 Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, How to Create Captivating Digital Content for Your Non-Profits. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. If you have any questions, feel free to use the chat box that you see on the left hand side of your screen. All callers will be muted, so again if you have questions, please use the Q&A box that you see on your screen. If you lose your Internet connection, just reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. Sometimes ready to talk can be quirky, so refresh your browser and just use the link that was emailed to you to reconnect. If you have to leave early or if you want to watch the webinar again, it will be hosted on our website at www.techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. We'll also be sending an email with the presentation, a link to the recording, and any relevant links that were shared today. If you are on social media, feel free to send us a tweet at TechSoup using hashtag TS webinars. But like I said earlier, we'll be using the chat box that you see on the left hand side. So just a little bit about TechSoup. We are located in 236 countries and territories. We serve over a million nonprofits around the world providing either donated or discount hardware and software. So just to make sure that the chat box is working, if you guys want to chat in, where you guys are calling in from, and I can read out a few. All right, we have Ottawa, Canada. Let's see, Boston, Texas, Kentucky, Anchorage, Alaska, Detroit. Do we have any international folks on the call? I did see Canada earlier. Brazil, we have somebody from Brazil, that's awesome. Great, okay, so we can see the chat box is working. So if you're curious about what TechSoup offers, we partner with several technology companies like Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, and several others that you can see here on the screen. If you want to find out more about our nonprofit tech marketplace, you can visit our website at techsoup.org slash get-product-donations to see what products are available to your nonprofits. So before we get started, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Sima Tucker. I'm the online producer here at TechSoup. You've probably seen Lashika's name in the chat. She's the associate program manager at TechSoup. And then today's featured speaker is my colleague, Steven Jackson. So he is the digital content manager at TechSoup. He writes and produces blogs, articles, and videos, and coordinates the syndication and promotion of content across multiple channels here. He holds a master's degree in learning and instruction from the University of San Francisco and comes from a strong background in education, journalism, and media production. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Steven. Okay. Well, welcome everybody. And I'd like to first just start off by saying how much I appreciate everybody taking the time out of your day to join us here. I hope that everyone is able to take away some actionable knowledge from the time we spend together. So I'm just going to dive right in and kind of go over to the agenda and we'll move forward from there. So again, we're going to be talking about digital content and we're going to get into what that means and actually how to produce everything. And it's going to be what I hope to be a very engaging time. But the first thing we're going to do is start by going over some best practices in the art of storytelling. We're going to be taking a look at exactly what digital content is. We're going to look at how to determine what type of content your nonprofit should be producing and when. We'll go over a little bit about producing content, some logistics items. We'll talk very briefly about analytics and how to measure whether or not content is successful. And then finally we'll sort of wrap things up with why it's important and really how creating all this can benefit your nonprofits. So hopefully if you do find yourself in a position where you're trying to sell the idea of producing digital content you'll have that many more tools in your toolbox. So today our objective is fairly simple but we'll be talking quite a bit about developing a roadmap for producing digital content at your nonprofit. We're going to learn some tips to produce more captivating content and we're going to learn some of the basics behind digital content management at your nonprofit. So we are just going to jump right in here. So storytelling, best practices in the art of storytelling. One thing to start with is the reason why people like to tell stories and the reason why people like to hear stories in general is because people are interested in connecting with one another. Whether or not this has to do with your friendships, your family, your colleagues, or anybody that maybe you've even just met, people want to feel connected. But they also want to feel connected to ideas and causes. And it's important to create things that help people feel like they are a part of what you do. So this can look like a lot of different things but it's all again, it's really about building this connection. So that can happen through sharing news about what your organization is doing. That can happen through sharing helpful information that somebody who is interested in the area of your cause can take with them to do maybe at their own nonprofit or maybe just in their own life. And then inspiring stuff also helps build a connection. So a lot of these have to do with the idea of an emotional connection. But you can also create an emotional bond, a really strong one through education. And like Seema said, I was an educator before I was here and I was a full-time writer and media producer. I was an educator for 10 years in San Francisco. And then at the same time I was also a local journalist in San Francisco. And it was during that time that I really learned how powerful it is to teach somebody something. So in a classroom that's one thing. If you're reporting on something that affects somebody in their local environment that's important, that's something useful. But what I learned through education is that it creates this immediate sense of trust with somebody when you can teach them how to do something. Now at the same time if you are doing this at your nonprofit and you teach somebody how to do something you're also demonstrating by yourself as an authority on a certain subject. So if you know enough to share your information with somebody in a meaningful way then all of a sudden you are presented as an expert. And then lastly when you're teaching somebody something and I mean in a lot of the way I see it in a lot of ways it's sort of your mission and action too. It's showing that you do care about effecting change in different places. You care about helping people. So I think it's really a win on a lot of different levels to focus on education and just to understand how important that emotional connection is when it comes to education and how you can build that. So I'm going to be going through a lot of examples today. And I'm just going to go through one very quickly here with an organization that I think is really great and that I think really kind of creates some cool digital content. So this is Sprouse Cooking Club. It's a local nonprofit here in the Bay area. They do a lot of different work. They do a lot of work with teaching kids how to cook and thereby promoting healthy sort of eating habits and teaching people how to do a useful skill. But here's an example of something that I found from their blog up in California. We have this kind of small batch cheese farm producer that's up north of the city. So the summer camp that this organization did took a field trip up there. So this is a great way that this organization was able to build a connection with people. This is showing that hey, we're out there. We're helping kids. Let's take a look at this cool stuff our organization is doing. It's really photo rich here. You can really get an idea right off the bat of what this nonprofit is all about. So when I saw this particular post, I was like, man, I really feel connected to this nonprofit. I know more about what they're doing. And I want to help those kids too. So how can I get them? Maybe it might not go all the way that way, but in certain respects you can see how that could happen. They also go the next step by actually providing cooking tutorials too, which I think is actually really, really cool because again, I'm this kind of education guy. And I just think this is such a neat thing because you can sit there, go to their site, learn about what they're doing, but you can also learn how to cook a dish yourself even if you're not involved in the nonprofit. So right there I think that's just a really great idea of building connection through storytelling. So I'm going to go back now. And the next important thing about storytelling is to remember that it's also about engagement. It's about engaging people. So you want to draw or kind of hook somebody into what you are writing immediately. So there's so much content everywhere all over the place now, all over the Internet. You want to be able to stand out in one way. And one old school kind of trick to that is creating a really valuable hook to draw your reader in immediately. And I'm going to give you two examples of that. But in one way it could be a very bold statement. There's a whole sort of science behind writing which you could go and do your own research on, but you really want to bring them in right from the beginning. But then another tactic is to really clearly state the value of that content near the very beginning. So to go back to an example of this, we're going to take a look here, sharing my screen once more. Here's one example of a blog that I wrote for an organization that is dedicated to securing land and by creating land trusts and all that sort of stuff in the southeast portion of America. And this is a blog post I wrote where they were using a product they got through TechSoup in order to back up data that quite literally helped them secure land by securing data that secures that land. Sorry, that was a little bit of a securitist. But a hook that I used was right here at the very beginning over the years some of the most pristine land in the U.S. Land with high conservation value has been recklessly destroyed. And the damage occurred because of careless residential and commercial construction projects, harmful industry practices, or other negligent actions by human beings. So what I was trying to do there was grab your attention with this thing that's happening that you shouldn't be mad about. So let's learn how to fix it. Another example of looking someone in right off the bat is this piece where I was writing about how to broadcast a live event. Again, this is straight up educational content. But in this one, I just go right out and say it. After reading this post you'll be able to broadcast a Facebook live event of your own. So people don't have time to weed through three things that you are trying to take this roundabout route to get at. They want to know if they're busy. I'm going to read this blog post and I'm going to learn this thing and see if you can gauge them like that. And then lastly, I'm going to talk a little bit about the importance of clarity. So information when you're writing it should be presented in a really structured manner. It's really important that it's very easily and logically laid out. You also want to make sure that you're not using too many idioms or phrases, especially if you're writing for a global audience. A lot of times when we're talking we say a lot of really weird stuff. That's because we speak in idiom and we speak in dialects and there's all these sorts of different ways of speaking. But when you're writing especially for a global audience, you want to try to stay away from those because even if somebody does speak the language, even if someone knows how to speak the language in which you're writing and it's their second language, those sort of terms of phrases will throw people off. The economical, really like what you want to do is again less is more. There's a time for long voluminous sort of prose and literature is one thing but really when you're writing for the web and you're writing about trying to get something involved with your nonprofit, the economical gets to the point. And that kind of goes into like this is sort of the mantra that I use a lot. And basically when you're writing one thing to keep in mind, you want to make your reader have to work as little as possible. Don't make them have to sort of work to figure out what this great high-fluent point you're making is. You want it to be as laid out for them as much as possible so that they can just get what you're saying. And again, it's easier to read. This isn't a webinar about how to write a novel in which case it's really nice sometimes to have this dense, really figurative language that you've got to crack the code of and then it presents itself as this beautiful thing for you. We're talking about writing for the web. So make them work as little as possible. And one thing that is really great to pick up is the book Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White later on. It's just a great book. If you get a chance to go to your public library, check it out. You're a local bookseller, do whatever it takes. But if you really want to learn some of the true nuts and bolts of writing, that's a real must-have. And just as an example of kind of clear writing, and we'll be stopping all this much time. Excuse me while I pull this link up. I think it's a whole lot more clear than this. Four things your nonprofit actually needs to do before 2019. This is really structured writing here. No guesswork. This is what you're going to learn. This is why you should learn it, and this is how soon you should learn it. And then it's really broken up here into four distinct sections. Each section with a very specific message and actionable kind of item to it. So this first one just talks about the trend of increasing amount of remote workers. And again, and we're sharing out these links so if you get a chance, you won't take a look. But it kind of continues like that. Connection, engagement, clarity. Those are all things to remember when you're going through and thinking about digital content. So let's get right into it. So what is digital content? It's a really broad chart. There's a lot of different definitions. I think for the purposes here, the best thing to do is to understand it as it's media that we consume online, including but certainly not limited to articles, blogs, videos, both animation and live action, infographics, podcasts. We're going to really be focusing on articles, blogs and videos, but there is a – there's just so much out there. And I actually grabbed just a cool link. It's like 101 different types of digital content that I believe Lashika will be sending out to the group right now, giving you an idea of really like the depth and breadth of what we mean when we talk about content. But digital content, articles, blogs, videos, it also refers to the stuff that is just written on your website as well. And there's a certain approach to landing page copy that is very different than writing blogs and things like that. But we want to hear, talk more about blogs, videos, articles. So what should digital content do? I think that's sort of a question that comes up a lot. What should it do? The first thing it should do is – these are sort of signposts really. This is like not a very high level understanding of what it should do. But the first thing you should think about is that your content should be engaging. It should engage your audience. And we went over that in the best practices section, but it should engage your audience in a couple of different ways. So engagement can look like sharing news so that they feel like they're a part of what you do. Engagement can look like you went to this conference and you learned all this stuff and you want to go back and share with your constituents all the great things that you learned. That's a way to engage. There's a lot of different ways to engage. It should also inspire. This was kind of the most inspirational looking photo that I could find. It should make people feel good about what you do. It should make people want to do more good work in the world. People should read your content and they should feel like – especially when we're talking about nonprofit stuff – people should read what you're doing and feel the urge to go out and become a change maker in the world. That's not going to happen every time. That's an ideal situation. You should keep in mind that it's really important to inspire people. And your individual content has the ability to do that because rather than having sort of a quick hit about like, hey, this is what we do, mission statement, boom. You have a chance to sort of be in a more long-form fashion to go through and say this is what we do and this is how we've affected so much change in this particular area and look at the lives that are better because of us. And maybe you want to volunteer or maybe you want to start a nonprofit of your own. But there's so much room for inspiration especially in our industry. And lastly, again, this will come up a lot. You have to educate. You know, digital content in many ways should be educating people and giving them information that they can read or watch or listen to and then use. And then for talking about nonprofits, use to better the world. So the next question is, what kind of content should my nonprofit produce? And the first question is to ask, and this is really what's cool about content is that it's this thing that happens at your organization that helps you or forces you sit down and ask these foundational questions about yourself and your organization. So before you start creating content, the first thing you have to ask is, who are we as a nonprofit? What do we stand for? It does this job of digging into what you're all about. You know, it's not just the tagline. It's not just the mission statement or copy and a landing page. I mean, this is a chance to tell a story about who you are. Another thing that you'll think about is, what is your goal for creating content? Is it raising awareness about your cause? Are you writing to increase giving at your nonprofit? Or are you even trying to attract a new donor? Or are you just out there trying to educate the public? So your goal should be very clear about creating content. And to be honest, it's probably a little bit of all four of these things and maybe some stuff that I haven't listed there as well. And lastly, you want to ask, what's our voice and tone? Who are we? What's our personality out on the Internet? What's our personality out in the world? Your voices have a lot to do with the characters or nonprofits. It helps define your personality, which is something that's difficult to do, especially when you're thinking about how people are viewing who you are and what you do from an external vantage point. You are constantly in your own world. So you know what you do and maybe the people that you've already been involved with know who you are and they know the type of people you are, maybe from working with you in the field or they understand your organization from a bunch of different channels. But if someone doesn't know that, your voice and the tone that you're taking when you're creating digital content can really do some great work in terms of defining that element of who your organization is. And then last, you want to ask yourself, where will this content exist? There's a lot of different channels and we're going to go through all of that. But there's some things that should be a blog. There's some things that maybe should be a longer form article. There's some things that maybe you know that's just going to be something like a social post. But whenever you're creating your content you should always have the end game of thinking where is it going to exist. And that also has to do with where might this end up? Is this going to get picked up in some newsletter? Is this going to get shared, hopefully shared around the Internet and then land somewhere else? You always have to keep in mind about not just what you're creating but what it's going to look like and how it's going to come across where it ends up. Both in terms of where you know you're going to put it and also where it might end up. So that's kind of a nice segue into talking about media. So what kind of content should we produce? How do we determine what the proper medium is here? So a blog, and these rules are all just sort of suggestions. The cool thing is depending on who you are and depending on how you would like to be running your organization or running your content plan or anything, these things can be different for each organization based on your particular personality. So I'm just going to go through, this is how I see it. And this is how to be honest, a lot of people see it too. So the first thing, a blog. This is generally shorter content. It's a lot of times more relevant content, meaning that it could be something that you're writing and you're reporting on a field trip that you just did, kind of like that cowgirl creamery example from earlier, or something that again like some of the other blogs I've already shown you that have a very specific purpose. They're really scannable. They're really readable and they're generally shorter, talking like 500 to 1,000 words. This tone can also be more conversational. So a blog in terms of voicing tone and your character as an organization, blogs are a great way to sort of show who you are. So next up is an article. In articles, this is an example here. You can see the articles. This is from the landing page of all of our articles. They're a little bit more serious. They last a little bit longer, meaning that they can be more in depth. They last longer both to read, but they also last longer in terms of being something called evergreen, which gets its name from the evergreen trees, meaning that you can post something and there's a good chance it's going to be just as relevant today as it will be a year from now. And a lot of times the tone here tends to be more formal. Another thing to consider here is videos. So shorter, meaning that it's like about 2 minutes max unless you're doing a long form documentary or something to that effect. This here is an example of video, just a screenshot from our YouTube channel of an animated explainer video that I produced with our team here at TechSoup that explains, it kind of takes people through different Microsoft Office options. Again, what we do is we provide nonprofits with low cost technology solutions. So when we're not thinking about content that we're making for us, if I want to educate somebody, I want to educate people on the way that certain solutions like this can help people. So a great way to do that is through an animated explainer and we'll have some time to take a look at some examples of that too. But again, with video, the best thing you want to do is try to remember to keep it short unless you are making an actual document. In infographic, these things should be data rich. It should just be a pretty picture. It should be something where a great rule of thumb is, okay, if I'm going to show somebody like a chart just full of numbers and jargon, and they're just going to glaze right over it. If that would be better explained with a bunch of graphics and visual aids, that probably means that that information would be a great candidate to be transformed into an infographic. It should be also used as like adaglance information. Think about it. Maybe it's something that they put up on the fridge at the office or at your house or above your desk. So you can just look over if you really need some quick hits sometimes of numbers or some kind of information like that. And it should be really easy to understand. So here's just a quick screenshot. I'm going to take us through some more in-depth examples here of an infographic we did here at TechSoup where we were illustrating the impact of our refurbished computer initiative at TechSoup. And lastly, a social post. So this is going to be your shortest content. You can actually be a little bit more creative with this type of content. And it's really supposed to be catching in social media as we all know is this deluge of information now. So stand out in social media is a very challenging thing. So you want to really have an idea of what you have a really strong grasp of how you want to look as an organization and how to produce visually enticing images that are going to make people want to click through. Okay, so let's go through and take a look at some examples. So I'm just going to pause for a moment while I pull those up. Give us all a moment to catch our breath. An example of what I feel to be engaging content. Some people from TechSoup went to this big Microsoft conference that happened in Las Vegas last month. And they were tasked with kind of coming back and bringing some information, among other things they were tasked with bringing some information for us to share with the nonprofit community that we work with. So they went and found some information that they felt would be useful to our community. I then took that information, did some interviews with the people who went, did some research and broke it down into some key insects. So in this way, this is how we're engaging with our community by sharing information that matters. It also shows that we're engaged in the tech community, that we're going out and we are keeping current on best practices that we're out there kind of being who we are in the world as TechSoup. And we'll be slacking around all these links. Just a quick also note, we have just an awesome graphic design department at TechSoup who helps us who creates these awesome illustrations. You don't need all of that to create a great image. There's a lot of options that will go over later about like how to source some of these images and things like that. But it is important, I think, to be including both images and text because it's easier on the eyes. So again, if we think about examples of something that's meant to expire, this is that land trust piece that I was talking about earlier. I genuinely found what they do inspiring in terms of going out there and finding these tracks of land and rivers and streams that are at risk of being developed upon and like messing up the whole ecosystem where they are in this organization that went out and is using law to save the environment. So I thought that was really cool and I really enjoyed being able to share that. Another thing from an inspirational standpoint is you can create a video that really helps tell an inspiring story. The show oftentimes can elicit a much stronger emotional response. So we will be sending out this link too. I'm just going to hit play on this video that we produced with this organization called Remake. That's a storytelling organization that's dedicated to kind of exposing bad practices in the fashion industry and getting people to think about rethinking how they shop and buy and close with some sustainability in mind. So we're just going to play this right from the player on our site. And just to give you an idea of sort of the tone in this looking feel of a video like this. Hi, Doreen. I believe I'm going to read through the products to make our film short. It is my dream that for every label that's in your closet and for every label you have made in whatever country, short-label products actually want the technology. So again, we are sending out the link there but you can kind of get an idea of what we're trying to get across there and create this inspirational, tiny little story. And the whole video only runs about under two minutes too. When we're talking about education, again, this is a Facebook Live event post that I created a couple months back. The idea is that like, hey, this is a free thing that your nonprofit can do at your next event. And you can create either. Here's this platform that might seem a little daunting to get used to or dive into, but it's not that hard. And if you take this little blog post, you can share it with your team and chances are you will be able to do a Facebook Live event the next time that you're out. So again, this is really just straight up educational content. Here is another. We're going to try the video audio again. I hope it's going to be a little louder this time. But here's another. This is an example of an animated explainer that we did. Again, with the very specific idea in mind to educate people about how this particular Office 365 license that's very affordable can help other nonprofits power their volunteer staff without having to get full-blown versions of the software they could save money. And so this is sort of explaining to people, hey, this can help you and learn more. So let me show you this real quick. With lots of volunteers, if so, consider F1 licenses of either Office 365 or Microsoft 365. F1 licenses are useful for volunteers or employees who only need limited access to Office 365 features. These licenses are available for a small monthly fee. You can also turn monthly subscription on and off to fit your requirements. You only pay for what you need when you need it. So that goes on. This is kind of a really standard explainer video type of animation. It's a 2D. It's really clear. One thing that your nonprofit could do is make one of these types of animated explainers or a live action like the other one that I showed you that just basically explains who you are. Just about us, this is what my organization does. This is who we help if we want to learn more, continue to play on our website. Which is another thing I should mention when we're going through these examples is that one thing about content is a big goal should be bringing people to your website from maybe the posts shared on social or maybe someone included it as an attachment or as a link in an email that they can impact your site. They understand who you are. They understand what you're all about and then they're encouraged to continue to sort of play around on your site and maybe look at some work that you're doing or maybe decide to volunteer or anything like that. Content is really great for bringing people from the outside into your world. Here's an example of an article. Longer form. This is educational content. Everybody is talking about moving to cloud computing lately. You can't go really anywhere without anybody talking about it like a cloud migration or something to that effect. So we picked up on that and we wanted to explain to people some really basic high level steps that they need to take to migrate successfully to the cloud. We had our very own Michael Enos guest blog, a guest write this article. This is a great example of a hook too. Here you go. This is what you can learn. It's a longer form unless everything that's happening with the cloud was going to obviously change inevitably. But this will last quite a bit. This is a high level enough too that it will sort of stay evergreen for a while. And it takes you through some really great insights and information. So I also want to take us over to this infographic that I should do this screenshot of. But what I'm going to do here is just slowly scroll through it. So we have this refurbished hardware program where we are able to basically recycle computers and get them out into the hands of people who need them. So this was during April. This was the kind of surrounding birthday. We decided to create this infographic that takes you through some of the key data. So it gets you into the numbers. I mean this is so much more interesting to look at than a spreadsheet. And it's not like you could really in good conscience publish a spreadsheet on a blog and expect people to read it. Let me go through here, sorry. So let me switch back over to some examples. Let's get back over to some examples of some social posts. Here is an example of a post we put up for Mandela Day. So this is just a great image, a great inspiring quote. It helps explain, it does help to define who we are as an organization, what we stand for by celebrating this day and by including this quote. You can see more about what we're all about, where we're coming from. We also here, we were aware that Mandela Day was this trending topic on social media. And so we wanted to jump on that trend. And there's a whole sort of strategy to planning your social media operations. And I'm not going to get into that at all, but it is important to notice that we did want to include this because we knew this topic would be trending. People come back and again we're just trying to get people to interact this morning. Here's a great example of an Instagram post that just shows our office culture. One thing that people use content for which is very important is to show people what's the culture of the nonprofit. What are you guys all about? If they don't know you, they don't know you unless and unless maybe you show them certain pictures of the people at your office. And what you do is enrichment activities. They're not going to know that. So in this case at TechSoup we do something called Walking Wednesday, promoting Healthy Lifestyle, all that kind of stuff. And this is a group of our employees who are out on a walking Wednesday. So social media posts can be quick hits like that and they get a lot of really interesting, kind of really get your point across in a really unique way. Social is a great place to share articles with your community, especially if you get a lot of followers and you have something where you think they're going to be really useful information to them, reposting things with intentionally reposting things where it says something about who you are and what your values are is really important. This kind of is focused on how to attract millennial workers to nonprofit organizations. And again this does add to our voice and it does contribute to how people see us as an organization. So content, you're creating content but the way in which you're intentionally sharing content is also very important. Okay, so let's get down to the logistics and I definitely am going to be mindful of the time here because I want to be able to open this up to questions too. So the first thing when you're talking about producing content you want to be to the content management system. And that word and that whole term I know if you're not like involved in it, it can sound freaky but really what it is is that the content management system is what you're using to produce content on the Internet. The majority of websites in the world are produced on something like WordPress which has a blog function. There's also kind of paid things like Squarespace and HubSpot and all those sorts of things that help you produce content, visual content and written content on the back end. But the truth is you can also use something free such as Medium. There's nothing stopping anybody from creating a Medium account. There's also free WordPress accounts as well. You want to just choose whatever you're going to be using to produce content, get to know it, take the tutorials and all that. If you already have a website, take a look at what it's hosted on. A lot of times there's a blog function already built into it. So the bottom line is you just choose and get to know some sort of content management system. The next thing you want to do is develop some kind of project management system. Now there's a lot of really intense project management tools out there and we're not really going to go into them. But the bottom line is you want to come up with a system that's determining the following things. Who does what? What's the timeline for producing a piece of content? Where are the images being sourced? There's a lot of free images, places to source images all over the Internet. Or you can be taking your own photos. Or you can be asking constituents to allow you to use photos. What's the process of quality assurance? Who's doing the copy editing? You should have a copy editor have somebody at least have one other person than yourself take a look at anything you publish. It's really important. What is that process? And it could be really basic. It could really be you showing your coworker this piece of content, Sam approving it, put it up. You can go really, really in-depth into content. Or you could do things in a very accessible, very easy way. So just have something that there's a process of quality assurance. And then have any of it determined about who's publishing what and how that schedule works. Are also going to be looking at how to build an editorial calendar in developing a syndication plan. Let me share my screen once more. I think this might give a lot of someone doing it. So we are taking a look now at a content calendar. And again, a lot of really expensive tools that can be used here. But you can also do something using your existing tools that you likely have you're using at your nonprofit in this case. Here's a sheet that basically just takes you through week one through four of a month in the days of the week. And right here you can see that there's some intentionality about the type of content that we're producing on a certain specific schedule throughout the month. And that can change for you. This is a really, really generic version of that. Mondays we do organizational news, Tuesdays educational content, Wednesday success story, Thursday thought leadership. I mean that could be two minutes with our founder on the state of education in America or something to that effect. And then Friday leave something open for the inevitable variability that you want to have in your content. And then I like to use, so this is a great view here to give you kind of a plan. And then you also want to kind of create sort of a syndication plan too. So as you're developing, oh a blog is going to happen on this day and an article is going to happen on this day and maybe finally a video will happen down then. However you want to be doing this, up to you. But this is an example of how you should at least be thinking about creating content and producing it. It's really easy to also do the same thing in a calendar review. I only did, since in this example I repeated the two weeks twice throughout the month, this is just an example of a two-week plan. I'll have to really see what's going on. You can also use any functionality in that calendar to assign the plan to people. You can really hack project management using the resources that you have at your disposal quite easily. So the bottom line is that the philosophy is the same. You should at least know what you're doing, who's doing it, when they're doing it. I'm going to move over to the idea of just measuring good content. There's a lot of different – the Google Analytics is free. There's a lot of different sort of paid ways to be measuring how people are engaging with their content. You can also be looking at your social media statistics, how many likes, and how many shares, and all that stuff goes. But the bottom line with taking sort of stock of how you – the bottom line is to do this, take stock of how your content is doing online. And that should help inform some decisions about what type of content you should continue to do, what type of content you should be doing less of. It just comes down to the idea that you shouldn't be just creating content, throwing it into the wind, and not paying attention to it again. It's really important to come up with some sort of way that works for you to determine what successful content is and what isn't. And again, the whole idea of analytics when it comes to content is an entire can of worms that we won't be diving into right now. So to wrap things up, why is digital content important? Basically because it defines who you are as an organization. It says what you're all about. This is beyond just web copy. It's beyond your mission statement. It's something that you get to really dive in and say, this is what we are, this is who we are, and this is what we do and why. Again, digital content is important because it's able to engage, inspire, and educate the people who are interested in your mission and everything you do as a nonprofit. These sort of three things in mind is a really good idea in terms of how to make sure that you're staying on the right track of creating this type of content, any type of content. Digital content is important because it provides value. Providing, it makes it so that your website isn't just a place to go donate money. It's not just a place that exists on the Internet. It's a place that is valuable to people. It means that it's a destination. That if you create genuinely helpful or genuinely inspiring or genuinely engaging content, people find your site valuable and they want to keep going there. And once they're there, they want to learn more about what you're about. And that might be what it's really all about right there. Because if you think about it, if you weren't creating these stories online, how would people know? From a nuts and bolts perspective too. Content helps you rank higher in Google search. It gives people something to share. If you're not creating a blog post, what are the pairing of your organization other than just the link to your organization online? And again, it establishes your site as a destination for a certain topic as an authority on a certain subject. And then lastly, content helps people make decisions. At the end of the day, you're running an organization, you're helping people, and you want people to be there along with you. And whether that maybe looks like a tracking donor. Maybe that looks like tracking people to want to volunteer to decide to pitch in and help your cause. Or maybe at the very end of the day, it's as simple as just sharing a great blog post that they wrote on your site. They read it on your site and they decide to share that with their own community. Great digital content really does a great job of pushing that needle and helping people to make decisions ultimately to support all the great things you do. Okay, so I'd like to thank you. First of all, thank you guys so much for already just sticking with us, sticking with me as we were going through a lot of content, a lot of information in the past about 40 seconds I suppose. And I'd like to open up this webinar to some discussion and some questions. And so I will be taking a look over at some questions that have been chatted over to me now. Hi Steven, I can go ahead and send you some of the questions that people have been asking. Just to be mindful of the time we have about 3 minutes left. So I think there are one of the questions that we got a few times was in terms of frequency and how often people should be posting, what is your recommendation especially for a smaller nonprofit that has limited resources? Oh, okay. So the idea of how much you should be posting is really a function of what the bandwidth is that you have at your organization to do quality content. So you want to do as much as you can without spreading people too thin. But in terms of how much you should be posting, it is good to post with a certain amount of consistency. So you don't want to just post once one week and then post five times the next week and then post maybe two times the next week. You want to create a certain cadence of how you are putting content out there so that people can learn to expect when they should be seeing something new on your site. Perfect. Okay, and then another question that we got, when you were showing the Microsoft animated video, people were wondering what tool you used to create that video, or if you have any recommendations on resources to make animated videos if budget. Totally. Especially if you are on a budget, going to any of these online marketplaces that there is a global community of freelancers that are ready to bid on jobs for you to create a simple animated explainer. We used an affordable animation studio that basically, that's fine, this type of thing. The price points for these animations are really varied. I've seen things for a few hundred dollars. So basically there are things like the Envato market, there are things like cyber in different sites like that where you can take a look, and there are hundreds of offers for affordable animation services. Exactly, yeah. I think also just to let everyone know for social media there are also resources available like Hootsuite so if you can't post them on your own, you can schedule stuff in advance so that you are not having to go in there every day to post things. So do you want to maybe talk about a few recommended tools for someone who has a small team to use? To blog with? To blog, yeah. So like if somebody doesn't have the capability to blog on their site or if social media going in every day and posting becomes a little bit difficult just in terms of common tools for a content creator. Oh yeah, so a medium is a great way to set up your own blog right off the bat. There's WordPress again is a very common tool. They have a lot of different themes and sort of skins that will make your site look really unique. And there's free WordPress sites. It's initially free but it's also at an annual level it's very affordable to do something on WordPress. I mean, let me think, what else? I would say I'd focus on those two or take a look at if there's a blog function on the type of theme that you have using a different site. Like some people use or decrease their sites on Wix and there's definitely different themes in Wix that support a blogging function and they have a little blog tab on them or not. And so I would just take a look when you're searching for different themes in these things like Squarespace or Wix or WordPress that you just in your search share make sure that that site supports blogging or kind of a media player or anything else that you imagine you might need. Perfect. All right, so I want to be mindful of everyone's time. Thank you Stephen so much for today's presentation. Thank you to everyone who attended today and asked questions. Hopefully you guys all learned a lot. If you guys don't mind it's always really helpful for us to hear your feedback. So if you don't mind just chatting one thing that you learned in today's webinar you'll also be receiving a post-event survey. So if you don't mind taking a couple of minutes to answer I think there's about five questions on there. It really helps us dictate future content so you should be receiving that once you close out of ReadyTalk. Also if you're on social media feel free to give us a follow. We're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn so please give us a like, heart, follow, whatever the actions are on each of those. And then also we have our blog which is blog.techsoup.org. We post fairly frequently there with tips and tricks. So if today's webinar was helpful we try to post things that are useful to you there as well. And then just if you are available we have upcoming webinars on our website www.techsoup.org. So keep an eye out for future webinars. Again thank you Stephen today for today's presentation. Thank you to our sponsor ReadyTalk and thank you to LaShika for answering questions on the back end and we hope to see you guys soon.