our needs. And so the ultimate goal is for everyone from your executive director to all of the staff members to feel like they have an equal stake in the success of your social media efforts. And if you can show how it can help staff people's work and not just add to it, that's really going to help as well. In terms of tracking the impact, there are many things that I do. One is we match our goal with our benchmarks. We create benchmarks for each of our goals. For instance, on our blog, we have, here's a picture of our blog, we have an e-newsletter sign up. And that's actually the main sort of tangible goal with our blog. We want to get interaction. We want to get people to comment and respond and share and forward. We also want to get your email. And that's a way for us to sort of create, instead of just having them come to us, we want to continue the relationship. And so that's the ask of the blog. And so the way we track the impact is how many people are signing up for the email newsletter. Another example sort of of a benchmark is this here was an actual event that we had called the Human Rights Award. And with the Human Rights Award, one of our goals and the way we tracked it was how many people are voting for the People's Choice Award? How many people are donating? How many people are clicking on the whole page? So all of those things were sort of matching our benchmarks to our goals of getting people to this event, getting them to vote online, getting them to donate online. All of those goals are tracked by benchmarks and looking really carefully. And one thing I would add that it's worked really well here at Global Exchange, especially with this Human Rights Award. It's a really good example. We knew almost a year in advance when it was going to be and what we were going to do. We have a communications team in-house that's consisted of myself, our executive director, our web content person, and our development person. We meet once a week and we sort of make sure we're all on the same page in terms of the goals of the organization and what communication strategies and actions we're going to take moving forward from one week to the next. With the Human Rights Award, I think the reason it was so successful is because we all worked very closely together. The development person was saying, look, we want to get our votes up. We only have one week left. And so I would take that information and I'd go to our social media and really pick up the pace and really push it because we were not as close to our benchmarks as possible. In the end, we far exceeded our expectations and we continue to do that every year. So I think it's a real testament to the strategy of inter-departmental working together and being clear that we all share those benchmarks and those goals and being clear with each other the whole step through, the whole process of where we are so we know how we're doing, whether we need to pick it up, that kind of thing. Great. Excellent. Thanks, Tex. So there's a lot of good questions. For those of you who might be wondering, have questions, please submit those via the chat right now. I want to move on to talking about Facebook. So Laura, can you explain what the biggest differences are between Facebook and Twitter and tell us what organizations are finding each useful for? We cannot hear you, Laura, if you are trying to talk. Sorry, muted my phone, forgot about that part. So the difference is between Facebook and Twitter. I didn't bring any of my illustrative slides to actually just explain what Facebook and Twitter are. So we're going to talk at a high level about what they're useful for. But in general, Twitter is considerably more simple from a nonprofit perspective than Facebook. There are a lot of different things that one can do with Facebook. Twitter is more a stream of information. And we asked, as I mentioned up front, we did a fair amount of research to understand how frequent Facebook users and frequent Twitter users, so two different surveys, thought about these tools as it relates to nonprofits. And what we found was pretty interesting and truthfully not really what we expected to find. So a couple of things about Facebook in particular. So what we're looking at here is a graph of the answer to the question, would you look for a Facebook page for an organization with which you are considering volunteering? So basically, do you think of Facebook as a reference site when you're thinking about looking up an organization? And down at the bottom here, we've got the amount of how often people use Facebook. These were Facebook users, so it starts at a couple of times a month over on the left and it goes to almost constantly on the right. And what you see is that the more they use Facebook, the more they are likely to refer to Facebook. So this is about 230 people here. Of those who use Facebook almost constantly, we've got about 30% of them who say they definitely would refer to Facebook, which is kind of interesting. This isn't exactly what we expected that people were actually thinking of it as a reference guide. So I'm getting a lot of questions about the methodology again, just for those of you who missed my quick overview of methodology and actually just a little more in detail about this survey. This was an informal sample of about 270 folks. We asked our own network to pass it to folks who were not in the nonprofit space. And we in fact, we did ask people, their demographics. We succeeded in, and we actually dropped everybody who was on staff at a nonprofit. So this is an informal sample of people who use Facebook and primarily who heard about it through Facebook and do not work with nonprofits or technology for a living. So Trisha asked about the age range. I think we do have the age range, but I don't know it off the top of my head. So I apologize. I can follow up with you offline if you are interested. So because we worked through our own network, I would expect that it would be typical of both our target audience and the people who follow us on Twitter tend to be between about 24 and 40, which overlaps reasonably well with Facebook's demographic. I would expect the majority of people are there. So let's see. So we also asked just for comparison purposes whether they would refer to a website. So you'll notice that more people than we expected said they would refer to Facebook, but it's nothing like the numbers for websites. So almost everybody, whether they are using Facebook or not, is referring to a website. So this said to us, so I actually just went back a slide here, so if people using Facebook are in fact looking for a Facebook page when they hear about an organization, it may in fact be useful simply to have a Facebook page to have a presence on Facebook, which was kind of the opposite of what we expected to find. However, you've got a couple of other interesting things here. So you have, here's the answer to the question, would you be more likely to volunteer if a nonprofit had a Facebook page as opposed to no Facebook presence at all? And a lot of people saying maybe here. So in general about 50% of the people said they might care whether people had a Facebook page. So this goes to the same hypothesis. It might be useful to have a Facebook page just to have it. However, here's kind of the flip side of it. So we also asked about whether or not they care, whether they'd be more likely to volunteer if you had a lot of fans on Facebook. We did not actually define a lot here, so this would be a lot subjectively. And interesting, a lot of people even who didn't care if you're on Facebook at all care, so this over here on this right-hand side, this is the bar of people who don't care if you're on Facebook, about 38% of them care how many fans you have. Here's the number of people who maybe care if you're on Facebook. It's up to about 70% who maybe care about fans. So this is kind of unfortunate news I think from the nonprofit perspective. So these two taken together would imply that although you – so it might be useful to be on Facebook just to have a presence there. However, having no fans might be worse than not being there at all. So basically it comes back to you need to make an investment. This isn't free. So you need to pay attention to the actual investment of time. And we're going to talk a little about time in a minute. From our research, Thomas asked the obvious question. What's a normal, in quotes, number of fans to have? I don't have any research here. I would suspect it's going to depend a lot upon the size of your organization and the reach. So if you're the Red Cross and you only have 400 fans, so if you're the Red Cross National and you have 400 fans, that's going to be a little suspicious. But if you're the local animal shelter, I suspect having 100 fans would be kind of impressive. That's my suspicion. So what's Facebook particularly effective for based on that? So we actually – so we did a lot of research and this is actually coming from our case studies and discussion groups. But Facebook is particularly effective for feedback and discussion, driving traffic to your website, so getting people to look at something, building an email list primarily by driving them back to your website, and attracting event attendees. So it's actually – people were finding it really fairly successful using the event functionality to get people to events. So this is – you'll see that this is actually quite different than what people were finding Twitter effective for. This is in general the – Facebook is effective for more general outreach and driving traffic and talking to people. All right, as opposed to Twitter. So let's just talk a little bit about Twitter. So this is our Twitter survey. This survey was a lot less sound methodologically, so you should take this with a much larger grain of salt. This is a survey almost entirely of nonprofit staff members and technologists because that's who our audience is and we had a heck of a time trying to get beyond our audience. We were trying to spread it through Twitter which interestingly did not work very well. So this is I think a really fascinating graph about what these people have done with nonprofits. So these are people who regularly use nonprofits – I'm sorry, regularly use Twitter. And the number of times they've done particular things. So over on the left-hand side how many people heard about a new nonprofit via Twitter? How many people clicked through to see a resource in Twitter or they looked up a nonprofit website? And you'll notice these numbers are relatively high. So this is all the time at the bottom sometimes once or twice. When we get to actually doing something that requires a bit of commitment it drops way off a cliff. So here at the end here we have got involved or donated. So as opposed to here's the top of sometimes for things that don't take much commitment, you know kind of information oriented, here's the actual top of got involved donated. One of the really interesting things about Twitter is that you can see the number of people of people who are following you on Twitter. But it's impossible to tell how many people are actually listening to you because it is a very common ethic in Twitter to follow people who follow you for instance, or to follow people to kind of support them for reasons other than actually wanting to hear what they have to say. So as we suspected when we did this survey we asked people how many people, so what percentage of people they see, sorry, what percentage of the people they are following, they actually see when they open Twitter. So basically this is a question of how many people do you actually pay attention to what they say as opposed to people who you in theory follow but in practice completely filter out and will never see anything that they say. And almost 50% of the people in our survey were listening to less than 20% of the people that they followed. So what does this mean? This means that you really have no idea how many people are actually paying any attention. The only good metrics for how many people are paying attention are not the number of followers you have on Twitter but the people who actually do things based on Twitter. Like for instance, Twitter is particularly good at sharing resources and information and to drive people to your website. Laura, can I say one thing about that? Yeah, sure. One thing I do is because you are so right, you don't know how many people are actually interacting beyond just your seed showing up on Twitter. But using the trackable links like Bitly is a really good way to measure how many people are clicking on your tweets. For those that aren't familiar, Bitly is just one of many what's called a URL shrinker. And so you put a really long URL in there and then you can shrink it down so it's really small, but in addition to that you also can get results. You can see who is clicking on it and that kind of thing. So that is one specific way to see who is reading your tweets, specifically the tweets that have URLs in them. Right, so my point is that you can see who is acting on your tweets. You can't actually see who is reading them, but you can tell the people who have actually done something based on them. So that's basically what you got. But yes, thank you for sharing that. That's an important metric for Twitter. And lastly, in the world of Twitter, so we started this out with a comparison of Facebook and Twitter. So while Facebook is from our research a better tool for kind of more broad based reaching out, Twitter is better potentially for connecting with particular audiences, particularly other organizations that do similar work. This was a really surprising one when it came up to us. It's so unusual that an organization would mention that they're finding partner organizations as actually an outcome that we really listened when a fair amount of people said it. So connecting with other organizations, connecting with the media, there's a fair amount of media on Twitter. And we got several stories from folks about real media success stories through Twitter. Twitter is also, you can post a lot if you want to, so it's really good for posting kind of near real-time, coordinating in real-time, giving kind of a play-by-play almost. All right, so that's the very complicated but abridged version of this research. By the way, someone had asked whether the actual research was available. I'm not sure exactly what you've defined as the actual research, but the decision guide itself includes all of the graphs that we are looking at along with some more data and some more discussion. The raw data is available to people who seem like they're going to do good things with it, as well as specific questions about methodology. There's also fairly substantial methodology section in the decision guide. Excellent. The next big question that I know a lot of folks are wondering is, how much time will this take? Can you give us some approximate numbers? Yes, so that was one of the best things in our minds that we were able to get from the research. So again, we had all of these case studies and discussion groups where we actually asked people, so how much time are you putting in and what success are you seeing? So in general, as a rule of thumb, the most successful organizations averaged about 2 hours per week per channel they were using. It varied a little by channel, so Facebook was a little higher than that for people using it successfully. So it's about 2 1⁄2 to 5 hours a week. Twitter was a little lower, about 1 1⁄2 to 3 hours a week. Interestingly, in fact, the hours went up with the amount of success they had. So this is, we don't have a way to easily calculate this out by channel. So this is the average hours total they're putting in for all social media and how much success they're seeing. So these success numbers, as opposed to the kind of murky, no, I think we know. So these are based on asking them what specific results they were seeing outside the tool, and then going through and actually coding and rating them by hand. So we looked at everything that everybody wrote in and said, so they say they're not successful. We judge that what they have put in here is substantial success. And by success we mean some kind of thing other than the tool itself. So if somebody said that they were doing great, they have a million Twitter followers, we would judge that as inconclusive success because it is not mission-based. It's inside the tool. So success was things like driving traffic to a certain report, gathering, so getting new volunteers, new donations, stuff like that. So it was things that would have impact on an overall mission. So you'll see, and in fact the more, so the average of people who are having substantial success is about six hours a week. And I think a really important statistic, not a single respondent who spent less than an hour of work so not even that we judge that they weren't having success, none of them said that they were having success. So basically this implies to me that really you got to estimate at least two hours a week or so if you expect to have any success. And then actually since we're talking about success, how many are actually succeeding? We were really interested here as to how many of the folks who are trying to use social media were succeeding at it. So if we look at those who did spend at least two hours a week, about 54%, so maybe about 60% overall are having some success. Then there's some no success and there's some folks who say they don't know. So interesting stuff. Now we're going to move on and we're a little bit short on time. So talking about the photo and video sharing tools, like what are the possibilities? Yeah, so let me just quickly go through this. So we weren't seeing a lot of kind of social use of photo and video sites in our research. So most people were simply using them to post. Photos or videos and then to attach them to websites or send them out in emails or stuff like that, which there's certainly nothing wrong with. It just does not quite fit into our definition, also idealware's definition of social media. Some of the more interesting social things that we're seeing people using photo and video sites for. So Flickr is a photo sharing site. You can create groups with it. So for instance you could have a group photo pool where people are posting photos that the whole group can see. So it would be a great way to solicit photos from your constituents and get some good photos and some conversation and community going on. You can also think about a contest, which is basically the same thing with a prize at the end. You want to be careful about what you say. If you want to use these pictures and get rights to them, you need to make sure that you are asking or telling people like the terms of the contest for instance are that you give us rights to them. Videos, some really interesting video things. This is actually, this is more impressive when Andrea is doing this presentation. This is actually Andrea Berry, our director of training who is on this Repower America's video website. Repower America is doing two things here. They are sending around grassroots organizers with a video camera and just interviewing people. That's how Andrea and her husband Steve got on. There's her daughter. And they are asking people also to submit their own photos. This is why renewable energy sources are important. So it's a really interesting way to collect lots of information from people who support your cause and get a lot of really useful stuff. Also think through something like a viral video. A viral video is the idea that you are going to make a video that is so compelling that everybody is going to pass it on to their friends and then their friends will pass it on to their friends. This is a little more of an aspiration than a strategy. It's not necessary. You want to make sure that if only the people will you send it to see it, it is still a success. That it doesn't need to go on to the homepage of YouTube and have a million views to have it be successful. Because even the pros are only probably have like a 30% or 40% success rate at actually getting this thing to go viral. So for lots of people to see it beyond who they sent it to. And that's my photo and video overview. I like that side a lot because I actually run a small nonprofit. One member of my board was saying the other day, we should do something viral. I was laughing at him like, okay, so let's think about how much time that's actually going to take being realistic because he's not from the nonprofit sector, so I'm having to do some educating. And that leads us into about 15 minutes for questions and answers. So if you haven't yet submitted your question, please do so. I'm going to start with a real quick question that I believe Laura you can answer. What proportion of the population uses Facebook? I believe it's outside of the people that you survey, but just in general, do you know that statistic? So there are about 300 million users of Facebook Worldwide. I don't actually off of the top of my head know what the U.S. statistics are and what proportion of the population that is. So there are demographics for it in the decision guide. It is about 60% people under about 35 years of age, though that does leave about 40% for people over 35 years of age. Great. And Laura, even though the survey is for users of Facebook and Twitter, did you discover what some of the barriers are to using social media? Well, I can certainly hypothesize, so that was not something that we did a ton of research on. But I think, so to my mind, the big ones are kind of a learning curve with the tool and a learning curve as to how to interact with a community and a social community in kind of a way that they expect. So it's kind of a different way of thinking for some organizations with the idea that you might actually interact with your community day to day and feed kind of vaccines information about what you're doing, which is kind of what these communities expect. I think those are some of the biggest barriers to entry. I feel strongly that one of the basis of the decision guide was the idea that when people ask about kind of overcoming objections from leadership, I think one of the key ways to overcome objections from leadership is to demonstrate how it would actually work for your organization, how much time it would take, what you would do, and how it would be useful actually to the bottom line mission. And that is exactly what the decision guide is based around too. The worksheets allow you to do exactly that with the idea that you can then provide your leadership. This is why we should do this. This is what it will get us. Here's not much time it will take. Here's exactly what we will do, which I think is always the best way to overcome objections is to show that you're missing opportunities if you don't do it. Great. And Tex, when educating board and executives about social media, what key points would you focus on? And Laura, if you have anything to add on after tax, please do so. When you're educating the board of your organization. Correct. And the leadership. Okay, so what you want to do is basically convey how you're going to achieve your organizational goals through the use of these tools. And track those benchmarks like I mentioned earlier, and be very clear and keep them updated. And hopefully the benchmarks will be either met or exceeded, and that's enough to sort of sustain the efforts moving forward. Yeah, I would agree that talking about what the goals are, so what the goals are that you're trying to achieve, how social media is particularly good at achieving those goals. So for instance, if you're looking to recruit, so this is a kind of ridiculously good example, but you're looking to recruit youth volunteers for your event. Facebook would be an obvious place to do that, and you could potentially have some actual benchmarks of okay, we're going to recruit five new youth volunteers. Many of us don't have quite that obvious other thing. I think goals are crucial here, and actually going to Alicia's comment here about the opposite when the board says we should do it, but they don't have goals or benchmarks in mind. I think from both types of boards to try to start out with goals and audiences and understanding what you're trying to achieve is going to be important, whether they're doubters or whether they're overly enthusiastic, either way to start in the same way. I have a client right now that I'm working with, and they have a 60-plus board, like they have 60-plus people on their board, and I worked directly with three of the key stakeholders from this organization. It's a nonprofit organization, and they were looking to explore social media. They hadn't gone into any of it yet, so they were really starting from scratch. The first thing I did was I asked them what their goals were, and then from there I actually created a survey and sent it out to their entire database of board and non-board supporters, people that had donated money to them. Crazy concept, but we asked their supporters. We just asked them, how do you want to hear from this organization? How do you receive your information? How do you want to engage? You're the one that is sustaining us. We want to help you, so help us help you by telling us where you are online and how you want to hear from us, and that sort of thing. It seemed so simple. If you want to know, you just ask, but the survey results were fascinating. I would say about 90% were all saying they wanted e-newsletters. A very small percentage wanted Facebook because in this particular industry, which was nonprofit law, the supporters generally felt that keeping their Facebook, their personal and their professional online lives, they wanted to keep them separate. So they would not be inclined to share information on Facebook with their own networks. That's something we only found out through really just, it was an online survey combined with me actually having a multitude of interviews with not their current supporters, but their potential supporters, a.k.a. their target audience. And between the two, it was really fascinating just to really take the time to research the needs of your audience and then sort of match those with the goals and needs of your organization. Right, 100% agree. And in fact in the Social Media Decision Guide, one of the worksheets is a sample survey to distribute to either a targeted group of constituents or your whole constituency. Yeah, that's the guide. I mean, I have to just say I'm such a big fan of it. It is incredibly effective in doing lots of things, regardless of what stage you're at in the social media efforts, there's something for everyone in here. And actually it was amazing how similar your survey suggestion was to the one that I had written. And I looked at it like, oh great, I wish I had this three weeks ago because it was virtually the same content. It was funny. I know that there are some leaders out here that are skeptical because they're like, well, what if we're using Facebook but all my employees are going to be doing personal activities? So that was a question that Mitch had. Do either of you have feedback on that? I actually do. There's another question as well that kind of ties into this that I noticed. One is, and this isn't even a social media issue, this is a personnel issue. You need to be concerned if you have personnel that are doing anything personally on the company's dime or the organization's dime. So I almost wouldn't even say this is a social media issue as much as it's a personnel issue. And if you have great staff that are dedicated to their work, then it should be a non-issue. I would also say though, someone asked, can't you have an intern or someone like that taking care of your social media needs? Regardless of what their classification is, intern, staff member, executive director, whoever it is, they have to have a thorough understanding of your organization's mission, your organization's branding. They have to have their finger on the pulse of who you are because they are sort of the bullhorn that is sending your message out. And so if it's an intern, then it better be an intern that knows the ins and outs of your organization's culture, your dynamics, your branding, everything. If you trust that intern, then sure. But you need to make sure that whoever that person is that's overseeing the messaging is someone that you trust will be a good representative of your organization's mission. And there's a question about someone from a smaller town in Oregon that's wondering, I'm a small town, well I still need to spend as much time doing this kind of work. Laura, do you have any comments on that? So I feel fairly strongly about the two hour a week kind of baseline. You could certainly spend a lot more. I believe text is actually full-time doing this, but those numbers are fairly sound. They do go up for larger organizations, but we drop, to find those numbers, we drop the, I think there were like 15 or 20 people who were spending more than about 40 hours, or more than about 20 hours a week. And we drop them in order to try to find people who were not, so social media was not a core marketing investment for them as would be true for most small organizations. So I just don't think that you can effectively keep track of, because in order to participate on something like Facebook, you really need to do more than post something once or twice a week. You need to actually pay attention to what people are saying, and it also has an implication of paying attention to what's going on online that might be of interest to your community. So I really do think, so you saw that statistic that no one who had put in less than an hour a week was satisfied with the results. I think that to my mind is mostly just time wasted if you plan to put in an hour a week. I would also add, first of all, I only work, I work basically three days a week. So I'm doing 24 hours of work, but there's also a difference between when you're starting your social media efforts and you're sustaining. We've been doing it less than a year now. A lot of my labor has been creating the blog network, and working with a designer, and creating our social media policies, all of these things that once they're done, they're done. So it's possible in the future I won't even be doing 24 hours of social media specific work a week. My goal is to create systems that can be implemented with less time once they're in place. So I'm sorry, I think that two hours is an ongoing figure, and then it's going to take a little more time up front. By the way, there's also a fair amount of chat in regard to MySpace. Just to throw out, from our research, MySpace has been almost entirely superseded by Facebook that except for very specific target populations, like literally like high school by high school, there are very few people relying on MySpace, and they don't rely on it in the way that they, other than the musicians and stuff like that. So it's almost become a niche site for musicians these days. Well that is all the time we have. This is really fantastic. Thank you both. I wanted to mention that Norman has given some suggestions, one of the participants that there are other products like TweetDeck, and Seismic, and Hootsuite, and these might be all strange words, but there are applications that augment using Twitter and Facebook. So all this information is in additional articles and materials that are created by Idealware and TechSoup. So we'll include links to that. Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot to know. So if this is new to you, don't feel overwhelmed. Just take it easy and start small and work your way up from there. But I would like to let you know that if you have additional questions, I'm so sorry if we didn't get to all of them. Please submit those to our community forums. We have a host of volunteers that answer those questions on a regular basis. We have another webinar coming up next Thursday on donor management solutions. So this is a hyperlink. So when you open up the PowerPoint, you'll be able to register for that. If you are interested, and we would like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk, which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology through the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas in increased collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So thanks again to everyone who participated today. And thanks to Laura and Tex. You guys are great. So much great information. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to send me an email or give me a call. And take a second to complete our post-event survey. So again, thanks for taking the time. Happy to provide this information to you and see you again on another TechSoup Talks. Have a great day everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you.