Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%
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Jereme Bivens and Megan Anhalt: Multichannel 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.
