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Nonprofit Radio for May 22, 2015: Linkage, Ability And Interest & Crowdfunding Legal Tips

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Opportunity Collaboration: This working meeting on poverty reduction is unlike any other event you have attended. No plenary speeches, no panels, no PowerPoints. I was there last year and I’m going this year. It will ruin you for every other conference! October 11-16, Ixtapa, Mexico.

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My Guests:

Marie SempleLinkage, Ability And Interests

Maria Semple

Introducing the LAI principle for rating potential donors. Maria Semple walks you through it. She’s our prospect research contributor and The Prospect Finder.

 

 

 

Gene Takagi: Crowdfunding Legal Tips

Gene TakagiGene Takagi is our legal contributor and principal of NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group. He raises your consciousness about legal issues around the popular crowdfunding sites.

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. We have a new affiliate to welcome k y r s eighty eight point one and ninety two point three fm in medical lake spokane, washington i’m looking forward to helping your non-profits welcome kyi rs thank you so, so much for being with non-profit radio and being our newest affiliate, k y our s oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with ngom nail blast iq limb, fadden apathy. If you gave me the bad news that you missed today’s show linkage ability and interest introducing the high principle for reading potential donors re a simple walks us through it she’s, our prospect research contributor and the prospect finder and crowdfunding legal tips jean takagi is our legal contributor and principle of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group he raises your consciousness about legal issues around the popular crowd funding sites and he walks us through those on tony’s take two non-profit radio on the road and third sector responsive by opportunity collaboration, the working meeting on poverty alleviation that will ruin you for every other conference, i’m very glad that maria samples back with me she’s, the prospect finder, a trainer and speaker on prospect research. Her website is the prospect finder dot com, and her book is panning for gold. Find your best donor prospects now exclamation mark she’s our diet of dirt cheap and free ideas you can follow her on twitter at maria simple. Welcome back, maria! Hey there, tony, how are you? I’m doing terrific, lee. Well, how are you today? Just find a little bit of allergies going on, but other than that, you know, i think everybody suffering, though, right? Well, i suppose i see you have a lot of allergens in new jersey. You know this here seems to be particularly bad. I have not been bad in past years, but ah, i don’t know. What’s going on this here against the it must have all exploded at once. Okay? I’m allergic to some people in new jersey. Ilsen listen, my family that’s what you know or not you mostly my family. Um all right, my mom and dad don’t listen, so they wouldn’t know that i just said that there, but they’re big fans. Of the show, but they don’t they don’t. Listen, um, this l a i linkage ability and interest. We’re using this for tracking and rating are potential donors. Is that right? Yeah. That’s, right. You know, i thought it would be an interesting topic today. I was i was recently asked to speak about this on another person’s webinar. And i was thinking that it was something you and i had not covered in the past, um and it’s certainly something that is freon dirt cheap, right? Because it’s being done by dafs board volunteers and, you know, khun really involve a lot of different people in this process and it’s probably, you know, a pretty important part of the overall fund-raising process when you think about it because, you know, we only have so many hours in a day in a week, in a month in a year, um, so we really need to be able to focus on where allocate our time and our resource is right. So human resource is funding, etcetera? Um, so, you know, we’re trying to really get down to is answering that most basic question and fund-raising is really how to qualify people. Right? So hopefully, you know, at the end of the next few minutes together we’ll we’ll come up with a process for your listeners that people can start to implement. Okay? All right. So, uh, what’s think our first part linkage? What is it? What i mean by linkage? Linkage to what? Right? So linkage to the organization. So how how is this person linked to your organization? Who is that? Ah, that individual that might stand between you and that prospect. So, you know, it could be that you have a boardmember who has access to this individual, maybe maybe it’s a staff member or ah, some other volunteer with the organization, so they’re really kind of like, in lincoln terminology, they’re really just two degrees separated from you. Um, and and in some cases, somebody might be more than two degrees separated on dh, then that’s going to really kind of affect how well linked they are to your organization already and how much they they already know about you, right? I have to i have to quibble with you about something now linked in did not create that two degrees of separation. That correct that comes from kevin bacon that’s, right? I don’t i don’t want the social networks taking over our r ah, story traditions, that is a kevin bacon, you know, story, whatever you’re called that is not attributed to linked in dot com, alright, right know it’s? Not absolutely, but of course, lincoln can help you in this process when you’re trying to determine linkage, right? So if you’re just trying to figure out you have a known individual, maybe they’ve come teo ah gala or something, and you’re trying to figure out, well, who can really help us, you know, cultivate and potentially solicit this individual? We want to engage them a little further in in our cause? Um, and so, you know, certainly lincoln is one of the tools that you might be able to use, i think, you know, why not use that technology that’s there to help determine how many degrees they’re separated from you? I’m not objecting, teo, speaking to that in terms of linkage and proximity to the organization. So geography, i think, in my opinion, could potentially play a knopper tune ity here into linkage. So if you really a small non-profit and you serve a very small geographic area um, you know, is this prospect living in that geographic area, or do they live somewhere else in your state? But maybe they have an interest in funding your type of cause. So, you know, i do think that that geography can play a role in this as well. Okay, okay. Um also the e-giving history, right? In terms of our their their closeness to the organization, another way of measuring that is how often and at what level have they been giving and how regularly, absolutely and, you know, we’ve all heard of the stories in the press, right of people who passed away, they leave a lot of money to an organisation, they were on ly donors that say very modest levels, but they were consistent, right? So they zsystems long time donors and and, you know, i’m preaching to the choir was talking to you about this, tony, but, you know, certainly passed e-giving history is even if even if the gift amounts have not been very high, i really do think you have to take into account that longevity how long they’ve been with you? Yes, on dh that’s particularly true looking for potential donors in planned e-giving but yeah, that that committed person who’s been giving and, you know, maybe you’ve heard me, you probably have because we’ve we’ve done seven hours together say that, you know, even if it’s ten dollars, a year or ten dollars, a couple of times a year, but they’ve been doing it for for a long, long time, like eight out of the past ten years or twelve or fifteen out of the past twenty years i mean, that’s ah, that’s a lot that’s a that’s, a really committed person, even at low, low level. So you want to consider them as potential? Maybe not for what you might consider a major gift, but certainly for potential volunteering planned gift or maybe moving them up the the e-giving in the giving ladder, you know, that consistency is really important, irrespective of the size of the gift. Yeah, alright, thanks, maria. So you know, i would agree with you, right? You’re you’re on safe ground. Yeah. Course. Plus, i i feel bad. I feel bad about my rant about the kevin bacon phenomenon, so i don’t want it. But you know me well enough that you know there’s no harm done. No, i’m intended no harm intended. Maybe harm done, but i didn’t intend any, but i don’t think so. What’s ah, what’s ability all about after linkage. So the a for ability. So really it’s it’s, really? The ability rating is it’s based on their ability of what they can give and not what we think they will give. And so that could be two completely different numbers, right? You might be talking to your board members and your board will say, you know, well, andre, go in either direction. Right? So the conversation might be something like, um, you know, where we really think that this person that we, the board, think this person is certainly capable of contributing to our annual campaign or our capital campaign at a level of, you know, five thousand dollars and, you know, maybe your research reveals that this person, you know, has never given anywhere near that amount. Maybe all of the donations use i’ve ever been able to find out what they give to other organizations in your community. Maybe two hundred dollars, and below. So certainly, you know, you wanted to raid it in that you know appropriately in terms of their ratings for the ability, but it could also be in the other direction so the conversation could be g we think this person capable of donating five thousand dollars and your research reveals that in fact there, you know, they made in the past in the recent past a twenty five thousand dollars, um, commitment to another organization. So knowing that you’re potentially leaving money on the table by not asking for a higher amount. Yes. Okay. Okay. Let’s, uh, let’s go out for our break a little early and if there’s more to say about ability, of course we will. And then we’ll we’ll cover interest, and then we got to put this all together. What the heck do we do with all this info that we’ve got? Stay with us. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there? A better way there is. Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. The small midsize shops that’s who were always about i got live listener love, cartersville, georgia. Marquette, michigan, san francisco, california, duncanville, texas cool and carmel, indiana special belated birthday wishes out the carmel, indiana live listener loved to each of you there’s others out there don’t fret if you’re still listening, there’s others out there and more live listener love coming. And of course, we’ve got our podcast pleasantries for everybody listening some other time on some other device unknown to may be many of us, but pleasantries to the ten thousand podcast listeners, and we got more. We got more love coming out, so don’t worry about that affiliate affections. All right, maria, um, anything more that we want to say about ability, that the person’s ability to make a gift, how much we think they can they’re capable of giving now, i think i’ll stay a little bit more about it in the next few minutes after we cover interest, because i want to go over some general levels of ability, so we’ll get into that when we get into the rating, okay, be little mysterious on me. Okay, that’s. All right. Okay, then. Let’s, let’s go to our interest. What is this about? So, really, you know, here we’re trying to understand, you know, if they could really be engaged in the organization, how interested are they? Do they have a specific area of interest, you know, are they connected to you because of a particular passion that they have or maybe there’s something that actually connects them to your program? You know, maybe you serve people with disabilities, and they have ah, family member, a close family member who is, you know, has disabilities and may or may not be using your services currently, you know, so what happens here is that, you know, way understand their interest so that we can fulfill a need that they have to make the world a better place. Um, and then, you know, they’re really going to be only too happy to invest in your mission or your services or your building campaign or, you know, whatever other major campaign you’re doing, perhaps an endowment campaign or a legacy planned gift campaign. So, you know, you’re really looking to fulfill a need that they have understand what they’re interested in and helping them fulfill their mission. So, you know, having a general idea of what they’re interested in is certainly going to come into play in your overall research right now, someone could be, you know, very closely connected under linkage and have very high ability, but maybe maybe they’re not connected. Maybe maybe they’re not well now, if they’re not, if they’re connected, there wouldn’t be uninterested. Let’s see, i guess around my point is someone could be very high in one or two of these, but quite low in another one that’s, right? Like maybe interest, maybe interest is very high ability is very high, but linkage, nobody knows them, they’re not connected to us at all, exactly. And then and then what do we do there? We’ve really got to find a path to that individual because, you know, if they have ah, hi ability than it’s pretty darn likely that you’re not the only person knocking on their door trying to get a gift. And now this can also apply for foundations and corporations to right. This is not just individual ratings or what you know, i want to apply this more. For individual ratings. But, you know, i suppose it could certainly apply for for foundations and corporations as well. So much of what i focus is on is individuals, but i think you could probably apply this very same formula to your foundation, corporations and corporations. I’m thinking, especially local businesses, local corporations. I mean, i guess it could apply for bigger ones too. But, you know, if your if your campaign is around cultivating local local business people, and then i think these things would apply equally. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we got are lei i laid out. Now what the heck we could do with this. Okay, so well, let’s talk about a typical rating system and how you would potentially callie up some points because what we’re trying to do here ultimately is trying to figure out who are our best prospects. Where should we be focusing our time? So this is a very general number that you might suffer in this rating process is going involved. Mathematics? Yes, very simple math, because, look, i’m not a math person either. All right, you’re probably more of a math person than maybe implant giving. You have to. Do division. No, i think i really think it’s just straight up addition. Alright. Additions. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Especially as long. There’s. No log. Arrhythmic found formulas or no, no, nothing like that. Okay, the total number of points that you can get is fifteen. Okay, your absolute best prospect is going to be raided. A fifteen. And this is how it breaks out. By the way, i got this off of a document that i found on a peace website. So if you just google les i principal it’s probably one of the first three hit that you’ll get on google lay our principal. Okay, but can we also get you? Teo posted as a comment on the on the facebook page. Takeaway here it’ll be up by three thirty or forty no around four o’clock eastern today. Could you do that? Sure. Thank you. Alright, so go ahead. So fifteen so linkage. So you’re going to go from a score of zero through four xero would be if there’s absolutely no record of giving and no contact with that donor that they’re rated xero for linkage. Okay, alright. So there’s? Yeah. There’s what i was talking about before somebody could be very low in something, okay, you’re xero now you said, xero four, can you do one to five? Um, well, for purposes of the download that i got from a p, it went from zero to four, so one would be if they made a pledge, but no gift, or maybe a one time or a memorial gift. Your organization. I’m just making trouble. All right? Xero will still xero before i prefer one to five, but we’ll go with yours. Okay, good. Um, two would be if they relapsed, or just an occasional donor. Your organization three would be if there are frequent donor let’s, say annually, but number four would be if there are frequent or current major gift donor-centric. The best would be five since i since i said at the outset, we have a maximum of fifteen points. We’d have to kind of stick with xero through four rating system for the purposes of this discussion anyway. Oh, so they’re not all going to be zero to four then, okay? Because correct, because that would only be twelve c i can multi actually multiplied, actually. Just multiplied three times for so you know, so give me a break. All right? All right. So go ahead. Now. Ability. We have different now. How many? How many do they break out to ability xero what? Seven. Okay. Let’s. Just seven. Okay. Ah, let’s. Just let’s. Just sample them a little bit let’s, not read all seven categories. Okay, so there will be if they’ve given you from one to twenty four hundred dollars, a four would be somewhere between fifty and nine. Ninety nine thousand dollars on day seven would be five hundred thousand and above all right. But of course you would. You would scale that to your organization if your largest if the largest gift you’ve ever gotten is one hundred fifty thousand dollars, no point in having half a million dollars on your scale. Right. So you scale, you scale your scale appropriately scale the scale. All right. I hope you haven’t from with this, because i am. I don’t know if i can’t tell if you are, but maybe it’s, maybe it’s tze pretty new to me, so i’m enjoying it. Okay, what do we do? S o that’s xero to seven for ability. You’re recommend, right? So we got four and seven. Eleven. So the next one must only go xero toe four. Yes, exactly. Xero for instruction at that time, i did subtraction. All right, go ahead. Interested xero no interest, no knowledge or very minimal knowledge. Okay. In your organization, on at the other end of the scale of four would mean that they’re actively involved in your organization. They volunteer. Or perhaps they’re aboard, or even a past boardmember right? Or maybe think about even a past honoree. So so for many organizations where an annual gala within an honoree is is somebody you know, if you haven’t honoree like that, certainly they would have had some more in depth connection to your organization. Hopefully, yes. Okay. There’s a good ones. Especially. Honoree that’s that’s one people might not have thought of, but all right, it’s it’s cool. All right, so we have totals in each of our three categories. I’m guessing we’re going to add these up, right? So then you would add them up. And as i said, you have a maximum of fifteen. So now you have some decisions to make, right? Like, what is that minimum score that your organization is going to need to have in place before you put that person into a a pipeline for one on one cultivation and solicitation? Right? Because you’re only gonna have, you know, so much staff and or so many board members committed to helping you reach out to do some of these major gift solicitation efforts. You know, you have to figure out how many prospects can we end up with that’s going to be manageable? Because if you give somebody an unmanageable number than people get overwhelmed and what’s gonna happen, they’re probably not going to do an awful lot. No, you know what i look? You know what i love about this is for small and midsize shops. This replaces what could be a very expensive wealth screening process and, you know, the compay cos teo to do that for you, and then they’ll stratify you’re prospects on dh. Then you’ll you’ll proceed from there, but this is for for smaller shops, you know, there’s time involved in doing the research here, but but if you could do that, um, it’s a way of stratify ing your prospects and then you got your you got your what was the top score again? Fifteen. You got your you got your fifteen toe, you know, maybe you’re fifteen to thirteen is your top prospects and then twelve to ten. Obviously, second tier, you know, but you stratify and then you apply resource is appropriately. Does that sound that’s unreasonable? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned well screening. And even if you had or are planning to have a wealth screening done that’s really going to help answer that that a part of ability helpyou, stratify where they could potentially be giving to you. So, you know, maybe you know about linkage to your organization. Maybe you know, about interest and maybe a wealth screening. Is what’s going to help you really flesh out what their ability is? Without, you know, doing major in depth research like i would normally dio i mean, you know, if you’ve got access to a wealth screening product, definitely see what the what the screening rating is going to be, even on that process through the product that you’re using. Okay? All right, so you’re now you were saying that i guess there’s a threshold may be below which you would not apply resource is, you know, maybe it’s i don’t know, i think it would depend organization by organization, but like, maybe it’s five or seven or something below a scorer now that my reaction to tony was maybe a five or seven for a small organization where, you know, you really have very limited manpower, both on staff and volunteer side. Um, yeah, you don’t want to discount anybody have again, you have to apply resource is smartly, exactly every potential, you know, every potential donorsearch can’t be can’t be pursued, but you know what else this does? It helps you see where you might have weaknesses with prospect, who would otherwise be strong. So in our example, you know, if ability and interests are high but linkages low and that puts the person below whatever you’re cut off is let’s say, it’s seven there i did division again, i was taking half the score. I’m like my mathematics game if there’s seven or below, but that’s, because they’re linkage is really low, but ability and interest are are doing well, then, you know, maybe now you’ve identified somebody who you want to try to get close to the organization and maybe that doesn’t take so much to do, you know, you know what i mean? Yeah, exactly. And it could be just, you know, a matter of sitting around and and having a very concentrated development committee meeting where you’re able to then try and figure out. Okay, look, these are our prospects that rated pretty highly for ability and interest if we could only determine what the linkage piece is, you know, so and that’s that would be a really good exercise to engage your board members in the fund-raising process because it’s still part of the process, right? It’s it’s just that there may be not involved in the direct ask because, sure, there are certainly a lot of board members who say i’ll do anything for you in the development process just don’t make me do the ad, so this is a a terrific way to engage them in the fund-raising process, and maybe they would get excited about, you know, getting out, doing some of those ass also interest mean ability, we’ve gotta face it ability is not much organization could do around ability, but interest, like if linkage is high ah, an ability is high, but the person just hasn’t shown a lot of interest. Maybe now maybe they’re not interested so that, you know, i have to consider that possibility. They just may not be interested, but if you’re not convinced that that’s the case, you know, maybe there’s some program or something that you can use as a connection and use your linkage, their relationship to try to get that person more interested in your work because they they rated low in that in that part, right, that that would be a great use of a cultivation event, for example, san, is that pool of people i’m seeing this as a way not to just stratify people, but also identify where weaknesses are with with potential donors and where you might apply. Some resource is to get them rated hyre in your l a i system? Absolutely. All right, we got another minute or so. Is that right, sam got? Yeah, just another minute or so, maria, you wantto leave us with something around l a i well, you know, good research is really what enables matching the prospects with e-giving opportunities, right again, as i said, so you’re fulfilling a need that they have to make the world a better place. So e i think if you just sort of keep that at the forefront of everything that you’re doing using the lazy eye principle, um, and always making sure that everything that you’re doing in terms of your communications, any engagement that you have with people, make it his donor-centric a possible it’s, not about you the organization. Okay, ultimately, yes, it is. But when you’re talking with people it’s, it’s trying to find that point of engagement that’s really going to get them excited and motivated and really want them to make an investment in your cause. Maria simple, the prospect finder dot com and at marie a simple thank you very much. Maria semple. Great. Thanks a lot. Always a pleasure to have you. Thank you. Hope you don’t mind that i had some fun with the l a i i don’t think so. You don’t take that stuff personal. Tony, take two and crowdfunding legal tips coming up first opportunity collaboration it’s a week long unconference in x top of mexico in october, around poverty alleviation, it’s structured but it’s, unstructured it’s structured with lots of unstructured time. So you, khun may connections and get to know the people who can help you with your work. There’s over three hundred people there you meet over meals. Drink. You mean in the ocean i had i had meetings with two women who became guests of the show we met in the ocean. It was nina chanpreet core and lena srivastava. They were on after i met them in the ocean. Well, we met on land, but then we planned our meeting for in the ocean. Um it’s ah, no power points, no keynotes. Every session is in a circle very collaborative. And i think you’re getting a sense of how it’s, not like other conference, is much better. I loved it last year and i’m going again this year in october opportunity collaboration, dot net non-profit radio is going west. We headed to phoenix actually leave tomorrow. Phoenix, l a san francisco, and in portland if you’re in any of those areas or between l a and san francisco, because i’ll be driving, then ah let’s, try to meet up my itinerary and video are at tony martignetti dot com third sector today. That’s ah, site run by amy davina. She has lots of contributors, including marie, a sample i was going to ask maria simple about that i’m going to see if she’s defecting the third certain sector today i doubt it, but she was on. Was it contributed to third sector today? Um, they have tips, strategy’s, good ideas for non-profits they are at third sector today dot com and they are at third sector today on twitter, but the third is the number three, of course that’s thea arabic number three not the roman numeral three don’t do ii rd do at arabic number three rd sector today on twitter use the arabic number that’s tony’s take two for friday, twenty second of may twenty first show of this year and now i’m very glad. That gene takagi is with me he’s, the managing editor of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco, he edits the popular non-profit lob log, dot com and on g tack on twitter. He is gi tak, which is much easier than third sector because there’s no arabic numbers to explain whether used the arabic or the roman. Aggie tak, welcome back durney great to be back. Thank you, and i’m looking forward to seeing you on my west coast trip in ten days or so. Absolutely, yeah, we’re going to sit down that’ll be a pleasure. Um, you’re concerned about our brand in our name and there’s, a legal issues you want people to be aware of around the very popular crowd funding sites, right? And i’m actually picking up off your conversation with aimee semple ward of and ten last week last night. Yes, you are. Ah, and you know amy and you discuss sort of the differences between an individual raising funds for a charitable purpose, like for the victims of of the earthquakes in nepal and a charity actually raising funds, and amy was pointing out how individuals through go fund me had actually raised almost double. What a big charity half for that. And so i just wanted to work off that a little bit about about saying, well, when people give a contribution to an individual, even if it’s for charitable purposes, there is no charitable deduction for that gift. Where if they make the donation to a charity, that’s using a crowd funding site named this’s done properly, they can get a deduction for the gift of doom, or little little intricacies involved. But that’s a huge difference. Okay, wait now, if we give to an individual’s crowd funding campaign. But as amy and i were talking about there’s, there’s, there’s pretty simple ways of getting the money directly to the charity so that the individual doesn’t doesn’t have to pass it on and and then so if we so if the person has that set up, and then we get an acknowledgement from the charity, can’t we get a can we get a charitable income tax deduction that way? Yeah, that would be where an individual is authorised by the charity to represent the charity and set up the crowd funding site. But much of crowdfunding is done by individuals who are just doing it for charitable purposes, and amy mentioned example of somebody saying, well, you know, i have friends who are on the site in the paul, and if we get them the money, they can help victims immediately, directly themselves, and it doesn’t have to go through any bureaucracy, all right? Okay, well, that’s not using a charity and they’re not going to get a receipt from a charity for that type of donation. There was a fire in san francisco. I believe it was last month and a ninja vigil wanted to raise funds. Really? Charitably inclined, well intended on. And what he did was he raised one hundred fifty thousand, which he had no idea he was going to raise that much. I think he was planning to raise a few thousand to help some of the victims of that fire. He raised one hundred fifty thousand dollars. And, of course, if you give it to an individual, that the individual has no power to say that you gave it to a five, twenty three organization, and therefore you get no deduction. Okay, okay, i see. I see the distinction. Yes, all right. We also need to be aware of who is raising money under our name. Yeah, absolutely. So if charities are involved in an individual says to you, well, i’d like to raise money for your project, and i want to use a crowd funding site. The game has got that problem about, well, whether the charity is actually the named recipient on the crowdfunding site for the donations or where the individual is, and the individual’s own account is collecting the money, and then the individual man transferred that money to the charity again, you have the problem of the donor getting no receipt from the charity because the donation the check wasn’t actually to the charity was, too the crowdfunding site sort of processor that’s going to the individual and not to the charity it all unless that set up separately so that that the charity is the recipient and the individuals is basically just the agent, whether an employee or a volunteer that set it up for the charity that the donor has got to really beware of that, and of course, donors have to be where if they ever give two individuals because maybe doesn’t go to the victims of the earthquake in nepal are the victims of the fire in san francisco. Maybe itjust goes into somebody’s pocket, and you don’t really know how, because that may never get reported that’s true and and on the charity side, it seems like it would be its worth is investigating to see whether your name is being used by people that you haven’t authorized. Yeah, but how can we do that? That’s a great point, i think the easiest way to do it is just to google the charity’s name once a while, and you might even google it with the term crowdfunding just to check to see if anybody is started. A crowdfunding campaign with the name of your charity, but you’re actually not seeing any of those funds, and sometimes when they have checks, go out to the acronym of your charity. It’s very easy to set up before profit business with the same acronym and have all the funds go into that account. So fraud is a possibility, like when when you’re giving crowdfunding sites. So you want a cz a donor again? You want to be really careful about making sure that any donation that you make through a crowd funding site is actually going to the chair. I never thought of that setting up. See, i’m not a savvy thinker like these criminals are, and frankly, i never thought of incorporating a business that has the same initials as ah, as a charity as a big time charity and then and then collecting checks. Yeah, it’s actually a good tip for internal controls of the own organization because any volunteer or employee that handles cheques could also do the same thing with acronyms. So be very careful about that in your internal control you mentioned doing searches, but, you know, even severe way is and i i think every organization should do this is have alerts set for your name, whether it’s google alerts now, some time ago, maria and i talked about how google alerts were not really being not very sophisticated, and we weren’t even sure they were still supported. But there are other alert it’s companies that are free, they’ll give you a free like mention dot net is one that i use for my name and also for the hashtag non-profit radio and they give you a couple for free. Then. After that, you have to pay. But i think it’s, very smart. And then i have other alerts for my company and the show name and everything. I think it’s very smart to have alerts set for your organization name so that you you find out when it pops up real, you know, real time or near real time buy-in blog’s or on sites or, you know, wherever i think that’s fantastic advice in the press. Yeah, probably somebody might write about you in the press. Yeah, so all right, but from a risk management perspective, too. All right, gene pool. Uh, and, you know, beyond even the deductibility donation issue, if somebody’s using your name out there and harming it in any way your, you know, the loss of the value of your brand and the trust of the community is far more can be far more important than any loss of deduction by don’t. Yes, for sure, we’ve talked about that reputation. Um, what if we’re thinking about a cz, an organization engaging on a crowd funding site? We’re thinking about having a campaign, maybe it’s around an event, maybe it’s around a program or a building whatever it is. What? What? What tips? You have fur going about this dahna great question. And there there are so many crowdfunding sites out there. There are few that people are are well aware of who you are. Many people are well aware of, like kickstarter and indeed go go, go fund me or just a few of those, but there are literally thousands of crowd funding sites out there now, and you want to make sure that you’re connected. If you do connect with a crowd funding site that you’re connected with a very good one with very strong reputation with the clear understanding of what the terms are of the agreement and what type of seas they may be collecting, they also may be regulated if they’re providing fund-raising solicitation service gettinto, you’re getting into the whole morass now with the charity registrations, charity solicitation, registration morass yeah, which you’re an expert at, you know, if you know if there’s soliciting for you, if they’re controlling or receiving any money on behalf of your charity, and not just threw a payment processor like paypal, but they’re actually controlling it in one of their account or even if they’re advising you as to what to put in the content of your fund-raising solicitations, then they may be regulated as a commercial or professional fundraiser, or is fund-raising council basically anybody that’s soliciting or providing advice to the charity on solicitations and that’s, a regulated, regulated area that they’re gonna have to think about registering not only in the state in which they might be located, but in any state in which they’re engaging in felicitations without spending that could be all states so that’s something to be very careful now that okay, let’s, let’s, be careful now. That would be a burden if they were considered. And of course, the laws vary state by state. This is why it’s such a huge morass. I was going to use an expletive, but we’re on too many terrestrial affiliates. I can’t do that but it’s a morass. Okay, so because the different state laws but if a crowd funding site operator was considered a commercial now i lost it a fund-raising fund-raising counsel or you are a professional solicitor. Then you’re saying that that site would have to register, right? Yeah. That’s like would have to register. And the charity actually has some responsibility as well to make sure that they’re not engaging in a contract with a commercial fund-raising professional fundraiser fund-raising solicitor fund-raising counsel that is not registered, right? Well, then there’s disclose yes, the organization has the obligation in a lot of states to disclose those relationships and also teo disclose the start of any solicitation campaign using one of those individuals or companies, right? Right, whether it’s, crowdfunding or not, but let’s try to stick with crowdfunding, alright, i don’t wanna lose anybody here, okay, that for that morass, i think that’s as deep as we can go, but you have a but let’s give you a shout out. You have an article on this not that we’re wrapping up or anything, but on this solicitation and solicitation registration issue and on the issue that that the crowdfunding site operators could be considered fund-raising council, et cetera. Right? You have some blood post on that right at non-profit law block dot com? Yeah, definitely. If you just do a search on the block sight on crowdfunding, you’ll see a number of articles. Okay, some of them discussed that issue. Okay. Excellent. Right. But let’s weigh. Just have a minute and a half, by the way, before our break. Let’s, let’s, look at some other tips. I mean, if you’re if you’re going out to a crowd funding, you’re evaluating crowd funding sites. What what other things should you be looking about? Well, i think you want to look at how the system works, though some crowd funding sites are actually set up, his donor advised funds and that’s where their charities themselves and if they are charity themselves, what they’re going to do is they’re going to take the donation, which is going to be made in their name, and they’re going to take the advice of the donor to re grant it to your charity, but they actually don’t have the legal obligation to re granted to your charity. In that case, the only time when that’s really at risk if your charity happens to be in trouble, basically with the irs and spider onesie, tree status is in dispute or the attorney general is thing you’re doing something unlawful, then the crowdfunding site that’s a donor buy-in fund may decide that it’s not going to re granted to your charity and still re granted toe another organization with the same charitable purpose. So that’s. One thing to think about is what type of entity, whether the charitable entity or for-profit, ended the year crowdfunding site. Alright, let’s, we’ve got to go out for our break. We got some more tips that gene will share and got you some more live listener love, so stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked. And naomi levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to, he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests are there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m peter shankman, author of zombie loyalists, and you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Time to send affiliate affections to all our affiliates around the country, especially jet out for k y our s. But all the affiliates love the am fm stations that are part of the non-profit radio. I don’t know, empire is that? Is that overstating it is ah, network. Maybe network is more appropriate. Empire maybe empire in june. By then it’ll be an empire. Let’s uh, let’s do more live listen love new bern, north carolina and tuscaloosa, alabama live listener love out to you and let’s go abroad. We have ah couple in japan, okazaki. And also super imahara, japan. Konnichiwa, brahma, sweden is with us. Welcome brahma, sweden. I don’t i don’t know how to say in your language, what’s the closest i can get our union. Yes, germany. Guten dog. But i know you don’t speak german in sweden and cerini i i know that but that’s that’s about the closest i can come. But i do know that seoul, south korea, multiple, as always on io haserot italy is with us, but i can’t see the city. Italy. I don’t know what you’re always masked. I don’t know you, roma. Vanessa. Uh, not really, gioia. Tauro, one of the chinchilla terra cities manure ola real majority i’ve been to all of them i wish i knew where you were, but live listen love to italy and also moving up north to ontario, canada sudbury live listen, love there also sorry jean had too little world tour. I hope you don’t mind that i love hearing where all the listeners in-kind that’s cool, is it? Yes around world. Unbelievable. Brahma, sweden i love that. Um, okay, more tips for evaluating on dh comparing potential crowd funding sites that we might use? Sure, i mean, one of the things that you have to look at is whether the crowdfunding site has rules about making a charitable contributions through their sight or not. So kickstarter doesn’t allow for general unsupportive solicitation and sorry, i’m restricted solicitations you have to solicit for a particular project starter, okay, so if you solicit for particular project now, you’re raising just restricted funds and not unrestricted funds. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re counting systems and that your your infrastructure is is ready to support that. You also have to figure out whether you’re issuing the proper type of receipt. To donors. So in kickstarter, again, if you’re raising for a particular project and tip what is very typical for kick starters, you raise funds and you give something to the donor or the or the contributor to the campaign in return for that a right, too, the first production of a book or were some some benefit there? So now you’ve got a quid pro quo contribution potentially if it’s not just the low cost of minimus item and you’ve got an issue, a proper receipt to that donor that says, well, here’s, your gift of one hundred dollars, but you received something of value of twenty five dollars, in return. Therefore, duck double portion of that payment is seventy five dollars. Something like that has got to be given to the donor, and if the crowdfunding site isn’t able to facilitate the charity to be ableto offer those proper quid pro quo disclosure statements, then you’ve got a problem. You just gotta make sure that your crowd funding sites are where the charity laws well, okay, there’s also a potential fees the side to make money sometimes off the off the money that’s raised so there’s feet potential and then also donors in formacion some of the sights will not share the donor information with you, ray, which is, which is a problem in fees. Yes, you do want to compare fees to make sure that they’re not exorbitant in relation to the type of campaign that you want to conduct. And it also may indicate whether the crowdfunding site operators operating with in-kind of the ethical parameters that charity’s think that they operate. And so for example, if a crowd funding site and i don’t believe any of the major ones do this. But if a crowd funding site is saying, we want to take a portion a percentage of your donations that let’s say exceeds ten percent or twenty percent, that that may really be a problem, and you may actually run into other regulated areas if you start to take a exorbitant fees where you’re actually sharing donations with a for-profit entity oh my yeah, i could see trouble there. Ok, ok, go ahead. Sorry, but typical a credit card processing fees three and a half percent on goff often there’s kind of ah, crowdfunding site c to provide that platform for you and then the credit card processing the to taking those donations. So, you know, anywhere, uh, you know, three to four to five percent for each of those things are a total of up to ten percent. It’s probably pretty common amongst the big crowd funding site operators. Okay, okay, privacy issues, right? There’s the issue we just mentioned are they sharing the donor information with you but privacy information? What are they doing with the data? People’s people’s data? Yeah, absolutely. And that’s another issue about whether they’re regulated, professional or not. So without diving into that too deep, if they’re really just providing the platform for you, they have to disclose your donors. And if they’re not willing to disclose your donors, you have a problem because that that information you’re entitled to and in many cases, you may have to report that if it’s a large contribution to the i r s as well so that’s that’s just ah, something that you need. I think when a charity uses a crowd funding site in terms of protecting the privacy of the donors, you do absolutely want to take a look at the crowd funding site operators privacy policy tto find out whether the donors that are contributing there are are going to be now subject to a bunch of others similar campaigns and have their emails splendid with solicitation or whether they’re going to give up other, you know, information that might create both legal or just a donor relation problems for your charity. We just have about a minute and a half left one minute actually left. Just today in the chronicle of philanthropy, i saw the minnesota attorney general suing a company called savers, and they’re they’re a brick and mortar store, and they give part of their part of the revenue or from items they sell goes to charity. But the charity’s aren’t being sued, but they’re being named and he was, like disabled american veterans, absolute epilepsy foundation, lupus foundation. So, you know, this is all related to your point that reputation could be out there even if you’re not doing something wrong. Yeah, and why you talked about monitoring how your organization is being used? Because sometimes and they don’t know about this particular case, but sometimes a commercial code venture, which is a little bit of a jargon the term but any for-profit that uses the charity’s name to say, well, if you buy from us will give a portion of the proceeds to this charity may be done without your knowing it as a charity, not knowing that they’re using your name and they should obviously be be letting you know that that’s happening. But you you do have a responsibility as a charity to make sure that, you know, when somebody’s conducting a campaign like that, we have two reportedly on your behalf. Jane, we have to leave it there. I thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in ten days or so. Jean takagi at g tack on twitter and the non-profit lob log dot com thank you very much, gene. Thanks, tony. See, you bet next week to ntcdinosaur views emerging tech trends and now get buy-in if you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com where else would you go? Opportunity collaboration with world convenes for poverty alleviation. It’s outstanding and it’ll ruin you for every other conference opportunity collaboration dot net. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff sound. Liebowitz is on the board as the line producer shows. Social media is by susan chavez, susan chavez, dot com and our music is by scott stein. I love when he affirms what i just said. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. 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Nonprofit Radio for May 15, 2015: Creating Communities & Questioning Crowdfunding

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Megan Keane, Michael Wilson, and Joe ProsperiCreating Communities

Starting an online community to engage supporters is a big investment. Learn how NTEN, Small World Labs and Relay Nation at American Cancer Society created communities that increase loyalty, fundraising, engagement and return on mission. Guests are Megan Keane, Michael Wilson and Joe Prosperi. We talked at NTC, the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

Amy Sample Ward: Questioning Crowdfunding

Picture of Amy Sample WardCrowdfunding is popular, but don’t jump in just because lots of others have. How do you decide if it’s right for your organization? Amy Sample Ward is our social media contributor and CEO of NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with four uncles and carb uncle’s if i had to hair that you missed today’s show creating communities starting an online community to engage supporters is a big investment. Learn how in ten small world labs and relay nation at the american cancer society created communities that increased loyalty fund-raising engagement and return on mission guests are meghan keene, michael wilson and joe prosperi. We talked at ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference and questioning crowdfunding crowd funding is popular, but don’t jump in just because lots of others have. How do you decide if it’s right for your organization? Amy sample ward is our social media contributor and the ceo of n ten the non-profit technology network on tony’s take two non-profit radio on the road and third sector, responsive by opportunity collaboration that working meeting on poverty alleviation that will ruin you for every other conference here is creating communities from auntie si. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc fifteen non-profit technology conference it’s day two we are in we are in austin, texas, at the convention center. My guests now are meghan keene, membership director for inten michael wilson, ceo of small world labs, and joe prosperi, digital lead for relay for life at the american cancer society. Meghan michael, joe, welcome. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Pleasure. Pleasure to have you your workshop topic. These online communities proinspire action and generate results. We’re going to get there in a second. First, i just want to point out that each interview today on day two, i’m highlighting on intense swag item. And i’ve got my zippered hoody. This is hi this’s, one of the high high end items, zipper pretty from from donorsearch. Welcome. Don’t drive, teo and ten peer-to-peer sec. Is that what they do? All right, it goes, it goes in our swag pile an outer growing pile. It is doing it all day today and i get that it’s eight eleven interviews yourself today. So good stash. Alright, let’s, build some online communities that inspire action and generate results. Um, where’s, the where’s the best place to start let’s, start down in the end there, joe, where should we start? With determining whether? It’s appropriate for us to build an online community, whether that’s really going to suit the needs of our organization, that is that a good place? Yeah, i think what’s really interesting to point out is that really for any of us that are non profit organizations, we already have community, you know, it’s already there we’ve got volunteers, we have staff, we have supporters, we have donors, those communities are already there, and how do we turn those digitally into online communities? And some of the most of organizations already have that whether it be a facebook community twitter community but the american cancer society, we decided a while a couple years ago that we really need to have a vault, a place where all of our top engaged volunteers are top supporters are kind of the big fish in terms of really, if her life had a place to gather in a place to share ideas, get inspiration from it mostly from a peer-to-peer fund-raising standpoint, but we also noticed throughout time that our community has grown too a peer-to-peer engagement place and a peer-to-peer inspiration place where we’re not relying on the american cancer society telling the story of what the american cancer society does. We’re relying on our supporters to do it for us within our community. Okay, michael let’s. Still stay at the overviews stage of community building? Yes. So when would you do it? So he’s really? Just an engagement platform. So i think similar to how email is a communication ty phone isn’t a communication like joe was saying. We have we have communities. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, just really late. You know, do do you want your communication to be isolated and one toe one like phone and e mails? Or do you want it to be many too many so in that regard, it can work and, you know, virtually any environment when you take the next step of okay, so is it going to work in this situation or for this program or for this constituency base? We generally try to look at the product of three things. So one is size so what’s the potential audience size two is what would they be able to do together? So the types of interactions that they could have at three what’s the affinity. So what is the relative similarity between each? Person that’s going to join because the hyre that affinity rate is the mohr relevant? Every thing is everybody there on and then yes, it’s floors for a fourth of that eyes the value. So how important is what they’re doing in the community to their daily lives? And so in that regard, you can have communities that are very small that are successful, that are very small in terms of potential audience, but high an affinity and high in value. Or you can have the flip side where you can have, you know, community of successful because they reach a large number of people, but they don’t have actually have that many that much in common. Facebook okay, okay, megan, about this threshold question whether we should be doing it. Yeah, well, when one thing that i think is always really important to look at is to look it like where people already are, you know, go do a little bit of hunting and kind of see, like, okay, who are the people you’re trying to reach? You know what? Platform? So they aren’t engaging on and that’s get indicated for you is like goto where they are already. Having those conversations are, you know, think about where you know where to reach him. So just doing a little bit of mapping and kind of seeing okay, are there conversations happening and kind of seeing what the landscape is and then seeing how how do you want to kind of be? How do you want to sort of guide that guide that bill? You know, if you will, you know, in terms of whether that’s thinking about your having community on your own platform, or having some other kind of group channel, that would be appropriate. Okay, interesting. Yeah. So i feel like i kind of started the wrong the wrong place because you all three made different points. But one similarity running through is the community’s exist in one way or another. We’ve got them. How? How robust can they be? How can they be built out? What methods do you want to use for the communications? Okay. Well, that’s cool. I’m i’m happy to stand suddenly corrected. Nobody is what he said it explicitly. I’m happy to do it. Ok. Where should we go next? In this community building topic what’s. Ah, if we do wantto billed out and make something special beyond what we where we are, where do we where do we get started? Something that might be helpful is we have a few community experts here that maybe could talk a little bit about what they’re doing to do to build community in their specific organisation. Ten and a cs to relay for life. Yeah, good. Megan, you want to? Yeah, sure. So one thing that we do it in ten and ntcdinosaur part of this is we really try to combine a lot of opportunities for people to network and connect and do some community building activities and sort of finding a combination of the online and the offline. So auntie si is a perfect example of, like, you know, what happens when you get a bunch of people in the right place having conversations and having an in person kind of community building, and then we really try to kind of keep that moment i’m going through some of the, you know, the online kind of community building, and so we’ve done that in terms of groups and what we have in anti seizure years, we have birds of a feather lunch. Which are lunch is for anyone who wants to meet on about a certain topics. So it’s a great way to break the ice because you automatically have something in common with someone else. So we’ve had every birds of a feather start that were women in tech table at lunch, there was another one that was a bunch of people that work at food banks, and some of those have led teo becoming more formalised communities of practice that exist online. So, for example, a year ago, we had a bunch of people howto birds of a feather table that was on arts non-profit group, and it has since become a community, a practice that has that lives on intense community platform and they meet on a monthly basis online or sometimes they have twitter chats in between the anti c and then they’re meeting up again this year. I want to explain what the inten community of practices yeah, eso our community to practice our our affinity group so it’s very similar to like thinking of like a bird of a feather in person thing on lee, it exists online on these groups will have discussions that take place in forums and usually will have some method of kind of connecting, whether that’s on, you know, on a monthly basis, whether that’s via tweet shot sometimes that’s on and online, you know, some kind of conference call with folks of shared notes, documents of different groups do different things with that, but some have some kind of kind of personal connection but mostly exists online. In between are the communities of practice on ly open toe, and ten members know they’re open to the public. So anyone who wants to join you very good about that, you don’t have to be a member. Yeah, any of our community groups, all you need is a lot in evil address and a password on your good. Excellent. All right, so pretty open ended. Kapin yeah, definitely very, very welcoming. Yeah. Go ahead, please. Joe. Relay for life. Yeah, so our online community is called relay nation and it came about really a couple years ago when we realized we didn’t have a really great way of taking all of the resource is the inspiration that we felt as an organization. We need to get in the hands of our relay. For life volunteers nationwide, you know, really, if life is such a large event, there’s just so many volunteers and they’re in all corners of the country, so getting them together in an online community to connect them to other relay er’s with similar stories, similar ideas, similar struggles even has been very valuable to us, and we’ve realized over the last two years with really nation that it’s not just an opportunity for us to share those resource is with folks, but it’s turned into even more of them, sharing things back to us, and it’s turned into almost a goldmine force in terms of online content, social content stories, videos, all of the things that for a non profit organization really help you tell your story about where the money goes, how the mission impacts people that participate in the event, and we’ve been able to use the really nation to do that. So an example, just a couple months ago, we posted a very simple question in our forum on relay nation and asked what was your moment? What was the moment? It really for life that you’ve got? What this event was all about and within? A couple weeks, we had over two hundred eighty responses from re layers across the country, some, you know, very short stories, some, you know, litanies of pages long of who they really for life for, um and many of those things came with videos and pictures, and we were able to turn a lot of that content into social sharing graphic. So by us asking one simple question in our community, we got lots of responses and lots of stories, and we really put an emphasis back on our relay for life participants telling our story for us because they could tell it so much better than we can as an organization and that’s really been the biggest highlight of having that online community is putting the storytelling of our organization back in the hands of the people that are benefiting from our services that are inspired by the events that they go to and that are, in the end going to recruit and raise more money for the american cancer society. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights. Published once a month, tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. What were the things you were thinking when you decided there’s a need for a community among all these three layers that this sort of maybe some of the symptoms would be helpful for people to understand, but yeah, so we don’t have a variety of nationwide meetings with leadership volunteers, and they always really enjoyed when we got the post event surveys back from those saying we enjoyed visiting with bree layers from other parts of the country in other divisions, other areas because they want to share the best practices as much as i hate that term best practice, it really does drive a lot of what really events dio, and they want to share their struggle. So there’s an event that’s having a tough time recruiting corporate sponsors or finding the right volunteer leadership, it not only allows them to share their concerns and get peer-to-peer feedback instead of staff at the american cancer society coaching these volunteers, volunteers air now coaching each other, and they were doing that in person, and we wanted to facilitate that online and give them a place tohave those shared meeting spaces for like minded volunteers, we have a number of featured groups in our community, so event leads kind of those key leadership volunteers have specific groups where they could just meet network, have forums, share resource is with other event leads all the way down. Two team captains and participants have their own forum specifically for their participation types on that really has been very helpful to one, you know, justified to those people that need assistance, that they’re not alone in the study, on the help that they need with their relay for life fund-raising in participation, and it makes a lot of advocates for us as well, because that peer-to-peer interaction, our volunteers air helping other volunteers which builds their confidence and their appreciation for the cause and their confidence in their leadership abilities, which grows more leaders for us. Michael, is that is that kind of segmentation in a community, and i don’t mean that pejoratively at all. But you know that kind of those kind of divisions where it’s a peer-to-peer is that eso lots of subsets? Is that important? And yeah, it is because when you think about how do you maximize going back to the, you know, the value of community affinity being one and then purpose. What can you do there and segmentation? So who’s the target audience for your community and what is going to be about when they get there helps increase that value. And so because of that, so we generally see it’s more lives, a few different community types and constituent groups that their focus on so one is event peer-to-peer fundraisers, which is where the american cancer society is doing. Another is members for more of like a association that’s what, like the american heart association is doing this with intent was doing another is for advocate. So the national wildlife federation has an online community called ico leaders targeted at student environmental activists, helping them create projects. Another is volunteers ahh par oh, very small organization in north carolina who’s here does all of their volunteer crew ting and matching through community on then the last is a kind of mission support, so for the people that the non-profit is trying to support. So the canadian cancer society is a good example of this. They’ve got a community in french for those in come back that is designed to bring together cancer survivors and those that are supporting them, you know, so that they can go through that challenge together, feel less isolated. So it’s kind of you generally do find in our experience, more success when you do kind of target who communities for and what the purpose is. All right, so you have the umbrella community, says the nation, but but lots of lots of affinity group well built build around different things. It could be geography. Yeah, language, but lots of lots of subsets. Yeah. And even really nation is that example that is targeted. Not for everybody who is on american cancer size email list. That is, for people who actually participate in the peer-to-peer or relay for life, and so that’s one segment and then below that joe is just mentioning they segment and even mohr. So carrion’s yeah, there you go. And that’s how you just helped make it, maura. And then the key there is to make it more relevant, invaluable to people so that they’re not just starting from, you know, the eternity of all space. And how do i find what i’m looking for exactly right now? And ten does a very good job of this. Andi. Carrying it well, geographically, but then carrying it to the meet ups, ted clubs all over the country. Yeah, in fact, internationally? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, similar this week, like we actually have one discussion group, which is, is kind of that sort of bigger group that’s kind of serving a bigger thing. That’s our general discussion list, which is kind of all things non-profit tech related. But then we have the individual, like, on the local level, people organizing the in person five oh, one tug clubs that will have monthly meetings, and then they’ll have an online space in which to connect in between meetings as well. And then the affinity groups i mentioned so it’s kind of similar to what you were. You know, you were saying, it’s, michael, about, you know, the kinds of things that people will connect about. And then how do you kind of narrow in that focus? So you have sort of niche is above sort of the larger what i find. Very interesting at intend those those local clubs is the names are not uniforms, right? Right. Right. Organise that the local organizations free to call itself me it. Could be tech for good maybe, and i see now on the spot, i can’t think of the group c tech friendraising cloudgood your butt you can call yourself whatever you want. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so that’s really where so comes in. I think that you kind of are segmenting indo, like kind of a good point about community building is like, you can kind of think of your community is actually being the driver of your community and you might be the person in, like the driver’s side seat, like kind of taken the steering wheel here and there, you know, to steer in the direction you want to go a little course correction course correction, you know? So you’re still staying on your mission and what your strategies and goals are, but you’re letting it be really self directed and then that way you’re communities really feeling a sense of ownership over it. Joe, what about that self directed communities is now a c s is a big organization? Is it that willing to allow that kind of decentralization alcohol it? Yeah, and it’s interesting, because when we first launched relay nation, it was fairly decentralized where we had just wide open groups that people could create their own user groups based on geography based upon participation tie based upon type of cancer that they were reeling for just a variety of things, and we noticed that we got a lot of groups right off the bat that people signed up and started those groups to try and network and that’s been great. But we realized about a year that we needed a kind of shift focus and provide some feature group some pieces that we’re setting out organizationally to put some resource, is behind moderate a little bit more cleanly and help push our resource is and our strategies out that way because, you know, after a while we noticed that for, you know, relay for life online volunteers that run our websites, there were four or five different groups that were all user generated, that we’re all competing for the same audience. So we picked out those ones that we knew had very large audiences that really applied to everybody across the country added them in a more prominent place on relay nation to make sure that the baseline strategies were out there the baseline. That’s like that’s, like one of the course corrections were just talking about you, and we’ve done a couple of those along the way. We used to have a very close community where you had toe, you know, log in to view all the stuff that’s there, and we realized, you know, again about a year ago that by unlocking that and long people to least read the information that’s there, see the stories, follow the threads, load the videos that we’re getting a lot more traffic that way, and a lot more use of john of the site and had a really great girl are alive because of that, okay? And i’m excellent at what you just said our ally and i was thinking, you know, let’s, let’s, turn the discussion to evaluation and and how do we know if these communities are successful? God, michael, you want to kick us off? Yeah, i mean, this is the this is an area where a lot of communities fall short and it’s not because they’re not achieving it. I think it’s, because of the mix of skillsets background and resource is that community managers have in that if you’re going to g o we’re going to go determine hey, what’s the r a y or if its mission related what’s the rom return on in mission from my community. Jerry lee skillsets of the community manager are to be able to kind of, you know, execute, build engagement, all of those types of things, and that’s a little different from alright, great. Now i’m to do data polls from our fund-raising database on going toe port them together with community data. And then i’m gonna run, you know, ve look ups if it’s an excel or queries, you know, if it’s a date what’s with the look up, we have george in jail on tony. Just you just seriously transgressed. All right? So, look, so we’ll look up is a function in microsoft excel that exactly that allows you to look at one cell and then say, go look in this other range over here and give me the value that corresponds to that it’s kind of a way to do a data base in my ear like myself. Okay. All right. Thank you. Probation probations allowed. So however, the the ability t get that data is there and being able to do so makes a big difference between the resource is that that community your community manager, gets and doesn’t, because, you know, after you started community and a year from now or two years from now, the cfo or whoever is in charge of finance he’s going to come around like, you know, like they should do on any project and go, you know, what’s this doing for the organization and so that’s one area where we, you know from from our perspective, so we’re kind of like a partner we don’t have, like, you know, we’re not a non-profit community provides metoo and that’s where we find that it’s really key to have not only the technology and then the strategy of the community, but also the support model for it so you can do things like, make sure your building engagement, but also run those end of the year r a y announce analyses and so joe, american cancer society, they got some great statistics that all of him share. But when you poll data together, here’s some examples of what you know it has been achieved. The american heart association has a professional online network. For their members, cardiologists, mts, nurses, it joined to be a part of us, they pay dues pre imposed, joining their online community thie upgrade rate from one paid level to another pay level went up seventy three percent, the rate at which people attend their revenue generating events, which are like conferences and sessions when a fifty percent the overall retention rate of members. So i’m a paid member one year. Do i continue to be a paid member of the next year? Ten percent and there are, you know, innumerable other quantitative, quantifiable examples like that, where volunteer hours have been increased two hundred twenty eight percent. I’m an annual giving. Yeah, i’m going to go to the folks who actually here. You don’t have a couple minutes left. Sure. So, joe let’s talk about your your comments on our oh, i do it not not just what you’ve achieved, but your advice for small and midsize non-profits teo to measure it. Yeah. So when we built out what our r o i looked like for real a nation, it was helpful to work with someone like small world labs who on their platform the users are are generated based upon their blackbaud id team, razor and blackbaud is the product we use for online fund-raising platform it relay for life, so we were able to easily export the data from the small world labs platt form where really nation is built and merge it using that constituent i’d with the fund-raising data of our users for relay for life, which makes it really easy for us to see what people that participate in really nation do fund-raising wise registration wise versus people that don’t, and we pulled that data about six months ago, and we’re just i geeked out for hours about it because it was just stunning to see that for people that participate in relay nation have had just one interaction, they’ve shared a one photo. They’ve commented on one forum those folks register on average eighty seven days earlier in the year than people that do not participate in really nation. You know, when you think about that in terms of a non-profit event, you know that’s almost three months that they register earlier there, getting your auto responders going called three months what’s three days, you know, it’s, mind blowing that what the amount of dahna the amounts that helps and to get those people in and fund-raising sooner and recruiting center was amazing. I mean, it wasn’t just their registration, it was they set goals that we’re one hundred twenty, one hundred twenty seven percent hyre i think then people that did not participate in relay nation and they achieve that goal seventy three percent of the time or all right, we gotta go turn to meghan, give her a chance on yeah, so i went again, not just not just what intends achieved, but how to yeah, one thing i would say on r o i is, you know, we’ve talked a lot about numbers, but it’s really good to keep in mind the qualitative parts of roo and so to be in continued discussion with your community and be really taking in that feedback. So we survey our community every year in an annual survey and it’s that kind of, you know? So while there’s some quantitative feedback that we get from that, we also get a lot of qualitative feedback as well, and that really informs our work in our direction for our programs and are content for the year okay. Excellent. Latto surveys, just simple surveys. All right, so now we still have a couple minutes. You were so quick. Anything anything more you want to say? Yeah. I mean, i think i on on that particular thing, i think it’s important to be, you know, when i said with constant, you know, talk, constantly talking to your community, i think it’s also good to not just have it be an annual in annual thing that you’re looking stats like ceo wants to know it’s like to be on a continuing basis, looking at those numbers and be able to course correct along the way and just being really nimble about being willing to change and be flexible with that. Okay, we got we got about another minute or so left. Anybody closing comments on community could be, yeah, i’ll jump in real quick because i think one of the takeaways i always like to share is when we share. These are aligned numbers from the american cancer society with the fellow our fellow staff, we had a ground long conversation about well, do you think that really nation is really driving hyre fund-raising or do you think? That your hyre fundraisers just naturally are migrating to really nation because that’s, what they’re doing, and after a good twenty minute debate, i kind of said, you know what? I really don’t care, you know, if they’re both really great things that we want, we want to provide a space for our highly engaged volunteers to meet and mingle, and we also want to take our less engaged volunteers and drive them to more fund-raising mohr engagement with us more recruiting and be more well rounded volunteers for relay for life. So, you know, i think it’s a good, solid mix of both, so you know, don’t think that necessarily you’re driving eight hundred percent hyre in something you are going to pull in some of those key people that are going to skew that number up a little bit, but it’s also a good thing to provide them. The resource is that they’re obviously seeking excellent. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. They are right. They are meghan keene, membership director for inten michael wilson, ceo of small world labs. And joe prosperi digital lied on relay for life at the american cancer society again thank you and thank you for being with tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc fifteen the non-profit technology conference time for live listener love. We got marquette, michigan, st, louis, missouri, new bern, north carolina, new york, new york, multiple san francisco, austin, texas. And langhorne, pennsylvania. That’s s o far part of our domestic live listener love also on twitter madeline nino’s software advice, jean takagi, thank you very much for doing a little live tweeting and, uh and your shout outs to the show and we’ll do a little bit of a broad, but we have ah, lots of listeners abroad would do just a little bit la paz in bolivia, italy, portugal and israel. Sorry, we cannot see your cities but live listener love to you and also in ah in taiwan. Ni hao, podcast pleasantries people in the time shift ten thousands of you listening wherever you are, whatever device, whatever time geever activity you’re engaged in as you’re listening, pleasant trees to the podcast listeners and, of course, those very important affiliate affections were gonna have a new affiliate starting in june. But we love can’t announce it yet. You don’t know exactly what day they’re going to start, but in california so i can, so i’m at liberty to say at this time, but for the everybody ate listening on the affiliates affections out to you, tony, stay two and ah, questioning crowdfunding coming up first, i gotta shout out the opportunity collaboration, our sponsor, the weeklong unconference in x top of mexico around poverty alleviation, it’s for non-profits impact investors, social entrepreneurs, grantmaker sze researchers, academics, corporations all of those entities will be represented there. I’ve seen it firsthand because i was there last year and i’m going this year. Any sample ward is going this year? It’s seventy eight percent sold out last week was only seventy six now. It’s seventy eight i stopped stuff to get my registration it’s selling out. Don’t be slow like me if your work is at all related to poverty reduction alleviation anywhere in the world, check out opportunity collaboration dot net non-profit radio is hitting the road, i’m going to phoenix, los angeles, then i’m going to drive from los angeles to san francisco spent a few days there, and then i’ll be in portland, so if you are close to any of those places, please. Let’s, meet up my itinerary and the video are at tony martignetti dot com third sector today at third sector today. Dot com amy davita runs it and she has lots of contributors. In fact, i met her live at ntc just what, two months ago they block tips, insights, best practices for the community. They have a podcast. Maria semple has been on the podcast stealing my guests just like guidestar did guidestar this past week had a newsletter i got the email newsletter three past guests on the guide star newsletter copying blatant copying non-profit radio it’s gross, but we love it because it’s it’s a flattering to be copied in any case, we’re not we’re talking the third sector today. That’s right, third sector today dot com valuable resource written and curated by very smart folks there run by amy de vida and that is tony’s take two for friday, fifteenth of may twentieth show of the year speaking of n ten and ntcdinosaur portland amy sample ward is the ceo of and ten the non-profit technology network. Our most recent co authored book is social change anytime everywhere about online multi-channel engagement her blog’s amy sample, ward dot or ge? And on twitter she’s at amy rs ward welcome back, amy sample ward hey, how’s it going. Thanks for having me back on. Oh, month after month. It’s a pleasure. You’re very well, thank you. Thank you for doing it all this time. Yeah, it was it was fun. And also strange at the same time to be, you know, listening in on the line muted, of course, and hearing hearing megan and then ten staff person talking, i just kept thinking, oh, i’m talking to megan. Oh, no, i’m not right. And that was all from auntie si, which you and i talk there too. I haven’t played that interview, but we will now intent has as a big announcement coming up next week. What can you share at this moment? Wait, do we have kind of two things going on, one that i can share more spoiler information about? We’ve been working for the last over a year on our new website and sharing that kind of publicly as we go along case studies of ourselves about things that we’re working on. Our things that we need to do is part of ah, website redesign. So we have nine working days until the site should be should be going live. So that’s taking up lots of energy and brain power over here. But then we also have announcement next week that will be on a new program area both kind of online content and educational programs as well as some offline pieces. Okay, okay. Eyes going, toby, is there another annual event coming up like leading change summit and and tc? Yes, the leading change summit is coming up from it. We’re really exciting. You know, last year was the first year that we did it. So we learned a lot about, you know, it’s it’s, a very different process. A ce faras an event, you know, it’s, not a conference. Where there’s lots of sessions happening. There’s no exhibit hall, things like thing, you know, the main kind of components of the non-profit technology conference or other big conferences. But this is more of a facilitated process. So everybody that comes it is kind of, you know, suspending disbelief and and going through this experience together to come out on the other side with more more kind of fully formed ideas. Concepts, new programs, whatever it may be, tio take back to their organization. So we learned a lot last year and have shifted some things around and made it just a lot more hands on. So this year it’ll be in september thirteenth through sixteen in washington d c so registration is open for that. And yeah, we got all kinds of things going on. Okay. That’s leading change summit info is, of course, that in ten dot or ge but that’s not what i was asking you. What i was asking you was, is as part of this new announcement, is there going to be on additional annual event? Is that is that now i’m not doing that, okay? No, but it will be. It will include a program and a delusional opportunities. So, you know, new areas of online programs, but then also ah, deep investment in offline capacity building. All right, all right. We look forward to that next week. And then, of course, on the website side, you and i talked about that just a few weeks ago, we were talking about mobile mobile accessibility and mobile friendliness. I’m pleased to say durney martignetti dot com is now mobile friendly. Look atyou between moving quick. We tweaked it. We did some work. Yes, it is now mobile friendly and i know you’re new and ten site will be also right. Ok? Yes, exactly. All right, let’s, move! Teo. What? We want to talk about our main topic. We lots of topics, but the main one eyes some questions about crowdfunding you were very prominently quoted in on npr blogged, along with other guests, gen shang, professor gen shang she’s been a guest. And sandra miniutti, a charity navigator? Of course. Ken berger, former ceo there was a guest multiple times on the show. So everybody’s stealing the non-profit radio guests remarkable god’s, pure steel. You’re just putting people on the map, tony, we’re i’m a pioneer in the pioneer in transit, so i better watch out for the arrows in my back. Because that’s, what happens to pioneers and the subject of this was the nape all crowdfunding. And you had some thoughts about. Well, i guess we could start with, like, organizational versus individual crowdfunding. Yeah, it’s. Interesting. I just thought that it was potentially an interesting conversation for you and i to have obviously you talk a lot about fund-raising on dh, you know, talking about crowdfunding isn’t necessarily something new to folks that listen to the show. Neither is kind of the rial surge of donations that most people are participating in after a natural disaster, whether you know, whatever country that’s in so that’s not new either. But there there does seem to be some interesting shift happening with the latest natural disaster, the earthquakes in the paul and i think, that’s why there’s been some of these, you know npr articles and others trying to figure out, you know, it’s, not it’s, not the most prominent thing this time to see, you know, text to donate to the red cross like that’s what everybody remembers from a lot of the most recent natural disasters the last few years, right? You know, as soon as something happens, we’re getting the text to donate to the red cross when there was the oil spill, you know, texted, donate teo national wildlife federation, you know, kind of big household organizational names, right? And this time, that’s, of course, happening like there are still those channels to donate to a very large international organizations, but there’s really big surge in in crowd funding efforts that are either totally personal, you know, just individuals setting up a page and some of those individuals they’re setting up fund-raising campaigns, you know, online funding pages that are not benefiting organizations they’re saying, you know, please donate and i will make sure that my parents, who are missionaries in the paul, get all the money and distribute it to villagers or, you know, donate to me, and i will fly over and help myself. So there’s, this kind of individual as the end, has the end relief effort there’s also individuals setting up pages that are directly connected to an organization so much more similar to what organizations are probably used to it they’re doing, you know, a walkathon, and everybody sets up their own fund-raising page, but the page itself is already connected to their organizational account, right? So that all the money is automatically going to them just through the system and then their organization setting that pages, you know, for themselves in the relief efforts that they’re working on. So it’s it’s interesting to see the shift where it isn’t just the red cross or use a i d or unicef, you know, very large international names, but, you know, people are just setting that pages for themselves or i know a friend that lives there, and i will send the money to them and they’ll decide what to do with, you know, and i think that, hey, it’s interesting to think about now, because this may be what it looks like more commonly as we go forward. No, crowdfunding is becoming crowded funding. Exactly. What about these? This is interesting individuals using the organization name. I mean, now you suggested an organ individual might be doing it, and then it goes just through the through the platt for the crowdfunding platform, whatever it might be on then to the organization. But what if it’s an individual using an organization’s name, but they’re not necessarily the infrastructure set up for the decoration to go directly, and they claim i will give it to whatever you know, whatever relief agency it is or something, you know? Yeah, that’s, that’s really a great point, teo, to provide some clarity on, i think it’s organizations or as individuals looking to donate if someone says, you know, i’m don’t worry send send me your money, and i will make sure you know that the red cross gets it. It is it is not. I mean, there’s no accountability and that, right? And if you if you really want to donate, you know, say, tony, you had a page set up and you are my friend and i wanted to support you, so i wanted to donate, you know, to your page because of that, you know, that feels good too. That’s, why we do individual based fundrasing right, like, i want to donate to relief efforts, but i want to do it through, you know, we’re together in this there’s there’s no reason why you couldn’t set that page up in a way that is connected to the red cross, right? So, you know, using most of these vetted, established fund-raising platforms that are are meant for organizations to receive donations. You can, as you’re setting up your page, it’s still in your name? You know, tony, this is my fund-raising page, but using one of these platforms, you can say, i want this to go to the red cross, and the money won’t go to you personally, you know? It really will connect to the red cross is account that they’ve set up in that system on dh if you are looking at a friend, our colleague page, and it says that it’s going to an organization but it’s not connected, you know, i would i would questions their own process to be able to make sure it goes, they’re not that they’re necessarily trying to be malicious, but that, you know, they’re they’re crowdfunding platform setup to facilitate that right? So why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? Yeah, it makes it a little yeah, it raises the suspicion, you know, exactly, it’s interesting. I mean, i’ve even seen, you know, there there are lots of there are so many platforms like you said it’s, a crowded crowdfunding space, and there are lots of platforms set up, you know, for organizations or entities to receive those funds, but then there are platforms that aren’t aren’t set up, you know, their intention is really individuals to receive money like, go fund me and you see people using go fund me to set up a campaign that like a you know example, you before, please donate money and i’ll give it to my parents, who are missionaries in nepal, and they’ll make sure this goes somewhere, but i’ve even seen people saying, hey, my friend, is there on the ground and, you know, they’re not really online because they’re there in the kind of aftermath and continued aftershocks of these earthquakes send me the money and also, and i’ll wire it to them without even using the platform literally just posting on facebook, you know, here is, you know, send a wire transfer to my hsbc account and i will send that money on which i think you know, of course, you want to believe your friends that you can send them some money, but i think even if you weren’t trying to be malicious, have you really weren’t trying to manage that it’s very difficult, right? You get a hundred ten dollars transfers. How are you even tracking that? So, yeah, okay, it like we said, reasonable suspicion and why not make it easier on yourself and and help the organization with accountability so that they don’t have to be concerned who’s using their name. Okay, we got to go away for a break for a couple of minutes. When we come back, of course, amy, you and i’ll keep talking about nepal. And some options is for organizations who might consider crowdfunding as a part of ah fund-raising campaign or not. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they only levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Lively conversation. Top trends, sound advice, that’s. Tony martignetti, yeah, that’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m travis frazier from united way of new york city, and i’m michelle walls from the us fund for unicef. More live listener love abroad, seoul, south korea always always loyal listeners soul multiple anya haserot in japan, lots of people in japan soca, tokyo, fu chiu, saitama, konichiwa. And in china we have beijing and chung ching and ebay ni hao. I wish it was somebody from czech republic because i felt like saying dobre den, but there’s nobody nobody would understand that. So i won’t say dope breeding again. There’s nobody out there who will get that. And columbia is with us. Columbia. I don’t see your city, columbia, but live listener love to you also, amy, the the the unfortunate part of just slightly, you know, i don’t mean to be difficult or anything, but well, you are. You are. Ah, when you recorded it by npr, they referred to you as ceo of a non-profit technology organization called n ten, but here on tony money now provoc radio your intent. Everybody knows everybody knows what intern is. They need that leader all that worthy leading a technology non-profit forgone ization called and ah, i felt about oh, really, npr doesn’t know intend well as well as a cz non-profit radio does and your home here you’re home you exactly. I’m not. I’m not on every month at m p r i know you will be no, this is a stepping stone, but you’ll never forget it. You know you won’t forget us exactly what else? What? Anything else you want to say in the in the part of the, you know, organizational versus individual on crowd funding sites. Well, i just thought i could offer up during the break. I just pulled up a couple lynx to have some sort of data. Teo kind of illustrate the point we were talking about there. I thought it might be helpful. And of course, you know the caveat when i’m about to share the data, i’m about to share it, you know, on ly one to two specific examples, right? But so global giving is ah, online crowdfunding platform right, used by organisations that wanna, you know, crowdfund are raised money online and that exists and they right after the earthquakes and appall set up a relief fund and what i think interesting there is that this is global giving setting up the page, bir says, you know, say, and ten, like an actual individual organization and it was set up, i’m saying, you know, of course, here’s the situation, they just have this natural disaster and, you know, fund, add your donations to this pool, and we will work on both right away, immediate relief efforts as well as longer term rebuilding in africa, and we will put your funds in tow, locally vetted organizations, so they didn’t even necessarily say great global giving is going to raise money in this pool for these two organizations. It just said, we’re going to put this into other organizations and then over on go fund me what i was referring to a four platform that’s normally used by people who are having, you know, maybe a medical emergency, and they put up a page saying, oh, my gosh, my, you know, sibling is in the hospital, can you help us with our medical expenses? You know, things that are much more personal, personally, well, in the immediate zone, so they also have a number of people who have set up these fund-raising pages on go fund me, you know, saying, please donate and i’ll send this to my parents over there, you know, send me money, and i will you know, make sure it gets over so two different examples, right? One of organizations, but exclusively focused on organizations in one focused on individuals. So on global giving, they have received as of this moment ten fifty one a m pacific time, heimans thirty three thousand nine hundred sixty one donations totaling two million, six hundred and sixty one thousand dollars. Over on go fund me. They have fifty seven thousand one hundred and seventy two donors. So good. Twenty five thousand more and have raised four million. Five hundred forty two thousand double. Yeah, basically, two. Very interesting. Right? And i think there’s a lot to try and take a part there that we could of course, formulate our theories about, you know, the global giving sight didn’t even say specifically which organization so there wasn’t that recognition of oh, i know them, but it was focused on organizations doing this short term in this long term efforts where these individuals were able to just go out and campaign for themselves. Right? Like here’s, my page. Donate to it. You all know me and trust me, please donate and we’ll make sure that money gets over there to folks who need it and that has, you know, at least using these two platforms are two examples that go fund me is like you say, almost twice, yep, yep. Okay, wait, we have to move. I want to move to the organizations who might be thinking about crowd funding as a part of a fundraising campaign. There are different ways you could do this. Let’s, let’s, explore that like e-giving days might be one, for instance. Yeah, so i think we talked a little bit about giving daze awhile ago back after giving tuesday. So can a national international now day of giving after the u s thanksgiving holiday and there was there was also just give local, which was able to america just make was just may fifth. Yeah, exactly that i think it’s uninterested in idea when it comes to crowdfunding because, you know, you sure the nepal earthquake is happening in lots of organizations and lots of individuals or fund-raising so you’re part of you’re you’re part of that fund-raising effort, right? People could come across your fund-raising page just by looking to give to nepal, right? They don’t know who you are, but they found you by, you know, doing internet search are looking on global giving for a campaign on and that’s really, i think how to think about it when you’re thinking about giving days, it isn’t necessarily i mean, e-giving days are going to have the same kind of total donations as a natural disaster, right where you’re bringing people together all around the world, but you do benefit from the fact that you can engage your community members, and it feels like, hey, of course, we’re asking you to donate, but it’s this big organized thing, so you get a little more leeway and forgiveness and, you know, the asks of, please donate, and here we are really asking you to participate because it’s a larger event and you benefit from people participating in that event, sharing the link and others in their network coming in and seeing you there. Oh, i didn’t know about this organization, but, you know, my friend just donated to them because it’s, you know, give local america and i want to participate, and i want to donate, too, so you get a little bit of that exposure benefit by participating in a larger yeah get that bump weii just have we have actually less than a minute left. It could also you could consider crowdfunding as a part of an event. Why don’t you talk about that quick? Sure, i think that’s a real missed opportunity if you’re goingto have i mean, you even did this right? Tony, you could do a case study in yourself, you know that you’re putting on an event is an organization and you have community members who want to show their support for you encourage them to set up fund-raising pages in advance of the event, even if they’re competing with each other and have the live event in person be kind of a deadline for those donations. So people see what that timeline is, and they all come together offline and see who raised the most. Yes, i did that when i was honored by hermandad couple of weeks ago. Thank you. Yeah, we have to leave it there. Amy sample ward she’s at amy rs ward on twitter. Her blogged amy sample ward dot org’s. Thank you very much, amy. And we’ll be seeing you very shortly when i’m in portland. Thanks, tony. Looking forward to it. Thank you. Next week, maria semple and jean takagi return, so we’re hitting all the regular contributors in just two weeks. If you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Think of opportunity. Collaboration with world convenes for poverty alleviation, i warn you, it’s, excellent, and it will ruin you for every other conference opportunity. Collaboration. Dot net. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam lieber what’s on the board, as the line producer shows social media, is by susan chavez, susan chavez. Dot com on our music is by scott’s dying. I love that, yeah, you with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a, m or p m so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Amador is the founder of idealised took two or three years for foundation staff sort of dane toe add an email. Address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno. Two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony, talk to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five per se.

Nonprofit Radio for May 8, 2015: Consider Consulting & Top Skills For Your Board

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Julia Reich and Marlene OliveiraConsider Consulting

Is consulting to nonprofits for you? Do you have the personality for it? What about marketing, pricing and setting boundaries? Julia Reich is owner of Stone Soup Creative and Marlene Oliveira is principal of moflow, a communications consultancy. We talked at NTC 2015, the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

 

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the embarrassment of giggle incontinence if it leaked out that you missed today’s show, consider consulting is consulting to non-profits for you do you have the personality for it? What about marketing, pricing and setting boundaries with clients? Julia rice is owner of stone soup creative and marlene olivera is principal of moflow, a communications consultancy, we talked at ntcdinosaur fifteen, the non-profit technology conference and top skills for your board software advice has a report on what skills to look for as you recruit board members. Melissa mccormick is their market research manager on tony’s. Take two thank you and third sector, responsive by opportunity collaboration, the working meeting on poverty reduction that will ruin you for every other conference here is considered consulting from auntie si. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of non-profit technology conference twenty fifteen we’re in austin, texas at the convention center our hosts are and ten non-profit technology network with me are julie rice she’s, the owner of stone soup, creative and marlene olivera, copywriter and communications consultant with moflow julia marlene, welcome, thanks for having us thinking it’s a pleasure to have you on a busy conference day. Thank you. You’re a very interesting topic is, uh, considering consulting to non-profits i like that a lot. We don’t do a lot of career topics on non-profit radio. So that’s why? I was very much anxious toe have you and talk to you? Um, julia let’s, start with you. What do i need to be thinking about? Generally? Because we have plenty of time together if i’m thinking about making this transition to consulting what what should be what? Some of things i should be thinking about? Well, when marlene and i were putting together the session, we identified five different main topics that we’re going to cover, and one of them is actually making the leap and what to think about when you’re first starting out? Yeah, on and so we both came up with our own tips of what we thought would be important, and so i’ll just share one of my tips and it’s going to sound really obvious, but when you’re first starting out as a consultant, i think it’s important to be professional and there’s a lot of different ways, teo exude professionalism, and one of those things is really easy to do and that’s get a professional headshot so, you know, you can use something from your iphone or whatever, but that’s the selfie is not really doing it. Yeah, yeah. And i see a lot of people do that, and i think that they’re kind of it’s kind of an injustice. I think that they could really be presenting just a better presentation of themselves if they got a a professional headshot on and there’s actually, right here in the conference in the science fair, they’re actually taking professional about two boots over, right? Flux a fail you xx our neighbors are taking taking professional hit shots so there’s, no excuse, right? If you’re here it but if you’re not, yeah, and we’re in such a visual society on the web is so visual. When people go to your about paige or your bio page, the first thing they’re gonna do is look at your picture before they start reading. So it’s your first impression and a lot of ways, right? All right, marlene, you have a tip? Yeah, for sure. I think when you’re thinking about whether or not to move into consulting, my advice is to think about two things in particular. One is your personality and whether you have an entrepreneurial type of personality, whether you’re going to be able teo, learn the skills that are outside of your specialty in order to run a business, have you also within your personality, whether you’re a warrior or not, whether you’re gonna be able teo, stay, keep an even keel when the business is slow, right? We went in cash flow. We need to know that cash flow and income fluctuations very, very much a part of having your own consultant lee totally a part of it. And so i kind of think that you should potentially not be pursuing this if you’re a real warrior. Yeah, some real introspection. Yeah. Think about your personality. And and you know whether you want to run a business because it’s a big move from having a paycheck. And then the other thing is, think about your finances. So you touched on it. I think in my in my experience, it worked well to have a good cash flow. Good reserve before launching the business. So i think, you know, save up for it if you can spend some time saving up so that once again you can weather the downtime and that you make good decisions, you won’t just take any client for any reason. So i think thinking about your finances and think about how good you are with money. You know, julie and i have talked about, you know, your good favor when the money does come in. Do you spend it all? So those are things i think you think you should think about in terms of your personality way want to avoid making an impulsive decision because all of a sudden, our job sucks. Something has really just happened that we just can’t tolerate. So i’m going off on my own. Yes. Actually, that is something that we talked about as well as your motivation. Are you? What? What you said, you know, it seems like the easiest way out of a bad situation. Or do you really want to be a business owner? Okay, julie, you want to share another tip? You said you had teo just came up with. A couple, anything else or around the motivation, any opening question tips? Well, i would just add to it, marlene said, when i first went out on my own, a lot of people would say to me, oh, i could never do that, i would just be watching television all the time or, you know, going shopping and, you know, my personality is well suited to being a consultant and being self employed because i’m just really self motivated and no, i have to, you know, i have to make a living, so i’m not gonna waste my time, you know, going shopping and watching television and so it’s, just i know that part of my personality is is motivated enough teo toe work, like on a and i guess that’s going back to being professional, you know, it’s, i’m i’m sitting in my office in front of my computer basically monday through friday, nine to five, sending that setting those hours cem or introspection, but also recognizing that the need to pay bills is quite a motivation. So you may think that you may be on the fence about whether you’re whether you’re disciplined enough, recognize that you’re gonna have bills and you are going to want to make money to pay them so that that should be some help to you, right, discipline, that way of putting it. But on the other hand, if you say you’re total slouch and, you know, for a fact, you’re not gonna do it, then then this is not the right both for you, although i can’t say i kind of learned this one the hard way a little bit where the year i launched my business was also an olympic here i watched it few too many olympic duvette your income suffer, and i mean, it was mostly during a quiet time it was during the summer, but i did realize that i could have been building my business instead and started to build that structure and that discipline in a more defined way for myself started to structure it in what year was that what you live for? Two thousand eight? And how long have you been in business? Julia? Since two thousand one. Okay, oppcoll what’s something else? Well, can i presume that marketing is one of the areas of importance? Who wants to start with marketing ideas? How? Do we get this thing launched? You go first. All right, well, i have just a few of the things that have worked for me that i think are potentially surprising to people. I mean, i think you need to do what you enjoy doing and do what overtime you figure out what works but a lot. People cringe when i say i could have obtained some of my favorite and best clients by either cold calling or sending letters. Really? Absolutely. Especially in that first year, i think, you know, nobody wants to pick up the phone and do that, and i didn’t want to either. I don’t mind as much as other people, but i just did. I just made a list. I made a certain number. People i’d call on certain days. It’s good to schedule marketing days. That’s another tip that you will spend on your marketing, your business. And yes, between those calls and those those letters overtime, i did plant the seeds, and they did take a while to grow. But i got some of the best clients my favorite work because they responded to the letter or that phone call. I wonder if. It’s, because you were very careful about who you put on the list. I definitely would have been a lot of time on research, absolutely so much, so much more than the writing and the calling. Yeah, but marlene is also a writer professionally, so i’m sure it was an extremely well written letter. Okay, okay, still that’s not what i would expect all these years and you’re consultant two thousand eight, i would have expected you say comes from referrals mostly that that’s my number to me, actually between that kind of pitching, sort of cold calling or or letter writing and referrals that’s where most of my business has come. And i think referrals, arm or account for more. But that was just a surprising one. The first one that i mentioned and i’ve kept up more with referrals then with letter writing and phone calls. But, yes, absolutely referrals. And when it comes to referrals similar, i think people should be disciplined, structured about it. You make it really targeted list. What you do is you approach your clients that you like working with and you let them know i’d like to work with more awesome clients. Like you and i’m guessing, you know, like minded people, and i think that they’re to you, you said a number how many referrals will i ask for per month to say and make it a point? Make it on your calendar asked for those referrals and pre write an email that they can forward on that your contacts conversely, ford on very, very simple, just like all our sharing tools on the web. Okay, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura the chronicle website philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way julia let’s, come back to your marketing marketing tips. Well, i think when you’re thinking about positioning yourself, when you’re first starting out, that you want to position yourself as an expert, i mean, obviously, you have an expertise in whatever it is that you want to consult about. So i don’t think that that would actually, you know, be an issue. But, you know, you kind of want to just stake a claim and say, i am this expert with this with this specialty, and position yourself that way, go on and have the confidence to do that. All right, anything else? Marketing wise marketing is pretty big. Well, let’s say, i mean, julia, you mentioned professionalism and the professional headshot. Obviously, all your marketing materials should be professional might be worth investing in a professional writer if you’re not one designer. If you’re not one, definitely. I mean, you should be investing in your business. Yeah, and and i would say that in terms of marketing, something that i think has worked well for both of us is sort of building a network and developing a community and sharing your knowledge with that community. So whether that’s doing blawg posts or webinars or marlene does tweet chats, uh, different kinds of presentations, but sharing your expertise with the community and building it up that way. There’s a good way too, huh? Just build your clientele and your prospects. Julia, what is your consulting? What do you do? I do graphic design and brand strategy. Okay? And marlene, you’re a professional writer. I do copy writing in communications planning. So basically a block and a newsletter planning it’s. Not writing strategy. Not writing if it’s not writing it’s those do you think? Okay. Okay, so you’re covering it. All right. So we have writing and design. Ah, where? Should we go after after marketing? Well, they didn’t want to just say one more thing about marketing really lead to it and a lot of those efforts i know for both of us lead toward building an email list on and that’s it for me. It’s a focus now that hasn’t been a focus prior to now, but it also fits with that building a community, having people who want to hear from you and are waiting for your help and your tips and your information keeping yourself top of mind with them. So it’s ready to add that about female? Alright, excellent way wish we go after marketing. Well, we didn’t finish talking, but one thing that i love talking about a little bit of this bit working from home, one of the advantages yeah, and the productivity side for me because i think it’s both the luxury on the challenge of being self employed that you’re leaving the world of meetings if you work in a non-profit you’d probably spend forty percent of your day in meetings, and maybe maybe i’m under representing that, but you can get so much done, but you do have to be. Disciplined, so i just wanted to mention the idea about setting boundaries for yourself and for others on, and i’m very pointed about that, you know, there are certain things i won’t do while i’m writing, i won’t let an internet distractions of all that social media scheduled time for those those are put to the side until i’ve been productive enough and setting boundaries with people around you could sometimes those friends who have more flexibility in their life get excited that they can call you during the day or they can pop in, or the or the lunch thing that julia mentioned that that they think you’re available now to fit into their social calendar. So you just need to decide what you’re going to allow in if anything, during a work day and be deliberate about that boundaries. And i’ve had i’ve had an office outside of the house, and i’ve had an office inside my house, and i like them both for different reasons. Pros and cons for both. Okay, murcott how about pricing? We move, teo pricing, what base do we have around pricing? Well, i have a few tips. Sort of. I find it. Hard to give anyone advice about what they should do with pricing, but these are the things that these short, more smaller picture tips that i that i use well, the big picture point is, too. If you’re launching your business as a professional than charge professional feet, it doesn’t mean charging here here doesn’t mean charging a ton, but it doesn’t mean trying to compete with employees and related to that is to get away from hourly pricing because clients will compare you to staff and what they’re paying stuff. Oh, that’s interesting you’re recommending avoiding hourly, but i don’t think of charged hourly since since that first year since two thousand eight, when i when i realized that for me project based pricing works better clients, they like the predictability of it. They know what they’re paying, and i build in the steps that it is going to take to get there. So that’s kind of like to use the analogy, if you know you had kids say they come over your lawn for ten dollar fee or, you know, four dollars every ten minutes and you have no idea how long this kid is going to take. And i think my clients like that predictability about it other a few other tips are i think you should always give a ballpark first to see if you’re speaking the same language, maybe, you know, even in the same world and never quote in person, like always have the conversation go back and think about what that really should be and come back in writing later. Yeah, sometimes it can be sometimes hard. Teo, resist the impulse to do be thoughtful and answer the question. Well, what would this cost? You know, you always have to say step, step back, let me think about it. Let me put something in writing for you that’s usually that’s, usually sufficient to get the person toe agreed. It’s wait a few days or a week for something more. I appreciate that you’re thinking about yeah, exactly, you know, with anything that we do. We’re thinking about time, but we’re also thinking about our particular expertise, whether we’re right fit were probably building out timelines for clients. They want us to go think about what it really is and so yeah, it’s customized for them. Yeah, more, more, more tips around, pricing, anything. You wanna add julia? I wanted to add onto something marlene said about not pricing by the hour because i think it’s also a perception thing, you know, if a client is hyre is paying you by the hour, i think they’re more inclined to perceive you as a vendor, you know, like, you know, someone who most lawn and not then that’s, not really what commodity? Yeah, like that’s, not really where we are and what we do, we’re more i feel like i’m more of a valued partner with my client’s projects, and i’m really trying to understand what their goals and objectives are, and i want to help them. I want to be honestly, genuinely helpful to help them achieve their goals, and i’m helping them plan and strategize, and they’re not going to get that from an hourly rate and it sure you both of you come would come across this that you want to be helpful, so i don’t want my clients to hesitate to call me or ask me to do something because they don’t want to spend that other additional hourly fee. I want them to feel like they can talk to me. To get it right do what it takes to get it right. And then if there is a need for an additional fee, absolutely you can say, you know, i certainly can help you with that. But it’s it’s outside what we go talked about initially that’s actually is another thought about boundaries different than what we were talking about, but still that’s important about boundaries. Yeah, that’s well outside we’ve we’ve agreed, if you like, we can add that on absolutely and that, and that goes back to those careful quotes. You know, when i build a quota bill didn’t exactly what steps are included in that fie, and if it does carry on a little longer than we might talk about an additional fee? Yeah, yeah, okay, one of the topics i think you were going to discuss his establishing your niche and identifying yourself as that within that niche. How do we how do we do that with our potential clients? Julia has a great thoughts. I’ll lead over to her about the consultant versus freelance or kind of role, but for me, when your first evaluating your nation with a canadian e, i think, you know a few things to just consider again you have to find your way along the way we’ve talked about how did we each find our way? Because we can’t pin it down to any one thing, you know, but you’re you’re looking at obviously your expertise and your experience and your skills, you’re looking at what kind of non-profit you want to serve if you want to focus in on a sub sector and you probably should, unless you’re skilled that you’re offering is very specific. He wanted to think about what motivates you, how you can bring your personality into your business and how that can influence what you what you have to offer. So, yeah, that’s kind of go through my thoughts around establishing your brand in the shape of your business and of course, your marketing materials have materials need to support all that and be consistent, just like we have a consistent message within non-profits our own marketing message needs to be consistent, okay? Julia well, my answer is more sort of about the terminology that i might use to define what i d’oh on, and so now i’m using the term consultant, but i haven’t always been comfortable using that term, so i mean, when you think about graphic designers and graphic design firms, you probably don’t think of them as being consultants in the typical sense of the word, and you’re right because i do have ah, more of ah, creative agency hat and with graphic design projects, you know, and they’re and they’re, you know, project fee, and i work with a team of people, you know, like a website, for instance, and i work with developers and designers and content writers, but there is also i am also a consultant because i do brands strategy, and i work with my clients one on one, and so i am wearing that more of that consultant hat, but i also do trainings and workshops and things like that, so in that sense, i’m more of a consultant. So i guess when you’re talking about establishing your brand in your niche, you know, whether you call yourself a consultant or an agency or a freelancer or a coach on this, you’re really matters. I mean, maybe the clients don’t even really care as long as you are positioning yourself so that the client that you want to reach knows that you’re the person to call in their time of need, and that may take some tweaking, right? I’m still tweet like that been in business for fourteen, fifteen years, i’m still tweaking. You don’t always get the clients that exactly in the sweet spot that you want, right? And you might change over the years, you know, i’ve been tweaking when i started right away and interesting. Yeah, you know, i actually was focusing on not focusing i was helping with anything that fell under communications because that was my background was overall communications managing within a non-profit and in the first few months, i decided let’s focus on content because i think clients know they need it, and they don’t want to write it themselves. And then i did that for several years, and in the last couple of years i thought, you know, i can still do that, but i can help more non-profit by doing mme or things like this chat that julia mention now that’s, that’s, not for compensation. I do that for free, but i wanted to sort of change who i was, who i was in the marketplace and i offer more training and more webinars and developing a course so it’s, always evolving. I assume it will always evolve for me. That’s actually the fun part of it it’s it’s creative to be self employed to be a consultant you’re always trying to think of new ways to do things and better ways to do things many things. A twitter chat is a great example, cause it sets you up as an expert in the area, a za convener of others live in your profession as a guide and help in the niche. Yes, a resource that got all that well within the niche that you’ve selected. All very good, i think, for long term credibility. Have you ever seen anything directly business come from twitter? Chat directly? You know it’s a good question, because some of the things i do in that domain, i think, keep me top of mind, but they don’t result in a phone call. Yeah, that’s fine. So i think it’s someone who knows about the rest of it or has been to my website or his has met me through referral and then they see the other activity and that gives it. A boots that just keeps me top of mind i feel that way for the chat, but what i find with the chat specifically is also that it creates sort of a you know, my my own, even though i’m a business might maya ambassadors on social media, people who are more loyal, more willing to share what i’m providing, whether it’s block post so that kind of thing so that’s a definite benefit that i’ve had from your ambassadors on social media love that, yeah, very good in all those ways. Yeah, well, well put, well put, i’ve been doing this show for four and a half years and on lee within the past year, i’d say has it led to calls related to business? So interesting really took a good three years, i’d say before, before that started happening and and it’s it’s a love i mean, i just it’s a joint i love doing this show, but that’s just like an added benefit. A lot of marketing efforts are like that. Yeah, yeah it’s a long cycle, long term, but i do plan to giving consulting, by the way e-giving fund-raising all right, so we still have another like three minutes or so together? What? What else? What else you want to talk about? Well, one of these we’re going to be sharing in our session tomorrow is about lessons learned along the way. I don’t know if you want to keep that are julia share? So we’re going to wrap up with lessons learned along the way and when i was thinking about what i wanted to say about that it’s really more about sort of ah, something i’ve learned about myself that i’m not very good at and just acknowledging that i’m not very good at it or introspection more interest back-up introspection, asses, yeah, preneurs yeah, yeah, so one of the lessons i’ve learned about myself along the way is that i really hate to talk on the phone like i’m think i’m phobic like i will talk on the phone, you know, if a client wants to talk on the phone or one of my strategic partners wants to talk on the phone, i will do it, but i won’t almost never pick up the phone and initiate a car, so you’re definitely not doing the cold calling marketing i’m doing carlene store. Right? I’m doing cold emailing. Okay, uh, but i would rather clean out my refrigerator, then pick up the phone. Okay? And i think that’s really held me back. You know, i don’t think it’s a good thing, all right, but just you’ve identified it right way you’re not going to force yourself to do cold call marketing, right? Alright, alright. Lessons learned, marlene for me, the big one is learn to say no, you know, say no if if it’s not in your budget, if it’s not according to your fees and wait for the client that will pay your fees. Say no if it’s if it doesn’t feel right, or if it’s not the right fit for me, i say no when it’s not a non-profit because other people hear about me and they asked me small businesses and i really my passion is focusing on working with non-profit so that’s where i keep it and it’s not to say not to be leased a little flexible on work outside your comfort zone and try new things, but just understand it’s okay to say no when it doesn’t feel good so that the more you say no the more you’re actually building the business you want instead of the business that is just kind of coming around. Yes, letting it involve organically. Based on what comes in. Did you have you said yes? Unwisely? Oh, yes, definitely. And so this is a big lesson learned along the way, and i don’t know why, you know, i think it’s just a coincidence. But every time i took a large corporate client, a large corporate client, it didn’t go well out of money. A lot of money in those. Yeah, actually that’s not always true. I was surprised to hear the medical, nickel and dime with me more than a non-profit might, but just just think, it’s the common thread that whenever i took a large corporate client, like once a year for the first couple of years, something would go wrong. It would either be about a relationship or they wouldn’t pay on time, so i just took it as a sign, you know, there are they paid by not on time. I mean, like, four months later. But i took it as a sign that i’ve got to start saying no, because even when it came in someone metoo copyright a boat, nickel mining or i don’t know the subject. I don’t know the people i should’ve said no, i didn’t say yes, we’re gonna leave it there, ok, thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Oh, my pleasure. Julia rice is the owner of stone soup. Creative and marlene olivera is copywriter and communications consultant moflow m o f l o w ladies. Thank you again. Thank you. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc fifteen the non-profit technology conference. Thanks so much for being with us. Julia rice has a very spotless refrigerator. Sounds like live listener love let’s start domestic right here, philadelphia p a the city of brotherly love live listener loved to philadelphia, lexington, kentucky. Langhorne, piela toronto in canada. San francisco, california. Marquette, michigan live listener loved toe all the live listeners going abroad italy haven’t had you? 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It’s in october, as of today, it is seventy six percent sold out. I in fact, i gotta get my registration in amy sample ward is going to be there also, if your work is related to poverty reduction anywhere in the world, check it out. Opportunity collaboration, dot net i thank you very much for loving non-profit radio your love keeps me going on cold, snowy nights when i have no heat or electricity. It’s a tough city here in new york, but your support gets me through. Um, actually, i’ve actually play of heat and hot water sometimes have to crack. The windows open it’s money that i could use you can send money because the love is no good if i don’t have the money. So what the hell is that? So i can’t go out for nice dinners can go on trips love is not going to be enough. Um, i can’t be golden corral and applebee’s. I can’t do those all the time. Although golden corral does actually have good salchow ices. I appreciate those, but you get the message now. But actually, i am very, very grateful for the love that you show for non-profit radio weekend week out really it’s almost it’s. Almost five full years were coming up. And my video this week is a thanks for recent prays that i’ve gotten from listeners you can hear. I got some got some quotes there and the video is that tony martignetti dot com and i do thank you very much. Third sector today at third sector today dot com amy davita runs it and she has lots of contributors. Not like my sight. She actually welcomes other opinions. Ah, third sector today. Blog’s tips, insights. Best practices for the community. They have a podcast, maria. Simple has been on the podcast and amy davita, stop stealing my guests. Don’t even try to get maria. Simple is a regular it’s not gonna happen. She’s she’s exclusive non-profit radio anyway, third sector today dot com a valuable resource curated with an open mind. I hate that. And that is tony’s. Take two for friday, eighth of may eighteenth show of the year. I’m feeling well feisty this afternoon. I know why that is. I mean, i don’t know, but i’m not going to take it out on melissa mccormick. She is a market research manager at software advice. She establishes and enforces standards and best practices for research and analysis. She oversees the regular publication of original primary research on the role of software and technology across many industries. Her research has been sighted in court’s information week, elektronik ce weekly ceo, dot com and other outlets. Software advice is a resource for software buyers. They provide detailed reviews and research on thousands of software applications there at software advice dot com and at n p o soft advice. Listen, mccormick, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks, tony. Good to be here. It’s. A pleasure to have a researcher. And rarely do i get in someone’s bio that they are an enforcer. What is that you do smack knuckles with rulers? Or is it like, stockades or or waterboarding? Which way? Now i’m really not at liberty to say i could tell you, but you have killing these air company secrets of pride. I kind of helped establish and make sure folks are following our guidelines for conducting research and analysis. Now, our researchers typically ah, like a group of anarchists. They’ll do whatever they whatever they please. Unless there’s an enforcer, not my researchers. Now you’re well oh, yeah, but because there is an enforcer. So researchers, they the they get a little loose handed if they’re not reined in. Is this is this ah, true among the research community, you know, not so much that it’s just there are lots of methods and method oppcoll method illogical approaches. So keeping everybody on the same page so that were consistent. Okay. All right. So we know the the research coming out of software advices ous high quality. It is enforced. Yeah. Okay. That’s your responsibility. All right, so how about this survey on board skills? Why? Was this ah focus area? Sure. So, you know, through other research that we’ve conducted and just talking to folks at non-profits that are looking for software solution, we’ve kind of observed that non-profits air a little bit slower to adopt new technology. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, you know, budget, obviously being a big one, maybe just lack of prior experience with software and technology, but it’s sort of a kurd twist that boardmember zahra and kind of a unique position to help guide perhaps the exploration of tech options. So having tech savvy board members could in turn, help non-profits improve their operations in the way they interact with software and technology. So that was kind of our hypothesis on land of reason. Is that your is that called that h one? We still use that terminology. H one hypothesis. You know, i actually don’t use that term, and i don’t see it’s, uh, played well. Sure. Let’s. Call it a one. No, no, no. I took statistics in nineteen eighty two. So each one is probably outdated. Now, it’s probably something else. I don’t know. Okay, we used to call it a tch one h two. And then you try to prove these and there’s something called confidence intervals. I’m sorry. Ok, ok. Is that that still exist? Count your confidence. Interval still exist? Yeah, they do. Ok. Alright, im sorry. Little digression trying to show off that i know something. Go ahead. Okay, so you had your your hat? Your hypothesis. You want to call it a tch one. You had this hypothesis about technology adoption being, i guess, a little quicker for for non-profits if they had sabat your board members. Is that is that basically it? Yeah, that was just it occurred to us that would be one entry point. So one kind of way that change could be an after would be through, um, kind of a technology progressive board. So we wanted to explore that idea and just kind of the broader impact that aboard could have. And how non-profits go about recruiting board members and how they should go about recruiting. Board members so kind of morphed into a bigger topic than purely the software and technology that that’s that’s, kind of where it started on and turned into you just to look at, um, you know from a non-profits perspective, what should you be looking for in a boardmember and on the other side of that coin from a boardmember perspective, which what should you be looking at in a potential board to join? Yeah. So you write. You looked at it, right? You said both sides. So what are people looking for? Yeah, out of board service. And we’ll get a good chance to talk about that and and how khun boards used that information to promote board service. I’m sorry. Not welcome. Non-profits use that to promote board service. Exactly. All right. On dh. What was the which method? A logical choice. Did you choose among the wide array open to professional researchers? Yeah. So we conducted an online survey of a little over fifteen hundred people. So that’s, kind of the quantitative approach. We also i did some expert interviews. So, you know, quantitative is great, especially with a big sample size. You can kind of get a degree of certainty about the results, but we really wanted teo get a little color to those results. So we also did some qualitative interviews with, uh, what i call subject matter experts, folks. In the nonprofit world who have been dealing with boardmember zoho topics related to boards and technology in general for a long time, so interesting and then how do you ah, as a researcher, how do you i don’t know what xero score those those interviews you call, they’re obviously qualitative said yeah, and using that term a little bit loosely report that we published drew most heavily on the quantitative results that were a lot of charts and graphs on dh then really used thie commentary from the interviews we conducted as just kind of quotes within the report on dhe means of almost kind of get checking our own analysis that we’ve done as well, okay, and i see those quotes are in the report. Um, yeah, a lot of mar yeah, so we kind of tied together the broad themes from the discussions we had with those folks into thank you take away that we had already identified from the survey results. I was i was not interviewed. As i recall, i that was obviously an oversight on the part of god there go. I did not coach her to say that i didn’t coach i implicitly. Begged her, too, but i didn’t say it. I didn’t say explicitly. Okay, next time. Okay. There’ll be other opportunities. All right. So what do we find? What? What? Let’s? Look at it from the non-profit perspective. What? What should non-profits b promoting as as board service values? Tio, you recruit? Sure, sure. So, um, one of the biggest, i guess, kind of most decisive findings was that people join boards for personal fulfillment on dh that’s, perhaps not really terribly surprising. You know, obviously, these folks they’re giving of their time and their money. So they want to care about the cause that they’re giving to, but personal fulfillment was number one on the tops of folks list. Okay, okay, let me get a question about that. Now, do we have to be concerned about self reporting bias that people would say the choose the altruistic fulfillment choice over networking opportunities or, you know, something more? More self serving? Sure. Yeah, that that definitely comes into play. You know, it was far in a way, the number one pick. So i think we still have a degree of certainty there. But but yeah, it’s probably safe to assume that. Consciously or unconsciously, folks are kind of elevating their their altruistic nature, as you said, but, you know, i think it also makes sense, um, kind of was validated by the folks we spoke with that, you know, this is a commitment people want two really care about what the non-profits stands for, they’re going to be dedicating so much of themselves to it. Okay, now, it’s clear why i’m not i’m on no boards, but to your point about, you know, networking. We did get folks saying acquiring new skills was important to them honing leadership skills, networking and meeting new people. Those were all other sighted benefits commonly cited benefits, okay, back to the top one, personal fulfillment? What is it? Is it those elements that they’re looking for is that is that satisfying the personal fulfillment that they’re they’re seeking? So i think there are a lot of components to that and that’s something our survey didn’t actually explore very deeply. So, um, potential for future research opportunities exposed, but, yeah, i think it’s not personal fulfillment in the sense that, you know, i am acquiring new skills or meeting new people, but also in the sense that i’m contributing to the greater good. Um so, you know, other survey results included that people really want to see the impact of what they’re doing in the non-profit and the impact that the non-profit is having on its community. So i think that certainly ties in the personal fulfillment as well focused on to feel like they’re contributing to an organization that is contributing to community. I also saw a reliability and accountability mentioned, yeah, so i think those terms specifically came up in the context of, you know, what skills should you look for in potential board way? Kind of explored to different avenues with that one being more kind of professional experience and even almost personality based skills on another being technology based skills? So when it comes to just professional experience and personal skillsets accountability, reliability, those blanked on the west, okay, um, we have just about ah minute and a half or so before we take take a break, melissa okay, why don’t you? Ah, why don’t we go into a little bit about some of the some of the tech skills that are that are sought after what we’re looking for? Sure so um, a little over half of the folks we surveyed mentioned a specific type of software in some capacity or another. So fund-raising software obviously a big one, some kind of experience with systems for doner management. But the number one that came up across the board that everyone said was important was basic computer skills again, not super surprising, but that would include stuff like email aah! Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Okay. That’s got to be there, right? Yeah, exactly. So something really foundational? Tio the the way non-profits conduct business, email documents, spreadsheets. Yeah, yeah, general kind of office productivity tools. You know, like you’re your microsoft word and excel. Not sort of saying calendar tools. Um, dahna obviously critical, but what was kind of interesting and i think what was reflected and the professional skills that we saw being requested was just the diversity of the types of tech skills folks are looking for. So you invented fund-raising and ensured time we’re going way. We’ll take a break, but hold that thought because it’s critical diversity is critical, obviously to ah, two, two boards and we’ll get to that diversity of skills and and continue right after this. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guest directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Yeah. All right, melissa let’s, keep talking about diversity, but what more can we say about that? Sure, yes. I’m probably going to throw that word around the whole lot. Ah, diversity it’s kind of a theme that came up a couple across a couple different topic areas that we covered. So i mentioned with respect to technology skills and software skills. You know, folks on boards were telling us, but the most important stuff was really a lot of stuff. So cr m donorsearch management kind of tools, tools for managing your website. Fundez counting obviously a big one and fund-raising tools in general, i mentioned already on dh that was kind of echoed when we looked at so not the technology side, but the professional skills that were most support. That was really interesting because it was almost an even mix when we asked people for the single most important we’ve got a pie chart with a bunch of pieces of pie that are very similar in size. Um, the number one that kind of had a little edge over the next few was fund-raising so experience fund-raising but others included, you know, just past experience with a similar type of non-profit so relevant volunteer experience. Um, professional services kind of experience. So stuff like legal and accounting skills. Project management provoc management, i think. It’s very grand marketing also. Yep. Marketing. Exactly. Good. You’re going to say something about project management, please? Yeah. That was one that was really echoed by the experts that we spoke with on dh. It makes sense to me that you would want someone who can, you know, manage lots of people working on tasks and keep things moving, keep things organized, keep lots of balls in the air at a time. So that’s a great one that came up in both our survey results in on our interviews, um, and then human resource, those skills, so just kind of oh, your management, which i think has tied to project management, but a little more on the, you know, actual people side. What do you think was meant by project management? What? Did you flush that out at all? Um, you know, i’m looking to see if we gave any examples. We didn’t flush it out much and mean kwan keita’s. But when we spoke to our experts, you know, they talked about the importance of this is where the reliability and the accountability came up. I think in the context of project management to the importance of, um, having the ability to hold others accountable. Tio get people to do great work without stepping on toes. And i think, you know, for non-profits, especially it’s, important to be really efficient. Anytime you’ve got a big group of people responsible for a single task. It’s, easy for, um, everyone to kind of go in different directions or, you know, lots of talking and not a lot of doing to happen. So folks with project management skills, i think, can really cut through that and keep things on track and keep everybody focused on moving in the same direction. Transparent communications was was thought as what? Where it was sought by by people aspiring to board service. Yes, what’s under that was i ah, that was very important. People want to know what the expected involvement is. So what exactly will they be doing? What will they be expected to do? Um and that includes you. You know, what kind of work will be doing but also e-giving requirements. So what will they be expected to give personally? What would what will day be expected to raise? Um, all of these things, people are looking for clarity. Um, and this was kind of echoed by some of the folks we spoke with us. Well, who said you know, non-profits tend to think that board members just understand what they’re getting in four or maybe don’t care about the specifics of what they’re getting in for, but it’s very important to have some layer of transparency and on the part of non-profits that requires maybe sametz tre thought into what the role will entail. So, you know, one thing that one of the experts we spoke to recommended was just actually writing up kind of a little job description to share with board members, you know, communicating really clearly what the expectations are in terms of, you know, frequency of getting together may be setting a schedule of meetings, like an annual schedule that you could share in advance. Um, and then kind of relating back to what i talked about earlier, the personal fulfillment thing. It’s important for non-profits to communicate the impact that they’re having and bringing things full circle. I think that’s kind of a role that technology can play, you know, helping track and also helping non-profits disseminate information about the impact that they’re having. That’s. All that’s, obviously very big topic in the community, especially now that charity navigator is looking for a new ceo. And what is that? What kind of priority priorities is that person going to bring to that to that organization? But yes, for interesting. And now, the way it ties back to technology. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, absolutely. What, whether what other questions are out there? We just have a minute and half or so left what the questions are out there that you’d like to answer. Software advice is going to answer? Sure. So, you know, i mentioned earlier i think one further area for exploration could be digging into that personal fulfillment question a little. We got the results back and saw oh, everybody’s looking for personal fulfillment and kind of went well, duh, of course. That’s what people are looking for and of course, that’s what they are going to say they’re looking for. But what does that mean? It probably means different things to different people. See? I asked. I asked that question also. So that makes me a subject matter. Exactly. You should be a researcher. Well, i’d rather just be interviewed, but i’m not a good influence. Our goal the line. All right, thank you very much. Just another minute. God, what else is out there? Um so so that was one thing another thing that i’m kind of interested in exploring, not necessarily in a quantitative way, necessarily, but just this idea of the diversity of skillsets you know what? What is the balance that you should look for? And how did these different folks with these different backgrounds worked together in the most effective ways? Um, and are there specific types of software and technology that can be leveraged by people with specific skillsets so, you know, should someone with accounting skills be advocating for accounting software for their non-profit that kind of thing? Just kind of the harmonies between the different topics that we’ve already dug started to dig into a little bit here, okay, actually, your urine unenviable position cause you can ask all these questions and then go research and find the actual answer based on quantitative analysis and not just based on best practices or tradition or anything else. I admire that, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. It’s a pretty exciting place to be cool. My voice is cracked. Melissa mccormack, market research manager it’s software advice. They are at software advice. Dot com and at n p o soft advice. Thank you very much, melissa. Thank you so much, tony. My pleasure. And at n p o soft advice. Thank you very much for doing some live tweeting today. Next week, another informative and tcs interview coming to the show, and amy sample ward returns. If you missed any part of today’s show, find it at tony martignetti dot com no singing this week. Opportunity, collaboration, the world convenes for poverty reduction. I’m warning you, it will ruin you for every other conference opportunity. Collaboration. Dot net. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer shoretz social media is by susan chavez, susan chavez, dot com and our music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff, sort of dane toe add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno. 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Nonprofit Radio for May 1, 2015: Multichannel Storytelling & Your DR Plan

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Jereme Bivens and Megan AnhaltMultichannel Storytelling

Once you have the best stories, make the most of them across the web, social media and email. Jereme Bivins is digital media manager for The Rockefeller Foundation and Megan Anhalt is strategy director at Purpose. We talked at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

 

Dar Veverka: Your DR Plan

Disaster recovery: Ignore it at your own peril. What belongs in your DR plan? Dar Veverka is vice president of technology for LIFT. This is also from NTC.

 

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with ataxia telly inject asia if i inherited the mere notion that you missed today’s show multi-channel storytelling once you have the best stories, make the most of them across the web, social media and e mail. Jeremy bivens is digital media manager for the rockefeller foundation and meghan anhalt is strategy director at purpose. We talked at the non-profit technology conference and your d our plan disaster recovery. Ignore it at your own peril. What belongs in your d our plan darva barca is vice president of technology for lift that is also from on tony’s take two thank you, responsive by opportunity collaboration with working meeting on poverty reduction that will ruin you for every other conference. Here’s our first ntcdinosaur today’s show on multi-channel storytelling welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc twenty fifteen, the non-profit technology conference we are in austin, texas, at the austin convention center and my guests are jeremy bivens and meghan and halt they’re seminar topic is multi-channel storytelling for social impact, jeremy is the digital media manager for the rockefeller foundation, and megan and halt is strategy director purpose. Jeremy meghan, welcome. Thank you, let’s. Start with start with jeremy bivens. Why is storytelling so important? Storytelling is important because we have a lot of social sector organizations that are out in the field collecting stories from their impact working with communities around the world and storytelling helps catalyze people to action, to donate money, to volunteer, to help communities so it’s really important that we capture those stories, that we share them to maximize impact. And why your storytelling so much better than some other forms of content that we have a story telling storytelling interacts this in a different way. You had trouble with storytelling, interactive storytelling interacts with with us in a different way, it kind of tugs at the heartstrings and and inspires us to take action. It educates us, but it it really it motivates us to do more than just doing. Ah report let’s say an eighty page report full of statistics and fax is great, but if it doesn’t, if it doesnt make action that it’s not doing its job and stories can help help bridge that gap. Emotion. Yeah, you want anything? I mean, i think, like, what is really incredible powerful about stories is they do have that human connection they are able to cut through, you know, different very complicated con content or other types of content that are really hard to really connect with on be able to really tie into that emotional human connection. So being able to have that authentic experience where it really motivates you and inspires you to want to do something and that’s where for the work that we do around really driving impact and driving action, it could be a really powerful motivator. Call megan, remember to stay close to the mic when you’re when you’re talking ok? Yeah, no problem. All right, thank you, megan. How do we find the people to tell the stories that we recruit the right ones? Yeah. I mean, i think it goes down, teo really being clear and defining what your goals are for the impact that you want to have in the world and then identifying the people that can be really powerful storytellers for that, that goal. So an example, i talked about in our session yesterday is on this organization called the syria campaign identified this brilliant group of men on the ground in syria who were first responders in the syria crisis. Ah, and they called the white helmets, and they were really powerful story teller because they were sort of be able to bring this like, hopeful element to the work that was happening on the ground, and so it allows people to not feel overwhelmed or sad or feel like there’s, not a hope in what can you can accomplish, and so they’re become really strong advocates for the work that they’re doing so that you can really inspire people to want to take action and not feel like there’s nothing that can happen, teo, be able to have that impact, okay, but within our organization’s jeremy, how do we how do we find the right people? How do you find the right people? Tell story. All the stories you know, storytelling is really a collaborative effort. It’s not just the responsibility for the marketing of the communications team it’s, about everybody working together to define what those stories are. So people that are out in the field collecting photos, collecting quotes, it’s about bringing back things that tell a greater story arc the greater narrative of what your organization is trying to accomplish. So that’s really a joint effort? What if somebody’s good? You believe they have great stuff to share stories to share, but they’re they’re reluctant. I don’t want to be in front of a mike even if it’s audio only i certainly don’t want to do a camera. How do we get started to cajole them? Teo, help us out. So when it comes to storytelling, especially our reluctant storytellers a lot of times a laying that fear is maybe just in baby steps it’s working with them to produce blawg posts instead of going right on camera it’s working with them in media training, it’s working with them in speech development. But oftentimes those daunting task is sitting down and saying, share a story with me because it doesn’t give anybody charlie that place that’s not too helpful, right? Tell me a story exactly. About what? Why who’s listening, right? So instead, really the best way to go about it. Say you’re going to the field today? Can you bring back one quote? From one of the teachers that was helping a student in your in your tutoring center. Can you bring back one photo of the well that we helped dig in sub saharan africa? Something like that. So it really sets the stage say, oh, of course i could bring back one photo. Yeah, one quote, i can definitely get on board with that, and it helps ease them into the process of great stories, and then maybe they’ll be willing to provide some narrative for contacts to that photo or that quote, right once you bring them into the process and they feel like they’re a part of it, they feel like they’re owning it will get more comfortable sharing stories. Okay? Bacon you got any ideas for? Ah, people who are reluctant, uh, we’re reluctant contributors. Yeah, i mean, i think, like, really, as jeremy was saying, starting first by getting them to just ride out the different things that they think that are relevant to the work that you’re doing on being able to sort of break that down for them in a way. That’s really simple s o that they don’t necessarily have to go on camera. Or be sort of the actual microphone for the story itself. But as jamie was saying, being able to, like, break that down through photos to be able to tell the story, sort of on their behalf, okay, okay, how about, uh, once we’re in in production, whether it’s you handed them a iphone or you’re in a studio, maybe more formally, what advice do you have there? In what way? Buy-in coaching them in getting them? Well, presumably there already over there, their reluctance, but maybe now that maybe they stage fright, they were they were willing coming a driving in, they were fine and walking in the door, but now there’s a mike in front of them? Yeah, or in, you know, in coaching, yeah, how do we help them out? I think like one of the key element there is just staying authentic and being true to who you are in your own experience and not feeling sort of like that you have to be over coached or over polished because what we’ve seen in the work that we’ve done, purposes that people really connect with that authentic experience in that raw moment of being able to sort of share in your own voice, that experience that you’ve had, what what do you think is a good story? Maybe i should ask you that first we’ll get around, i get around the good questions. What, what? What? What makes a good story? I think, well, we’ve seen a lot of different elements that really drive really powerful stories, particularly ones that are really share a bowl and connect with a lot of people, so one of those elements is people really like to be surprised they like to hear something that they haven’t heard before. They also really like having that human connection. So as i said, that, like authentic, raw, human, honest moment could be really powerful, with people also being a little bit of paying attention to the right place and the right time, and i don’t mean that sort of by luck only, but also paying attention to what is happening in the news cycle, what people are already talking about events that are happening and sort of what’s already getting attention and being able tio leverage those moments as well, toe add a new element to it, that sort of hook news hook. Something talking about jeremy got more advice, anything you want, teo, that hits the nail on the head, being contextual and being relevant, somebody can identify with your story, they’re going to be more willing to share it. They’re going to be more willing to understand and they’re going to be more willing to take action. Okay, okay, and we’re going to move on because i don’t want to overlap too much with storytelling, storytelling, conversation i had with someone a panel on an earlier earlier spot, but you have some you have resource is that people can use sites non-profits can use to help make them better storyteller so maybe we could spend a good amount of time. We’re not near the end. I’m not i’m not trying to wrap up. We’re nowhere near the end, but i like to focus on something that you have to add to the previous conversation so we don’t do to that of the same let’s. Spend some time on these resource is sites aps whatever let’s get started. Yeah, so the rockefeller foundation has invested some time and resources into this and partnership with our lead grantee, hataway communications and plenty of other people who have provided us input and we wanted to know what what was the real challenge for organizations to telling great stories. And so we had done two things. The first thing we did was we created a report that just kind of let you analyze the landscape of the field what’s available out there for resource is what’s available out there for tools. What are people saying? What our organizations saying that there were issues are what they’re really succeeding? Well, with and from that report and from all of that feedback wave created a platform called hatch for good and hatch for good identifies those five those five areas strategy capacity, content platforms and evaluation, and it helps organizations go through each of those pieces step by step so you can identify what your strategy is. You can go through your audiences with sort of content you should be producing, how you measure that what platforms are out there and available to you, plus that it incorporates thought pieces from thought leaders in the in the space that are sharing excellent stories, how they answer those questions, the types of campaigns that they’re running things like that so it gives you some inspiration, and also a framework to go by is, uh, for the number four it’s fo r hatch fo r good dot or ge. Okay, you’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Dahna that report that you mentioned that looked at what makes what keeps non-profits from being good storytellers, what lessons were there? Well, that was that was really focusing on those five pillows, and people were saying, you know, we don’t have the strategy behind it or we’re collecting a lot of stories, we’re sharing them, but we’re not getting a lot of feedback on them, so it was it was that mix of strategy capacity we don’t have enough people on staff, we don’t have the buy-in from our gdpr board, we don’t have the right content, that kind of thing, i say. All right, meghan another you have another resource that you can share? Well, i actually recently was involved in a purpose, the organization that i work for drafting a guide to digital to crafting digital stories, particularly with a lens for young people who are interested in sort of telling your story. You’re starting their own non-profits being able to bring sort of new perspectives to that on dh. That resource, which is an analog actually printed out guide that you can download it’s open source. You confined it purpose dot com okay. And what is going? To share a little more detail, what we’ll, what we’ll find there? Yeah, i mean it’s broken up into two parts, so the first part is really about identifying sort of the way to tell your story, really breaking down and thinking about the different elements of the story, which are very much in line with the resources that jeremy was talking about as well. S o thinking about things like goals, we talk a lot about a crisis, unity profess, which is really identifying a crisis that’s happening, but instead of sort of feeling overwhelmed and that you can’t there’s no hope coming out of that crisis, really turning that into an opportunity on being able to provide that hope in that story. So really thinking through that, and then it also talks about different platforms that you can use and how you can build those stories because a lot of times people think of stories justice being sort of full written out story. So blog’s are articles or sort of long form posts on, and we really think of stories as every little piece could be a story. So a facebook image that you post online with you know one sentence of content can be in a story and of its sound. Yeah, what are what are we talking about? His other platforms for storytelling before we get now, are there more resource is besides those two? Or there are there will be those of the crux, the resources you confined other other other places out there for block post that go through great detail. We were talking about this yesterday purpose has some fantastic campaigns to look at. Causevox has been doing some great stuff in storytelling big duck also has some resource is but a lot of what we’re doing now is taking what we see is the best of the best, and we’re trying to to get off their permission to put it up on hatch for good dot org’s so people can come and find one place where they confined all these great resources from all their best organizations that are doing the best storytelling. Let’s, let’s talk then, about some of the use of platforms. I mean, interesting that we can conceive of a picture in a sentence or two as storytelling nothing. Most people are thinking that way, so clearly is there? More that we should be thinking about more broadly on let’s just on facebook, let’s start there, is there? Yeah, i mean, i think there’s so many different ways you can tell a story on facebook these days. I mean, particularly with, like, you know, the native in beds of video now is getting really prioritized on facebook, so being able to create those videos, obviously there’s your stories now, you see a lot of those videos without the audio playing, so i think there’s a real opportunity there, as well as your people are scrolling through their news feed to be able to get that story without having the audio itself. But also, i mean, you see this a lot through images on facebook and there’s so many different types of images you can create that tell a story. I mean, a lot of people do like this or that, which is, you know, before and after cause and effect type of image, you also get really, like, thought provoking images, so people, images that really require people to think about an issue in a new way in one thing that you i’ve seen a lot particularly lately of on facebook is really just a photo or a snapshot of an individual on then really going behind the scenes to tell that person story. So it’s like here’s joe, who is an iraq war veteran, and then going into something related to the issue of veterans affairs. Ah, and so i think that is one element that could be really powerful was story time, okay? Anything else you want to add? Facebook? Jeremy, before we move off that platform, not not specifically to facebook? No, okay, we would like to go next. Well, i’m just thinking in terms of content like megan was saying photos and videos and different statistics and things like that a lot of times we received one piece or one piece of long form, like a publication or an essay or something like that has a whole bunch of different assets that are already too tied to it. So it’s about taking that piece of content and breaking it up so people have twenty ways into it instead of just posting your block post to facebook it’s about grabbing that photo and taking like a quote and saying, this is the quote, this is the photo and letting your audience engaged that that way, maybe there’s a link back to the block, maybe there’s a statistic that you khun tweet out with that video underneath it they’re different ways you can package that content that they comptel individual stories over the same narrative, the same longer narrative. Very interesting, alright repurpose ing dividing up helps helps increase your capacity, but it also helps give your story cem cem length, and it also makes sure that more people are consuming it. Then just package again into one giant report also also makes the storytelling craft less daunting. Yeah, you’ve got a couple of good stories that can be divided up. You could have you could end up with thirty or forty components across all the different channel. Exactly. Okay, excellent. Excellent. Should we wait? Talk specifically about twitter? You mean you know we’ve hit it sort of tangentially we haven’t named it but certainly could do what you just described on twitter anything mohr there’s now video on twitter anything mohr anyone add? Besides what has already been suggested twitter specific? Yeah, i mean, i think another thing twitter has done recently as well as images. So images are definitely king in the twitter feed these days, and so not just relying on that hundred forty characters but also being able to incorporate an image much like what worked really well on facebook. So being able to have these graphics that can have quotes or have the sort of bite-sized element that people can retweet and share, i think really thinking about like, what is that bite-sized element that could be easily consumable because we do that naturally, anyway, i mean, even if we’re scanning a long form content, we’re looking at the headlines were looking in the margins for sort of the key takeaways on twitter really allows you to pull out those key elements on and create bite-sized terrible content that’s, easily consumable and allows people to sort of share one keep perspective and on building on that, you could also you could also ask questions that on twitter and then build blackbaud post based on that feedback it’s a really quick way to the longer form content using short snippets or maybe a link to a survey if you want to ask more than just one question, yeah, if you could do a storify we actually recently the beginning of the year, we ask people with the what their big idea was for twenty fifteen what was the big social impact idea of twenty, fifteen? And so a handful of our staff leading up to it just tweeted our responses to that question, and then we embedded it into the blood post and people could comment back and say, this is my idea for twenty fifteen or they would respond over twitter and they would put that up there, and then we shared it on facebook and they would add it to the comments so they would reply directly back to twitter again on the comments on the block it takes again that one concept of an ideal what’s your big idea for twenty fifteen and it turns it into something that’s cross platform. Okay, well, we still have a few more minutes left together. What we could talk about some more platforms. We haven’t touched on instagram wherever you want to go, but what else will she got? I mean, in terms of the platforms, the platforms are you know, wherever your audience is, maybe if you’re dealing with youth, you don’t. Want to be on facebook anymore? Maybe you’re looking at snapchat how you, how you actually use that? Maybe there’s an entire generation of baby boomers that are now embracing facebook, so a lot of organizations that might do service baby boomers should be thinking about what’s our facebook strategy for our content. So the platform is really against whatever you set your goals to be again on your stories. Now, do you want to be talking to you? Let’s say little about snapchat? We don’t talk about that too much on show how much you use that for, for storytelling and again, this is this is for people or organizations that want to be talking to teenagers basically right? But if if that’s your objective, how could you be using snapchat wisely for stories? Yeah, you mean in snapchat? Because of the nature of the the disappearing nature of their work? It’s a great way to share things that might be kind of taboo i could see it being used for planned parenthood let’s say i could see them using it to great effect, convert convening ideas to a younger audience that maybe they would be too embarrassed to. Be looking up online themselves or to be looking at content that would stay on their phones. They have this is ah, it’d better information that you can see that disappears or a meeting date or time, things like that you can communicate directly out to your audience that’s temporary doesn’t have to be there for him. Okay, one example of an organization that i think used snapchat incredibly well, eyes do something dot or ge, they’ve been on it for quite some time now and do some really interesting things. So if anyone out there is really interested in seeing how you could engage teens in that in that snapchat way, they’re great organization to check out and you’re not the first guest in these two days to recommend recommend do something for talking, teo, i think they’re they’re targets like fifteen to twenty five thirteen to twenty five some like that when they do great work. Yeah, yeah, i’ve had aria finger on the show talking about do something and i’m also talking about t m i, uh, theo of their consulting spinoff? Yeah, i could do something about it also neo-sage let’s. See? Okay, we got still got a couple minutes where where would like to go with this? You you talked for ninety minutes on storytelling, so i know that i haven’t covered everything. What else more is more than a share. I mean, what else more is there to share about storytelling? I you know, i think a lot of organizations don’t think their storytelling organizations i think that a lot of people would probably listen to this and they would say, well, that’s, great, but that’s not for me, i don’t do that kind of work, and i think that that’s probably ninety nine percent of the time not even remotely true, that it just takes it takes a moment to step back and consider how your work is affecting people. So even if you’re not doing direct service, it’s, the work that you’re doing, how how, how you’re helping those organizations access it right? So it’s either on an individual level or an organizational level. How are you making people’s lives easier? How are you changing things for the better? And if you take a step back and identify what that is and start mapping out what that framework looks like, you’re going to find a place you can tell a story, you know, meghan, in your work, have you seen organizations that felt it wasn’t for them? It’s just they didn’t have anything t tell. Yeah, well, i think a lot of times people think that they don’t necessarily have they’re not, you know, maybe doing direct work on the ground or feel like they don’t have access to those stories that they traditionally think of as the ones that are incredibly powerful. But i mean, in the work that we do and particularly when you’re an organization seeking to have impact, one of the most powerful ways to show impact is through the stories of the impact that you’re having on, and that doesn’t always have to be work on the ground. I mean, it could be working with the siri’s of organizations, but i also have a social purpose and being able to help those organizations, maybe it’s, a young entrepreneur who just started a new organization, change the world coming out of school, being able to tell that story of how you were able to help that individual can also be really powerful. I mean, you see a lot. Of times who we do, you know, an annual reports are report backs for donors and that’s a storytelling i’m being able to find the right way, tio sure, that message can be key. So i think all of this applies for that that as well, yeah, ok, so do cement prospection. I mean, you’re a charity, you’re you have a charitable mission by design and definition. Who were you? Were you impacting? You got to be helping somebody and those somebody’s i can talk to you. Okay? Absolutely. I’m going to say it again myself. A couple more minutes share some more about whether we’ve even if we we’ve covered it, but maybe we didn’t cover enough detail here’s some more about stories. One of the points we went over in the session was this idea of the forty sixty rule that i borrowed from garth more from the one campaign and that’s about spending only forty percent of your time producing content and sixty percent of your time marketing it. So when you’re making that block post, no perfect is the enemy of good making sure that it’s good enough to go out, but thinking about who should see this block post who should see it and what do i want them to dio and then going to those places with, you know, whatever that content might be, because spending more time finding the right people that should be consuming it and should be sharing it and should be adding to it is ultimately more fruitful when you’re looking at your your analytics and your feedback. So you’re not just sending a story out into the wind and hoping that it catches on, you know, it’s got no value, then back in the morning it had anything to that? Yeah, i mean, i would say a lot of times, people sort of sometimes have quotas for certain number stories or start number of videos that they want to get out each year, and i think at the end of the day, the most important thing with any story they’re trying to tell is the story itself and that it’s compelling and that its strategic on and you’re creating that story for a reason and not just creating a video for videos sake on dh that’s really what’s going to drive the success of that piece of content in connecting with people is really having something powerful that people can connect with first on then thinking about sort of how you can use that to achieve your goals that you have for your organization on be able to build that impact. And then, as jeremy was saying earlier, be able to break that down into pieces and being able to use that story in a lot of different ways across different platforms to achieve your goals. Can we measure the r o i of storytelling? Absolutely. But you have to start with the strategy first, because maybe the roo i’ve storytelling is we want to raise more money, and we want our donors to being more involved. We want our board to be more involved. We need more volunteers. So, starting with your strategy and thinking about what your goals would be, why are we doing? Why are we still telling story exactly what i mean? What were we trying to do with these? Yeah. Okay. And then and then measure from there. Okay. Yeah. Purpose. We talk a lot about signaling and confirming that tricks. So a lot of times, people would be like, oh, great, this video got a million views? That was what that is, what we would consider a signaling metrics, so it shows the sort of a way of attention being brought to an issue, but it isn’t necessarily proving that doesn’t mean i can’t exactly uses worthless yeah, so you keep that in the category of could we keep that the category of, say, signaling metrics? But then you still have to pay attention to the broader change that you’re trying to have in the world and a million views on a video might be one thing, but a year from then, you might see some real impact on an issue that you’re sort of pushing through legislatively, and that video is all about that. And so that’s, where you’re able to sort of confirm that impact, ultimately it doesn’t happen right away. I mean, a lot of times when you’re tracking impact four stories, it takes a lot of time that speaks to a swell looking at the long form are the long tail of storytelling and that you don’t just want to produce that video, send it out there and hope open the best they need to start thinking about what’s. The game plan for this how we’re going to get this in front of the right people? Yeah, i mean, a classic example of this, of course, is in the marriage equality shift that has happened in the us over the past, you know, decades really on really that started with the power of stories. I mean, being able to connect with people on these universal issues of love, inequality on overtime, being able to sort of really connect with people on that issue and be ableto ultimately move the needle. All right? We’re gonna leave it there. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right. Jeremy bivens, digital media media manager for the rockefeller foundation and meghan and halt strategy director for purpose. My pleasure. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of and t c twenty fifteen the non-profit technology conference. Thank you so much for being with us. Tony’s. Take two and your d are planned coming up first opportunity collaboration. It’s a week long unconference in x top of mexico around poverty reduction throughout the world. This really is an amazing experience. There are no keynotes, there’s, no power points you’re always sitting in. Circles there’s lots of free time for making valuable friends let lasting connections new friends that can help you reduce eliminate poverty in whatever form you’re working it’s in october i was there last year. I’m going again this year if your work is at all related to poverty reduction, check it out. Opportunity collaboration, dot net, thank you for making it a double honor. I was honored last thursday, the twenty third at the hermandad gala and to make it a double honor. You were with me and i’m very grateful non-profit radio fans really stepped up and together we raised nearly five thousand dollars to save lives with water projects in rural dominican republic. The whole event raised over twenty five thousand dollars and i thank you. Thank you very much for being with me. My video thanks. Is that tony martignetti dot com that is tony’s take two for friday, first of may seventeenth show of the year here’s our next ntcdinosaur view on your disaster recovery plan with dar veverka welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc twenty fifteen the non-profit technology conference we’re in day two we’re in austin, texas, at the convention. Center and my guest is dar vivir ca she’s vice president of technology for lift a lefty, and her workshop topic is avoiding disaster, a practical guide for backup systems and disaster recovery planning. Dar welcome, thank you very much. Good to be here. It’s. A pleasure to have you this day two, we’re highlighting one swag item at and ntc per for interview and, uh, i have a double chip biscotti from a sputnik moment. The hashtag is hashtag is sputnik smiles and i’m told that the glasses go with the biscotti. So this is essential. This is this interview’s swag moment. Thank you very much. Sputnik smiles and it goes into the goes into the swag collection. There it is. Okay, door. Um, we need to know some ah, little basic turn. Well, you know what? Before we even get into why is disaster recovery and the related and included back-up so, um, i don’t know if it’s just for gotten ignored, not done. Well, what inspired the session is a organization i used to work for. We were required by auditors to do a disaster recovery plans. So when it came time for the annual audit, i got out the current disaster recovery plan. It went all right, i’m going to go ahead and update this, and when i discovered want to read the plan was there were servers that were eight years gone for last eight years server and reading the planet was very clear that what the previous person had done was simply changed the date and update the plan for auditors. And as i thought about it and talk to other people, i found that that actually happens a lot people. It’s d r is sort of that thing they don’t have time for because no one ever thinks it’ll happen to them, so you push it off and you push it off, and you either just download the template, you know, a template off the internet, and you slap a date on it and basically fill it out just for the auditors. But a lot of organizations never actually think through their disaster recovery, they don’t get into the details, they don’t worry about it, and then when a disaster actually happens to them, they’re sort of stuck. You don’t have a plan that i don’t have a functioning crush on, and they’ve never tried it out, so that was what inspired the session, and as we dug into it, we we tried to give the thirty thousand foot view because disaster it cover, you know, there’s an entire industry, the deals with technology, disaster recovery. You can spend days on this topic, and obviously we didn’t have days. We had a ninety minute session, so we tried to give the thirty thousand foot view of the practical items you need to pay attention to if you’re not confident in your organisation’s d our plan, if you don’t have a d r plan or if you do and you really don’t, you know, you think it really needs an overhaul that sort of the top ten of items of what you should really be looking at when you’re dealing with disaster recovering backups. And we tried to give some several practical examples myself and the other speaker and andrew, who could not make it this morning of disasters we’ve had to deal with as well as other well known ones. Yeah, okay. Do we need some basic language? All right. Before we get into the d r disaster recovery topic short jr is one of them disaster recovers, often referred to his d r it’s often spoken about in terms of business continuity or bc, which is sort of the larger plan for the entire organisation. Should’ve disaster strike there’s. You know, there’s very d are specific things such as our poet recovery point objective that we could talk about your rto, which is recovery time objective, there’s very specific language like that or disasters it’s usually just referred to d ours. So whenever we say d arts disaster recovery okay, we’ll see if we get into those eyes and i could explain this week. Okay, um, all right. So clearly we should have a disaster recovery written, just recovery plan. Even if we’re an organization that small enough that doesn’t have an annual audit. We still should have something in place. Yes. Okay. What belongs in our day? Our plan top ten things. You need a contact list for your team. So if you have a top ten of the d r i do. Of what should your plan d our plan. You know, it could be anything from a five page outline that just covers the basics and in in our sessions slides, which i’ve posted in the ntc library, gives it some good resource is for doing a d our plan or it could be a you know, a huge hundred page document covers absolutely every aspect of business continuity or something in between it’s going very by organization, and the reality is, if you’re a small organisation with a small team, you might only be able to do the five page outline but that’s better than nothing that’s better than no d our plan or a d r plan that realistically hasn’t been updated in the last ten years, but i would say, you know, the top ten you really should have in your day. Our plan is number one, a contact list for your team members. What is the contact for your team, folks, your business continuity folks, if you normally would get that out of your email and you’re in a disastrous situation, you know you can’t get to your email or, you know, like we’re ever going through, and i want listeners to know that she’s doing this without notes, i it seems very confident that she’s got hopefully i’ve ever altum in-kind get seven out. Of seven or eight of ten will be ecstatic, but so continue. Oh, but i want to say, yeah, as we’re going through, consider two organizations that may not have someone devoted to it correctly is our listeners are small and midsize non-profits right? They very, very well just all be outsourced or it falls on the executive director’s desk. Excellent point. Would you cover that in the session? So to finish at the top ten contact list, three team members contact list for your vendors, a call tree and some sort of communications. How do you tell your organization and your members that you’ve had a disaster? Either your servers have gone down, your pipes of burst and your communications are underwater? How do you do that? What is your network look like? So network diagram process? Outline how you’re actually going to do your disaster recovery a timeline? How long do you expect these activities to take before you? Khun b live again, a list of systems and applications that you’re going to recover if you’re a large enough or gore you can afford a hot site was called a hot or warm site where you can immediately. Switch over two other equipment. You know information about that. You’d need that to start your recovery. And then also information about your backups. You know, who’s got your back ups. What system are you using? How do you, you know? Get those back. So those air sort of like the top ten things or d our plan should have. Alright, let’s dive into the the process. Okay? A bit is that intrigues me, bond. Hopefully listeners? I think so. I think i have a fare beat on what’s. Interesting. I hope i do. Um, yeah. What? How do we start to think about what our dear process should be? First, you have to think about what all could be a disaster for your organization. A lot of people think about things, you know, earthquakes, hurricane, sandy, hurricane katrina. But it could also be water pipes bursting in your building. That is one of the most common thing if your server is not properly protected. Which a lot of a lot of stuck in closets. Ah, dripping pipe water. We call those water events. And that seems to be the most common thing. Departments encounter is leaking pipes in the building or some sort of a flooding situation. But it could also be an elektronik disaster. Such, i’ve worked at an organization that underwent what’s called a ddos attack, which is a distributed denial of service. It took out our entire web presence because malicious hacker hacker went after that’s where there’s millions of right network and they just flood your network seconds you’re overloaded and yeah, and that’s a disaster situation. So one why would they attack like that? Why wasn’t non-profit attack malicious? The cp dot organ are attacked out with avon marchenese travon martin decision. Folks attacked our petition site way. We were able to get it back online, but for a couple of hours. Yeah, we were off line. And that could be considered a disaster situation. For sure. Yeah. How do you help us think through what potential disasters are not even identify them all i think about what could affect your or what you wear. You vulnerable? Some of the things we talked about in the session and we’ll think about it. How would you get back online if the’s various things happen to you are your are your services sort of in the cloud do you have servers on site and start there when thinking about your process is, what would you have to recover if these various scenarios affected you or with these various scenarios? Scenarios affect you if your website is completely outsourced to a vendor that has de dos protection. Okay, that’s not a scenario you have to worry about so kind of analyze it and every organs going to be different. You know, if you live on the west coast, you’re probably concerned more about earthquakes than other regions. So it’s it’s going to vary for each organization, what sort of disaster you’re going to be worried about? And then you start getting down into the practical nuts and bolts in terms of who are your disaster recovery people, who’s your team, if you’re really small lorry, that might just be you or as you mentioned before, if you’re using outsourced, manage service provider and your vendors responsible for that, make sure your vendor has a d our plan for you. Ah lot of folks just assume your vendors taking care of that, but when it comes right down to it, do they actually have d our experience can they recover your items actually sit down and have that conversation because so many of the small org’s, as you pointed out, do youse outsourced thes days and there’s there’s a lot of manage service providers that specialized in non-profit, but you need to have that conversation. Don’t wait till you’re under a disaster scenario to discover that groups they don’t actually have that experience have that conversation ahead of time. What else belongs in our process? Outlined in your process? Latto outline if you’ve got a another site either a cold, a warmer hot site or if your stuff is based in the cloud, where would you recover to the outside is some place you go to a different drink, cold water or hot? Sure cold site would be where you’ve got another location. Let’s say you have a dozen sir servers at your location, and in the case of, you know, your building being inaccessible or underwater. A cold site would be where you’ve got another location you could go to, but you don’t really have any equipment stage there, but it is another location you can begin operations out if that’s a cold sight there’s nothing ready. To go, but you’ve got a sight ah, warm site would be where you sort of have a skeletal equipment there, it’s far less capacity than you’re currently at, but you’ve got something there it’s not live, but you got stuff ready to go that you can restore to and get going. And a hot site is where you can flip over immediately. Your live replicating to somewhere else, it’s ready to go? It might not be full capacity, so it might not have, you know, full blown data line size that you’re used to might not have your full range of service, but it is live and you could switch over near instantaneously. That’s a hot site, ok, eso you’d want that in your process and you’re going to want to think about what are you restoring and that’s where we get into the backups? What comes first and that’s, where you start getting into terms such as recovery point objective and recovery time objective those air to very common d our terms recovery time is how far back are you recovering too? And what does that mean for each system? So if it’s your donorsearch system that’s probably fairly critical. You want a recent restore of that? If it’s a system that doesn’t change very much, maybe a week ago restores okay for that sorry that’s recovery point objective recovery time objective is how long does it take you to get back online after a disaster? You know, ifyou’ve got to download your data from an external source. Has anyone thought about how long that’s going to take you to get the data back? Is it going to take you fifteen hours or three days? So it’s in a lot of folks don’t think about that ahead of time, they just go. Oh, you know, we’ll we’ll pull it back down if we have a disaster, but they don’t think about instead of their nice normal data communications, they’re going to be on a tiny d s l line trying to pull down one hundred fifty gigs of information and it’s going to take a week to get it back down. I have to say you’re very good about explaining terms and thank you, proper radio. We have jargon jail? Yes, we try not teo transcend. You haven’t transgressed cause your immediate about explaining exactly what recovery point. River and recovery time objectives are it could be very confusing. You know, if you don’t understand the terms in tech, you can be confusing what folks are talking about, and that was one of the focuses of our station session is making it less confusing and being very practical, practical about what you can or cannot do. And if folks go and look at our slides, they’ll see on several of the items we did a good better best, and we tried to talk about that all throughout the session because we realized again for a small ork or, you know, even a large order that just doesn’t have the resources to devote to it. You might not be able to do best practice, but you could at least try a good practice that would be better than nothing. And then so we do a good, better best for each each type of thing like what does a good d our plan look like? Versace best day our plan and at least try and get to that good, because at least you’ll have something and it could be a continuum where you try and improve it along the way. But you got to start somewhere. It’s. Better than just ignoring it, which is what happens at a lot of places. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they only levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests are there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Lively conversation, top trends and sound advice. That’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m lawrence paige nani, author off the non-profit fund-raising solution. Oppcoll do we need to prioritize what what’s mission critical and, yes, we can work with out for a time? Yes, how do we determine that? Definitely we talk about that in terms of its not just a knight each decision either because we may think that the emails the most critical thing out there but development may see the donor system as the most critical out there program might think that the case management system is the most critical out there, so you finance wants their account, they want their accounting system up. Obviously you’ve got to have an order in which you bring these things up. You’re probably not gonna have enough staff for bandwith or, you know, equipment to bring everything back online, so there needs to be and hopefully your executive team would be involved in deciding for the organization what is most critical in what order are you going to bring those things up? And that needs to be part of your d r plan? Because otherwise, if you’re in a disaster scenario, you’re not going to know where to start and there’s going to be a lot of disagreement of who starts where so you guys need to decide on the order, okay, we solve a few minutes left, but what more? What about d r and related back-up that’s not going to wait till i’m back up because i think we could do a little bit in terms of d r i would say the key points on backups are check them because a lot of time, yes, monthly or quarterly, at least is anyone looking at your back-up back-up work-life one of the scenarios that we talked about that actually happened to my co speaker, andrew, was that their server room flooded and it hit their razor’s edge server, which is their entire c, m, s, c r, e, m and donorsearch system, and they thought it was backing up, but no one had actually check the backups in the last two months, and it was on, and it was not s o in terms of back-up just typical, you know, pay attention to the maintenance. What do you backing up? Has anyone checked it? And again, if you’re using a manage service provider, make sure if they’re responsible for for looking at your backups of managing them, make sure they’re doing that. You know, double check and make sure that they understand that your backups are critical and they can’t just ignore the alerts about your backups. You know, you don’t want to be in the unpleasant situation of three of our servers just got flooded. We need the data and discover nobody was backing it up. It ain’t exactly okay, all right, anything else, you wanna leave people about back-up before we go to the broader d r no, i think that’s good for those were the highlights for it. All right, so back to the disaster recovery. What more can we say about that? There are going to be a lot of watches if you’re in a large d our situation. And so one of things we stress is one getting down into the details of your d. Our plan before disaster hits. Because if you’ve never thought about how you’re actually going to do the restores air, actually, how you’re going to be rebuild those servers. You need two ahead of time. A lot of folks never practiced have a fire drill. I hate fire drill, but and you don’t have a live fire drills in this case, it might be a live fire drill. You don’t want to have that, so you should make some effort to practice, even if it’s just something small, you know, trying to restore one server. I mentioned in this session that i was put in a situation years ago at johns hopkins university, where we were choir, to have verification of live tr practice, so i was put in a room that had a table, a telephone, a server, and we were carrying two laptops and we couldn’t come out of the room, and so we had completely restored our domain. We had a set of backups on the thumb drive and added the second laptop to that domain improve that we had restored the domain, and an independent person that was not connected to our department was monitoring to make sure we had done it, and we had to prove it, and that was an eye opening experience is as experienced as i was doing that i’d never done it live, and it took me three tries to do it so that’s, right? Encourage folks to really try and practice this stuff ahead of time and get down into the you know, the weeds on their on their d our plan and, uh and also to think about it, you weren’t fired because way, john no, no, no. I actually like too much, john soft. No, we we did complete it within the time frame, but we were a little startled when we discovered that we thought we knew how to do it first time. And we kept making little mistakes. There were two of us and they’re doing it. And we were surprised ourselves that we thought, oh, of course we know this. This is not a problem, but no, we were making little mistakes because we didn’t have the documentation down. A specific is it needed to be. And so that was a very eye opening experience. There’s a couple of their d r gotchas we talked about, which is crossed. People don’t think about the cost ahead of time. How much is it gonna cost to get you that data back in the instance of my co presenter who had the damaged drives, they weren’t expecting a near ten thousand dollars cost to recover those drives, but that’s what happened when they didn’t have the backups? They had to take those hard drives to a data recovery place, and the price tag was nearly ten thousand dollars. Dealing with insurance is another big one that people don’t think about having to account for all of the equipment that was lost, and dealing with that insurance morass often gets dumped on the auntie department in a small organization. There’s not, you know, a legal department that’s going to deal with that it’s going to be you so to, you know, kind of talk to your insurance provider ahead of time and see what all you have to deal with in a disaster situation. So you don’t get an unpleasant surprise if you’re ever in one a cz well on the insurance topic, just are you covered? Exactly what i think is your equipment covered. And what do you have to to do with that in terms of accounting for it? If you suffer a disaster, you know the gooch is we get so ah, a couple of minutes, if if oh, for days about consciously trying to think about somebody we don’t hold back on non-profit video, i think some of the other ones that we covered in their thick wit mint again to the cost. How much is it going to cost you? Two gets new equipment and did you account for that when you were doing your d our plan and a time to recover? A lot of folks don’t understand how long it may take them to do a recovery and also deciding what is important and what is not important, not just in terms of what should be restored in what order, but in terms of practical things, do you really need to restore your domain? Er, or could you just start over from scratch? If your domain only contains maybe fifty accounts and doesn’t have any associated servers faster for you to just start over and just recreate the domain immediately? Especially if a lot of your emails in office three, sixty five or google maps, you could reconnect it very quickly. So, you know, thinking about more practical gotsch is like that that you should think about have time, you know, obviously it’s that’s the best. Practice to think of all these details and we realised folks may not be able to, so we provided someone sheets and some samples of them of just quick, yes or no questions and thinking this through and things to think about and where will we that is not notice provoc radio has a professional sound i don’t know about ntcdinosaur ten, but that was a way over there. They’re on their own. They can come to us for expertise if they if they need to, but, um, see, now i messed myself up because i ask you about something, but we were just talking about how much, how long will actually take you to recover things and whether or not you should practically skipped recovering something because it might be faster to rebuild it. Okay, i have a follow up to that it’s my smart ass humor, maybe lose it. All right, so why did you leave us with one take away d, r or back-up the session was a little bit misnamed because technically, you’re not going to avoid a disaster. You really can’t. In many cases, you’re not gonna avoid the, but you’re not going to avoid. The earthquake if you’re in that region so you need to plan on how to deal with it. So it’s more like avoiding avoiding your d are becoming the disaster cause you’re not going to avoid the disaster itself, so you might as well plan for it. Outstanding. Thank you very much. Door. Thank you much. Darby america, vice president of technology for lift. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc non-profit technology conference two thousand fifteen. Thank you so much for being with us thinking thanks to everybody at and t, c and the non-profit technology network next week. What skills are most desirable in your board members? If you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com opportunity collaboration with world convenes for poverty reduction, you know, ruin you for every other conference opportunity collaboration dot net. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer shows social media is by susan chavez susan chavez dot com on our music is by scott stein i love that yeah, he will be next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a, m or p m so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe. Add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno, two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host listen er of the week, kim wolber or maybe overt. I’m not sure she listens to the podcast on her way to work as director of development, raising special kids in phoenix, arizona. So now she knows who she exactly is. Yes, it’s you came, she says, by the time i get to work, i’m usually fired-up about fund-raising today i listened to your peer-to-peer thirty report and giving days show, and i was secretly a little glad about the traffic on the freeway so i could hear the entire show. You’re an entertaining dose of encouragement. Oh, kim, i love it. Thank you very much. Look atyou longing for traffic so you can listen to non-profit radio that floors me. Congratulations. I will send you a video and you can pick a book from the non-profit radio library. Thanks. And congratulations on being our listener of the week. Oh, i’m very glad you’re all with me. I developed a parrot counselor abscess. If i was forced to chew on the notion that you missed today’s show embrace emerging social media snapchat tinder whisper secrets lauren girardin encourages you to experiment bravely with new channels like those, but who should decide where to spend your time and money? And what questions should they be asking she’s principle of lauren girardin consulting and we talked it ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference and you’re content strategy. Once you’ve decided where to be, what should you do there? How do you launch and stay consistent with your message on your mission who’s responsible for that? Brett meyer is director of strategy for think shout and katie caress is director of online communications at the humane society legislative fund. That interview is also from ntc attorneys take two between the guests a double honor responsive by opportunity collaboration, the working meeting on poverty reduction that will ruin you for every other conference. Here’s my interview with lauren girardin on emerging social media welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference twenty fifteen we’re hosted by entender non-profit technology network with convention center in austin, texas. My guest is lauren girardin. She is a marketing and communications strategist. Lauren girardin consultant loren welcome back! Hi durney it’s, good to see you you’re were together in auntie si twenty fourteen. Yeah, we were all right. Your topic this year is don’t panic how to embrace emerging social media with infinite majesty and calm that’s, right? Very important avoiding shiny objects syndrome in social media is that not true? It is to a point i like to encourage people to avoid shiny object syndrome, so using something just because it’s new isn’t the right approach, but the idea is to experiment bravely. So by avoiding things that are new, we often miss out on what opportunities there might be. So if we experiment a little bit doesn’t have to be a full commitment, we can actually find out a new way of doing things are being noticed or of reaching new audiences like that phrase experimenting bravely, but not full not-for-profits it’s experimental before we start to talk about some of the some of the sites that we will like snapchat, tinder and whisper and secret, which i’m very much looking forward to because three of those four i don’t know. How do we evaluate when the next one comes out, whether whether it makes sense for us to to experiment bravely. So the question that we’re often asking ourselves is the wrong question. The question we ask is, should we be using snapchat? Should we be using tinder? That’s not the right question, so we actually to think about what the right question is on the right questions will depend on your organization, but very broadly are what are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to connect with and engage? What do you trying tto learn? Because a lot of these emerging social channels give us away to learn something new and also then what do you actions real asking people to take in? Is that inaction that they can do because of that channel? So you have to think about the right questions as you’re evaluating these new social channels, all right? Hyre is it possible to be well, who should be? Who should be involved in these in these questions and answer sessions for new channels? So that’s a really good question, their school already only now, i hadn’t actually minutes, and i’m already good question. I know i hadn’t thought of that one before, because when i think of experimenting bravely, i think of sort of the the person looking out into the rising on their own it’s almost it’s, not an isolated practice, but it’s something to do that doesn’t need a committee that doesn’t need a big meeting that doesn’t need a big strategy behind it. And so i think the person that should be involved is the person that’s most comfortable on these channels. So someone who has used these channels for their own personal reasons. So sometimes the first step of experiment on bravely is to use the channels for yourself and then use them for your organization and then to bring it to people who are open minded about new channels who khun see potential rather than seeing negativity. So folks who are involved with your audience is directly are often the best people tohave rather than folks who are not out in the community. Okay, so maybe some of your program, your program, folks, program, people policy, people, fundraisers, anyone who is engaging with people and who could actually ask folks, they take out your phone, told me the apse that you have there. Let me talk to you about the kind of information you’d like to see from our organization on these new channels sometimes it’s really that anecdotal evidence that can help us make brave decisions about social media? Okay, anything else you want to suggest about the the, the general and the and the evaluation before we get into some some actual channel? Yeah, thie evaluation on the newer channels is is really tough because non-profits are looking for metrics we’re looking for measurement, we’re looking for numbers to make our case, and a lot of these channels just simply do not provide those numbers. They either don’t have any analytics built into their system or the analytics they have are not particularly revealing for non-profit so one of the things we need to allow ourselves is a little bit of uncertainty in this evaluation. We may never know the exact demographics of the people that we’re reaching on these new channels on dh, so what we need to do is just take a guess and start playing around really, if we’re not looking, teo, engage buy-in our younger say, tulani als should we still be looking at emerging channels? I argue millennials or younger, even right now, all right, you know, i would argue, yes, because you know, a lot of people say, oh, it’s, just teenagers that you’re using these and that’s what we said about facebook when it launched is, oh, this is just something for college kids. What does this have to do with me in my organization? And very quickly that khun change and snapchats a great example of that? The growth of the user base and snapchat is just astronomical in the past year, whether it’s going to stick around or not is another question, but we have to be nimble in social media, so sometimes it is about looking for what’s hot now and thinking, if there’s a way that we could make it useful for us because it’s really about it being his form. Okay, you know what, before we talk about the newer ones, yeah, let’s talk about the venerated one facebook is it really falling out of favor? I mean, i hear i hear a lot of people complaining considerably about they’re organic reach, having declined precipitously on facebook. Well, facebook is changing because facebook’s audience is changing, so facebook’s audience has gotten a lot older. It’s, one of the fastest age groups growing on facebook, is you know, in their sixties or older and so facebook is adapting to their audience, and they’re also adapting to the realities that they need to make money on dso for non-profits what we have to do is think about instead of facebook being our main channel, it’s been one of many and how are we designing hunting specifically that can work on facebook instead of putting out everything we have and being upset that it’s not working and some of that will be about being a little less self promotional, facebook is dialing down the self promotion that it allows people to share. And so if, if it doesn’t let us put that information out, either we have to find somewhere else. To put it all, we have to put out different information on facebook. Do you find your client’s questioning? Yes, facebook’s value? Yes, absolutely. Part of it is they can see the hard numbers changing, and part of it is that it continues of you’re the organic regional yeah, the organic reach Numbers and and 4 smaller numbers it’s requiring more effort and then there’s the question of will if i have a limited capacity myself in my organization, where can my time be better spent for better results? I think facebook still has a value if you’re not on facebook can affect your credibility, people will go well, are you really serious than if you’re not on facebook or twitter? But we can dial down our efforts there make sure the efforts were how much we’re going to devote tio and then take that time and spend it in a new way and see if we can find something else to add to our catalogue of social media repertoire. Eso let’s talk about something let’s talk about some of the newer ones tinder when what’s tinder tinder is a dating app, but it’s not like i have yes, everyone has that reaction. I don’t think of it as a social media, right? Okay, yes, you swipe left for somebody you like? Yeah, i can’t believe you’re not on tinder, okay? I’m married and i well, i think that would be something that we’re gonna stop here. Maybe not that much different, but okay tinder. So you swipe one way for somebody you want to see. But it’s also geo located? Yeah, it sze showing people who are close to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so you swipe. And if you both swipe yes, then you get access to message each other through tinder. So then you can set up a coffee or a date or something else like that. And tinder, you would think what good is a dating app for non-profits? How could you possibly use it? But it turns out there are few non-profits who views it really creatively. So what are they doing? So one organization used to match rescue dogs with people in manhattan, so they put up profiles for rescue dogs. And if you decided that you like that dog, you could then message the organization and take the dog on a walk or fostered in your home if you weren’t sure you were ready to adopt a dog or straight up atop the dog. And so they did this funds small tinder experiment to figure out if there was a way to use social media like tender not just in her, but other dating outstanding. Could you can you shout out the name of the organization? You know, e doing? I do not, but i will. I will tweet it. And find it later. Okay, it’s, in my presentation on friday. Okay, you’re tuned in on labbate radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. That and i’m kind of surprised that tinder dot com would allow would allow that that so that’s the cabin you that’s actually, i applaud them for that. It’s. Admirable. Well, so that’s the caveats. So tinder has a revenue model, they actually ask people to pay money for their service, and they also have advertising. So this is all considered advertising. So when these channels first come out tinder or what have you there is a kind of a beautiful period where you can get away with a little bit more and so now they’re becoming more formal. So the gap actually just tried to run a tinder advertising campaign, and they got shut down because they didn’t ask permission. So if non-profits are looking to do this, you should definitely always check to make sure that you’re allowed to have either fake profiles or personas or something like that. Okay, gap just want to show people in jeans. Yeah, or other tinder wanted them to pay. Yeah. Okay, but i do admire that they would allow it, you know, like it’s saying that we don’t take ourselves a ll that seriously that we won’t allow that we want to rescue dog matchup. Yeah, and, you know, and even these can be serious topics. There’s, another organization, amnesty international. They did a campaign to bring attention to human trafficking on tinder. It was very serious campaign. What do they do? You remember? Yeah. There was a series of photos and the women got first was a photo of a beautiful woman. And then the next photo you saw of her, she had some bruises. And then there was another photo where she looked even more abused. And it was about not all women have the same rights as women who are using tender, you know, it’s very popular in manhattan. It’s very popular in the us and also a couple of other countries. So it it allowed this serious topic to come through, but it made sense when you were seeing it there that not all women get to choose their partner or how their partner treats them or if they want to leave their relationship. Great education campaign soas faras. You know, tinder is still open to those types of discussions. But with your caveat that you better discuss it with them. Yeah? Or or just be really quick. Don’t put out a press release. We’re not recommending underhanded behavior. Never sneaky. Whisper what’s whisper about so whisper is one of these gossip paps, so whisper secret you quack are these abs that you can use to put up an anonymous post usually text base, and then you can just complain about something that you have to complain about. You can tell someone else’s secrets or one of your own, a lot of people use it when they’re feeling isolated or lonely, to talk about their their deep feelings they would never share on facebook with people who know they are on dh. These are really interesting apse because and has that anonymity or that perceived anonymity there’s some question on security on the steps of course, ok, but there and there that none of these ups or doing anything particularly grand, but a lot of them, you’re back, for example, is geo located and so it’s very popular with college students and there’s a lot of complaining about professors and classes and what’s going on in campus, and so they’re actually very riel social conversations happening on some of these. You cock in particular had a lot of college students talking about race during all of the protest that were going on last year and, you know, there’s a question of whether or not non-profit should be part of those conversations happening on these aps. And are you seeing non-profit using secret? Yeah, and and you quack also, yeah. So there’s one example and i believe it’s it’s anand’s organization. And i think it was in ireland that used one of these aps to it was secret because they were playing on the whole idea of secrets. And what they did was they asked men in there because that was their audience. Two send a picture in on their name and then, with their permission, put their photo and name up on secret and said, i have hiv and it’s no secret with their name and photo. And so that’s. Why kind of turning the tables on secret, really raising awareness about the stigma of living with hiv and aids? I’m telling my own, i’m sharing my yeah, and it’s and it’s, not a secret it’s actually something that’s part of me. And so they wanted to change the narrative about hiv aids sigma in their community and it was really experimental and, you know, a lot of times it’s experimental. Stuff gets you good media coverage and get you really interesting attention andan. Other examples get gas. When they were having all those problems in ray’s, colgate university, the professor’s banded together, so not a non-profit but non-profit could have been involved in this, and i sometimes think, should have they banned it each other, and the professor’s took over you. Cack colgate is a non-profit, the university that’s, true, that’s, that’s, a good thing you called me here in the u s tonto and the professor’s got together, and they took over the conversation and put out more positive messages on the app to overwhelm the conversations around racism that were boiling and boiling. And they decided they wanted to tamp it down, and they used the app in the way it was meant to be used in order to become part of the conversation and to change that conversation as well. Outstanding. Yeah, that was you back, right? Yeah, all right. Quarrel? That water is one that’s been around for a few years. I do a very little bit with quarrel, but so it’s spelled qu o r a right. What do you seeing non-profit potential what’s the potential there. You know there’s there’s two sides to this one. We have to stop your i’m sorry. Yeah. Let’s. Describe what quarrel. I’ll leave it for you because you’ll be more articulate tonight. Let’s tell. Make sure you understand what quarry corps is one of those question and answer site. So anyone can go on, make a profile and post a question, and then the community of core participants can answer that question, and they can do it seriously. They could be a little silly, but for the most part, cora folks take themselves seriously and it’s a professional venu kind of much like lincoln. So people do use it as a point of credibility. Okay, so now the non-profit potential, so they’re non-profit potential is in-kind twofold. So you have the people inside your organization. You have your spokespeople in your leaders, your staff, your board. They can go on and answer questions that are relevant to what your non-profits doing. And they can have that personal that personal view, really showing people that your organization has a lot of different messengers and having those answers, i come from people inside your organization, then speaks to transparency. So you’re both building up the credibility of your employees, but then also building up the transparency incredibility of your organization and charity water, which is so often held up as an example of an organization that does things well on social media actually did this a few years ago, where the ceo went on to kora and asked you answered people’s questions about the organization, which now the tech sector folks are big into kora on silicon valley types and so charity water knew exactly what they were doing that’s one of their audiences and so getting on there and reaching out directly to those people one on one answers was a great move on their part and really helped advance their prestige in the community. So i’m sure you can search for different topics and insert yourself into conversations that you believe your work merits being. Yeah, absolutely. So even if the question isn’t about your organization, you could jump right into the conversation and there are a lot of social chat apps and websites like this, so read it, which, you know a lot of people are talking about has very similar functions, and tumbler has a cuban eight feature as well that organizations i’ve seen use to answer questions and the one one of the nice things about tumblers that those questions can be asked anonymously, but then answer publicly so it’s kind of like a dear abby column latto comedia i didn’t know this feature of tumbler whose question answer yeah, it’s i’ve seen a lot of organizations that work in reproductive and sexual health used this feature because there is that idea that you want some privacy about these questions you wouldn’t go to mom and dad. Perhaps so planned parenthood uses this feature, as does sex, etcetera, which is run by answer out of rutgers university. Interesting. Okay, i only know the microblogging. The future of tumbler. Yeah. Okay. Interesting is always to get your get your organization in conversations and also to show that you have people who are relevant. I mean, that could help for media, perhaps if they if yeah, you’re showing that you have expertise? Well, maybe a voice in a subject. Yeah. Medium a google and find an answer in court and see that your organization five. That answer and they might come calling to interview you for an article they were writing. It’s it. It does establish your credibility in your knowledge on the subject. So within quarter especially you can answer a lot of questions on a particular tag or subject, and people will start seeing you as an expert in that area. I just learned that tweets are going to start being indexed by google. Searched. Yeah. There. There, there. Finally found a happy agreement. Somehow someone must have had a really good meeting. You has been in discussion for a long time, and they couldn’t agree. So good. The rumors. Yeah, yeah, because, you know, everyone wants an insider social media inside. I read a lot. I well, well informed. Yeah, yeah. I’m a sponge for information on this. I have a lot of tabs open in my browser’s, so they so they have been trying, you believe? Okay, yeah. Everyone wants to become the next search index. So actually, some of the apse that i’m going to be talking about on friday, some of them have these aims to become the google of images on do you know a lot of them are also trying to cultivate more positive messages to come through in those ways, too? So there’s fierce competition for for being the next hub for for these audiences and for search? You know, facebook has been trying to do that for a while, twitter as well, google plus, which is just changed itself again. All right, yeah, google plus seems to be struggling. It seems it has a high user base, they’ve got a lot of users, but the engagement numbers for that i’ve seen have been very low on dso just this last week, they’ve announced some new staff changes and that they’re going to be a fraction ing their google plus ap into a couple of different services, perhaps to target specific audiences. Better look for different types of engagement so remains to be seen how and if that can be relevant again. Okay, yeah. Um now i already have a session from from here. It ntcdinosaur where we talked about oppcoll snapchat pretty well and read it on tumbler although you just you drop something up to read it, but i didn’t know what other what other sites can weigh acquaint people with gosh, i wanted to talk about it, but that’s that’s my own obsession. I mean, what about feed, feed and kick there’s ask f m, you know, there’s every for every person, there seems to be a new social through these three foot together ascot from feeding kick no, you know, they’re each one is kind of its own niche, the one that i’m thinking about which i would love to see non-profits use and i haven’t seen that means it is called plague. Okay, well, piela yeah, it’s actually spelled the way that you think it is that such a stream saying for social right now, like feed, which is th e d all right, so this could be cutting edge and emerging news. I, you know, it’s about plague, i just think it’s really interested in what? I’m going to spread the plague about plague. So plague is an app that you can use to spread information so you join you don’t have to create an account, you’re immediately part of a network you don’t a friend people, you’re already part of the potential play. And you i can put a piece of information up and four people near you so it’s all that geo location can receive that information from you, and they decide whether that information is worth spreading or not. And if they decide it’s worth spreading from that one person, it goes out to form more people. And then those people decide if it’s worth spreading and it spreads. This information spreads like a plague exponential and yes, like so if you put out good information, your information can travel. So if it’s something that people like it khun spread as faras the plague network users go so it’s still newish so there’s, you know there’s not as many users in some parts of the u s and some parts of the world but if you can get a piece of information out there it could be very engaging. And i haven’t seen a non-profit use it yet. So i want to see who’s gonna be first across that line very short pieces of information or going to be several hundred words like a log post or or no it’s, not it’s. Mobile audiences so it would be short and then you can also do image is a swell so you can mix it up, but i would keep it short just because the mobile audience tends toe have short attention spans, right? Cool. What anything else you wanna tell us about plague advice for the for the for the the first for the first brave experimenter uganda, you’re going to want to hook it to something that’s happening now something that people are talking about now. So whether it’s an event or a gn anniversary something a current event in the news, i wouldn’t you know it wouldn’t use the dress that that we’re all talking about. Now the blue and gold were black and blue dress, whatever it was, but something that people are talking about now, because that’s going to be the kind of thing that people want to spread, that people want to pay attention to something about trending, trending or timely start? Yeah, and you should always think about doing that with your content because that’s really how people spread information is by whatever they’re already interested in. Okay, now i’m out of touch with black and gold are blue, like i don’t know. I don’t know the dress conversation, not as much of a hurry. I don’t have the same tabs open if you have one tab too few clearly has dressed think, oh, there’s, a photo that went out last week, a few days ago of address and people were up in arms, whether it was black and blue dress where a white and gold dress or something like that, people were arguing about it and then meeting about the colors of the dress. Yes, because there’s and then scientists actually started arguing about why we were seeing different colors in this dress. What is this relevant to anything having to do with anything in the world? That’s important, it’s it’s, not it’s, not no it’s, very frivolous, and we’re at kind of an ugly stage of frivolity and social media right now, and that trust is sort of being held up the totem for that ugly frivolity. You know what? We’re going to end it right there with the ugly frivolity of social media. Lauren girardi, she’s, she’s terrific, you’re great fun! Thank you very much. Marketing and communications strategist the company is lauren. Girardin consulting, and this is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference. Twenty fifteen. Thank you so much for being with us, tony’s, take two and you’re content, strategy coming up, first opportunity collaboration. It was a terrific experience. It really kicked us up to the next level. That was ross baird, executive director of village capital and again. There are lots of funders at opportunity collaboration. I said that last week. I want to make the point extremely useful. Contacts, projects, funding. It opens people that’s alberto vasquez, president of soc edad de dis capacidad in sodas, peru opportunity collaboration is a week long, nearly weeklong conference in x top of mexico and it’s around poverty reduction anywhere in the world. It’s in october. I’m going again this year. If that’s your work, you should check out opportunity, collaboration at opportunity, collaboration, dot net. I’m being honored by hermandad mention this last week and hope you’ll indulge me for this last week it’s, a charity that brings water to the poorest of the poor in the dominican republic. I’ve been helping them for a lot of years and saving lives in the d r and it would be for me a double honor if you’d be with me by supporting hermandad with a gift we can save lives together in the dominican republic and the honor together on the stage on april twenty third, i’d be very grateful for your support. Video and links are at tony martignetti dot com and i thank you very much. That’s tony’s take two for friday, seventeenth of april, the fifteenth show of the year here’s another interview from ntcdinosaur with brett meyer and katie caress on your content strategy. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference two thousand fifteen it’s hosted by antenna non-profit technology network. We’re in austin, texas, at the convention center. My guest is katie caress she’s, director of online communications for humane society legislative fund. Katie welcome. Thank you so much for having me. That’s a pleasure. Thanks. For taking time on a busy conference, your workshop topic is content strategy one oh one, what are non-profits not doing so well? I could do better at around their content strategy. Well, i bet everybody here has the intention to do much better. I think that everyone here probably is looking for something like content, strategy and it’s, just a matter of kind of getting their leaders, the executives onboarding really what it does is it applies, like intention and focus to all of your messaging. It’s, the basic plan, or the idea that your messages need a plan, a plan, focuses plan strategy, yeah, that sounds like it starts with goals. Yeah, it starts with goals. It’s just a good idea to start with making sure that you understand oh, yeah, making sure that you understand what your business goals are and discovering how your channel usually is websites with content strategy, but it could be anything social email, whatever making sure that those platforms have goals that are tighter business schools. So you’re avoiding this kind of like sprawl and all over nests of what happens with web sites a lot of time and the ad hoc put this up, teo well, great now, right? I’m taking it back to come from a ceo or a boardmember on dh or someone else senior, and it becomes hard to say no, exactly exactly, and i think that a lot of people who were working on websites or other channels just kind of feel like they’re in this quagmire, right there just likes just drowning and content, and they don’t have the tools to kind of push back or, you know, carve out a better way. So what this says it’s, like, we acknowledge that you’re in this like situation where you’re getting input from stakeholders who had all kinds of varying degrees of a definition of what the website is for what this content is supposed to do so content strategy says everybody from their own perspective, everybody’s no perspective, their own priorities, different audiences and you end up with this website that kind of like pleases nobody, right? It doesn’t drive your business goals, so content strategy says let’s, ask the question of why, before we do anything and i think that’s kind of revolutionary who worked on the web even the past, like ten years. It’s it’s just this race to the bottom, like what you said, like publish all the things now, and this has kind of slow down let’s have a plan and it ends up like driving engagement that it improves your brand it, you know, drives up, conversions, everything if you can kind of get the buy-in take a beat and pursue this, ok, where should we start our conversation? That was great over that was excellent. Overviewing thank you. Should we get started? Well, you should get started by, you know, finding some similarly minded colleagues, right? So talk to your team members about this current problem. Probably everybody started talking about it. I’m sure they are. Right, so talk to them about this. Just, you know, new notion that people are pursuing get the, you know, good kind of the buy-in from your colleagues and then start reaching out to people who are, you know, a little above you who could be an ambassador for you to senior leadership and work on getting that buy-in from those folks and then you just start by where you’re basically telling them or trying to get them on board with. We need to be more strategic about this. Yeah. Here. Our problems. Yes. And here’s, what are potential outcomes are yeah, if we can be a lot more sophisticated about, like here’s. Why we’re drowning, right? He’s, our driving here’s where our pages aren’t really converting people here’s why there now, not performing to where we want them go and you can even, like, start with your business goal. And then you pursue an audit. We got a big hump, okay, just went away. Okay. Great. What that was that was the speakers, the thie non-profit radio sound system. A cz exemplary it’s beyond question. So that came from the austin convention center. I wish i could run. I could run. This convention out of the way we run non-profit really agree? I don’t know these losers here. Yeah, but so one of the great first step to take us to get an audit done right? And so it’s an inventory of all of your content, but then it’s the audit phase, which you’re you know, you’re evaluating page by page, and for some people, this could be like tens of thousands of pages on their website right lorts a couple hundred, you’re evaluating page by page and determining whether that content piece of content actually lines with what everybody says your business goals are it’s a pretty serious audit? Now you gotta look at every page, every page, and obviously, if you have hundreds of thousands of pages, or if you’re, you know, a merchant’s site you’re going, you’re going to do like a sample size of those pages, right? You’re the idea is to just see, really, hell, well, you’re you’re content is performing and a lot of times that drives a conversation that drives, you know, that gives you the ammunition to make the case that we need to make a change, so an audit is key. It’s the first place to start and then you’re pursuing just getting that content landscape kind of sketched out determining what you’re ecosystem is right. So let’s say, you’ve got like, you know, thirty things the organization works on for non-profit you’re gonna have all kinds of things somebody’s working on. So you get the executives and the subject experts to agree? Like what? Our priorities right where the organization’s priorities get really clear on that, and then look at how those priorities and those areas they’re kind of developed on your site. Do you have one thing that’s like this really, really weird offshoot thing? Just like favorite thing, and you have, like, forty thousand pages on it. This should all be driven by the mission. Yeah, exactly. I already should be pretty clear. Yeah. Moflow very yeah, smooth from your your mission statement. Yeah, but what you’ll find, but i think a lot of non-profit especially large ones like, oh, my gosh, there’s there’s competing goals were competing priorities, and competing interpretations of with that mission is all across organization, which leaves just, you know, a lot of strife and a lot of tension for folks who were like right in the middle of that content production system, like the web editors. So, yeah, the idea is to kind of, like, sketch out what your content ecosystem should be. So if our priority right here is, like farm animal welfare, we we should have, like, the depth of that contact your sights to reflect that, and it should also reflect what the current priorities are and the tone that you should using, etcetera. But if you have something that’s just, like, really, really low priority, it doesn’t make sense for that to have, you know, take up twenty percent of the site and you’ll find that that happens a lot of times, so okay, okay, so we were going to get some early stakeholders summerlee allies engaged with us, yeah, hyre who then starts to develop the content strategy? So, you know, you may have someone who is a content strategist on your team, like, if so lucky you a lot of places, all right, let’s assume not our audience is small and midsize. Non-profit yeah, exactly, i know, and i’m from a huge non-profit and we don’t have anything like that, so usually this falls on the shoulders. Of you know that editorial director of a website or, you know, a director of any filler online platforms and usually going to fall on them, and it doesn’t have to be like we’re going to do all of this right now. It can be baby steps. They can be like let’s just take on one like many project and apply content strategy to it, like run that through that screen, kind of demonstrate successive that way, teo to your stakeholders and say, look how well this worked. Look how we drove results this way by applying attention and focus to this, and then you could move on to a larger things, but it always usually kind of just germinates from the web team, maybe someone else, depending on how the organisation structure and maybe someone like development or design. Everybody has a part in this, but yeah. Then it just gets not only getting the work done and turning your website our platform into what you wanted to be. Okay, that all sounds very simple, but there’s gotta be more to it on. We got plenty of time to spend together. So where? Where do we go now? Well i mean, yeah, gosh, so it starts with the audit, you know, and you’re looking into how your, how you’re this map to your goals and everything, and then you might start with, like, a section of the website, maybe a section that you feel like the stakeholders there are going to be easy to work with, and they’re going to, like, excited about the process, and so you might start with that that that section that makes a lot of sense but very good to make it explicit, you got some of those early allies. Zoho leaving some of their content is the place to start, you know, and don’t start with someone who are a section of your organization who, you know, it’s been kind of contentious to work with them, and a lot of people talk about how content started she’s about, like therapy, right? It’s like all these relationships, because content is so personal, there’s so many people who were owning content across the organization and to them that that page that they wrote on legs, horse, immuno contraception is like their baby, right? Like, okay, well, this makes no sense to an audience this makes no sense to a user, how are they going to do that? So a lot of this kind of, you know, your revision work or whatever is collaborative, and you’re getting people on those teams who contribute to content and you’re all coming to a consensus on, like, what it should be based on, like what? We’ve all agreed on the goals, and we’ve all agreed on the audience, like, how can we change? And sometimes you get them involved in writing new stuff? It all depends on kind of the scope of the organization and how involved everybody wants to be, but it should be a collaborative process, and it could be merely taking, like, five pages that you took out from the audit and saying, like, okay, well, these pages are they really working for us? And so you get them involved in that early early stages so they can kind of see it don’t feel like they’re being put upon, right? A lot of this is relationship management, and so, yeah, you may take five pages and two of them make the cut on the new site, but you’ve all worked on that together. Three then you decide to retire or, you know, you can, you know, contingency plan it, right? Like have a couple of bourbons on it, and he composed it. But the whole thing should be collaborates. You have everybody going on the same page from beginning tend so we should be thinking also about our audiences. That’s, right, who’s who’s consuming this content, right? And so that’s. One of the first things you develop as your, you know, working on your goal, you’re also thinking about your audience. And so anybody who’s working in a content strategy, capacity and organizations should be talking a lot, teo, all the stakeholders throughout the organization who are touching that content, right? So my job would be to go to that course. Amina, contraception page owner i mean, like, why is this important to you? Tell me, i use this in your work, but do you really, really want to see this? And what do you want them to do with it on? Don’t get a lot of really, really good information out of that. It sometimes turns out to be less contentious than you may have thought it wass right? You’ll discover that like, oh, actually they’re you know, they’re worked, requires something different, and now i can pitch something different to them that’s more useful than like this page on the website that i’ve seen has gotten like twenty, views and past year and so it’s, just a lot of lot of talking relationship management, and then once you’ve got kind of, i guess that section worked on or even the whole site, then you just move on to a governance situation and actually see bret coming right here. Maybe he wants to speak on governance. Governance is actually brett’s section right? Red, you better hurry up, man. Come on. Get in here. Brett, please get in here quickly because we just transition to your section. Take your lanyard off, please. Red came in late, but we can accommodate him. And actually, we were just getting to the section on governance, governance. So please put on your headset because you’ll hear a lot better and filter out background noise. And wes is going to bring you into the picture. We got everybody, wes. Alright, outstanding welcome. Thank you. Okay. This is brett brett brett meyer, content strategist for think shout welcome. Welcome to non-profit radio. Thank you. Coming closer to the microphone, please should be within an inch. All right, excellent. Katie was doing an excellent job. Hopefully you were going to join us, but we would have gone ahead without you. So i don’t want you to think that you are indispensable. Great, but you did show up at the exact right time is very good timing if you’re going to be late was perfect great governance, governance around our our content strategy. What what does? What does that even mean? The governance of it governance is the plan for the plan. There are a lot of non-profits these days who are under the impression that they need to create as much content as possible, which is kind of the opposite of having his strategy. So governance ltu plan who is responsible for what? So you’re going to have probably a team of writers. Is that team of writers going to be able to publish content directly to the website themselves, or is it going to go through a review process? The whole thing around governance is making sure that people understand what their roles are and setting up the map for how content. Is going to move from creation through publication to the public. Okay? And as we are, these are these are written this’s, a written plan, this government’s plan. Ideally, it is going to be written down. Usually, it is more of a word of mouth thing, and people just have a general idea of what their roles are. We always advised that there is that kind of written plan or map of how things work, because people leave and new people come in. And if you don’t have that documentation for how things were supposed to work, it takes them a long time to get back up to speed. All right? 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Sound advice, that’s, tony martignetti non-profit radio and i’m gale bauer from sponsorship strategist. Dot com. Let’s, go into a lot more detail. Way got some time left together. What what? What what element do you like to see in in the government governance plan? Let’s? Take the idea where it is, it is written? Yes, we try to make sure that things aren’t just happening in the communications department because everybody’s going to have some sort of content that they want to get on the web site that day, we talked about getting the early buy-in great. So yeah, it’s it’s kind of along the lines of a cross functional team, you have to identify who the best writers are the people who are going to create content that’s going to have meaning for the users who were coming to the website and just generally making sure that they understand what their roles are, who is going to be creating the content who’s going to be editing the content? If you have that kind of evergreen content, they stuff that is going to be kind of a permanent fixture of the website. How often are you going to go back and take a look at that content again to make sure that it is meeting? The needs of the organization isn’t performing as well as it should be. So part of the governance is it also understanding what the metrics for success are and the metro for success are going to be a lot different for the about the organisation information than it would be for, say, the blawg or if they’re doing events? An event is a very time box thing it’s going to have a ramp up? They’re going to be pushing a lot of content or information around the event, but as soon as the event is past that usually doesn’t have a lot of utility as opposed to maybe some of the about us content you want to get across what the goals of the organization is, what the organization does. You want people to really understand what this non-profit is trying to accomplish its very important content, so they need to keep coming back and making sure that it’s working, writing down the goals means that they have something to measure against, and they’re not just creating content in the dark. Katie, i see you doing a lot of nodding, but there’s things you like to add, i mean, the only thing i would add to that i’m sure brett nose like you would think, really addresses the idea that content is like a living, breathing thing, right? The website this is living, breathing thing it’s very different than an email that you sent out to your list. You know, it has to be up there all the time. And so what? Brett’s talking about it’s so critical, teo to know that it’s not enough just when you hit publish, you know, it’s not like a print magazine. It’s not like an email, he just sent out not even, like log, you know, so that’s just the beginning when you hit publish and so this governance is so, so critical to making sure content is still performing, you know, a year from now or that you that you remember that it’s up, it makes a lot of times you have a huge website, people were like, oh, that that page, yeah, it happens to people who are, like, really deeply invested as well. Just i have a huge websites going to it’s going to take over if you don’t govern it let’s spend a good amount of time talking about the measurement and the success metrics go ahead, that’s your that’s, your area? Excellent. Yes, we’ve been doing a lot of data with our cloudgood data work with our clients recently, so we know for a fact that the home page is not the common way that people come into a website anymore. They’re using google, they’re coming in deep in into the site, through social media or through what’s called dark social, the people chatting each other, links on stuff that can’t really be tracked. No, you have to understand that any page of your website might be creating that first impression for folks, but the goals of the various types of content that you might have on your website are going to be different. So when we do work with clients, we try to help them understand that an event page, a page that somebody might google for. Oh, amplify austin, for example. What? We don’t know exactly what page they’re going to come into at first, but as the data starts to come in, you can see where they’re entering the site and you can help. You can come up with the metrics that are going to let you know whether or not that paige is successful, so if you’re coming into an event page with the registration, you want them to get the information about the event very quickly and decide whether or not they want to attend, and the next step from that would be clicking on the register button, which would be very different from a post on the block where you want them to consume the content and then probably share it. So the metrics there going to be slightly different. The important part is to recognize all the types of content and set up the different metrics that will indicate success for that particular organization, because it’s always going to be different, okay? And katie, we were using the interesting example of the equine immuno contraception paige thank, which could be a coin acquaint, contra or something. Yeah, i mean that that was so it was so benefit from governance. I would just so benefit from having those questions asked. Like, what does it mean for this page to succeed? What do you want your users to do with it? And then really, really, like, trail down and see if that’s happening. And i think that that could take care of so much like problem content on so many people’s websites, if you’re just sticking to you, like, really direct, objective measurement and then there’s kind of you take away all the, like, the sensitivity with that, like, okay, here’s this thing that i didn’t say like, you know, google said it, whatever, we still have several minutes left together, what what have we not talked about? Whatever i ask you that that you want to share? I like to, and i know that katie agrees with this because we’ve talked about it a little bit make sure that krauz understand the content strategy doesn’t have to be just about the website, and it shouldn’t just be in the communications department e channel it is multi channel and the development, the people in the development department who are sending out fund-raising letters that is a piece of content that is going to create an impression and if any one of these things is a little bit off message, i mean, we don’t want to get too far into the whole whole branding part. But if anything’s too far off message or strikes a wrong note with the supporters, you’re probably going to lose thumb, at least in the short term. I’m so glad you brought that up exactly whenever i’ve talked about content started, you know, a lot of people think like, oh that’s just for websites and even this idea that content is only on a website and just like no like a tweet is content any you know, period it’s, certain pages, that’s, all content that’s why i get so excited about this top because i really feel like it has, you know, with the ability to bring everything together and it can get kind of as big as you want it to be. But that’s what that’s? Why it’s so cool? And i the best organizations i’ve seen are the ones who are integrating every single channel into their content strategy and all just completely flows the same ethics, the same style, the same tone, the same priorities and goals and audiences were just really, really woven and deeply, inappropriately and it’s just like it’s cake. I love it! Brett katina, a zay mentioned, talked about getting some allies early on and then may be developing a mini project. Around some of their content. Do you have any other ideas you want to add about trying to get this? This team buy-in whether it’s in the early stage or or in the later stages, maybe some, maybe some departments are not as willing as others. What advice do you have there? Katie is absolutely right getting that early win always going to be important because then you’d demonstrate the success or what you can possibly achieve by having a written content strategy other than that getting that leadership buy-in early is it’s, not just from the team that you’re assembling, that that’s going to be creating the content. Leadership really has to support this and understand the value they already understand the value, because we’ve been talking about branding at the non-profit technology conference for a long time, there’s a lot of companies who’ve been helping non-profits developed this brand, but the content that is supporting the brand has to be taken into account too. So it’s not a big step for leadership to take, from supporting the brand to supporting the content that is supporting the brand. Yeah, like there’s, so much overlap with just brand and content. Strategy is the time o que onda geun this all all flows from our mission statement, so that seems like the place to start. Katie and i did talk about that anything you want to add about that non-profits have a built in advantage. They don’t have to worry about what the for-profit companies do because everything should be coming out of their mission and their values when your values driven organization it’s much easier to develop content that has meaning than, say, one, a big company that wants to sell you shoes and thinks that a good way to do that is by showing people succeeding let’s, leave it there, all right, brett meyer is content strategist with think shout and katie caress, director of online communications for the humane society legislative fund. Brett carry katy. Thank you very much. Thinking having real pleasure. Thankyou. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference twenty fifteen austin, texas. Thanks so much for being with us. Thanks to everybody at the non-profit technology conference and intend the non-profit technology network. Thank you very much. Next week, two regulars are returning. Amy sample ward and jean takagi if you missed. Any part of today’s show? Find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where in the world else would you go? Opportunity, collaboration, the world convenes for poverty reduction. It’ll ruin you for every other conference, i swear. That’s, true opportunity, collaboration, dot net. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer. Shows social media is by susan chavez at susan chavez. Dot com on our music is by scott stein of brooklyn. Yeah, with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. 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