 All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our webinar. I'm going to give everybody just another minute to get logged in. But before we get started, I just wanted to go through a little bit of housekeeping if you can hear me and see my screen. If you could just let me know in the questions box of your go to webinar panel just by typing yes, that would be a huge help so I can make sure that everybody can hear me talk. Awesome. Thank you. I'm just going to go ahead and put myself on mute for another minute and we will get started at the top of the hour. All right, we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you everybody for joining me today. This is one of our last webinars for Giving Tuesday because incredibly it's October and it's always one of our more fun ones about social media strategy for Giving Tuesday. So here's a quick look at today's agenda. We're going to go through the basics and then we're really going to try to dig into social media workflow social media planning some best practices and what you can do on each platform to maximize your impact. And we're also going to talk about live streaming because, as you all know, our year this year has gone off the rails and social media and live streaming is playing a bigger part in our lives than it has in previous years and it's also going to play a bigger part in Giving Tuesday. And just so you know, we do have a couple of different events that take place on Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause so we have Georgia gives we have rich link gives. So if you are with us from one of those giving events, hello, and even though we will be talking specifically about the Mighty Cause event. It will also be applicable to your giving event because you're happening on Giving Tuesday. And just as a quick note, we'll take questions after the presentation because we've got a lot of information to go through today. So if you think of something that you would like to ask while I'm talking, just plug that into the questions box of your go to webinar panel, and we'll make time to get to that at the end of the presentation. And just to clarify this question that always comes up. Yes, everybody will get the recording and everybody will get the slides. So before we dig too deep into social media strategy and live streaming. I really just wanted to go over the background of Giving Tuesday and talk about what it is, and how it works just so that we're all on the same page. Giving Tuesday is a global day of giving that takes place the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It has it's on a different date every single year but it's always in that that specific Tuesday after Thanksgiving. And the goal of Giving Tuesday is really to get people focused on charitable giving after some of the biggest days for retail consumption all year. So instead of focusing on, you know, purchase this gadget, purchase this Black Friday deal, really focusing them on focusing on giving back to charitable causes that are doing great work in their communities. This year Giving Tuesday is on December 1, and Mighty Cause hosts our own event and this is actually a 27 hour event. It's not just 24 hours. It starts at midnight on the East Coast, and then goes to midnight Pacific time on the West Coast. So you're actually getting 27 hours of fundraising. In order to participate on our platform, you do need to register and registration is open now. So if you haven't registered to participate, please feel free to take a moment while I'm talking and go to givingTuesday.mightycause.com. And just click the big button that says register and fill out the form. It's absolutely fine to do this while I'm presenting it won't hurt my feelings I promise. Every year there are organizations who frantically call in support on Giving Tuesday and asking why they're not on the leaderboards, and it's because they spent all this time creating a campaign, but they forgot to register so get ahead of the game don't let that happen to you and go through that first step of actually registering now. And one thing I do want to mention is that if you're not currently an administrator for your nonprofit on Mighty Cause registering for Giving Tuesday will actually give you access to your nonprofit profile. So it's really just killing two birds with one stone. If you haven't used the Mighty Cause platform before by registering for Giving Tuesday you'll also get set up on the platform. We usually leave it open until a couple of weeks before the event that I do not recommend leaving that long to register because pretty much every year we see consistently that nonprofits that sign up early have better campaigns and raise more money. And we will have prizes available this year, which we will be announcing very soon so keep your eyes on your inbox for that announcement. So part of social media management and marketing that gets talked about a lot less than what time to post and what kinds of content works best is workflow for social media, which is especially important on a very busy day like Giving Tuesday so that's what we're going to talk about in this first section of the presentation. You may have come to this webinar for social media tips and you're, you know, wondering why we're not getting into how to target it of an ad on Facebook, and we will get into a lot of that. But beyond all of that stuff beyond the little stuff on social media that will help you perform better is your internal workflow. And that is really at the center of your success. A nonprofit that uses social media successfully is coordinated internally. And you can usually tell that just by looking at their social media that they've got a coordinated message look, and they have a strategy in place. And having a strong workflow will help you be more efficient. Since with most nonprofits and most fundraising campaigns, there are a lot of moving parts, and anywhere you can streamline and maximize your efficiency is obviously important. And you can also keep your staff and volunteers from duplicating efforts, or having too many people working on the same thing so that you can keep your messaging focused and consistent across all of your channels. And you can also reduce the likelihood of errors that can happen on a busy day like Giving Tuesday and reduce gaps like staff members posting on social media at the same time or posting conflicting things. So it's just really important to have a coordinated staff or volunteer force inside that knows what the what the deal is what you're doing, and knows how they're supposed to respond on Giving Tuesday. One of the biggest keys to getting your internal workflow under control is appointing a social media manager. So if you have someone who normally managers your social media at your nonprofit, or even if you have somebody from with that title. It's a really obvious choice. But like a lot of nonprofits, if you have several people working on your social media accounts or they're kind of moving in and out to post about certain parts of your work. It's really important to appoint just one person to manage that, even if it's just for the duration of the Giving Tuesday campaign, and not a permanent position. Your social media manager will coordinate posts, make sure your social media plan is integrated into your overall communications plan for the day, so that everything lines up with what you're saying in emails and at events or live streams as it were for instance. And they'll make sure that everything is on track and that you have everything ready to go. And next you'll want to identify your team. And for a lot of nonprofits that maybe one or two people, but it can also include volunteers who might help with anything from writing copy to taking photos, or even helping you edit a video. So don't leave volunteers out of the equation because they can be a huge help to nonprofits on social media, especially right now we have a lot of people sitting at home who want to use their skills so it's not. It's totally fine to go out to your social media audience and see if you have any volunteers who would like to help you with social media, or if you have a volunteer coordinator, let them know that you're looking for some skilled people who could help on social media. And then you and your team need to create a social media plan, which will include where you're posting, how often you're posting, key pieces of content you want to share, and also coordinating any paid advertising efforts and coming up with a proposed budget for ads and boosted posts. Now I really don't recommend getting lost in the weeds of thinking about making spreadsheets with what time you're going to post and researching the best time of data to post. I think it's most important to focus on the big picture, your high level goals and strategy, and make sure your team is all on the same page about your key messages and talking points for Giving Tuesday. So you can let whoever is scheduling Facebook posts worry about actually scheduling out what the Facebook posts are going to say. And just as a note, again, if your nonprofit is small and you don't have a big team, or even if it's just you, definitely loop in volunteers, get them involved in your social media marketing. There are a lot of skilled people out there who do this for a living and would be happy to help you on Giving Tuesday. And one thing that I really highly recommend sketching out is an editing process because although social media is definitely more informal than say an email, you still want to put your best foot forward and make sure that all of your posts are copy edited, have links checked and so on. And I do recommend if you do have a team of more than one or two people setting up some regular meetings leading up to Giving Tuesday with your team so that you can brainstorm ideas, talk through any issues that pop up and get basically just get in sync for Giving Tuesday. All right, so now I want to move more into social media planning. The first step and this is really rolled into your general campaign planning is finding your angle for promoting your nonprofit on Giving Tuesday. While general pleas for help can work, it really works better to have a focus like a specific program or initiative, or even a thematic focus on one thing, and then coming up with a marketing hook. Your hook is basically, why should people care? What sets your nonprofit apart? What is the story you're telling about your nonprofit? Do you have a tagline or a theme? On this post, this is a little bit of an older campaign, but I just thought it was a really great one, is performing animal welfare societies hook for their Giving Tuesday campaign from I believe 2018 called dollars for dirt. So I didn't know this before they made their campaign because I've never actually met an elephant before, but they apparently really love dirt. They love to roll in it and play in it and one of the expenses that this organization has to budget for is trucking in the dirt for the elephants to enjoy. So they set a financial goal that would provide dirt for all of the elephants they're currently caring for, and donors chose the amount of their donation based on how many truckloads of dirt they wanted to purchase for the elephants. So that was just a great example of a really great hook. They showed one of their elephants actually luxuriating and being adorable in the dirt in their campaign video and introduce the elephants in their care. So their campaign hook really got people where their concern was, and they also told a story about their nonprofit and what they do on top of telling a campaign story. And so that campaign is a really awesome example of an organization that has a strong marketing hook for Giving Tuesday. But the general lesson there is that people do respond to general appeals to your cause like if you wanted to just send them an email saying hey it's Giving Tuesday, make a donation. But they respond much more strongly to something that speaks specifically to them and their reason their emotional reason for giving to your nonprofit and wanting to help. So when you're in the planning stage really pull back and think about the story you're going to tell and how you're going to hook people into your campaign, because that's going to dictate a lot of the individual pieces that you need for your campaign. One thing that you'll also want to consider here is the fact that, as we all know, and we've all heard, you know, in ad infinitum for the past year, 2020 is a weird and wild and unprecedented year. So do not be afraid to tackle that head on. Are your needs any different as a nonprofit? Have your programs and services and priorities changed? How has the pandemic and the recession affected your nonprofit and the day to day work you do, as well as your big picture work? How is this affecting your nonprofit? All of us are affected, not infected, affected, and nonprofits are no different. So this is a really great thing to address head on with supporters. And if you've already been talking about these things to your supporter base, keep going and stick with your messaging about COVID and the recession and anything else happening in this country right now that you've been speaking on. And if you participated in Giving Tuesday Now, which was on May 5th, I believe, now is a really great time to close the loop on that campaign and follow up on it. Did you achieve your goals? Did you get the help that you needed? And even tie it into your current Giving Tuesday campaign and your end of year messaging so that throughout the year your messaging for 2020 has been cohesive and consistent. So step two is identifying your needs. So thinking through all of the things you'll need to do well on social media. One thing that you're definitely going to need is images. So figure out what your needs are based on your campaign story and marketing hook and figure out how to make that happen. So that may entail a photo shoot with a volunteer photographer, obviously socially distanced and state safe, but it can also just mean collecting images that are already, you know, in your network into one place. And one tip here is to ask your staff. I worked at an animal shelter here in Virginia and the staff were a photo gold mine. They had tons of pictures and videos of the animals in the shelter on their phones that they just took throughout the course of their work day. And so anytime I needed something from them if I needed to put together a post, I would just ask them to send me any photos or videos they have that they think are good. And they, you know, provided those for me and I didn't have to do anything, but send out an email saying hey guys send this to me. So it doesn't have to be as complicated as a photo shoot. It can be just as easy as asking people that you know interact with whoever your nonprofit serves on a daily basis. Do you have any great photos or videos. You'll also want to consider a campaign video, because video is a very effective tool on social media we're going to talk about that more in a bit. So think about whether you'll want a slick video with some production values, or again just pull together the videos you have that are already sitting on people's smartphones and work with those. Both of them can be equally effective. And you can also elevate your videos from people's smartphones by splicing them together so that you have them in a cohesive video, and you can use free tools like YouTube. And there's lots of free video editing apps that you can download, you know, so that you can sort of take these little pieces these little strands you have and turn them into something cohesive that will speak to your supporters. And again, don't be afraid to seek out volunteer help here, because you may have people with video editing experience or YouTube channels in your volunteer base that you won't know about unless you ask. Something to think about as well is any testimonials or quotes you'll want for your campaign, which is important if you're focusing on the personal effect your work has on the people you serve. These things can take a little bit of time to coordinate, since you'll need to do outreach and people are bad at responding to emails and phone calls. So think about these needs and come up with a plan to get the info or the quotes that you want from people. In fact, I would honestly start having those conversations with anyone you'd like to use for a quote or testimonial now, because they can just take a really long time. And you'll have to wrap that stuff together into content on top of just getting the goods from them. So getting an early start when it comes to testimonials is really helpful. And lastly, think about graphic design. You may not need anything, but you may want to have some images at the ready like infographics or a tweaked logo that has some giving Tuesday incorporated into it. So think about those needs and come up with a plan to get them ready for the big day. You really don't need to hire a real graphic designer. I mean, definitely if you have the budget for it and you would like to. People need work so employ a graphic designer if you want to, but you can also throw together some really great stuff in a free program like canva, which is easy to use and you don't need any special graphic design knowledge or training to use. The last step of planning is really putting together all the different things we just talked about into motion. So start scheduling posts. We'll talk a little bit more about scheduling in the next few slides, but basically scheduling your key content ahead of time will help you tie your social media efforts into your other efforts like email so that you have a cohesive presence and plan for giving Tuesday. You can also draft your posts with the scheduling tools and edit them. You should be testing links to make sure that they work, looking at images to make sure they display how you want, and copy editing to make sure that no typos get posted. I mean, it happens, it happens to everyone, but it helps if you can just sort of edit them ahead of time and have a couple of pairs of eyes on each post. So if I make a social media post and I'm drafting it and I'm putting it in my scheduled posts, having two people look at it and say, oh, well, this doesn't make any sense, or you have a random period there that shouldn't be there. It really helps make sure that your copy is clean when you post it on social media. All right, and so now we're going to go over some of the best practices that we know of for social media. So the biggest thing I can recommend to nonprofits is to just go where your audience is. That'll be different for every nonprofit based on your supporters and the kind of work that you do, but focus on the platforms where your audience is actually paying attention. So take a look at where you have the most followers so that you can make sure that you're not spending a bunch of time on a platform where you really only have a handful of people watching you. You don't need to devote equal time and attention to all platforms, especially if, for instance, your Twitter following outpaces your Instagram following by thousands of people. It doesn't make sense to spend your time equally on each platform. And as an offshoot of that, Giving Tuesday is not the best time to experiment with new platforms. There are a bunch of things you can try and you may leave this webinar with some great ideas, but Giving Tuesday is high stakes. It's 27 hours. It's a short period of time and you have limited effort and this year a lot of nonprofits are at a limited capacity. So if you've never used TikTok, you don't need to use TikTok on Giving Tuesday. You just don't have to. You can certainly try if you have the ability and the desire to, but it's totally okay. And in fact, it's recommended that you just stay in your comfort zone on Giving Tuesday instead of putting lots of effort where you're not guaranteed any sort of payoff. But if you want to get more active on Instagram, for instance, or build more of a following on some one particular platform, now is the time to start doing it. So that when we get to November and December, you've done a little bit of groundwork there and you maybe have a base of followers who are watching your posts. I talked about this a little bit before, but another best practice is to utilize volunteers, especially if you're small and you have limited resources and even nonprofits that have plenty of resources are feeling that they're feeling the stretch in 2020, volunteers can really be a godsend. And sometimes nonprofits that limp, they try to limit volunteers to certain roles, like greeting people in their lobby or sorting through in kind donations or things like that. And they're worried about giving them access on social media, but there are people who work in marketing and manage online communities for a living and they have really great skills to offer you. So you can ask for their help however you would normally ask volunteers for help with specific tasks, whether that's through your social media through email, through your volunteer portal or from emails from your volunteer coordinator. However you do it, if you're feeling the pinch of 2020, or you just are just a small operation you don't have a ton of hands, reach out to volunteers however you would normally reach out to them, loop them in and see if you have anybody with experience and interest that can help you. So one best practice that I recommend utilizing for social media year round is scheduling. Pretty much all platforms have a way for you to schedule and free tools you can use as well. Facebook's publishing tools, which everyone with a Facebook page has access to. They also have their creator studio which they rolled out I think earlier this year. You can schedule your posts there and create your posts ahead of time so that they post on a schedule you tell them when you want it to post and it'll post. And Twitter has a free tool that's called tweet deck that Twitter users all have access to that you can use to schedule tweets you do not have to sit there and live tweet on giving Tuesday. Or you can just save that kind of effort for things that need to be announced real time like hitting a goal. Send it to Buffer and Hootsuite, which are paid programs they do have nonprofit programs a nonprofit discount, I believe, can be a really great help especially with Instagram, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, but scheduling ahead of time will help you, integrate your social media with your larger promotional plan and free up space in your day, and in your head to focus on the things that on the things that need your attention in real time on Giving Tuesday. It's usually a long day for people running campaigns and so anything you can do to make your life easier is something that I highly recommend. So these tools are available, they will help you and it's a best practice to make use of them. All right, so now we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of the types of content that you want to post on social media for Giving Tuesday. So we talked about this a little bit earlier but these are the specific types of content you'll want to have ready for Giving Tuesday. You don't need to do all of these things but if you did we can guarantee you that your social media posts will be more lively and engaging and your campaign's branding will be better overall. First, as we talked about earlier you will need stories that includes testimonials, quotes, permission to tell all of these stories if they belong to other people and it can also just be a general campaign focus and story that you're telling about your non-profit. That can work but even within a campaign that's about a larger program or your larger big picture goals it's helpful if you're able to within that fits and stories about real people that have been helped by your work, things that you've done in your community just to help build an emotional connection with your followers and inspire them to donate and give them an actual example of the impact that you have. You will need images and in many cases this is just gathering everything into one place as I said and you'll also want to think about video because while it's not a requirement to have a video it does really well on social media and can really help your non-profit be seen on social media and it can inspire people to donate because a video is a multi-sensory experience for the donor and can get them involved emotionally in ways that copy or photo really can't and think about other graphics you might need like a logo that's specific to Giving Tuesday an infographic even things just like a Facebook cover photo or video and Twitter banners and avatars that have some Giving Tuesday branding in them so you really can make your whole social media presence integrated with your Giving Tuesday campaign and again I don't work for them but I recommend them all the time because I use them all the time canva is a really great place for this and they also have some great templates that you can use for things like Instagram posts and stories Facebook cover photos and so on and finally you'll want to think about copy which is what pulls all of these elements together so you can have a video you can have an image but what is the context of that video what is the context of that image so you'll need somebody who can sort of write that out and write some copy for your posts excuse me so I want to talk for a minute about the storytelling aspect of content because it's really important and honestly dictates whether or not your content is successful on social media at the heart of whether a post succeeds and motivates people to donate to give is whether or not your story is successful at explaining what you do and getting them emotionally involved so the first thing you've got to do is find your story and then find smaller stories that fit within that larger story I really recommend crowdsourcing this when you can because sometimes staff members and volunteers can remember things that you didn't or just in a better position to get those stories because they interact with people on a day-to-day basis and if staff members and volunteers are all mentioning the same story to you you can bet that it's a pretty good one and it's going to run it's resonate with a lot of people one thing that I've also done before and attempt to find what my story is this year is just browse through my photo files and see what I've got and if there are any images or videos that I already have that stir up an emotional response in me that I could potentially use to tell a story about the nonprofit that I work for on social media you'll also want to be sure that if you're tying these stories into your you also want to be sure that you're tying these stories into your overall goals and focus for your giving Tuesday campaign another thing you'll need to consider here is access and finding the right subject so first of all if you don't have access to the subject of a story you can't get permission to tell their story and you can't tell a story involving someone else without their permission and you'll also want to think about whether the subject is right for what you want to do you want a subject that is relatable sympathetic and translate translates well to images and video and quotes so for instance if you have a really great story that involves someone who hates attention and doesn't like the camera and is sort of standoffish then maybe you don't really have such a great story overall and might want to go back to the drawing board or find a different person to tell that story and just remember any story that you're telling for giving Tuesday should be telling this larger story about your nonprofit in the work that you do like with the performing animal welfare society it was a specific story about trucks of dirt being delivered to elephants but it was part of this larger story of the care that they provided for the elephants at their their facilities who were all rescued from you know performances circuses and movies and so on and providing enrichment for them so if you tell a story about a situation that was totally out of the box for you and not representative of the work that your organization does on a daily basis then you're not telling an effective story about your nonprofit so always put any stories you tell through the filter of what is this telling people about our nonprofit and is this reinforcing the story we tell year-round about the work we do so moving on to images here's what you will want to keep in mind first just work with what you've got if you only have smartphones to work with make that work it's okay smartphones are actually powerful little tools that can take excellent high resolution photos and videos so don't think that you need to have Ansel Adams quality photographs to have a good social media campaign but if you do want to step it up you can also see if you have any volunteers to help you with images whether they're photographers or editors because even a photo that's kind of dark and not that great a good photo editor can maybe make that image work for you and make it more striking obviously this is a little bit different this year because of social distancing so photo shoots make sure that you're safe if you need to have a photo shoots but the easiest thing to do is to just work with what you've already got on hand best practices this is a fun tip use faces whenever possible the human brain is wired to seek out faces so in most platforms a face will get people to stop and scroll and if you can post an image of a face with eye contact the odds of them stopping scrolling to look at your photo are even better you want bright clear colors and a little trick that you can use is bumping up the contrast on your photos can help people pay more attention to them you don't want to go crazy with it you don't want to have photos that are so high contrast they look strange but just bumping up the contrast a little bit especially on a photo with a human face and eye contact is social media gold people will stop scrolling and they will look at your post next I wanted to talk about video a little bit because like I mentioned it's a really important tool on giving Tuesday and content that's worth investing some time and effort into first if you have access to a videographer or professional equipment or editing that's really awesome but you don't need those things to make an excellent campaign video for giving Tuesday your iPhone or your galaxy whatever you have they really do take amazing video that's high resolution and totally suitable for social media and as a bonus you can often even edit the video on your phone as I mentioned there's a lot of apps that you can download to edit your video add music and effects add some text overlays and YouTube also has a free editor that you can use so you can do some basic editing to your video and if you are willing to put a little bit of budget behind video editing and a moto which is a n i m o t o and a moto is a really easy program to use and plans are really cheap at eight dollars per month we're not affiliated with them I'm just telling you as a tip from me to you and you can also ask for volunteer help because who knows maybe you have a youtuber in your volunteer base who's really great at editing videos but you've been having them wash dishes or take out trash so really don't feel like you need to make an oscar winning picture here a campaign video can be simple and that can be just as effective as something that was professionally produced videos you do want to keep pretty short at all platforms prefer when you upload your video directly to their platform which is called native video unfortunately sharing youtube videos or sharing the link to youtube videos especially on facebook can actually do more harm than good in terms of your reach because facebook and google which owns youtube are competitors so if you are able to just get the file on your computer or your phone and upload it directly into the platform that you're working on videos are oh this one broke I'm sorry that I was going to show it to you videos are an excellent and versatile piece of content for giving Tuesday so here are some tips for making great videos one write a script and have other people work on it with you or at least give you feedback it's really hard to make a cohesive coherent video without some kind of script that does not mean that you need to have a thick script with every little line written out but at least having a story board or a plan for how you want to tell the story and how you're going to get from point a to point b in your story is going to go a long way to making sure that you have a cohesive video and you want to make sure that you're just telling one story at a time nonprofits often have so much that they want to say about their work but seeking a million different talking points and thoughts and images and streams of thought into one video can just make people confused when they watched it and you really want people to have a simple emotional experience and learn it learn about one specific thing that you do or one specific aspect of what you do and you can also create a storyboard as I mentioned it does not have to be beautiful it does not have to be well done at all you can use stick figures but just plot out the video like frame by frame what do you want it to look like how will it progress and this is really helpful if you're shooting new footage rather than using existing video and you'll want to keep it short I mentioned that already but ideally three to five minutes often even less people have a short attention span and you'll want to format it for the social media platforms that you're going to be using and keep in mind that a lot of people are watching videos posted on social media on their phones now that's actually the norm now so the rule of thumb used to be that you should turn your phone around for a landscape shot but now you actually want to keep it vertical and Instagram for instance will want a square video so you may need to do a few different cuts and different platforms have different times that they prefer so you may need to do some playing around with different cuts of the video and that's where a volunteer or someone who really knows what they're doing in this arena can be a huge help but yeah you can just you know sometimes that you can edit them right in the app if you need to but it's helpful to have maybe more than one cut maybe a short version and a long version that you can use on social media you can also use photo montages if you don't have film footage and you can also splice together video with still photos in most editors so don't be afraid to use still photos in your video at animoto which I mentioned is a drag and drop you can use video clips and you can use photos and you can sort of splice those together and have them fade into each other in a way that makes sense so that's a really great cheap easy to use tool and definitely have a few people review a rough cut of your video to give you feedback catch any mistakes or tell you yeah this didn't really make as much sense to me so that you can make sure that you are putting something out that anybody watching will understand so moving on from video here's some information about other graphics you may want to come create you may want to create a cool giving Tuesday specific logo like the one that's right here on this page or simply just add the date of giving Tuesday to your logo so people have the date in their mind these are easy changes you can make that will help it let will go long way you may also find it helpful to create infographics information about your impact your nonprofits needs your specific programs or even breaking down a specific issue that your nonprofit tackles can be a really great fundraising and storytelling tool canva actually has some templates for infographics that you can utilize if you wanted to add an infographic to your campaign content one thing to think about is what you'll need on the day of so having an image in your back pocket to announce that you say want a prize or that you reached your first one thousand dollars that's really helpful to just be able to pull out and save yourself a little bit of work and hassle on the big day again I love canva it's a free program and they do also have a discounted program for nonprofits and it can be really awesome for these kinds of little graphics that you might need and as I mentioned before they have templates for things like facebook cover photos and youtube banners they really have a ton of excellent templates that you can use that are super easy you need you don't need any knowledge I use photoshop and xd and a slew of other photo editing programs that I know how to use but I still find myself going back to canva because it's just so much easier it's super duper easy so again I have no affiliation with them I'm just sharing that because I love using canva and when you're looking for these kinds of graphics it's such a great tool to use and finally we're going to talk about what kind of copy works for a day like giving Tuesday first you'll want to try to draft things and have at least two people review it this doesn't need to be done in a word document where you're tracking changes you can also just plug the posts into facebook and tweet deck and your whatever scheduling program you're using and just have a few people review it there you'll want to keep your copy easy to read accessible and approachable and what I mean by that is keeping it clear direct and avoiding the use of jargon and inside baseball terminology that may not make sense to people outside of your nonprofit emojis are totally okay to use with social media posts just be careful and judicious with them and make sure that you know what they mean because some of them do have double meanings and you want your copy to be skimmable since you're not writing the next great American novel you're writing a social media post and people have short attention spans on social media so just try to break up any text you have and avoid giant walls of text on social media and with that we'll move on to some platform specific tips on this webinar just for the sake of time I'm really sticking to the big three which are Facebook Twitter and Instagram because there's a lot of platforms out there and if we discussed them we would be here until tonight and frankly these are the platforms that nonprofits use most prolifically so we'll start out with Facebook so Facebook had a golden age where it was basically free democratized marketing for nonprofits back in 2010 and 2014 and so but it's changed a lot since then and now where there used to be benefits there are some specific challenges for nonprofits first and most important is the problem of decreased reach on Facebook pages which is something that nonprofits and businesses have been noticing for a few years now and it's really only gotten worse the reason for that is because in 2017 Facebook made some significant changes to their algorithm that prioritized family members and friends and people's feeds and they made even more changes in 2018 that made conversation and interaction an important factor in whether or not Facebook chooses to put a particular post and a particular user's feed which is a really great feature for users I mean ultimately the platform should serve the users and users want to hear from their family and friends and not be marketed to but it does have some consequences for nonprofits that are using Facebook to connect with supporters they also have some new advertising rules which is basically a result of Cambridge Analytica and the election and you know misinformation so their advertising guidelines have gotten stricter and you'll find that if you skate the edge of those rules your boosted post or ad might get flagged a lot more easily this may not be a huge deal for an animal shelter or a food bank but for nonprofits who are you know say trying to get people to register to vote it can be a huge barrier to getting your ads through their review process and even just your run-of-the-mill everyday posts might get pulled or flagged and users are also generally much more wary of Facebook and filtering to other platforms we're going to talk more about you know people using Facebook in a minute but people on Facebook are generally a bit more cautious about things like making donations and clicking links on Facebook and also this is a really big one that we do need to talk about Facebook rolled out their own fundraising tools a couple of years ago which compete with Mighty Cause and they market that pretty aggressively especially on Giving Tuesday they usually have some prizes available that sound really great they give away a ton of money but usually it's gone very very quickly and the bigger nonprofits are the ones who take that money and win those prizes so there's just a lot of confusion about that we've even had some donors who've been confused they're like I thought I donated but I didn't get a receipt but they actually made their donation through Facebook that happens a fair amount with Facebook just because they do market their their own fundraising tools so aggressively all right so it's not all bad news the good news is that there are workarounds for nearly every challenge that we've discussed the first tip for Facebook is to post algorithm friendly content now it's worth noting that nobody actually knows how Facebook's algorithm works because it's changing and it's really to some degree unique to each user based on what they interact with and how they use the platform but there are some things that we know work better on Facebook Facebook live is a great way to be seen on Facebook and we're going to talk more about live streaming in just a bit because all your followers who have not turned off Facebook live notifications will get a notification letting them know that you're live right now which will prompt them to go view your video Facebook stories are also a great way to be seen and if you're also posting Instagram stories you can link up your accounts and post them to your Facebook page at the same time it's double the content for half the effort so I recommend doing that and they've also added a new feature called a watch party where you can invite people to come watch a video with you it can be your video or somebody else's video and it's really great for expanding your reach because users get notifications that you started a watch party and people who come to the party can also tag their friends and get more people notified and joining that party some old standbys like native video which we talked about meaning video files that have been uploaded directly to Facebook and images always do well and some marketers are noticing that long text posts which used to be a total taboo and something that you should never ever do are actually seeing better results largely because people are spending more time on these posts they're clicking the read more button to keep reading and they're interacting with it so that can be something to experiment with a little bit leading up to giving Tuesday to see if that actually helps your your reach and your post engagement but just try to break up the text don't pause post a giant wall of text but if you wanted to experiment with some longer text posts and see if that helps your reach improve that is something you can certainly do tip two is to boost posts target them well and plan ahead so obviously Facebook is a for-profit company and they like it when you give them money so not only does an ad or a boosted post help that help that specific post reach more people it also means that you are generally rewarded with reach for your other posts when you spend money so come up with a budget it really doesn't need to be much it can be a boost of $10 or $15 for one of your key posts but consider asking the powers that be at your nonprofit for a little bit of advertising money now I've had a lot of people report to me that they didn't get there they boosted their posts but they didn't see great results or they got clicks from people across the country and the reason for that is that they weren't targeting them properly so just make sure that you're using the Facebook targeting tools properly and getting the post in front of the people that you want to get it in front of all right so tip three is to use Facebook if you have followers there there's been a lot of press about Facebook and some buzz around a lot among marketers that Facebook is dead almost every year somebody says Facebook is dead but the data really doesn't bear that out people are still on Facebook and they're still checking their news feeds and it's got millions of active users than literally every other platform in the market 1.69 billion people still log on to Facebook every single day and just to put that in perspective that is more than every single person in the United States so Facebook is far from dead there is some data on this slide but I think the thing that's most important and interesting is Facebook's most active users which are women 35 and above are also the nonprofit sectors most engaged demographics so it's still a place that you would want to be as a nonprofit and we're actually seeing a rise in the use of Facebook in 2020 because of COVID and lockdown people are using it more to stay in touch with the people that they know and finding social interactions on Facebook and they're also using Facebook groups more as well so tip 4 is to avoid the donate button and the reason for that is that the donate button forces donors to donate through your Facebook page instead of your chosen platform so just refrain from using that button on boosted posts or adding it to boosted poster ads and make it clear to your followers that they should donate through the Giving Tuesday portal and that's really important because if you're participating in Giving Tuesday we can only count donations that are made on our platform so since we have no record of donations that occur on Facebook this is a mistake that could cost you on leaderboards if this subject on this subject if there is a donation that you cannot find on your donation report on the Giving Tuesday portal it's often because the donation was actually made on Facebook so you can always contact us for help but that's something that we're seeing happen more and more often so it's really good to just check the donor's receipts to figure out where exactly they donated all right and so I want to move into tips for Twitter so Twitter is a platform that's been getting some media attention lately and it's one that more and more nonprofits are using well the benefits of Twitter are that it's all about interaction and conversation whereas platforms like Facebook and Instagram are more about talking to an audience Twitter's really about talking with them and one cool change that is not by any means new but I'm still excited about is that they've done away with the famous 140 character limit you now have 280 and links and images don't count towards your limit anymore so it's a lot easier to say what you want to say without having to do gymnastics around the character limit and it's always really busy on Giving Tuesday people come to Twitter to share campaigns that they like and get involved in the Giving Tuesday conversation so being on Twitter and being active in conversations can really help you on Giving Tuesday so we already mentioned this in an earlier slide but my first tip is to make use of tweet deck it's a free Twitter product that allows you to do a lot everything from scheduling tweets to monitoring your mentions so that if someone shares your fundraiser you can thank them and engage with them and you can also monitor any hashtags that are that are of interest so you can get in on the conversation you can find it at tweetdeck.twitter.com and you just use your Twitter login credentials to sign in it's a really great tool and on Giving Tuesday your social media manager can just have tweet deck open so that you don't miss anything that's happening on Twitter and also Twitter tweet deck now has a composer which you can do to add things like gifts and polls to your posts so really this is just the easiest way to monitor hashtags and you'll definitely want to set up giving to a tweet deck to monitor your Giving Tuesday hashtags and on that note the next step for Twitter is making smart use of hashtags you'll want to use the Giving Tuesday hashtags but you can use other hashtags that are related to your work like if you're a wildlife rescue using hashtag wildlife or if you're a hunger organization hashtag stop hunger so that you can help your tweets be found by others who are interested in work like yours so pay attention to any trending hashtags and as appropriate participate in them with the caveat that you really need to read the threads to understand what the hashtag is all about before jumping in we've all heard horror stories about companies jumping into trending hashtags that are about something serious and like trying to use them to sell hamburgers or whatever so don't be that nonprofit that goes viral for all the wrong reasons just a quick once over of what's being posted in that that trending hashtag should give you an idea of whether or not this is appropriate for your nonprofit to participate in but it can give you a little bit of a boost and you can see what's trending right when you log into Twitter it's on the side of where your post feed are and posts with hashtags get around 60% more engagement than those without so if Twitter is part of your social media strategy it's in your best interest to use hashtags and just like Facebook certain types of content on Twitter will help you stand out in people's feeds so diversify the type of content you share you can post images use videos you can go live which will result in notifications to all your followers and one thing that can also help as strange as it sounds is using emojis and posts just be sure to use them carefully and understand the meaning of the emoji before using it for instance the peach emoji might seem like a really great idea if you're for instance participating in Georgia gives which is happening on giving Tuesday but you have to know that it has a dual meaning one being that it is an actual peach and kind of represents Georgia and the other meaning is that it's a but so just make sure that you understand the context of the emoji but it is documented that weirdly enough emojis do help you stand out on Twitter so the one last little tip for Twitter is that you can find shortened URLs for Twitter right on Mighty Cause so to get one just go to the page that you want to share typically your organization profile click the Twitter icon and copy we have to click share and then click the Twitter icon and there you should be able to generate a short post or short link that will eliminate the need for services like bitly all right next up is Instagram so Instagram is an image based social media platform and while I personally love Instagram and it's really awesome for things like sharing an outfit or pictures of your cat or your meal it's a platform that a lot of nonprofits have kind of struggled to figure out how to use because it does have some specific challenges the biggest challenge is that you cannot post live links in your posts and users also can't copy and paste them from posts so that is a little bit of a wrinkle because you're trying to get them to go to a specific place on the internet and it's harder to direct them from Twitter you also cannot as easily scheduled posts like you can on Facebook and Twitter which can make managing Instagram a little tougher and the thing that annoys me the most about Instagram and I wish that they would fix this is that there's no desktop API that you can use to post you can basically view and reply to and like posts on Instagram from from your laptop or desktop but everything else is done in app which means that you have to have the app on your personal phone along with any images or videos you want to share which is kind of an extra step if you made something on your laptop and you need to get it onto your phone to upload it onto Instagram and it also for a lot of people gets a little too close to their personal Instagram account for comfort and nobody wants to be the person who accidentally posts a selfie to their organizational Instagram account so it can be a little bit tricky to utilize so they just add some additional challenges to Instagram and there's also a little bit of a generation gap Instagram users tend to skew a little bit younger on average than Facebook users and nonprofit donors tend to skew a little bit older so there's some question about whether or not Instagram is the right place for a nonprofit to find its audience but the good news is that Instagram has plenty of benefits for nonprofits number one it's growing fast and it has one billion active users every month and 500 million people use Instagram stories every day so people are using Instagram more and more and there are more opportunities to be seen and connect with your supporters and since Instagram is owned by Facebook a lot of the tools you want especially advertising tools are available through Facebook meaning that you can set up an Instagram ad through Facebook's advertising API and start using their targeting tools and your saved audiences and that's also a way around not being able to include live links in posts on Instagram because when you're paying for an ad you can post a link you do have a link that appears within the post and it's made for visual storytelling so it's a place where you can draw people in and build emotional connections with images and video and really use some of that great content that you've spent time developing and lastly the coveted millennial audiences using Instagram and I'm a millennial we're actually a lot older than people think we are people think of us as teens in early 20s but we're getting older we're getting spending power and we're starting to get more involved in nonprofit and charitable giving so you can reach that audience on Instagram the zoomers generation Z most of them are on TikTok but some of them are on Instagram as well so the first tip I have for Instagram is a little bit of a technical one but it's to convert your account from a user account into a business account and the reason you should do this is because business accounts on Instagram get features that regular users don't these include a donate sticker that you can use in stories contact buttons and Instagram insights they don't have a ton of data available to you but they do have some additional data that is available to you as a business account to convert your profile you must have a public profile it can't be a private one and you just sign up for a business account you go to your settings and you say I want to want to switch to a business account and you set up your business profile which just involves going into the Facebook API and making sure that everything is connected there so it can be a little bit of a of a pain sometimes but it's pretty easy to do on the whole and it's definitely worth doing the next tip is sticking the link to your giving Tuesday page in your bio you can't post live links in your posts but you can link them in your bio you have a link that you can use in your your account bio which will allow users to get to the page that you want them to visit this does add an extra step for them to be sure but Instagram users are used to this and that if they want to get to a link putting it in your bio is a lot more effective than putting it in text in a post because they can't copy and paste that in Instagram which is something that I also wish they would fix so just put the link in your bio and in your post mention that they can visit the page to support you by clicking the link in your bio it's really easy to do and it can easily get around some of the challenges that Instagram has presented by not making it easier to post links. All right so one of the coolest things about Instagram is stories. Instagram stories were developed in response to the popular popularity of Snapchat a million years ago well a few years ago and stories are live for 24 hours and they disappear unless you add them to your profile as a highlight or you cross post them to your feed and not only are so a lot of people on Instagram that I thought this was interesting don't even look at posts anymore they just look at your stories so it's really important to utilize stories if you're utilizing Instagram because for a lot of users they are not scrolling through your posts they are looking for your story and if you have a new post put it in your story share it to your story that's the kind of early engagement that Instagram wants and it's where a lot of people will find that you have a new post and the great thing about stories is that they're real time Instagram also uses an algorithm like Facebook so sometimes users see posts on Instagram a few days after they were posted but since stories have a limited shelf life there are way to be seen when you want to be seen of course any accounts that you interact with a lot you'll see those stories first but they're at the right at the top of their feed on Instagram so they're super visible and easy for them to access and there's a lot of stuff that you can do with Instagram stories you can post text and photos and video and you can also use filters you can use Boomerang to make short mini videos like doing things like throwing confetti can be really fun with Boomerang and so on one of my favorite things is Super Zoom which zooms in and adds some effects and music and you really just have to experiment to find what you're looking for with Instagram stories but it's definitely a way to add some additional types of content and a lot of it's just built right into the app so utilize Instagram stories when you have a new post there's a little paper airplane icon that will allow you to share it to your story you can also share some of your you know partner organizations stories and get involved and help them out and ask them to do the same it's really a really cool tool that Instagram has perfected and most Instagram users are watching stories so make sure that you get into stories all you have to do is go to your account to your feed and swipe right or tap your story and you'll be able to see the options to post a story all right my next tip is about finding inspiration for Instagram and I know that we're budding up against the top of the hour if you want to stick with me I'm going to keep on rolling but if you need to go we will send out the recording in the slides but I'm just going to keep on going my next tip is about finding inspiration because if you want to do well but you're kind of struggling out to figure out how to use Instagram it can be really helpful to look at nonprofits who are doing a good job on Instagram so look for large nonprofits in your area of interest like if you're an animal shelter you may want to look at the ASPCA or Humane Society Instagrams if you run a food bank check out with what Feeding America is doing and just take note of things like what hashtags they use what types of content they post watch their stories to see how they're using those these larger nonprofits have huge teams of people managing their social media so you can easily get some ideas from how to use for how to use Instagram from the big dogs one nonprofit that always does an awesome job on Instagram is charity water so they're worth checking out since they've definitely been able to harness the power of Instagram really well and you'll also notice that most of their pictures feature people and more often than not they're looking directly into the camera and they've bumped up the contrast in their photos just as a little bit of a callback to our earlier slide about photos so hashtags used to be a really big deal on Instagram and the game used to be to a stuff as many hashtags as possible into a post but now that Instagram has been acquired by Facebook they've gotten much better at content surfacing which means finding content that is relevant to a user's interests and putting it in front of them users can still follow hashtags but every user has an endless page of content that Instagram curates for them so it's not essential to pack in every hashtag under the sun in order to be seen instead you'll want to do a little bit of research and be strategic about using a few hashtags or if you want to do the hashtag packing you can also just do that in a comment and just as a note here it's not on the slide but it's important to know that one of the most important things Instagram looks at when deciding to show your posts to users is early engagement that means people leaving comments liking your post giving it a little heart sharing it in their Instagram stories is really important that's the kind of engagement that Instagram wants to see so one thing that you can do leading up to Giving Tuesday and an easy non-monetary ask is asking your followers to turn on post notifications so that they can get a notification each time you make a post which will prompt them to go to the post give it a double tap leave a comment or share it with their their followers to help you get some of that earlier engagement and get more eyes on your post all right so and I just wanted to sneak in a slide about LinkedIn because it's a platform that even I forget about sometimes but people are active on LinkedIn and it can be a really powerful tool on Giving Tuesday the rules of engagement are a little bit different though so to effectively utilize LinkedIn on Giving Tuesday I would recommend having your C-suite staff or your executive director and director level staff leading the charge on Instagram and reaching out to their personal networks since those are the people who are likely to have the biggest and most most active LinkedIn networks your board of directors can also post about Giving Tuesday on their LinkedIn pages as well so don't forget to ask them because most of your board members are often well connected people and it's helpful to have their reach on LinkedIn you can also tap any sponsors you have any partners to help you get some traction on LinkedIn and talk about their own connection to your nonprofit and your campaign you can also post on groups on LinkedIn although like I mentioned the rules of engagement are a little bit different so read through the rules of the group before posting anything and finally you can you can promote it on your business page which you should have it's pretty easy to set up and it's very different from your your personal profile it would be the profile from which you would post job openings and LinkedIn is a place where having relevant content is important so blog posts guest posts and so on are really great for LinkedIn sharing and you can also just link just post linked LinkedIn links to your Giving Tuesday page if you wanted to share that this is something that you've got going on professionally and you know you had a good time and got some good experience making this campaign all right so we're in the home stretch and before we take questions I really just wanted to make sure we talk about live streaming because obviously 2020 has changed the game and it's an important thing to consider this year especially so a live stream is basically a live video that you do for your supporters and we've touched on it before but I wanted to dig into why it's important to consider for Giving Tuesday this year first it's usually part of the robust marketing strategy in any year at any time because people like this kind of content it feels exciting it feels like something they need to pay attention to right now and they tend to respond to it and interact with it live stream content actually gets about six times more interactions than pre-recorded videos on average and in 2020 when we're all craving human connection these live streaming events are especially important when businesses and nonprofits can't actually hold events you can't gather people and have a big event with your supporters and you can also build it right so this gives you an outlet where you can connect with your supporters in a more personal way than sharing a pre-recorded and edited video with them it allows for more spontaneous interaction with your supporters and you can actually build it right into your mighty cause org pages if you're using Facebook live just embed the Facebook live link into your about section using the toolbar on the top of your about section and boom it'll be in your your about section and Giving Tuesday is actually coming up on its 10 year anniversary soon so Giving Tuesday itself is really no longer a fresh and exciting idea it's definitely exciting but it's no longer new and so adding some live streaming especially if you've never done it before and you've always participated in Giving Tuesday adds a new and exciting component to your campaign that can freshen things up and also if you usually do have a live event like I mentioned this still gives your supporters the ability to interact with your Giving Tuesday campaign in that personal way without actually gathering people in a building which we obviously don't recommend at this particular point in history as I mentioned live streams streams tend to hold people's attention for longer than say an image or a pre-recorded video or just a text post or a link so you'll keep their attention for longer and on mighty cause you can embed your Facebook live into your about section and that will keep them on your page for longer and then they'll be more likely to donate live streaming content can be done on the fly so you don't need an editor you don't need music you just need a camera a phone and a well-lit room or even better go outside into the sunlight and start filming it's an opportunity to feature more stories and use them in a different way and in these tying times trying times we really have to hold on to the little things so a live stream that's fun and engaging and entertaining can really go a long way for your nonprofit and for your supporters so the last thing I'll leave you with is some ideas for what you can do with a live stream and again with live streaming you can get a lot of mileage for very little effort you could try an interview with your executive director or some key staff members or even just people around your nonprofit who have interesting jobs like if you're an animal shelter talking to an animal caretaker about their job could be really interesting to your supporters because obviously they care about how the animals are taken care of and it's also not it's just not a job a lot of people have done and nonprofits actually have a lot of those positions so having interviews with people that you work with you have kind of cool interesting jobs that you see every day but is really novel to your audience could be a great use of a live stream you can also do q and a's where you're answering questions from your audience live which is tailor made for engagement because they're asking you questions and this is something that's really commonly done on instagram and it's just a great use of the big brains and subject matter experts that you have at most nonprofits you want to take their expertise and their perspective and really utilize that with a q and a you know if you again going back to animal shelters if people have pet care questions you can have someone answer that who is an expert so there's lots of ways that you can apply a q and a and people love behind the scenes stuff where you pull back the curtain and allow them into areas of your work in spaces where the public is not usually allowed so you can think of a way of you how you can give people a behind the scenes look at your operations even do a few live streams with a day in the life kind of format like here's what I do during the day you could discuss your impact and do a live with someone who has used your programs and services so if you do have someone who's involved in your story telling this year for giving Tuesday bring them on to a live if you're all comfortable with that and you can also do stuff like a donor spotlight just pick out one of your rock star donors who just goes above and beyond for your nonprofit maybe somebody who's providing a matching grant or even your board members spotlighting volunteers who help at your nonprofit these are all really simple ideas but again the beauty of a live stream is that they do not need to be complex and the simpler you keep it the better off you'll tend to be all right so I know we're over time but I do want to make some time for questions so if you have a question just go ahead and put that into the questions box of the go to webinar panel and we will go through as many as we can okay can you use drafts to schedule posts on Instagram that's a really great question yes you can use drafts on Instagram to schedule posts they don't really actually schedule them you do have to go into Instagram manually and access the draft and then post it but it can be a way to load up your content ahead of time so that all you have to do on the big day is actually go in and post it it's not really in an obvious place but basically when you have a draft that's saved in the app when you go to create a new post you'll see those drafts along with the pictures and videos on your phone's gallery and you can just continue the post from there and also I just want to mention that buffer and Hootsuite do allow you to actually schedule Instagram posts and I believe you can also schedule them from Facebook's creator studio as long as your Instagram and Facebook accounts are connected all right let's see what social media platform drives the most traffic to mighty cause on giving Tuesday and really just year-round Facebook is where most of the social media traffic comes from so above and beyond Facebook is the most popular platform that sends traffic to mighty cause but just as a note it's really really the most common source of traffic and donations is direct links which means that usually somebody clicked a link on an email and they got to the page directly from an email so that's really a good case study for why you need a robust strategy so you want to take social media and also work with email so that you're getting those direct links to people so they can get directly to the page where they can make a donation and just sort of telling these stories in multiple places in a couple of different ways because there's really no like one source but direct links are really the ones who are that that are sending the most traffic to mighty cause in general but Facebook is still where most of our traffic comes from and that's from people at nonprofits sharing links and sending donors to those links okay do you have any posts or videos as samples that you could send or suggest that we get ideas from previous campaigns yeah so we actually on our blog have some case studies they're a little bit older but they do have some screencaps and information about their social media strategy so I'll see if I can round those up in the post with the recording and slides that I'm going to send out so you can read a couple of case studies we don't have any current ones for this year but we can I can definitely try to include some of those case studies so that you can get an idea what other nonprofits who've done well on Giving Tuesday have done in the past okay so I think that is it thank you guys so much for spending time with me today just wanted to mention again everybody will get the slides and recording and if you hung on for the additional 10 minutes or so I really appreciate it this is a big subject and I really wish the best for you on Giving Tuesday happy fundraising