 Welcome to How to Make Your Campaigns More Viral. My name is Becky Wiegand with TechSoup, and today we are joined with Jim Pugh from Share Progress. To give a quick introduction, again my name is Becky, and I'm the Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. And I've been here for about 5 years coming from a background of working for a series of small nonprofits in Washington, D.C., and Oakland, California, and now San Francisco, where I had to solve a lot of problems without technical expertise and run campaigns, and just try and make things work while wearing many hats. So I know many of you may be in a similar position, and so we're really thankful to have access to experts like our presenter today, Jim Pugh, who is a CEO of Share Progress, and came to share progress from having worked for the 2008 presidential campaign and organizing for America as one of the data gurus that helped successfully win the Obama election, and is still working on many campaigns for different public policy and political causes across the country. You'll also see in the back end, Ali Bostekian from TechSoup who will be there to grab any of your questions and help you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. Just to quickly go over today's agenda, we'll spend just a couple of minutes introducing TechSoup since we're your hosts today, and we'll take a couple of minutes to have you tell us a little bit about you that will help inform our presenter who's joining us live on the phone today so we can better speak to your needs. And then I'll hand over to Jim to talk about pressing the viral button and what that means, and is that a real thing that you can just do, or is it a little bit of a misnomer? And also what is virality? And then he's going to give us some examples of campaigns that have been optimized and what the differences are between one that's been optimized and one that's not, and what the impact is on their numbers when they're able to optimize. And then we'll have time for Q&A. So quickly launching into who is TechSoup or what we do, what we are, we're part of TechSoup Global, and this is our mission statement. We are working toward the day when every nonprofit social benefit organization has the tech, knowledge, and resources to operate at their full potential. And part of that is hosting webinars like this where we hope that you'll come away with some expertise that you've garnered from our experts here and can use that to better meet your organization's mission. And we are a 501c3 nonprofit. You can see a little bit about our impact across the global sector of nonprofits and libraries with more than $3.6 billion in IT expenses saved in 56 countries across the world. Most of those are donated from 63 different donor partners in the US including companies like Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, and Symantec. So if you're not familiar with our donation program and you come from a nonprofit or library background, definitely check us out at TechSoup.org to see what kind of donated software, hardware, and services that you can access through our program. Now onto the topic of the day, quick poll of our participants. Can you let us know have you run an online campaign before? This will help us understand sort of what your background is individually. So have you, Cynthia, you, Daniel, you Christian individually? Have you run online campaigns before for your organization or your cause or your library? This will help inform kind of what your level of experience is. Are you the expert that should be a presenter on this webinar today? Just give a couple more seconds for you to respond to that by clicking on one of those radio buttons on the screen. We have some folks chiming in in the chat saying, yep, or no, I've not. No previous online campaigns. So we can see that about 52% have not but would like to start. A few people saying that they're not sure, so maybe a quick definition of online campaigns, what that is, what that means might be helpful when we get started to make sure we're all on the same page. So I'd say the majority of our users have either not or have only done it a couple of times. So that helps a lot in informing some of the direction that we'll take with the content. And then one other quick question, what size is your organization's email list? Go ahead and select one of these. You're not sure that's okay as well, and this isn't used for anything but the purposes of this webinar. We're not linking this to your name or your organization or anything like that. It's just to give us an idea of how many people are currently on your list that you're reaching through email so that we can get an idea of what sort of audience you're working with currently. Just a few more seconds to let people participate and then we'll move along. It looks like that half of our group almost is less than 1,000, and almost the other half is 1,000 to 10,000. So that's helpful I think in informing where most of our organizations on the phone are coming from, most of our participant organizations. So with that I'd like to go ahead and introduce our presenter today. So we're really fortunate to be joined by Jim Pugh from Share Progress who is truly an expert leader in this field. No matter what your political stripes, there's a lot of competition in getting people like Jim to share some of their wisdom on how they've been so successful in creating viral campaigns. So welcome to the program Jim. We're so glad to have you. Jim Pugh Thanks for running me, Becky. Look forward to this. So as you may have gleaned from the poll questions, we're really going to be focused today on online campaigns and looking at morality there. And for those of you who have run a campaign before, if when you have been creating and setting up that campaign, if you did look in whatever system you're using and try to find that viral button, you probably saw it wasn't there. Unfortunately it's a bit harder than just clicking a button to make the campaign go viral. But there are some key things that can be useful to know about that and some key approaches that you can use to actually make your campaign to be at least more viral, not actually go viral. So as was mentioned, I'm Jim Pugh from Share Progress. It's a startup that I run for about the last year. And we work primarily with nonprofits to help them get more of their online supporter base to effectively act as social ambassadors and to share the campaigns they're running and the comments they're producing and get more of their friends to see it and engage. So let's get started. So to begin with, let's just begin with, start with the definition. What is virality? Viral is a word that gets thrown around all the time. But it's often something that people don't have really a front-back to what exactly it means. Some recent usages that I've heard when I was trapped in this presentation, people asking, oh, go make me a viral video. Or there's a viral campaign happening right now on Twitter. And literally as I was creating this slide for presentation I received an email that said, social media goes viral on Capitol Hill. So people use it all the time. They know it means something is going big, but what's a key thing to note about virality? It's not just how many people are seeing something or doing something. It's actually a measure of growth. It's how many people are actually sharing this with their friends and how is that causing the number of people either seeing the video or taking part in the campaign to grow beyond that initial launch, that initial push. So there's not going to be, for those of you who are concerned about it, there's not going to be much math in this presentation. I do want to go into some very top-level definitions though, so you have a sense of what virality literally means. So a key concept to be thinking about for virality is what's called the virality ratio. And what that is, it is a measure of growth when you have a video or a campaign you push out there, how much it's spreading. And what it actually tells you is that for every new person that comes in, for every person who sees that video, for every person who signs the petition, on average how many people are they recruiting them to come back in and also see the video or also sign the petition. Because what that will tell you is what it looks like over time as people engage with your content and tell their friends about it. So something that actually goes viral is something where that virality ratio, where that amount of spread is actually greater than one. So for every person that comes in, they're actually getting more than one of their friends to come back and check it out as well. And so what happens then is you get this explosion that even if you start with only a handful of people, you can end up with thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands of people coming in and engaging because those people are telling their friends and friends are telling their friends and it just gets bigger and bigger. Now what happens in almost every case is that you actually have something which is sub-viral, which means that ratio is less than one. So you could have something that people tell friends about, oh, this is kind of a cool video. Let me send this to one or two people I know. But maybe those people aren't so interested or did do with work and so most of them don't actually check it out. What happens then is that you can still get your content spreading. People can still pass it along, but it will kind of, the spreading rate will slow down and you'll get this kind of plateauing effect beyond that initial group of people that you launched to. So just to give you some examples, you can see what this really means. We can look at a couple of different virality ratios for hypothetical campaigns here and look at how that affects how much they spread. So let's say that we're talking about some petition that's being launched and you're sending it out and you're going to get 5,000 people assigned. Now if you have a virality ratio of .01, that means that only one out of every 100 people who sign it is going to get someone else to sign it. So you send it out to those 5,000 people and they sign it. Those 5,000 people then tell a couple friends about it and they get 50 more people to sign it. And then those 50 people tell some folks but they only convince another one person. So really you haven't gotten that many more people than just your initial launch. Now in the second case we can look at what happens if we have a virality ratio of .1 or 10%. In that case your initial 5,000 people actually recruit another 500 people to come in time. Those 500 people recruit another 50. And in the end you end up with an extra 550 some odd who have come in in time beyond that initial group D launcher. Now if you start getting virality ratios that get closer to 1, you start to see the power of how this plays out over time. If you have .5, you already just through that spreading across people passing along to friends and then those friends passing along, you can end up with almost double how many people you start with. And if you get something that's either almost viral of .9% or actually is viral of .1%, you can turn those initial 5,000 people into either 32,000 if it's almost viral. Or if you actually cross that threshold and get something that goes viral where people are recruiting more people and more people coming in, you can really get an explosive growth and turn that initial 5,000 to 80,000 later. So just to dig in a little bit more and try to understand what's going on here, we can actually look at something that's called the viral loop. And this describes how growth actually works in the context of the campaign here. So there's really three steps to the process. The first one is the action step. And that's actually having someone who's coming to your site take the action that you want. So if it's a video, it's actually someone watching a video. If it's a petition, it's actually them adding their name and submitting the form on the website to design that petition. Once they've taken the action, the next step is for them to invite their friends. It's someone who says, oh, that was either a really cool video or if it's a petition, something that really matters to me, I should be telling people about it. So maybe they post it on Facebook. Maybe they post it on Twitter. Maybe they email their friends. Maybe there's someone down the hall from them that say, hey, check this out. I'm going to send you a link right now. But however they do it, they end up inviting people to come in and to engage as well. And so the next step is to respond to them. And that's seeing how many of their friends that they ask are actually responding. If they post on Facebook, people may look at it and say, whoa, that's really cool. I want to check this out. Or they may say, eh, I'm busy with other stuff and ignore it. But the number of people respond there that determines how many people are coming back to your website or to your video page and then have the potential to take action as well. And that's where the loop repeats. And so if you want to figure out what our buy-rally ratio is here, all we have to do is you have to go through these steps one by one and look at and we're really just multiplying what's happening at each step, how many people are taking action, how many people are inviting, how many of those people are responding, and that will tell us what that ratio is and what our growth is on the campaign. Okay, so that is really how buy-rally works. So hopefully that gives you a better sense of what's going on. But really the next question is, okay, I see that, but how can I increase it? Because you really want to know how when you're pushing out a video or running a campaign that you can get more people through buy-rally growth. So the key thing to remember is what we just talked about, which is that your buy-rally ratio is the action rate multiplied by the invite rate multiplied by the response rate. What that means, if you can improve any one of those steps, if you can either get a higher action rate, a higher invite rate, or a higher response rate, that means your buy-rally ratio is going to go up. So the trick is how do we improve those rates? So let's take a look at a simple example campaign here. Let's say that your organization is launching a petition. And it's a petition that people are somewhat interested in. They want to sign it and tell their friends about it. So you start with a buy-rally ratio of 0.1. So on average, for every person who signs, they're going to recruit 0.1% which I mean that means for every 10 people who sign, they're going to recruit 1%. What happens in the end is that this will increase the total number of actions you get beyond your initial launch by 11%. So it's not a ton, but you're getting a boost there. But now let's think through what happens if we can actually do optimizations and improve those different steps that we just talked about. So you have your petition page where you're asking people to sign. Now if you make smart choices about how that page is designed, if you do web page optimization, you can actually get it so more people who are coming to that page are actually signing to the petition. So let's say we make the smart choices, we make some adjustments to the page, and we increase the number of people who are taking action and signing a petition by 20%. So next we look at that invite step where we're asking people, or getting people to tell their friends about it. If you are again, use good practices about how you set up a follow-up share page for the petition, or you're actually asking people to post on Facebook and on Twitter and to any of their friends, you can actually get a lot more people share than if you don't have that, if you're using either some very basic straightforward share button, a Facebook Live button, or not having anything at all. So by using Dr. Sharon, you can actually get as much as 60% of more people to be telling their friends and saying, hey, I just signed a petition, you should too. And then finally the last step is how do you get those friends that people have reached out to to then come back and engage and sign up and check out that petition as well. To do that, really what's going to make a difference is what language people are using. They email their friends or when they post on Facebook, what are they saying, how are they encouraging their friends to get involved. And if you can make smart choices about that, you can actually get a lot more people who are first listening through and coming to check out your site. So now if we take the equation we had before looking at how we calculate their Vibrality Ratio, we started this Vibrality Ratio of 0.1. 20% of higher action rate means that we're increasing it by 20%. 60% of higher sharing rate means that we're increasing it by additional 6%. And a 30% higher rate means that we're increasing it by an additional 35%. What that works out to is you went from a Vibrality Ratio of 0.1 to 0.26. So we more than doubled it by making these optimizations. And what that translates to is that instead of just getting an extra 11% of people coming in and transition, you're getting an extra 35% now. So if you started with 1,000 people instead of getting an extra 100, you're getting an extra few hundred by making those changes. Hey Jim, just to interrupt you really quickly. Sorry to jump in here. We had a couple of questions just where people were asking for clarification around what's an action page and a share page. Can you just define what those would look like? And I have to say you must be really good at math because percentages, not my forte, but I can understand the point of getting better impact off of these individual pages and if you increase those rates, which in just a few minutes he's going to show us some examples of what an optimized page looks like and what an optimized share page looks like to give us ideas of how we can actually tweak those things in real world. But if you could quickly just answer what's an action page and a share page, what do those mean? Yeah, absolutely. So an action page is when you have a petition you're running online, you want people to put in their information, put in their name, put in their email address, maybe where they live in order to sign that petition. So the page where they do that, that's where they're taking that action. That's where they're signing. So that's what we call the action page. So ideally when you want the people who are coming to that page who are interested in your petition, you want more of them to be adding their name there and then putting in their information and then clicking submit on that form. The share page is after they click submit, generally what will happen is that you'll get a page that says thank you for signing. And on that page you can say now will you tell your friends? And then you can encourage them to, you can give them this button that says post on Facebook. So if they have a Facebook account they can say okay, they can click that and say I just signed a petition, you should too. And maybe you have a button to share on Twitter and so on. That's really helpful. And I think that could be for a petition like you mentioned or it could be for some other kind of action too like could it be if somebody is signing on to your campaign or saying that they want to be a supporter of your cause or whatever it might be that that page that they're signing themselves onto is the action page. And then there's an invitation for them to share it with friends or family or colleagues as the landing page after they get to that. Absolutely. When people come to our site if you have a page where they can join your organization and sign up for your list, that could be this as well. That action page could be that form where they sign up for your list. And then you can follow that with the share page. Okay, well and the person who asked one of those questions is asking specifically what it means to be optimized and that's what's coming up in these case studies. So he'll go over some specific examples of what it means to optimize those pages in just a couple of minutes. So stay tuned. Jim back to you. Thank you. We are definitely going to give you some more concrete examples. And I'm not going to go in depth through the second example campaign. But what you can see here is that if you start with a campaign that are from the start is more viral that instead of having a viral ratio of 0.4, you have 0.1, you have 0.4. By doing this optimization you can actually turn something that is sub-viral into a viral campaign by increasing that viral ratio above 1. And then you get that exposed to growth. So with that said, let's move on to some concrete examples. So we're going to look at two different case studies now. The first one comes from Credo Action which for those of you who aren't familiar with their organization that does a lot of petition campaigns around politically progressive causes. And the example we're going to look at from them is actually a petition they ran against Monsanto. This was a petition they launched back in May of this year. The US Congress had passed a law which gave extra special protections to Monsanto that prevented, protected them from lawsuits. And so they ran a big campaign to say this is not a fair law. We need to stand up and tell Congress to repeal this. So Credo does a lot of online campaigning. They actually have a very big list of online supporters, more than 3 million people in contact. So often their petitions get 10, 300, 100,000 people to sign on. So in this particular case, so generally for those of you who haven't run online petition campaigns or some of the ones before, most of the signatures you get on those campaigns are from the outreach that you as an organization do directly. So when you send an email to people who are subscribed to your email list saying, hey, this is important, they sign this, they'll sign it, and then you'll get a little bit more sometimes from people who are passing along with their friends. But it's usually not very much, usually less than 2% of those signatures you get are from people who are passing along. In this particular campaign, Credo actually got 13% of their signatures from social sharing. And this was a big campaign. They had over a quarter of a million people who signed it. And so what that meant is that they actually got 25,000 new people who had never been involved with Credo before to sign on and then get involved with Credo through that campaign. So this was a big growth moment for them. Not only did they get a lot more support on this particular petition, but they got a lot more supporters out of it as well. So how do they do this? And the answer is that they use the process I was just describing. They optimize participation, and just a minute I'll explain more what that means. They use the share progress, share page in order to get a lot more people to tell their friends about it, and then they optimize their share language. Again, I'll define what this actually means in a second, but in order to improve everyone in the steps of the process to make their campaign more viral. So first thing, optimize petition page. This is an example of an action page that I was mentioning earlier. This is the webpage that people will come to when they are considering signing the petition. So they are able to put in their name, their email address, and their location here, and then click sign the petition button in order to add their name there. What Credo did was to actually do testing on this page where they would try out different versions of the page. They would try out using different titles or you see in the top right corner, they have a thermometer to track the progress. They actually tried all what happened when they had that and when they didn't. And it is comparison to see what actually motivates people most to want to sign this petition. And it turns out by making, sometimes by making very small adjustments to the page, you can actually convince a lot more people to sign who are coming here. And so through that testing and those adjustments they made, they were able to increase the number of people who were signing their petition by around 20%. So as I said, those sometimes very small changes can make a big difference. The second step was that they used a share progress, optimize share page, which when I say optimize here, I actually mean a very similar thing. We at Share Progress have spent a lot of time designing and trying out different pages or different designs in different language that can be shown to people after they sign a petition or after they sign up for an email list or after they make an online donation in order to encourage them to tell their friends. Using a lot of inspiration from social psychology to figure out what actually makes people more motivated to reach out, but also looking at when we had a design, looking at what happened when people came to the page and how they responded, and then making sure we were using approaches that actually got people to be more inclined to email their friends or to share on Facebook. And we actually did a test, a comparative test where we looked at how many people actually tell their friends when using the share progress page as compared to how many people tell their friends using what Credo had as their previous thank you share page and found that share progress page actually gets about 50% more sharing by people. So that meant this means that we are getting a lot more people who are telling their friends and inviting them to also sign a petition. And then the last step is actually trying to increase your click rate. So when people are sharing, when they are posting a Facebook, when they are sending an email to their friend, try out different language that they can use there. So one of share progress organizations actually try out at the same time different Facebook post language. So when someone clicks and posts it all on Facebook, the headline that shows up there can be different. And we look at how people respond to different headlines and figure out which ones actually get more people's friends to say, oh, this looks interesting when they click on it and come into the site. And so what Credo found using that tool that we offer is that they tried out a couple of different Facebook titles that people could share with their friends and that one of the titles actually did much, much better than the first title it started with. In fact, if you looked at how many people clicked on it, it was more than 63% more than the initial title it started with. So that meant they were getting a lot more people, a lot more of their supporters' friends coming and checking out their sites than before. So what does this mean in total? So again, we can look at these optimizations and improvements on each step of the viral process and then see what impact it had. So as I mentioned overall, Credo had just over a quarter million people sign as petitions. And they ended up with a little over 35,000 people who came in and signed because of this sharing of people recruiting their friends. And that accounted for just over 13% of the total signatures on a petition. So 13.5% is what they ended up with here. But what would have happened if they hadn't ended the optimization? I mentioned before how all those improvements can add up to a higher viral ratio. If we were backwards to see, okay, without those improvements, where we created within, instead of that viral ratio of .135, we would have had viral ratio of .056. So it would have been less than half as much. And that would have meant they would have gotten 22,000 less people signed than petitions and 15,000 less new people recruited through that campaign. So spending effort and time in order to have that improved viral process made a big, big difference as far as how successful this campaign looks for now. So as I saw early on, I know most of you are not at the level of Credo with their millions of people on the email list. So I want to move to a campaign that's maybe more appropriate in size to what you're looking at. This one comes from the organization Peers.org. They're a nonprofit that just started this year. They're working in a shareable economy space. So doing community building and organizing around people who support this idea of reusing and sharing the resources that they have. Some examples are things like Airbnb, or Lyft's car sharing, or Skillshare programs. And so they ran, it's also a petition that they're actually still running, but they launched just a couple weeks ago which was in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There was legislation that was being considered that would ban Airbnb in that town. And so there's a big difference. People who use Airbnb, for those who aren't familiar, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer company that carries people up when they're looking for a place to stay. So instead of staying in a hotel, you can stay at someone else's apartment or house in the spare room they might have there. And so they were running campaigns to help save it in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And they were only targeting people who were actually living in Michigan. So they're pretty small group people. And their goal for this campaign was initially to get 500 signatures and later they increased it to 1,000 signatures. And so if you look at what happened there, they received just under 1,100 signatures on a campaign. Only 584 of those signatures came from their outreach round. They emailed the people who they have on their email list and posted on their Facebook account to try to get people to sign and got just over 500 people. What happened then though is those people went out and recruited their friends and that brought in another almost 500 people to also sign a petition which increased the total number of signatures they had by 85%. So they went from just 500 to more than 1,000 signatures that way. So the process they use is actually very, very similar to the one that Creed used for their campaign. They put together an optimized petition page using some common best practices and actually doing some testing to figure out what made the page more effective and made more people more likely to want to add their names and sign a petition there. They also used our share of progress pages in order to increase how many people were going on to tell their friends after designs. And then they also made a point of trying to use optimized share language. So make sure their sharing was using language that got people more interested in coming back and visiting their site. They didn't actually run any tests themselves but they used some of the studies that we've done to include tricks or not tricks but include approaches that generally make people more interested in responding. So one of them was when they gave people something to post on Facebook they actually included the next sign of the petition in the Facebook headline which through a number of, through pass analyses that we've done with organizations was found to actually increase number of people who have clicked on that and then signed a petition by between 20 and 60%. Another one was when they had people send an email to their friends they used a personal subject, recommended a personal subject on that email something like I just signed this for you. And being more personal also through pass analyses we found to get people to respond more than if you use something very generic like Save Airbnb. And so that's making a big difference in how likely people are to click back and check out your petition page and maybe get their name. So what happened overall? Again they were just made a point of trying to improve things at every all three steps of the viral process. And what they ended up with was this 5-rally ratio of .46 which was that 85% increase in action. Now if they hadn't done all those, hadn't had all those increases, again we can look at what might have happened otherwise. In that case instead of a viral ratio of .46 it might have only been .166 which meant instead of getting 500 actions from social they would have had only 116 so almost 400 less. And so instead of crossing that threshold of 1,000 signatures they might have only had 700 which if you try to convince someone that's a power kind of petition crossing a big round number like that can make a big difference. So that concludes this part of the presentation. So I'm happy to answer any questions you have at this point. Thank you so much for that Jim. My mind is trying to go back to 8th grade and remember percentages and fractions and things right now. So I would definitely need a calculator I think to figure some of the ratios out but some great advice on how these campaigns can work. And we have a whole bunch of questions so I will go ahead and raise some of those up to you. Christopher asked, most of my member base is pre-tech. How do you bridge the gap to that audience? So if you have people who are maybe not very familiar or very comfortable on computers, how do you help make it easy for them to get engaged in online campaigns? Sure. So yeah, this actually relates very closely to, I thought some of the questions about best practices as well. Generally a lot of best practices are about making the whole process simpler. You want to make it very, very clear to people exactly what they need to do. So when you have, I'm actually going to, is it alright if I go back to the previous slide Becky? Absolutely. Just go ahead and double-click on it. I'm going to hop back to this optimized decision page slide. Actually I'll go back in part of this one so it's a little bigger. Making sure that you're keeping the webpage very simple. You don't want there to be a lot of bells and whistles or things that might distract people and confuse them as to what they should be doing there. You want to have a very clear, it's called the ask on the page, very clear direction as to what they're doing there, and then a very clear way for them to do it. So here you see we have the petition title that describes exactly what the goal is here, so Airbnb and Grand Rapids, and then an image and then right there tell the Grand Rapids City Council to lay the vote and protect home sharing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Clear fields for their first name, their last name, an email address, and a zip code, so not too many things from the fill-in, just four options here, and then a big button to say add my name. So just keeping it simple can make a big, big difference as far as how many people will engage there. And similarly on our share page, a lot of our testing has been to try to make it very clear what needs to happen there, not tons of things going on here. There's an error point here where you need to be lucky on the page and then a big button for you if you want to send an email to your friends and a big button if you want to be posting it on Facebook. So again, making sure that it's simple and clear. Great, and I noticed on the actual optimized petition page that there's not much text. You have a little bit of text down in the lower left, but the main bolded action is one bolded sentence and one not bolded sentence that's telling people really clearly what you want them to do. So that's for somebody who likes to write and talk a lot, that's really helpful to see just how little text is needed to get the message across. We had somebody asking, these are a couple of best practices I think that you're highlighting here, and you mentioned a couple of other best practices. Are there any other best practices that you'd want to share that may be mentioned in the two articles that we'll link people to after, but any other ones that you'd want to highlight for the group? So I would say on your action page, whether that's a petition page or an email sign up or a donation page, making things clearly visible when someone first visits that page. A lot of times I see organizations that have either a lot of big menu or a lot of text up top, and you actually have to scroll down to find where you're supposed to put in any information and actually submit something on the side, making sure that it's clearly visible from the start is another one that will help a lot. And yeah, those are really the main ones. As far as the web pages go, for what's being shared, what you're using for your Facebook or email sharing text, also generally being clear is very helpful there. There's a tune that I mentioned here using actually the phrase signed a petition on Facebook if you're running a petition, or being personal on your emails. We've definitely seen consistently seem to get more people to respond. There aren't any other standouts that we've found recently beyond those two, but as I said, clarity is generally helpful. Now would that also work for something like we have Regina asking about best practices for educational institutions like how to get more donations or recruit students? Would that sort of action phrase work for donate today or different terms? Or is it really very specific to petitions that people are signing that you found real success rates? We know we're quite certain that it is true petitions. It's hard to say at this point how well it would translate into other things. I think there's certainly a good possibility. Generally what we like to do is for any kind of doubt, we do like to actually test it and to try out different language and see what happens, which is again, part of what shared power is designed to do is that when you ask people to share instead of having to just choose one option, it gives you the ability to try out a couple of different options and then see what happens, which is that's what I was describing earlier with the credo experiment. This was just on a single, on that one campaign they actually tried out four different possibilities for Facebook posts to see what was actually done. Great. So just even through your regular email blast just testing those titles or on Facebook testing the titles that you're putting out there and seeing what they get. And somebody asked, Lisa asked, can these results be computed for Facebook? Like is there Facebook analytics that you can look at that would show you the success of the different titles? How do you get that information out of Facebook? That's what share progress tracks. We actually log all that information and let you out. Okay, so if somebody doesn't have share progress, are they able to do that through anything natively in Facebook or through maybe another third-party tool? Unfortunately not. There isn't any other social media language testing systems out there at least that I'm aware of at this point. There may be others in the future but right now I'm not sure if I'm the only one. You guys are the innovators in that space. That's great. Christopher asked a good question for folks who might just have an email list and they're sending it out through their personal email or outlook. How do you get petition signed and shared with those elected bodies? How do you get those emails to Congress? And I think that speaks to again tools that are made to do that. And I can give some examples of those kind of tools that are out there from very low cost to really, really expensive, just naming like Nation Builder or Salsa, Convio. Those are a few company names that provide services for email blasts that can target elected officials. I'm sure Jim that you can name many, many others. So if you'd like to name many others that they might want to look into that you're welcome to do that. Yeah, another one that comes by is Bluestate Digital is another one that does that. And then there's actually one that's very new. It's only a few months old but it's actually free. It's called Action Network. They offer a lot of those same tools. So I would encourage groups to check that out. The other thing I would say is that if for whatever reason you can't sign up for one of those platforms at least in a short term, you can do that manually. You can create a Google survey form that asks people to add their name. And then you can actually print out and hand deliver to signatures to whoever your target is there. But there are, like he's exactly right, there are a lot of good tools out there now to help with that as well. Great. And we'll try and include some of the links to a few of those. It won't be any comprehensive list because I think between the two of us probably couldn't cover all of them even if we wanted to. But we'll send out a list of a few of those in the follow-up email for people who don't have a tool to reach out to Congress members and would like to. So Lisa asks a good question. And a couple of people actually asked a question related sort of similar. Is there a good way to ride the coattails of a different viral campaign? So her example is that they have an optical illusion senior dance in Michigan. How do they ride the coattails of the German optical illusion dance success? So this is referring to a different viral video that was very popular. And I know a lot of people have been piggybacking on Bat Kid. If you haven't heard about Bat Kid in San Francisco, that was a big viral social media campaign that helped a little boy become Batman for the day. And people are creating all kinds of other Bat cats to ride on that sort of theme and the enthusiasm around it. So is there a way to piggyback well? I wouldn't say there's any definitive recipe for it. I think certainly campaigns that are more topical generally do better. So if you can find something that's in the public consciousness, and then the trick is to actually make something that isn't itself compelling but that has that theme, then that can certainly be effective. But what I've seen is that when groups try to just try to piggyback on a theme without any real substance to their own campaign, I generally haven't seen that go too well. There needs to be something solid in whatever you're doing as well. There are a couple of questions actually asked about testing. So Cynthia's question is specifically, do you take a chance on burning people out when using them to test? And another related question was do you ask a group of people every time to test out the different titles or different statements that you're making? And I think a little explanation of A.B. testing might be helpful because you're not over testing people repeatedly with the same message. You're testing parts of your outreach with many of them. Can you explain that a little bit more clearly for people? So the idea behind A.B. testing is you're not splitting out a separate focus group that you're not asking people what they would like that. You're actually taking the people that you are contacting generally through an email send and you are taking at random some of those people and sending some of them your first idea, some of them your second idea, and you're looking at how they respond. And so the people in those groups aren't being given both options and have to choose. They're just being given one of those options. But by looking at how people respond in those different groups, you're able to see if one of those options actually is a lot more compelling than the other. So on this slide here what you're seeing is, well maybe this is probably more detailed than I'm going to right now, but what you're doing is, so everyone is only getting this one possible ability for say the share post, and then you're using their response in each one to decide what you give to everyone else. The system that we use in share progress is actually we do it dynamically so that as soon as we discover that something is clearly better than others, automatically people, everyone starts getting that. So what that means is that there's actually very little risk to testing because if you happen to choose one option that's particularly worse than others, almost immediately people will stop getting it and if you choose something that's much better than others, almost immediately everyone will start getting that. So there's not much chance of burning a lot of people down there. That's a helpful explanation. So we have, let's see, Katie is asking, our organization is very small and lean. We don't have much of a communications or marketing budget at all. Is there any advice on how to stretch our budget or find free tools to make easy and effective online campaigns? I know we mentioned a couple of specifically political advocacy tools that can help you reach Congress members, but do you have any other recommendations of really free or inexpensive tools for online campaigns? Yeah, again I would check out Action Network since that is free. If you're looking for something to manage more of a say donor outreach network, sales forces offer free service for organizations for nonprofits with fewer than 10 users. There's a lot of nice, there's some good Google products out there that are free. Google surveys you can set up for free for social media management, Hootsuite is one I'm a fan of for managing that. So I don't have the comprehensive list up my head, but those are some to take a look at. Great. We also have a question from Chris asking, do you test using Facebook and then do an email campaign? Or is there a specific order that you need to do the testing and are you testing for both and doing them concurrently? What's the process like for that? So there's not, we don't do a separate phase for testing. It's all together. The first thing about the way we do AB testing is that it's really invisible that you watch campaigns, send your email list and say, hey, please do sign a petition or please make a donation here. And then as they do that, as they start to share with their friends, the system will automatically be giving them different versions and looking at what happened and adjusting on its own without you having to worry about doing any sort of splitting or segmenting. Cool. So Rhoda asks, how long does it take to get your campaign started? So from beginning to end, or is there a different time frame for every campaign? So you mentioned the Grand Rapids Airbnb campaign and that it started a couple of weeks ago and then you had results for today but said it was continuing. Do you have a set time frame for how long they typically last? So generally when you do sign up for one of these different digital management systems that we've been talking about like Nation Builder or Salsa or Can Video or Action Network, there's some initial set up required where you have to kind of design your pages in there and get things set up. Once you've gotten over that hump of having that ready to actually start a new campaign can be very fast. You need to figure out what sort of language you want to use around it but then the technical set up can happen over the course of just a few hours. So you can move very quickly in response to the things that are happening in the world. And then a lot more and more systems are providing actually real time data on what happened. So share progress among them. So you can actually as soon as you send out an email or as soon as you post a Facebook and start getting people to respond, you can see what's happening there with it. Great. And then is there an end time usually to a campaign? Like you start a petition or you start a drive for signatures or something or sign-ons and do you usually have an end date in mind when you start it up? It's really going to depend on the campaign. Sometimes you're working up against a real world deadline. Maybe there's a vote in Congress or in some municipal council or maybe a company is going to be making a decision about something or maybe you're at your end of the month fundraising deadline. And so in those cases there's a hard deadline built into it. Otherwise it may be something where it originally could in theory continue for a very long time. Often you don't want to be pushing things potentially over a course of weeks or months unless there's clear progress. So you may artificially say we have the goal of getting this done by this week but it will vary a lot depending on the situation. So even if you have sort of an ongoing advocacy campaign or ongoing education campaign that is part of your mission to work on for years and years, you still want to try and find smaller chunks of time to work on a specific piece or highlight a specific piece and campaign so that people don't just ignore it as sort of the normal noise. Well thank you so much Jim for all of your great expertise. I'm sorry we didn't get to everybody's questions but we did get most of them answered today. I'd like to just share a few resources that we mentioned earlier on Jim's slide, some of the best practices. We'll share those links and we'll see if there are any others that we can come up with in the follow-up email that you'll get after this webinar wraps up later today. We'll also make sure to include some of those tools that we talked about that can be used for political and advocacy campaigns as well as some of just the tools that are available out there for online campaigns of any stripe. Thank you so much for joining us today Jim. We really appreciate it. And thank you Allie on the back end for helping manage all of the questions that came in. I'd also like to just take a moment to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing this webinar platform so that we can present these webinars to you on a regular basis. Our next webinar is next Tuesday, November 26th, and it's a site tour of TechSoup. So if you are not familiar with our organization and would like to learn more about the donation programs, we'll be sure to include a link to that webinar in the follow-up as well so you can join us for a quick tour of our site. Thank you all so much. And be sure to take the post-event survey that pops up when you close your screen so we can continue to improve our webinar program. Thank you all and have a terrific day.