 Hi everyone. This is Susan here at TechSoup. We're going to get started in about one minute. I just want to check all of the sound. I want to do a quick sound check so you guys can hear me and let me know if you can't hear me in the chat box. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and get started and very quickly my name is Susan Hope Bard. I'm with TechSoup. I'm the training and education manager. It's my pleasure to be with you here today for our weekly TS30 and today we're featuring the amazing Adobe Spark and our amazing expert Molly Bacon as well as Jim Lynch will be joining us to share some of our most recent and exciting articles and posts. I do want to quickly share with you my website and the learning platform so that you guys can see and understand that after each of our events we do record place the recording in the date that it occurred. So if you want to go back and watch our April 11th Adobe Photoshop tips you could just go right into that module and you can view the recordings. We also have lots of resources for you to access in the platform and you can see upcoming events as well. We've scheduled out through June 6th. You can simply register for those by clicking on the date and RSVP that you're coming. So without further ado I am going to turn this over to Molly and she is going to take it away with some tips about Spark. Go ahead Molly. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday. So we're going to go through and talk a little bit about Adobe Spark. So I managed the social channels at TechSoup and I love using Adobe Spark for really fast graphics for social media but it has many purposes that you can find helpful for your nonprofit. So we're going to dive in. I'm going to share my platform, my screen with you and show you what is possible with Adobe Spark. Okay. So can you guys see what I'm sharing? Yes. All right. So here we are. So I created this landing page in Adobe Spark and it was very simple. So if it looks intimidating it's actually really easy. So what can Adobe Spark do? So the first thing that I love that I just mentioned is that you can create social media postings in minutes with the quick templates and the best part about Adobe Spark is that your creativity is really going to pop because it helps create things for you. So I created these really simply. So this is an Instagram post. It's designed with the template in mind for creating Instagram posts. So the size is already perfectly for Instagram. There's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. So I created all of these to show you guys what we were, what's capable and you can also design banners, Facebook covers, Twitter headers, different types of postcards that might be helpful for your nonprofit, magazine covers, also posters, and websites. So there's a lot of different things that you can design in the post feature of Adobe Spark. And so here's another example. This is a poster and this is a quoted image and you could also do social ads. So these are all really great examples and you also have the links so you can go back and reference this at any time. And so then you can also create videos. So and these are great because you can create these again in minutes. So I'm going to show you some videos here and let me know if you can see it because we haven't tried this video showing you yet before. So let me know if you can see this video. So this is one video that I created for the promo. Okay, so that was a short little video that I created. All of the footage I actually made with GIFs using Boomerang. So that's another application. And it was really simple. It really took me probably 10 minutes total and it really just starts with an idea. So let me show you another example that I really liked. This one is, it's a Stopped Food Waste campaign created by Danielle and I'll show you what this one is. So that was another great example of how you can convey a story and I'm going to show you one last one so you can get ideas. Is this what our world should be? No. But people litter. Recycle is the key to animals, habitat, and a clean world. When you see it, pick it up and recycle. Thank you for watching and helping us make a difference. Made and narrated by horses. Thank you. So at the end, you can see that it credits everybody in all the products used in the video. That's because a lot of the images come from the Creative Commons and if you have an Adobe Creative Suite Creative Cloud account, you actually can remove all of that branding so it can really be your own. And you can download these videos directly and post them on social and it's just a really great feature that you can even use on their mobile app. So I'll tell you more about that later. And you can also create web pages. So these are more like landing pages. They're just one page scrolling. And they're really, really simple as well to use all template-based. So here's an example of a success story. The Eagles Foundation funds a million dollars to support autism. They kind of told their whole story on a web page. Then there's another example of a call to action. So the Brookfield Beekeeping Ordinance Group urges the public to take action to support legislation for residential beekeeping all within just one page. So they're driving traffic to this page asking people to call their representatives. And then there's also, you could spread your message. So you can create monthly newsletters that you send out in emails. And you can have this really beautiful visual design assets. So this one was about getting the message out about sexual violence in Africa. And so that's a great way to do that. And then also fundraise. So you can get a group together and or this group got together and set up a page for fundraising. And they basically told the story of the ambassadors of Hope College Scholarship Fund and how they wanted people to donate. And you can have a button on the page and have people donate. This was another one where they were trying to create a movement. And it was a page to explain and empower a movement of feminism. And our very own TechSoup has an Adobe page that we use to celebrate our staff. And this was created by Ali. And so I'm going to show you this page and also the page we're looking at right now I created. But I'm going to show you this one just so you can see one more example. So here we kind of showcased customer service. And it just is really cool the way you can have images scroll and have all these different features. And so you can really kind of create a visual story. And so all of these platforms really represent creating stories. So it's a storytelling platform. So we're going to go back. So again, you can design in on the web, which is what we're going to walk through today. And I'm going to show you inside the platform how to do that. But you can also use your mobile device and it has to be an iOS device. So your iPad or your iPhone. And there's separate platforms for each or separate apps for each each thing you want to create. So for the post, the first thing I showed you, there's a separate mobile app for a page making a landing page. There's another app and then for video, which is really awesome. I highly recommend it. You can use for editing videos. And so you can do these all on web or on the web, it's in one platform and on your phone, it's in different mobile apps. So feel free to download those. I have the links here. So what will you create? So also reminder that you can unlock the full potential with the Adobe Creative Cloud. And we do have a story makers campaign this fall. So keep that in mind. So come back to this page at the end. But let's dive into the platform. So here we are. So all my projects live in inside here. So you can see that I created a bunch for the page, the landing page and a bunch of them are here. So some of these were my promo videos. You can see it says post or video and page. So next let's try to create a post. That's the one that I use the most for social media. So here you can see that we have you go to create a post. So if you click the post, it will instantly take you to the platform. Sometimes it takes a little second to load, but it does remind you of amazing little quotes to get you inspired. Usually it doesn't take this long. So I do apologize. So what other tips could you share while we're waiting for that to load? Yeah. So one of my tips was that using the mobile apps is really great for if you want to do on the fly kind of editing videos. So that's really great for that. I personally like using the platform for making webpages because it's a larger. They also have a new feature that's going to be released very soon that they it's called Bloom and that's going to make it so the webpages can be responsive. I really like that they're adding that feature because it will look amazing on a mobile device right now. It doesn't look it's not designed or equipped for mobile. And you know Spark only came out about a year ago. So there's a lot of features to come and it's kind of amazing how how much is already in the platform and how much you can do. So let me go back and try to refresh this and see what's happening here. Okay, maybe it can just go into an existing. See if this goes quicker. Sorry, I apologize for this delay. I would love to take you guys in the platform and show you all the tips. Okay, here we go. So when you get in the platform, the first thing it usually asks you is to create text. So that's the first thing that you do. And that what I did was I actually wrote in slide because I was creating a slide. So this one was formatted for a specific slide. So basically you can take the text here and it automatically will give you a design. So this was the design that it gave to me right away. So if I go to this section we start with the design. It's formatted for a slide because that was the option that I chose. But remember that there's all different types of template sizes. So at the very beginning you do select that. So here we go to the different design filters. So you just simply can click and go down and see right away all the different types of options that you have. But then you can definitely go and make it much cooler. So next you can go to the layout. So here in the layout you can change the margins and we have it clicked for magic layout because that's going to automatically kind of change the text as we play with the layouts. So we also have banners so you can add kind of this look and feel if you want to add some color or make your text pop. There's also grids so you can have kind of dual sides have an image or a color or again two images you can have two frames. And then you can also resize it. So if you decide that you change your mind and now you want to do an Instagram post it's really simple to switch back. So that's what I really like about it and that's a that's a really neat feature. And so moving forward now let's change maybe our color palette. So if we go back to palette you can click here and see that each time you click down it's going to change the color within the palette. So that's kind of a tip right there. You don't just click it once you can actually keep clicking and it's going to continue to change your theme. So if we go back so just know that there's endless of options with the palette when you first when I first saw this I thought oh you just click one but actually you keep clicking down and it will continue to change it. And then another thing is the background you can add filters so we can add a filter to the photo. You can change it back to a specific color if you want to get rid of the photo. You can always also replace here and search for a new photo. So for instance it will go to any free photo available on the web and you can simply add that in there. And that's really cool because these are all creative common images. So you can use these right away in your social media efforts or any marketing effort or whatever you're designing. And so moving forward this feature is also very amazing. So now that my text is selected it's we're on the text tab. We're just going to scroll here and you're going to see that it's going to change our designs. Let me make this bigger for you. So again you just kind of simply and intuitively drag the arrow. You can drag it here too. Let's straighten that out and let's continue to drag this. So you can see you could just have endless options. So sometimes I even just before I go into Adobe and make you know an illustrator graphic sometimes I just come here and get inspiration. So that's another tip that I use. But really you can create all of your designs just in here. So we like that one maybe. You can also add shapes to the background of the text. So you can kind of change that. And it really is endless options. So you can continue to scroll and play with that here. This one's fun. And then you can click done and you can always go back and you can also change the type of font. So they have all different kinds. And then you can also change the spacing of the design. So we're changing it here. And this is just by clicking down here. So that so you can remember with this platform sometimes you have to click a few times but you're actually changing it. And with the line it's the same way. We're doing center side and center. And then you can change this as well. So you can make it less visible or more visible. So that's pretty much it for the post. So then when you're done you click share. So I'm ready to share my posts with the world. And you can say that you want your author. You want to be shown as an author. You can select what category. So causes or events or whatever you're doing. And if you do have the creative cloud suite you can remove the branding. So that's a nice feature there. So that when you download it right here you can directly download it. Save it to your computer. Or you can get a link and share it to the world. So if you want to get noticed on Adobe Sparks website another great feature to kind of get your name out there if you're a designer or your organization and you really want you know more SEO stuff. You can do that as well. So you can create the link here and then you can share this link. You can tweet it out email it or Facebook it or direct download. So I think we have another second. I'm going to just try to show you guys one other thing. So let's go to the video and see if we can get in here. So we're going to make a video. So let's do hashtag make it awesome because this is our hashtag for the Adobe campaign we have right now. So here you have all these different templates. So these are great because in these templates they're actually going to tell you they're going to lay out the entire thing for you and tell you in each slide or each snippet of the video what you should be doing. So if you're if you need help start there but we're going to just go with make up our own and start from scratch. All right here we go. And also this is what I wanted to show you all last time is that at the beginning it always gives you a tutorial. So it's so simple. You'll always know how to do what you need to do. And so we're here and again it's all about the theme selecting the theme first but you can go back and change it anytime so you don't have to be set on it. So let's choose this theme and then it's very simple again. We're going to add video. I have some really cool kind of gifts again. It's from that video I first showed you of a butterfly. And so this isn't even a real movie. This was a boomerang that turned into a movie but it was just a gift. So you can use those as well but it has to be an mp4. So here you see this is it and you can shorten it. So maybe we just want to start at the end or whatever. You can change the length up until the entirety of the video. So there we go. And then so this is my first one and you can add text on top. So make it awesome. And then we're going to add another one. We're going to click right here and add another side. And this time let's add an icon. Ocean's my favorite one because I'm always thinking about the beach. So add this. And you can also add a video in the background on top of it or you can just stick to the icon. And right here in the corner, a pro tip, you can change the length. So we'll do two seconds for now. And over here the layout it's going to optimize so we can do two things at once if we want to add text, create, or you can go back to the full screen. Okay, I think I got confused for a second but it's okay. And then we can add one more slide. This time let's try two things. And let's add a photo of the ocean. And then you can zoom in here to make it fit that whole frame. And then let's add some text. Okay, so sorry this doesn't really make sense but just for example. And then you can also have whatever video you want. You can add your own music, a very cool feature because sometimes being limited to the creative comment options is limiting but they do already have all of these sounds in here. So we can select a sound and then we can play our video. So already we have a video and you can also add your own audio right here. Another great feature so that's why I said on the mobile app sometimes it can be fun to kind of you know shoot it on your phone and then just create that create the video right away. I mean it's a very fast thing so you can add audio if you want for storytelling. And so this is very simple. We can go back and we can actually re-change the entire theme and you'll see it does change. So once we've created a new video. And again this ending slides if you do have the creative cloud it will remove that branding. So again when you're finished you just go to share. You can directly download. You can add the author out of step title. Pick a category. And then you can again add the photo credits if you want but if you have that exclusive kind of paid feature you can turn that off. And you can decide to get noticed and then you can create the link. Okay so we don't need to do that here. So one last thing I'm going to show you is we don't we don't have time to go through it but this is I'll show you very briefly is how to create a page. So just because it's so simple I'm going to show you really quick. So here we're creating a web page the same one that we started with. It's the same type of thing and again they love their templates in Adobe Spark so everything's so simple. So it's just and then here you can add a video from YouTube. You can't actually upload a video to this one but you can create a spark video and then add the link here. A button. So that's how people are doing their donate page. So you can add donate and you rank it back to your website. And you can add again a photo. So we're going to go find that free photo. A new ocean picture. And this just really quick. You can do the window so it fits this way. Add a caption. Fit full. Full width. And then there's also other features to do photo grids and the glide show. So that's kind of how you saw images kind of moving in some of those other ones. So it's all again very simple. And so when you're done you can preview it. So let's add a photo here first. Before it goes live you can preview it. So that's a really nice feature as well. So I'll show you this. So now we just made a little web page. And again you can remove the credits if you do have that paid feature. And yeah that's I don't know if this is going to reload now. I hit the back button. But again it would just be the same way you go to publish that page. You just click share here. And this time you're going to actually have to create a link because the link is going to be where you send everybody and send that traffic. So that's it for today everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope this was helpful and I hope you feel inspired to go create your own stories with Adobe Spark. Great. So now we're going to turn it over to Jim. Hi everybody. Hi. I'm Jim. I'm a Senior Writer here at TechSoup and I'm here to show you the new content things that we have available for you. So let me share my screen. There we go. If you like free Adobe stuff well here's more. So we have this landing page that is our 20 days of Adobe which is a pretty cool thing. There you can see that that's a free thing that we just did right this second and I'm doing currently. But every Tuesday and Thursday we're updating this page. And by the way we're going to send you these links through the we're going to send you the links in the recap of this webinar. There's a ton of stuff on here and we're adding stuff every week and it's been going for about nine or 10 days. So this is a great, great page. I love this page. Let's see what else do we have. TechSoup has a lot of stuff on it. I just wrote this thing not too long ago and so I am really, really surprised at all the free cool stuff we have which is kind of tech support and things that you can get on TechSoup to tech up your nonprofit in terms of your knowledge. So of course our TechSoup courses are moving along at a pretty quick pace. You can see a lot of them there. A ton of stuff on Adobe and technology planning is a four-course series which is pretty great. So you can figure out your technology roadmap for your organization. We have that on there. We have webinars every week, always free. We have how-to articles. We've got a bunch of them. Here are the ones that are pretty popular on TechSoup. We have in-person training events from something called NetSquared. We have our blog and I'm the guy who writes a bunch of stuff for that kind of stuff. Here's a few stories that we have done recently on our blog. We have discussion forums. If you have any question on technology, any kind of question, just go there and ask them. Of course, no charge. What else do we have? Here's a thing that we published on our TechSoup for Libraries page. Love it. This is a free technology resource and the thing is called You Can Do It. It was designed for libraries, but I think it works pretty well for any kind of organization. And it's a thing that will provide basic technology skills for your staff. That's the idea of it. So it's once again designed for libraries, great for nonprofits as well. Here's a fairly recent article that I really love. This is an international organization called Chain. They're all about creating privacy, online privacy tools and pointers for women in crisis and battered women. So they have this free Do It Yourself Online Safety Guide, which is one of the best things out there. It's actually an e-book. And there, of course, is a link to that e-book in this article. And in this article, we tell you a few things that's in there. Here's a few tips on that. And then finally, I want to just say that one of the most popular things we do these days is the grant station promotions. If you're looking for grant funders, this is a great thing. $99 for one year is special promo we've got going on May 16th and 17th. So check out this page if you're looking for grant funding leads. So there we go. That's all we've got this week. Over to you, Susan. Great. Thanks so much, Jim. Great roundup of all of those articles. I've chatted those out so they should be in your chat box. And they're also in the links. You can save those to your desktop or go right there. I've also shared out Molly Spark. Huge thanks to Molly who's sitting right next to me. Who she is. A huge thanks to Molly because she was so excited about Spark. She couldn't wait to share it with you. And I think there's lots of other things that she'd like to share about Spark for those of you, you know, designers that are non-designers. And hopefully we can get her back to share some other Spark tips and tidbits. Make sure that when you exit this platform today, you take the time to do the survey. It is right in the module that for the date. Today's date is the 9th. May the 9th. Go to May the 9th. And there's a survey in the middle column. You just click on that. It's just a few questions to tell us how you thought this mini webinar tips and tricks all about Spark kind of getting you excited, kind of lighting that fire. And we will see you next week where we will be talking a little bit more about grant station. We'll probably have five to ten tips about why you should think about ordering grant station. And then after that, we'll be doing some more Adobe products. So we look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you so much for your time. Have a great day.