 Welcome everyone to Tumblr for Social Good. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'll be your host here at Texas Headquarters today in San Francisco. And we are going to get ourselves started with this webinar. I've been with the organization for about 6 years. And prior to that, I worked with small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California over many years, often being the accidental techie and making the decisions around which technologies we should move forward with and which ones we shouldn't. So I'm glad to be your host for today's event. Also joining us is Liva Rubenstein who is the Director of Social Impact and Policy at Tumblr. And she'll be sharing her expertise about how to engage your audience and connect with your constituents using tools like Tumblr. And she'll be giving us a bit of a demo as well as showing us some examples of how social good organizations, nonprofits, and libraries have been able to embrace this tool and leverage it for greater impact. You'll also see Ali Bazdikian on the back end. She's an interactive event and video producer here at TechSoup. And she'll be helping to make sure that your questions are flagged and helping you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. So a quick look at today's agenda. I'll do an introduction of TechSoup for those of you who aren't yet familiar with us. We'll do a couple of participant polls to gauge where you as our audience, where you're currently at in your use of Tumblr or not use of Tumblr. And then Liva is going to take us through really looking at what is Tumblr, why is it relevant to social good organizations. We'll look at some examples and some use cases, ways that it can be used, and she'll share some best practices and show us around Tumblr a little bit. We'll also have time for Q&A at the end. But again, feel free to put those questions that come up to you into that chat window anytime through the webinar so we can address them as opportunities arise throughout the presentation. So who is TechSoup? We are a 501c3 nonprofit, and we are working towards the day when every nonprofit library, foundation, charity, church, what have you, social benefit organization around the world has the access to technology resources and knowledge to better meet their mission. We've been around since 1987 serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. We have a catalog full of donation programs with companies like Microsoft offering products like Windows 8.1 and the latest QuickBooks 2014, and also offer new things like consulting services or online hosted services. So definitely check out these types of donation programs if you're not already familiar with us at TechSoup.org where you can learn more about the technology resources and products available to you and your fellow charitable organizations. Let's get us into Tumblr. So go ahead and click on these radio buttons on your screen to let us know if you're currently using Tumblr, maybe you have a personal Tumblr, maybe you already have a professional or an organization-related Tumblr setup, maybe you just look at Tumblr that other people have created. Maybe it's brand new to you and you don't use it at all or you're not even sure what it is. So go ahead and let us know. Some of these you may feel multiple answers. So go ahead and chat into us if there is an option that is not on the screen that you'd like to share with us. And I'll give just a few more seconds to allow everybody to participate. We'll close this one and move on to one other poll question in just a moment. Take a second and click on your screens. Let us know what you're doing with Tumblr currently. I'm going to go ahead and let's see. So around almost half of our participants today 45% say not at all, and another 20% say I'm not even sure what it is. And that's totally okay. That's what this webinar is all about is to make sure that one, you know what it is and you know how to leverage it. Let's see, we've got about 20% that use it personally, only about 7% that are using it professionally or for their organization. That's great to know. And for those of you who are using it professionally in your organization, if there are experiences that you have that you'd like to share with the audience, feel free to chat those into us and we can chat them back out so everybody can hear about your experiences as well. One other quick question, what do you think you can use Tumblr for? And so this is particularly useful I think for those folks who aren't quite sure what Tumblr is, let us know what you think you can use Tumblr for. And these are just a few of the options but you can also chat into us to let us know if you think Tumblr is for something totally different or something that's not on this list. And this isn't even what you think it's primarily used for. You can select more than one of these options about what your impression is of Tumblr so far. And so Nancy writes in in the chat window that we use it for learner blogs for project community.info. So we'll chat that back out and people can look at it. Paula writes, I set Tumblr accounts for a Coursera class to showcase our work. That's cool. Matthew writes, I thought of Tumblr as an earlier form of Snapchat. So for those of you who are maybe not familiar with Snapchat, it's an app that you can install on your mobile device that lets you chat quick photos to one another that disappear after 10 seconds or something like that. Let's see, Denise writes in, I originally started our Tumblr to collect articles and case studies before we started a project. That's great. So I'm going to go ahead and click to show our results. And it looks like around 80% think that it's another social media site. And around 60% say that it's a good way to reach younger audiences. 56%, 57% say mostly for blogging. So it's a great spread of options of what people think it could be primarily used for. Let's see, we also have Ervashi writes Tumblr host professional travelers who capture beautiful photographs. So a lot of different ways you can use it and there is no wrong answer for this, which I think is somewhat the moral of the story with this poll. And with that I'd like to invite Liba Rubenstein, our presenter who's joining us from Tumblr today, to talk about how Tumblr is and can be used for all of these things and how you can leverage this really flexible tool to use it for your organization's mission. So welcome to the webinar today. We're happy to have you join us Liba. Thanks so much Becky. I hope you can all see the presentation. I now can no longer see the chat window. So Becky will be monitoring your questions and comments from now on as I go through the presentation. And just before you jump in Liba, sorry it looks good on my end, but I just want to let our audience know that since Liba can't see your chat questions let us know if the screen is loading slowly for you or anything like that and we can interrupt if we need to to make sure that everybody can see what's going on. So with that I'll go ahead and hand it over to you. Thanks Liba. And no problem thanks Becky. And again on the technical note, the presentation is in keynote which is why I was sharing my screen. And there are a lot of animations so depending on your internet connection or what device you're using they may load a little bit slowly. So we will try to move slowly enough that you can get the full experience and just be patient. But hopefully we'll add a little bit of extra fun to the presentation as well. Thanks everyone for having me and for taking the time. I'm really glad that we didn't overlap too much with the USA soccer game. Although I did not watch it, I imagine there's some people on the phone here who want to make sure to get that in today. And I'm really pleased to be talking to you guys and really to thank you so much for participating in the poll because it's confirmed. I mean there are many ways this conversation can go. It really helps for me to prioritize what to focus on. I'm going to spend a lot more time on kind of Tumblr basics, what Tumblr is, and going through the wide variety of use cases and maybe a little bit less time on the tactical best practices. But certainly there will be enough time at the end for questions that we can get into that if that's useful for folks because I'm going to speak primarily to those who are new to the platform. I will say and just get a little bit at what I'm going to talk about later that Tumblr is a little bit like the old parable about the blind men and the elephants. I don't know if you're familiar with it. I think it's an Indian parable in which there's ten blind men standing around this enormous creature and each of them sticks out their hands to touch the creature and describe what they're feeling and believe that the entire beast is represented by that one piece that they're touching. So one of them feels the tail and one feels the trunk and one feels a toe and one feels a sort of leathery body and one feels an ear and you can imagine that their perception of what the entire animal is is completely different depending on which piece they experience. And Tumblr is so versatile that even folks who are familiar with Tumblr, especially from you that personally, a lot of use cases that we're going to talk through in terms of organizations and institutions may be completely new to you, may be a way of thinking about Tumblr that you've never encountered before. So hopefully, if you're sitting here saying, oh, well, I was looking for more taxable stuff but you're going to do sort of a Tumblr one-on-one, hopefully this will still be very valuable and we can certainly address specific requests as we go. My name is Liba and I work at Tumblr. And my role at Tumblr is, as Becky said, Director of Social Impact and Policy which is pretty much as broad and big as it sounds. And I do everything from sort of external facing work to build the narrative of Tumblr as a platform for social good, to evangelize the tools of Tumblr to the social impact community. I do a lot of talks like this but also broader ones about young people and sort of engagement online or the gift as the new political cartoon or changing nature of politics and media, a whole range of things that sort of represent Tumblr's role in the zeitgeist when it comes to social and civic engagement. And I also helped to help our CEO think about what are the values that Tumblr is a company and style is and how those values live and breathe through our employer policies, our user policies, and our engagement with public policy as well as the issues that we might get behind philanthropically or on a cause basis. So I wear many hats. We're going to focus on one of them now. So what is Tumblr? We describe Tumblr as a social blogging platform which sounds a little bit like New Media Mumbo Jumbo but it's actually very descriptive of what the product does which is specifically it is a little bit schizophrenic. It has a multiple personality of this product. Unlike most social networks that you might be familiar with, Tumblr is also a publishing platform. That's why we call it social blogging. So Tumblr has a web-facing experience and a logged in experience that are very, very different and tools that serve each of those experiences. So we like to say we are aware the open web and social media meet which means that creating a Tumblr means that you can have the discoverability of a blog to the open web and the ability to control the way your content appears to the open web as well as the audience and reach and engagement opportunities of the social network. This is probably, might be loading slowly for some of you. Unlike some social networks out there, we are not into creative constraints. So you can post any type of media in pretty much any form and any size to a point. We actually have seven post types that are very much customized to that type of media. So our product team spends a lot of time making sure that when you post video to Tumblr you have the best possible video experience. When you post audio to Tumblr you have the best possible audio experience, et cetera, et cetera. The customizability of text images are obviously very important as they are increasingly across social media. So we really spend a lot of time in our very simple and streamlined product making sure that each type of media that you might post is going to be optimized for that experience. We are not limiting you to square photos and we are not limiting you to a hundred and forty characters. Every piece of content on Tumblr exists in multiple forms. Apologies for the sales slide but it is really pretty and also I figure everybody loves some sizzling bacon even if you are a vegetarian. It is just fun to look at and you can almost smell it through the screen when it is animated like that. But the point of this slide is to show that the same post exists both on the open web, that is the first image, also in the dashboard in your browser. That is the second image. That is what the long-distance experience looks like on Tumblr and as well it is fully optimized for mobile both in the browser and in the app. We also play well with other social media. So because Tumblr has this sort of unique element of the web-facing experience a lot of folks use Tumblr as a home for their content and then syndicate from there to other social networks that will then drive traffic back to their Tumblr or they use other social networks that are primarily designed for creating a particular type of content and pulling the content from there to the Tumblr. So for example, there is a good argument to be made that one of the reasons Instagram enjoyed such success in its early days when I don't know if you all remember when Instagram first launched oh so long ago, what was it like 18 months ago or something. The only way that you could view photos on Instagram was if you were an Instagram user and if you had the app. So a lot of people who were excited about Instagram pulled their Instagram photos into a Tumblr and then were able to share those photos with all of their friends even though they were on Instagram. The same sort of growth happened with YouTube and MySpace in the early days. So these sort of more versatile platforms become a way to share content that exists and is created on more constrained platforms. And the Tumblr can become very much sort of a hub of your whole social media ecosystem. Again, this just reemphasizes the multiple benefits, the sort of web benefits as combined with social media benefits. And we'll show you how what some of these things look like. So we've talked a lot about sort of the web-facing experience, the ability to customize the way your content appears as a publishing platform. And now we're going to talk a little bit about that logged in social experience. So again, this is the dashboard. This is what it looks like when your log gets Tumblr. And what is that community that we're talking about? When we say we're a social network, it's a well-published platform. We have about 200 million blogs around the world, 125,000 new folks are signing up every day, 90 million posts are made every day. And we have, depending on the numbers that you're using, somewhere between 150 and 300 million, monthly, unique globally. We are also, and this is I think particularly important perhaps for some folks on the phone today, uniquely balanced when it comes to gender and demographics. A lot of other social networks skew heavily in one direction or the other. And we heavily over-index in millennials. And I think that that's why a lot of organizations initially come to Tumblr because they hear about it as a place where young people are. These stats are important for a couple of reasons. One, there's a lot of press about Tumblr being where teens are. You can see the numbers don't really bear that out, which teens are by no means the majority of our users. They are super engaged and there are trends that show that they're using other social networks perhaps less, not necessarily leaving them, but slightly less engaged on those platforms and they're coming to platforms like Tumblr to really express themselves and interact more regularly. And anecdotally I would say my experience is that teens are sort of overly engaged on Tumblr. Just to give you a sense of what that means, we have a daily post limit for Tumblr which is really designed to prevent spam. We don't publicize exactly what that number is, but it's somewhere between 2 and 300 posts a day. When I look at Tumblr mentions on Twitter or the support tickets coming into our support team, we get dozens if not hundreds of complaints every day from teenagers who are hitting their post limit. And they love Tumblr, but it's the one thing that they're most frustrated by is that they can't post more than 200 times in one day. So this is giving you some sense of the type of engagement we're getting about teens. But I think importantly for this group, because millennials are such an important demographic, they're about to be 50% of our workforce. They're increasingly donating to nonprofits. They're sort of the fact that throwing donor base, they really want to understand how to engage. They're the new and young voters. They're the sort of upwardly mobile young folks who are entering their first jobs, who are figuring out how to spend their money. So that's a really important demographic and Tumblr is very much where they live. And even more important than these big numbers, these sort of overall traffic numbers are the engagement metrics. And really this slide is just to show that Tumblr sort of slices everyone else on engagement. We've been consistently number one of ComScore's top 100 web properties. And the reason that this is important is if you think about it, so we're usually neck and neck with Facebook on engagement. And Facebook is in many ways the holy grail of engagement, as I'm sure many of you have experienced. And the thing that I would say to kind of put Tumblr in context is that we think about what engagement on Facebook means. Think about all of the different types of activities that people do when they're logged into Facebook. They're not just looking at and sharing content, but they're also playing games and they're organizing events and they're chatting with their friends. And so if Tumblr and Facebook have sort of similar levels of engagement, 100% of that engagement on Tumblr is around the creation, curation, and consumption of content. Which means that if you think of yourselves to some extent on the web as content creators and publishers, in theory 100% of all of these beautiful engagement metrics could be around your content on Facebook. And even more importantly to that online engagement is the offline engagement because there's a lot of cynicism out there, especially among young people, among millennials that, okay, it's great, these kids will still click and they'll share and they'll like things, but are they actually going to convert into the other behaviors that are very meaningful for our organization? We don't collect a whole lot of information about our users and I can't wait for the day that we actually do our own research on this. But these are numbers from Tumblr that if you have access to Tumblr you can also look up and compare social networks. But compared to the average user of the Internet between 18 and 34, our users are more likely to go to a rally, more likely to be the ones who advise their communities on current events, more likely to register to vote. They're also more likely to have donated to an organization in the last six months. So there are some objective measures that show that this audience that is super engaged in influential online, that engagement translates offline as well. And engagement on Tumblr comes in a few forms. Some of these will be familiar to you if you're a user of social media. There is the follow, the like, and the reblog. Following is really about building a community of folks that you can go back to time and again people who've opted in to receive your content on a regular basis. Likes are that sort of immediate satisfying feedback of just signaling that folks have engaged with your content. And the reblog is really the magic of engagement on Tumblr. The reblog was designed actually before the retweet existed, but for similar reasons as a response to traditional online commenting where especially before Facebook connects online commenting and it still is to some extent today, you know, an easy excuse for people to dump negativity on other people's content and walk away. And the idea with the reblog is that if you want to engage in a conversation around content that's not yours, you should have to really own that conversation and be prepared to have all of your followers know what you're contributing to that conversation. So it's a way to hold people accountable and to create a more, hopefully a more positive environment. And it really does that we're actually, if you can believe it, Adobe's Social Intelligence Report ranks Tumblr as the highest sentiment ranking among social media websites. There's actually a study that shows that the comments and the engagement and the types of content people post on Tumblr actually is objectively more positive than on other platforms. So I would like to believe that the reblog has the feel of that intention but it's also because it's the way that folks take your content and own it and publish it to their followers. It's a really magical way for your content to travel through a network. This is sort of a visualization of the nodes of engagement around the reblog. And you can see that you actually identify influencers in your network by understanding how the reblog travels and see who are the folks who are sharing your content, who are the most influential and who are amplifying your content the most. They might not even be followers. They might be folks who encounter your content farther down the line. Our third-party analytics partner Union Metrics, and we can talk about analytics more later if people are interested, does this sort of visualization around all of your posts that you can actually really understand how your community is engaging and who that community is. The reblog is also part of why the nature of content and content sharing and engagement on Tumblr is pretty different from on other social networks. A third of all reblogs occur 30 days after the content was originally posted. So content on Tumblr is not nearly as ephemeral as it is on other social networks. I can also show you later we have an archive function. So you may have experienced that feeling on Facebook where you were scrolling through your newsfeed and you remember that you saw this great article that someone posted, but there is basically no way to find it if you don't have it right in front of you. On Tumblr you can actually search through that content. You can find archival content, a lot of organizations and entities that I work with use Tumblr for evergreen and archival content because it doesn't have to be quite as immediate and newsworthy as it does on other platforms. I know the rule on Twitter is something like if you don't get engagement in 20 minutes like the tweet is dead and you have to tweet the same link again in order to get it in front of people again. And similarly, in terms of reach, 60% of all reblogs come from downstream which means followers of followers. So again, the reblog is a beautiful way of getting your content in front of people who haven't already opted in and reaching new audiences. So I'm just going to stop there for a couple of seconds because I've thrown a lot at you about this Tumblr product. Some of this stuff that just sounds like words will become a lot clearer when I show you the use cases, but I just wanted to stop and see if anyone had demographic or engagement questions that we could address before we move on to kind of specific examples. Sure. Well, this is probably a segue more than a question about the numbers. But we've had a couple of people ask about specific scenarios in Tumblr. So Urvashi asked, how can we use it in a library? And Matthew asks a similar question saying, I'm thinking maybe I could host audio and video or video of my sermons that I preach at Sunday worship so that shut-ins or military service members who aren't able to come out could actually access these things. So those are a couple of examples of the types of uses that a couple of participants have mentioned. Do you want to speak to the different ways that it can be used and segue into some of your examples? Sure. I think I will actually go ahead with the examples and then I'll refer to those specific questions in the context of these examples that I'm going to show us. All right. Sounds great. Sure. Okay, so I'm going to talk about these are broad types of uses that I see specifically among social good organizations and sort of civic-engaging organizations that just give you a sense of the breadth of how Tumblr can be useful to what you want to do on the web. So the most, honestly, the most common usage and one of the most exciting overall is just a lot of the organizations that I work with either have websites that are built in old technology and that are real pain to update, or if you're lucky, you have a really gorgeous website that was built by a fancy agency that donated their time. And so it's really beautiful and highly functional and interactive, but still if you want to make a change or you want to update the content, you sort of last on your designer's priority list because you're the pro bono client. And so for a whole lot of reasons, a lot of organizations that I work with, think of Tumblr as the way to do what they can't do on their website. Sometimes it's also because their website has a slightly different audience. Their website is where their donors go. And their big donors are of a different generation and they're looking for different things, the kind of information they want is different, but these organizations know, for example, that 75% of millennials who are donors say that they are completely turned off by a nonprofit website that is static. So young people are looking for a living, breathing website, which is sometimes really hard to do on your main site. And so Tumblr can actually exist as, again, because it has this web-facing experience that can exist as an extension of your site. Either a lot of organizations are hosting their official blogs on Tumblr because you can assign your own URL to your Tumblr. The user experience to your web visitor who comes to the Tumblr through your homepage or comes to your Tumblr through web search might not even know that they're on a Tumblr if you don't want them to if they don't know what they're looking for because you can scan it to look exactly like your site. You can be completely on-brand. You can really use it as an extension of your existing website just one that's a lot easier to manage and you're essentially using Tumblr as a content management system. And then secretly, every single post that's appearing on that site is also shareable within the network, the super-engaged network of 200 million other blogs. There are a zillion examples of this and I can show you some other as we go through. Taking it a step further, I work with organizations who use Tumblr as the homepage, as the main site, either of their whole organization or the microsite for a particular campaign. This one I might pull up on the browser later because it's really beautiful if you don't even get a sense of how gorgeous it is with this static image. But StillMade has done work in the largest refugee camp in the world for many years and they were empowering the refugees with their own kind of media tools and training so that they could tell their own stories. And this content had never seen the light of day. It was being used as sort of a coping mechanism for the refugees themselves and eventually StillMade said we need to show this content to the world and so they built this beautiful site DobbStories.org that is a site built on Tumblr. It does not look like a blog. It doesn't look like anything you probably have ever imagined a Tumblr would look like. But it is in fact a Tumblr and each piece of content exists as opposed to in the dashboard is shareable. Tumblr is also used as a way to actually serve the community, to provide a service that is in line with your mission. Planned Parenthood, their first Tumblr was using our Ask function to showcase a sort of reproductive and sexual health information services. So they were actually collecting questions through Tumblr and then answering those questions. When they first launched and the first month or so Tumblr was the number one referral to their online hotline chat service as well. So it was a way to reach a community with a particular part of your brand and part of your service and actually drive people to be more engaged and use your other services as well. And then there's just sort of the I've seen Tumblr used as rapid response and politics and Tumblr used as a way to display a lot of user generated content. This is one of my favorite really simple examples of sort of a micro campaign that I think launched around the last government shutdown where someone just started a Tumblr called, is Congress in today? And every day he would update it and design the Tumblr so that you're only seeing one post at a time. And so you just go on that day and get the answer to your question. It's kind of a brilliant simple use of the platform. Another common use of Tumblr is almost taking a signal from the sort of top culture meme type uses of Tumblr which is to pick one theme and kind of stick with that one theme and build a brand around a particular theme. So in this case, the World Bank, not your sexiest brand in the world. Yes, maybe an organization that's technically creating a lot of original content but it's not really like social media-ready content. They were interested in reaching a sector of the Tumblr audience that is sort of the intersection of design and tech and data nerds. They have 800 data sets available on their website that nobody knows about, no one's doing anything with. So they decided to build a Tumblr that was almost 100% curated content but it was not original content. They were just collecting content from elsewhere on the web and reblogging content from within Tumblr. But it was all of the best data visualizations about international development. Now it's super specific and kind of wonky but if you know what audience you're trying to reach, you can use Tumblr as a way to build your authority and build clout and credibility among the audience to say if you want to know everything there is to know about X, you come here. And we have tools like a bookmarklet that you put in your browser that allows you to post to your Tumblr from anywhere on the web so you encounter great relevant content and you don't have to copy and paste it. It will automatically format to whatever post type you want that you can post to the Tumblr without even clicking back to Tumblr. You can use all the content that's already coursing through the Tumblr network and leverage all of that content and just curate content that's already within Tumblr to one location that has one particular theme that helps to build an audience of people who are interested in that particular theme. You can also leverage tools that we have that other sites don't have like the Q&A function and the submission function to drive direct engagement with your audience. The Planned Parenthood example is a good example of that. NPR does a zillion of these. They're launching like one submission Tumblr a month that ties in with some sort of on-air programming. But what's nice about this is that they're really using Tumblr for one particular set of tools. They're referring to those tools. They're linking to those tools from their main site. And it means that they don't have to build their own user-generated content submission function. They're just using Tumblr's own function. And again, they can skim the page to look at whatever they want and that content can be shareable within the network. But they're really using Tumblr tools to power what they already want to do on the web that's accessible to everybody. So I'm moving into some of the best practices, but just to address those two questions that came up. So in terms of libraries, when I get out of the presentation I'll pull up some library examples. But I would say libraries as a category could use any one of these use cases that I was talking about. I guess the last use case being Tumblr as just another branch of your social media strategy where you're posting a version of the same content that you're posting elsewhere but you're customizing it to the Tumblr audience to really drive engagement within the Tumblr network. And that's where some of these best practices really come in. A lot of those other examples were much more about using Tumblr to power your digital strategy more broadly, not specifically about engaging the Tumblr audience. So I think libraries can use Tumblr in pretty much any of those categories. I've seen libraries that are posting a book a day or using Tumblr as a book club or using Tumblr as a way to humanize the institution and having multiple librarians at the same libraries curate content and you get to know the librarians and they're posting in their own voices. You could use Tumblr as a way to show amazing archival content that the library holds. Obviously libraries like the Library of Congress does this and the National Archives does this very, very successfully as well as smaller institutions. So I think pretty much any of those use cases could work for a library for a church or religious institution or really I would put a preacher in the category of any other creator like a photographer or journalist or anyone else who is creating content on a regular basis and wants it to find the greatest audience possible and perhaps there are in-person ways to experience that content in a gallery whether it's a gallery or a church or a movie theater but they also want it to be accessible to other folks. That is one of the original use cases for Tumblr. Tumblr is where a lot of journalists, photojournalists, photographers, artists, storytellers, short story writers, novelists, Tumblr is their homepage on the web. Tumblr is their main blog, is their main site because it has that archival capability and because it's such an easy content management system. So I think for sure posting content, a variety of types of content, even what's beautiful about the multi-faceted nature of Tumblr is you can imagine one sermon living in many different forms on Tumblr without being redundant. So you could post the whole thing as a video, you could post the whole thing as an audio file and you could pull out individual quotes and post those separately and organize quotes by topic and have a whole experience on the Tumblr where people are able to read quotes both in passages from your sermons on different topics that they can search based on the topic that they're interested in. So you could have one original piece of content that lives in multiple forms and is accessible to people in whatever form they're interested in finding it. And one can link to the other so people come to the sermon through a quote but there's a link at the bottom of that to the post that's the video post. It's kind of a beautiful way of getting at all the facets of one piece of content. So I'm going to really quickly run through some of these best practices in the next like two minutes and then open up to questions again and we can look at stuff in the browser and get to some more specific questions and cases. So a lot of these dashboard tips are, some of them are very similar to what you're going to hear from any other social network. Visual content is only increasing in relevance on the Internet. So simplicity, visual, colorful, positive. Now I will say these are really, really broad generalizations and Tumblr like the rest of the Internet is really one huge community made up of many niches and there are really active librarian communities, long form journals and communities, fandoms of every type. So content that might not conform to these broad generalizations might really work if you're plugging into the right audience. Tumblr is definitely prioritizing quality over quantity. So I wouldn't be too worried about like the amount of content that you post as long as it's in a regular cadence and you're building the right expectation among your followers. And again, there's so much content already through the system and so many easy ways to post with elsewhere on the web that you can supplement your own original content if there's not that much of it with other people's content that are relevant to yours that you can add commentary to and be part of a larger conversation. And again, it doesn't have to be quite as timely but having a little bit of humor and a little bit of a reverence will definitely go a long way on Tumblr. It is not necessary but it can really help. And being a good Tumblr citizen is really about engaging in the platform even if you're primarily using Tumblr for its web tools and you're using it to reach everyone on the web not just folks within the network. You know, still follow other blogs that are relevant like other posts that are relevant. It will build goodwill. It will spread your links within the network. It will help drive engagement within Tumblr. And again, those folks are still influential offline as well so you don't want to totally neglect them. The most engagement happens actually outside the work day on Tumblr. You can queue and schedule posts to hit me prime times and also you can sit down on a Monday morning and queue up time post to post a regular interval across the rest of the week. But I wouldn't worry too much about these rules just because again the life cycle of a post is so long that even if you're not posting during the high engagement hours, you still might get a lot of engagement you know, hours, days, weeks later. Tagging is really important. We can talk about that a little bit more if you're interested but tags are both a form of discoverability within the Tumblr search function and the Tumblr network as well as a way to organize content within your own site. And I can't say enough about the animated GIF. We can talk a little bit more about this if folks are interested. It's really had a renaissance in recent years. I would say, you know, thanks to Tumblr in many ways. Now you see other platforms supporting GIFs that didn't before but they really become elevated to an art form and a communications medium not just sort of annoying blinking graphics on a MySafe page. And they can be really powerful as a way to record a live event, leverage GIFs from pop culture to express an idea that's relevant to your important issue. It's really arresting in a scrolling dashboard environment when you're scanning a whole lot of content. You can see a lot of other platforms took cues from the animated GIF when they made videos autoplay, so like Instagram video, autoplay is when you sit on it in your Instagram feed. That's very much modeled on how the animated GIF works. It's something that doesn't require you to press play to engage with it. And so it has a much lower barrier to entry. It's really a fascinating format. And it is relevant for serious issues. It's really not just for me to talk culture and there are a ton of tools out there, both mobile and web tools at various levels of expertise and sort of technical ability that will allow you to take advantage of the GIF. And then obviously post it to your Tumblr and tag it appropriately and share away. Okay, that's the end of my formal presentation. We still have a few, a good 10 minutes left for questions. Sorry, that was a little longer than I had hoped. But now we can dig into some more specifics. No problem, Libba. Thank you so much for that. It's really interesting and I love some of the examples that you gave. We had a couple of sort of the logistical side of Tumblr questions. So one is, Matthew asks, does Tumblr expect money to boost our pages or posts similar to what Facebook has been doing? Is there any cost to Tumblr? Sure. Not only is there no money cost to Tumblr, but our ad product is actually such a premium ad product right now that even if you have money at the end of the year and you're like, oh, maybe I'll throw a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars to Tumblr and play with Tumblr advertising and see if that works. We can't even take your money. So there isn't a self-serve ad product right now. I think it will be great when that does exist. But you can actually, if you are in the habit of buying ads, you can actually buy Facebook ads that drive to your Tumblr just like you could buy Google ads that drive to your Tumblr if that's something that you're interested in. We'll see how long this lasts, but our advertising on Tumblr is native advertising, which means that the unit of promotion is the post and the blog. So all of the folks who are spending a lot of money with us are actually active within the Tumblr community. They have Tumblers, they are posting regularly to Tumblr, and they are paying a bunch of money to us to help promote those posts. I have the ability to leverage all of those same units that we sell to advertisers on an editorial basis to help promote great things that nonprofits are doing as well. So it's not super targeted, and it is on an editorial basis, but I would definitely take advantage of there's a function on here. I'm showing you, this is my blog for nonprofits. You can submit to the Changemaker site and let me know about a new campaign that you've launched or that you're newly on Tumblr. And I can work with our editorial team and Steve. We can't be sure you're in some way or another. So definitely send me things that you're proud of, that you love a little extra boost on. I can't promise anything, but there are cases in which we're able to give it a little extra love in addition to all that great organic work that you're going to do within the community. So no, Tumblr is free. The only other thing that I will say is that our third party analytics partner, Unimetrics, is a really great product. There's a free version of the product, but the paid version has definitely had some extra features in it that if you have some budget and if you're really investing in Tumblr as a platform are very much worth your investment. And the last thing that I'll say about money is that we have something called a theme garden. So just like WordPress, there are off-the-shelf designs for your Tumblr that are a great place to start especially if you want to use Tumblr as a home for a particular campaign or your main blog or your main site on the web. And as you can see, there's a lot of them that are free, but some of them do cost money. Those are one-time costs and the most expensive ones are $49. So even if you're really going all out and getting something super fancy and getting all the support that's built in with it, you're only spending $50 once. So that's pretty much the extent of cost on Tumblr. Great. And so with the question about analytics, we had one that just came in that's related to that asking, can you tie this into your existing analytics tool if you use something else like Google Analytics? Can you connect to your Tumblr with that? Or do you have to use the one that's already connected to Tumblr? Sure. So for the web side of Tumblr, the web publishing side of Tumblr, Google Analytics is a great option. We encourage – a lot of the themes have built in. The theme customization are really easy place to drop in your Google Analytics account. So yes, you can absolutely connect those. And we highly recommend it. That's not going to capture any of the data in the dashboard. It's not going to capture engagement metrics around posts among logged in users. That's where Unimetrics comes in. And that's pretty much the only consumer-facing product out there that does Tumblr Dash. Now there is a product that I'm showing you guys right now. There is in your dashboard – and this is something that's only available to advertisers but the Activity tab, it comes with every account. And you can see up to the last 30 days of key engagement metrics on Tumblr. And Unimetrics is basically just a much, much more robust and long-term view of a lot of the same analytics. So you do have separate analytics for the social media side of Tumblr versus the web publishing side of Tumblr. Great. We have a question from Kimberly asking, how do you secure your own URL for a Tumblr page? Is it just when you set it up that you just get it or do you have to purchase it from somewhere or buy the domain? How does that work? So when you start a new blog or when you start a new Tumblr account you're going to be asked a couple of things including the title and the URL. It will tell you once you choose the URL whether or not it's available immediately that you might have to go through a few different versions. You can also search, just type into the web browser the URL that you want.tumblr.com and you'll see pretty quickly whether it's available. Now that's for the Tumblr URL and that's going to be sort of your username within the dashboard but when it comes to assigning another URL that you own maybe it's a sub domain of your main site. It's your site.org, your organization.org slash blog or something you want to be your Tumblr. There's also a place in your setting where you literally just type in that URL that you already own on the web and within about 24 hours they'll sync up and you can match that domain to your Tumblr. So for example a lot of the organizations and companies that use Tumblr as their main blog including the U.S. federal government use their own URL. I'm just showing you a few examples. That's just in your setting. So you have to own that URL separately and then you assign it to your Tumblr. Great. So as far as the engagement is concerned, does Tumblr have a chat portal or are people able to engage? Kara asks, is there any kind of live voice interaction like what you'd see in virtual worlds like Second Life, or is it primarily liking, following, reblogging, that kind of stuff? It is the latter. It's very simple functionality around content. And now there are third party products that plug into Tumblr that offer chat functions and other things that aren't necessarily endorsed by us or supported by us but there's a zillion of those add-ons that are available. And there's also a very robust community of Tumblr folks who meet up in real life. So we have a very robust meetup network. We actually have our own meetup engine on Tumblr and you can see there's like dozens of them every week around the world. So there is very much like a culture of real life and real-time communing with other folks in your community that we do help to facilitate but there aren't online tools to facilitate real-time chat or voice contacts other than the basic kind of content publishing and sharing tools. Great. So kind of with that in mind, there are a handful of questions that are asking about posting to Tumblr from anywhere on the web and how that works. For example, somebody asks, can I publish on our blog and have that shared on Tumblr? Can I publish on Second Life and have that shared in Tumblr? How does it work? Is it only those specific web apps that you showed the logos of that you can share from or is it really from anywhere? Well, so there are two ways to answer that question. The automated function, that is a product by product question and I actually don't know off the top of my head whether – there's definitely a function where you can link your – if you have a WordPress blog you can publish directly to Tumblr. Every post can publish to Tumblr. I would question exactly if you're sort of mirroring content, one-for-one, like what the value really is there and what additional value you think you're going to get out of it, but that's certainly possible. I don't know offhand from Second Life, for example, but that's something that Second Life builds through our API, not something that we build. But the other question of how you post from other places on the web to Tumblr on a sort of a case-by-case basis, on an automatic basis. I just happen to have this up in my browser, but I can show you the way that bookmarks work, which is that this is something that I've dragged, a tool that I've dragged to my bookmarks bar. And you can see it's loading slowly, but I want to share this article on Tumblr. And I can basically share it in any of the post types. So I can do a photo post and choose any of the images that's on the page as the main image for the photo post. I can do it as a quote post and pull out some text from the article and post that as a quote and it will automatically retain all the source material. I can post it as a link post, et cetera, et cetera. If there was a video on the page, I could do it as a video post. So that's how, and then literally, as long as you're long-distance Tumblr, you make the post here where you find the content and it will post to your blog. You can even save it as a draft or add it to your queue or schedule it. You can add tags. You can customize your tweet, all of that, send automatically to your other social networks, et cetera, et cetera, all for fun. Becky- Lots of things. Great. Well, we are at the top of the hour, so I'm going to go ahead and steal the screen back from you quickly because I wanted to show a couple of wrap up things way down here at the end. Thank you so much for that. I'm taking time to answer all of these questions. For anyone who has additional questions, I would invite you to join us in the Digital Engagement Community Forum on TechSoup's site, and we'll share that link in the follow-up email as well. Really quickly before we close out, I know that we're a minute after the hour already. I just wanted to quickly show where did it go here. So TechSoup has a Tumblr, Nonprofit Tech Confessions, where you can share your greatest shames around technology and how it's used in your office. And then for the librarians who are on the line who are interested, there is a Tumblr that is a list of excellent Tumblr sites for libraries and from libraries all around the country. And it's pretty exhaustive. It's amazing. So if you're a librarian, definitely check out the Lifeguard Librarian Tumblr at Tumblr. And I'll share that link after. And then Liva had already shared the Tumblr of different spotlighted nonprofits that you can submit yourself to be part of. And just as one other library example, one of my favorites is this left-in-a-library book Tumblr where they feature photographs of pieces of stuff that are left inside library books. And I just think it's a lot of fun. So I wanted to share that quickly. Lastly, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today and invite you to join us for any upcoming webinars. Like I said, we archive these. So even if you're not able to join us, if you register for them, you'll get an email after with all of the information and the recording. So we have one coming up for faith-based organizations next Tuesday followed by two different mobile technology webinars, one specifically for libraries and how to welcome people in your community to use mobile devices in your library. And then on the 17th of July, how to write earth-changing emails to help you raise funds. So with that, I'd like to thank you so much, Liva, for your excellent presentation today. Sorry to be rushing you off the line here a couple of minutes over the hour. And thank you so much for everyone for participating. Please take a moment when the webinar closes to take a chance and let us know how we did today so we can continue to improve our webinar program. Thank you so much to ReadyTalk who provides the use of this platform for our webinars each week. It is also available to nonprofits and you can demo their product four times a week through ReadyTalk. So thank you so much everyone, and have a terrific day.