How to Build Community and Actually Drive Donations Using Social Media

Adam Wilbur: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining today’s session. Hi, Julia. I’m Adam Wilbur. I’m one of the co-founders of CauseVid. I’d like to start by introducing the speaker for this session, Julia Campbell. Julia Campbell is named as a top thought leader by Read More

Adam Wilbur: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining today’s session. Hi, Julia. I’m Adam Wilbur. I’m one of the co-founders of CauseVid. I’d like to start by introducing the speaker for this session, Julia Campbell. Julia Campbell is named as a top thought leader by Forbes and BizTech’s magazine. She’s an author, speaker and nonprofit consultant on a mission to make the digital world a better place. She launched the podcast Nonprofit Nation this year, and has written two books for nonprofits on social media and storytelling. Julia’s online courses, webinars and talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking and raise more money online. On a personal level, I’ll just share how excited I am to be here today with CauseVid’s partners, both Julia and DonorPerfect. When DonorPerfect reached out to us asking to be involved in the conference, we looked at the agenda and immediately saw Julia’s name on there and said, “Hey, we’d like sponsor that one.” I’m really excited to be here today. We at CauseVid help nonprofits incorporate video into their fundraising [unintelligible 00:01:17]. We’ve helped over 500 of them do so since the company was founded in 2018. I can be honest and real to say that we wouldn’t have done that without help from people like Julia Campbell and DonorPerfect. Specific to DonorPerfect, we help power DonorPerfect’s video feature, DP Video. If you haven’t given it a try already, I’d encourage you to do so and click the button there within your DonorPerfect environment to try sending a video today, to thank your donors in a personal way with a personal video. With that, I’ll turn it over to Julia and I look forward to hearing what she has to share here during her session. Thanks, Julia. Julia Campbell: Yay. Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Thank you to the team at CauseVid for always being just so supportive of me, of my work. Thank you to DonorPerfect. I’m really excited to be here today. We are going to talk about social media, which is a hot topic. I don’t know if it’s been in the news lately this week. [chuckles] I don’t know if it’s the only thing people are talking about. Since Adam read that lovely bio and he didn’t say that we’re actually good friends and we hung out in Florida recently at a conference, and they’re just such fantastic people at CauseVid. I’ll talk about them because I’m such a huge fan of video, but he did read that bio. I’m not going to go through my bio again. A couple things that you might not know about me. I am a mom of two. I’ve created several academies around social media. What I really want you to know is that I’m a former development and marketing director and everything director really, washing the coffee maker, driving a truck full of balloons to the event, staying up until 2:00 in the morning, making sure the brochure is correct. I’ve done all of that and I’ve been in your shoes. I know that this conference is really- you’re probably a small team, a small organization. Maybe you do have a large team in large resources, but you’re looking for some real actionable and practical tips that you can take away. I just wanted to share a little bit of my history before I became a consultant. What are we going to cover today? We’re going to talk about the latest changes, trends in the landscape. Some statistics and some trends, and maybe a little bit of my views on what’s going on with the social media landscape, as it stands this week. How to build an engaged community on social media, how to convert your fans to followers, your fans and followers into donors, that is probably the number one question that I get. I have some strategies for you and then some free and low cost tools you can use to really enhance what you’re doing on a shoestring budget. Let’s dive in. I always like to cite my sources, Pew Internet, Pew Research Group, a nonpartisan research group in DC. They’re so fantastic. I cite a lot of their research, M+R Benchmarks, Global Trends in Giving, and eMarketer releases a social media usage report every year that is always very thorough, very, very helpful. Let’s talk about Facebook. The reality is that 7 in 10 Facebook users say they visit the site daily. There are billions of people that are still using Facebook. While YouTube is technically the most used social media site, I don’t consider YouTube a social media site, I consider YouTube a search engine, because we use it differently, but Pew Internet considers it a social media site. There’s a growing share across demographics, maybe not younger people, but baby boomers, millennials, older generations, they are definitely using Facebook. It remains to be seen if the recent revelations brought on by the whistleblower in the congressional hearings in the last two days, if anyone cares, we don’t know. I have an opinion about it. I think that we as nonprofits have a responsibility to make the digital world a better place, and our responsibility to share what we’re doing and lift the veil on a lot of this bad information that might be out there. For me, I really do- I don’t want to see nonprofits- like a mass exodus from these platforms, but I do want us to hold them accountable. We just can’t escape that social media is a revolution in communication. It’s not a to-do list, not an item on the to-do list. It’s completely changed how we actually function and communicate as humans. We do need to pay attention to other social media sites other than Facebook that are growing, that are emerging and that are increasing in popularity, especially with younger generations. The big question, doesn’t matter for nonprofits, I asked a question in my Facebook group of 17,000 nonprofits yesterday. I said, “Are you planning on leaving? Or are you considering leaving Facebook or Instagram because of the recent revelations?” 100% of them said, “No.” What I think is happening is that we’re not willing to give up these open source platforms, this fantastically really effective when you use it effectively way to reach our donors and our supporters, but we do want to use it in a really responsible and ethical way, and that’s what we’ll talk about today. It is effective. I think that a lot of nonprofits agree, a lot of website traffic comes from social media and the best part is that people use social media to express what they care about, to express their identities, to share things that they’re passionate about. It’s a perfect platform for nonprofits when used in a strategic way and used effectively. A couple of things that we’re going to touch on today. We’re not going to focus on Facebook fundraising, Instagram fundraising, I will touch on it. I’m not going to get it too into the weeds on it because I don’t want people to put all their eggs in that basket. I do think, and I know that these platforms are too powerful to ignore. We can’t just bury our head in the sand and say, “We don’t want to do it. We don’t want to listen to it. We don’t want to know about it.” We need to know about it. We need to be educated on it because then we can make a decision for our organization as to whether or not we want to use the platforms to fundraise. We might just want to use them for advocacy and awareness. Maybe we do want to use them to fundraise, you are going to have very different goals from the nonprofit that’s next door to you or down the street. Another piece of information that I think is really helpful is the way that people are interacting with social media and using the platforms is changing and evolving. We originally signed onto Facebook to look up family and friends and maybe our old college roommate, that kind of thing. Now we’re really using them for discovery. We’re using them to find information. We’re using them almost like search platforms. I know Instagram is being increasingly used as a search platform rather than connecting with friends and family. People connect with celebrities, influencers, brands, all that great stuff. Also people- we know this, so this is for better or for worse. Sometimes people can change their mind on an issue for better, sometimes they can change it for worse, it’s all subjective. The point is that these platforms are highly influential, and they are embedded in a really huge percentage of at least the American population, our daily life and how we experience the news, how we experience opinions, how we experience connecting with friends, colleagues, family, things like that. We need to be paying attention to these statistics and understand that whether or not we personally like social media, our donors are on there and using it and we can shape that experience. We can only control our little corner of the internet, but we can make sure that it’s a good experience and that it’s an ethical and responsible experience. I do like to start off my presentations talking about what social media is, because there is a lot of myths. We were sold a bill of goods. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to create Facebook pages, we thought, “Oh, man, we could just have a billboard and just post stuff and it’d be a great way to reach our fans and followers for free,” but now we know that’s definitely not true. Social media is really an opportunity to reach a wider audience, a place to get real time feedback, and a chance to make connections with your community where they’re spending their time, so rather than trying to grab them and pull them kicking and screaming to wherever you like to spend time, we’re going to spend time with them where they spend time. It is not an ATM, this is not an ATM, a one size fits all, a magic bullet, and is not free. Now, if you are a South Park fan, you’re going to know about the underpants gnomes, and that was an episode of South Park. Basically what the gnomes do is they go in houses, they steal underpants and then they have this business plan, this is their business plan, collect underpants, phase two, question mark, phase three profit. That’s their great business plan. That is what a lot of our social media plans look like, we’re going to get on a lot of platforms, we’re going to sign up, create some accounts. We don’t know what we’re going to do in phase two, and then phase three, we’re going to miraculously profit, so don’t be like the underpants gnomes. It’s not free, it actually requires a lot of strategy and creativity and time, as we do know now. It’s also a value exchange, this is so important. I give you my attention and time, you give me something that I value. I don’t only value coupons, I don’t only value looking up leggings on Facebook, even though that’s all they show me. It could be inspiration, it could be something that has meaning to me, entertainment, it could be education, information that’s valuable. Value is in the eye of the beholder. Something that you think is valuable, doesn’t really matter because what your donors think is valuable, is what really matters, and they’re going to tell you, they tell you with likes, comments and shares, that’s how they tell you what they think is valuable. Social media is not a billboard, a chance to just yell at a bunch of strangers and hope that they pay attention. Get out our promotions, that’s another question that I get all the time, how can I use social media to get out our promotions? No, that’s the wrong framework. That’s the wrong mindset. You have to really build a community that knows and trusts you, before you can promote to them, you can’t really promote to a bunch of strangers. The only way you could is if your cause is in the news, so say like the Australian bushfires, Hurricane Ida, some natural emergency that’s in the news? Yes, strangers will pay attention because they’ve heard of it so they’re not actually strangers, they’ve heard of it before. If you’re a little local Arts Association, it’s going to be a lot harder to yell at strangers and convince them to pay attention. It’s also not a one way street. I’ve had clients that have come to me and said, “How can I turn off all the comments on social media? How can I turn off the replies, the direct message, the comments?” I said, “It sounds like you want to build a blog. It sounds like you want to build an email list, even though we know people can email you back, but it doesn’t sound to me like you want to be on social media, because it’s not a one way street here.” A framework for you as we go into some more specifics, and some specific examples of nonprofits using social media effectively, a framework that I use is the 80/20 rule. 80% of the content that you’re sharing should be interacting, building community, educating people, inspiring people, entertaining and connecting, and 20% can be promotion because you have to earn the right to promote, you have to earn that trust and attention and also, you can’t just mail it in with your promotions. We’re going to look at some fundraising examples. You can’t just say, “Donate to our campaign,” and post the link, that does not work. You still have to put a little bit of effort into your promotions and make them interesting and relevant. I think social media is perfect for nonprofits, because we can shed light on all of the complex and difficult issues we talk about, we can advocate for our work and our impact, we can address myths and misconceptions around the populations that we serve. We can educate, we can enlighten, we can fill knowledge gaps, which is hugely important, and we can use it to really keep people inspired by and active in our work. I really want us to change the world we live in for the better, and we try to do it every day so let’s do it on digital channels, and that’s the hashtag, take back digital, we’re going to take it back for good. I also think we have a moral obligation, I really do. We can’t hide our work away in a little ivory tower and not tell people, because this is what a lot of people think, homeless people want to live in the street, the arts are nice, but not necessary. I don’t want to say a lot of people, some people. Some kids are just bad kids, the poor will always be with us, that kind of thing. We need to really shine a spotlight on the problems that we’re solving. We need to also play the long game, we need to elevate human connection and focus on transparency and these are all benefits so if you’re looking to convince a board member, or convince an executive director about social media, you should be talking about these bigger picture things rather than just oh, we’re going to raise money on it. The key here is like anything else, the know, like and trust factor, that is huge. We’re going to look at some examples of how you can build this factor, all three factors, within your audience, because you want to build a community that would follow you anywhere. You want these tools to be a moot point, you want to be like, if I need to get off Twitter, then they’ll follow me somewhere else or- not everyone’s going to, but a huge chunk of people should be willing to follow you. Another important thing that I want to say is, it’s just not something that you can check off your to do list, it’s a very hungry beast. I think what you’re asking, okay, this is all really great, Julia, but how can I build a social media marketing program, with very limited time and with multiple responsibilities on my plate? You know what I love about this picture? You just Google like working mom, and you find these awful stock photos. I just wanted to highlight this because I don’t usually use horrible stock photos like this, but be careful of the stock photos you use. This is just the worst stock photo, but I think it conveys a point at least. You don’t have to be everywhere. I’m going to show you a framework that you can use to evaluate where you need to be in the first place. You shouldn’t be everywhere. You can’t be everywhere. It’s not possible. Should we be on there? Say you’re asking, okay, should we be on TikTok? Is your target audience on the platform? First of all, you need to know your goal and your target audience. Can you add value on this platform, or just more noise and clutter? Can you actually contribute something helpful to your audience? This is very important, because you can re-purpose, so if you have a great story, if you have a great photo, you can share it across multiple platforms but you cannot simply cut and paste and spray it out and use Hootsuite or one of those platforms to just put the same exact thing on all the platforms, because they all have different character counts, and some can use hashtags and some can use tagging and that kind of thing. Can you consistently create and share content that’s designed for this specific platform? I just actually want to go over this one more time. These are the questions that you’re going to bring to your board when your board chair says, “We really need to be on Snapchat,” you’re going to say, “Okay, I will evaluate that. I also will take something else off my plate, what would you like me to take off my plate so that I can put that on my plate?” If we’ve decided that we can answer yes to all these three questions, then perhaps it’s a great place to go, like Clubhouse, it’s like anything else. It’s like, let’s start a podcast. Let’s start a blog. You have to ask these core questions because first of all, it’s not free, your time is not free, and adding something else onto your time is not free at all. What are the strategies that we can use to actually drive donations, to convert social media fans and followers into actually taking an action for us? Number one, and I’m actually pleased– Well, I’m not pleased with what happened this week, but it proves my point, the great Facebook and Instagram outage of 2021, and then the congressional testimony from the Facebook whistleblower on how toxic Facebook and Instagram can be to youth, to teens, to our mental health. What we want to do, and I’ve said this before, I’ve been saying this for years because we do not own the platforms. They could go down at any time, they could start charging. They could do some crazy algorithm change that we don’t know about, and they do very frequently. We don’t own those platforms. If you have a permission-based email list where people sign up and opt into your email list, you can carry that wherever you go, you can bring it to DonorPerfect. You can bring it into [unintelligible 00:20:55] contact. You can do whatever you want with it. Really, if it’s permission-based, I’m not saying harvest emails from LinkedIn or by email lists. If it’s permission-based, you can do that. We also have to think about the power of email versus social media. It’s the first thing people check in the morning, email’s the first thing usually before social, and people prefer to receive this promotional marketing content through email. Email open rates, 16%, they start up. I hope that yours is higher, but Facebook reaches just 2% to 6% of a page fan. If we’re thinking about reach and engagement, we do want to create this more intimate relationship with our audience by bringing them over to email. Why email? Then I’m going to show you really how to do that, but I just think building this deeper relationship with people, that should constantly be the focus of your social media marketing plan, not every post, certainly not every post but certainly it should be one of the primary drivers of your social media plan. The key here is not to just say, “Sign up for our newsletter.” Excuse me. NASA said, “Our next newsletter is coming out soon, sign up for a condensed review.” I would have changed the title here to get updates on climate change or something, make it something compelling. Nobody really wants to click on sign up for newsletter, right? No, sign up today, we’ll send you two simple ways to fight hunger in your community. Join us in the fight against deforestation. Never miss an update in our mission to cure childhood cancer, right? Don’t miss our stories. You do have to give people a compelling reason to sign up. That is the key here. It can’t just be signed up for a newsletter. Do play on FOMO. This is a tip I got from Sandy Rees of Get Fully Funded. That is one of my favorite fundraising blogs. Sandy Rees, Get Fully Funded. When she was talking about how her tips on getting people from social media to the email list, she said, “Play on FOMO.” “Tomorrow we’ll be sharing Molly’s story and her incredible journey in our newsletter. If you want to read it, sign up for our updates here,” and then post the link to sign up. That is really enticing and interesting, and make sure that its content that you’re only featuring in your email newsletter as well. Add your email sign up to all of your social media bios and give people a reason to sign up. I love this, subscribe to our monthly email, Herd Around the Barn, to keep up with the excitement. Really enticing people to make that deeper connection, add an email, sign up to all of your videos. In all of your video captions and live stream broadcast, you can add them in the caption like New York Public Library does. You could add in the comments, you could add them inside the caption, but you don’t have to do this for all videos. Just where it makes sense. You might have a fundraising appeal on some videos and then other videos, you might have an email sign up, but these are all places where you can ask people for their email address and try to build your email list, get them from social media to your email list. If you’re on YouTube and if you have any video content at all, you should be on YouTube. It is the number two search engine in the world owned by the number one search engine, Google. You should be on there. This is just such a great place to build your email list. You can add a card, you can just add it in the caption of your YouTube video, if you want, because you can add hyperlinks in your YouTube captions, or you can actually add a card overlay to your YouTube video, asking people to sign up. Also, of course, pop-ups on your website, but also what I wanted to highlight here, I wanted to highlight the wording, be the first to know, get exclusive updates on the conflict and what we’re doing to stop it straight to your inbox. Join us, stay connected to the global movement to end poverty and low expectations. Today we can give every woman in India hope and the opportunity to create her own future. It’s just very, very compelling call to action, much more than, sign up for our email newsletter. Right? Okay. That is building your email list. Make sure you are strategically using these channels to actively get people over to your email list, where then you can build a deeper relationship with them. All right. Step two, strategy two, leverage the power of targeted social ads. Social media is really pay to play at this point. You can of course use all of the strategies in part one that we talked about and not pay to boost them, but I would actually pay a little bit of money to boost them, to get them in front of even more of your fans. The way that you do that, don’t send people to the homepage of your website and expect them to figure out what to do. You want to- not necessarily boost your post. You want to create a separate ad in Facebook Ads Manager, because boosting a post just really sends it to the lowest hanging- not the lowest hanging fruit. It really just sends it out to a broad audience. You don’t get as many metrics on it and you can’t really control what happens to it in the budget and the timing as much as you can, if you create a stand-alone ad in Ads Manager. Anytime you have a campaign, you need to be running ads on Facebook and Instagram. If your audience is on there. If your audience is on there, I should say. Don’t run ads if your audience is not on Facebook and Instagram because that would be silly, but the majority of the world is on either one of those platforms. I would say maybe some of your audience is on there, but it’s definitely worth boosting. Now you want to do something you can track, so you want to do something where you can say, “Okay, we spent $50 and we got 150 email signups,” and then even better, know what an email sign up is worth to you, or you can say, “We spent $50 and we got $300 in donations.” That would be incredible by the way. That’d be amazing. That’d be amazing conversion rate, but it has to be something that’s trackable. I don’t like paying money for reach, unless you’re going to retarget those people later and that’s another whole topic, but I don’t like just having people look at my stuff, because looking is fine. They could be scrolling through, they technically looked at it, but they didn’t really care about it or click on it or pay any attention to it. You want to measure for clicks or video views or sign ups or something tangible that you can measure, because then you’re going to be able to measure the return on investment that you spent. What I want you to do when you’re not actively fundraising, have things to offer that people can click on, like a new report, a special story, a video, a free event, a webinar, a Facebook live, have things where they can join you off social media, give them some incentive. Then remember for your long-term plan. I want you to focus on warm audiences, trying to reach brand new cold audiences who’ve never heard of you. If you’ve never run Facebook ads before, that’s going to be very difficult. Talk to your warm audiences, your fans, your followers, your email lists, talk to people that [unintelligible 00:29:07] like you, your video views. You can send ads to the people that have watched your videos on Facebook, to the people that have watched your Facebook lives. I know in the works right now, you’re going to be able to retarget ads to anyone that’s made a donation to you on Facebook, and that’s huge. That is definitely coming down the pipeline, which is going to be amazing. When you’re being strategic about targeting, there are three ways you can do it. Create a custom audience from a list of donors or volunteers or stakeholders. Everyone that gave to you on GivingTuesday last year, you definitely want to target an ad to them this year. Everyone who gifts you Mother’s Day campaign last year, target an ad to them this year as well. You can pull up this list in Facebook, target an ad to really whoever you want, as long as you have an email list, if you have the pixel, Facebook pixel on your website, you can create an ad and send it to people that have visited your website. People that visited your donate page, people that visited your email signup page, people that just visited your homepage, you can really target it however you want. There is a way- I’m not going to get too technical here, that you can actually prevent ads from being shown to people who’ve already donated. It’s pretty technical, little bit in the weeds for people, but there is a way to do it. If you’re worried about offending your donors, there definitely is a way to do that, but I wouldn’t let that hinder you from targeting ads to other donors that haven’t given yet. Then this is really where the power lies, right? This is where the power lies for us to really reach new audiences. This is Facebook and Instagram, but it applies to any social media site that you run on ads on. Once they get enough information– If you’ve run ads for a while, they start to see, oh, this is the kind of person that clicks on this ad. This is their demographics, their behaviors, their interests, their age, their location. They start to get that kind of information and then they can target brand new people who look like your [inaudible 00:31:25] list. This is the power. It’s certainly a long-term strategy. It’s not a silver bullet. It takes a long time to really effectively build this kind of audience but I think for all of our purposes, if we’re going to be leveraging the power of these platforms, we need to lever the power of the platforms. This is the power, the social graph and the ability to target ads to specific people. That was a little technical. You can just Google how to create a custom audience. It’s actually very easy. You upload a list- or what I recommend. I’m not kidding you. I do recommend. I don’t offer this service, but hiring a freelancer to do your Facebook ads or your Google ads, because it’s a science. I’ve hired people to do ads for me and it was well worth it, let me tell you, because it’s time consuming, but it’s definitely a long-term strategy that ends up paying off if you do it correctly. This one doesn’t really require any money unless you want to pay for ads. This could be a free strategy. Promote your campaigns, tell people that you’re raising money. You don’t have to use the donate button. You could send people offsite, feeding America raises millions and millions of dollars, sending people offsite. Macmillan Cancer Support, they raised million of dollars with their text to give campaign. They don’t use a donate button, text dad to 70, I can’t even read that, 70550. There are other ways to use social media to promote your fundraising message without using those internal tools. Also let people know that monthly giving is an option, please. You don’t know that people know that. Tell people about your monthly donors, your recurring options. Tell people that you rely on these donations to sustain you. You can’t assume that people know, you really can’t. The most compelling fundraising on social media tells a story, grabs my attention with a visual, has an emotional component to it, kind of a hook and then specifically tells me what to do next. It tells me what to do next. It’s easy to make a gift today by clicking the donate button below. Can you give just $5 to help Fiesta and other animals like her? Specific, specific, specific, feed a family for the holidays. Your $20 gift provides a complete holiday meal for a family of five. This works because you have to think about how people use social media, they’re at their kid’s soccer game. Maybe, that might be me, or they are on the go. They’ve got two minutes. They’re waiting in line at the grocery store and you’ve got to tell them what to do and we also have so much decision fatigue. I know that I have decision fatigue by the end of the day. I don’t want to make a decision, tell me, $20. Okay, great. $5, awesome and just make it as easy as possible for them to follow the directions. Now I’m going to talk just really briefly about the tools available on Instagram and Facebook. YouTube has a donate button, but it’s only available to select nonprofits. You have to have 10,000 subscribers. You have to jump through all these hoops. I didn’t actually cover YouTube here. Twitter does not. LinkedIn does not. TikTok only has a donate button for very select. They hand-select the nonprofits, that kind of thing. Instagram, you can put the donate button on your profile. People can go to your profile and click the donate button and make a donation in two taps. You can put the donation sticker on your Instagram stories or people can raise money for you on their Instagram stories. The way to do that is you do have to sign up for Facebook charitable giving tools. You do have to sign up for Facebook fundraising tools in order to access those Instagram tools. The best calls to action. These are the best calls to action on social media. Make your give now language compelling. That’s really the best thing that you could possibly do. Join our movement. Join us now, save the summer for kids. Don’t just say, “Donate to support our campaign,” because helping you reach your goal for your campaign is not the reason I give to you, and also GivingTuesday, that’s not the reason I give to you. I might be looking to give that day, but it’s not the reason I give to you. I give to you because I want to solve a problem and you have a solution that I care about. Emphasize that, always consider your audience, play on their motivations and their desires, like what kind of world do they want to see and how can you fit into that? And they want to create a meaningful life too. How can your mission fit into that? What problem do they want to solve? Hugely, hugely important when you’re writing a call to action. Also, I want you to have fun. I want you to have fun because do we remember when social media was fun? I don’t know if we do, especially right now, but I think it used to be fun. Even in COVID, curator battle, creepiest objects. I saw museums, aquariums. I saw so many historical societies just having fun on social media, sharing gratitude, talking to your staff, talking to your volunteers, just simply sharing what you’re thankful for, especially right now, what your wish being thankful, gratitude. What you’re thinking of for the New Year. What are your plans? Maybe you’re just taking some time off. Things like giving people helpful information, eight tips for a perfect hike with kids. I saw something from an environmental organization, seven climate justice podcasts to listen to. I thought that was so helpful. I was like, “That’s really cool.” That’s such a cool idea for something that you don’t even have to create. You just find your best podcast and share that with people and that’s what’s going to keep people following you and that’s what’s going to increase that no like, and trust factor, because they know that you’re providing helpful and useful and relevant information to them. They’re much more likely to keep following you. Share the love from one platform to the next. Kiva does this all the time. In their Instagram stories, they share how they got tagged- on the stories they got tagged on Twitter, on Twitter they share their best Instagram stories, repurpose, reuse content, and share and share even more, and then make sure if people are writing you these thank you notes, writing you these testimonials, sending these amazing stories your way, that you have a way to curate them and to collect them and to keep them so that you can share them across all the platforms. This post I absolutely love because I want to encourage you to actually ask for engagement, especially when you’re not fundraising because as we know all too well, the algorithm rewards engagement, it rewards comments, likes, and shares. What Amirah does, and they actually do it in a very genuine, authentic way and they’ve been doing it for years. It doesn’t really look like, oh, tag a friend, or, tag a friend who needs to hear this today. If I see that one more time on Instagram, I will scream, but what they’re saying is, leave a note for Joanna below and we will share it with her, name change for privacy and security. They do this a lot. They say a woman has celebrated five years sober. A woman has just gotten her college degree. A woman was reunited with her son, something like that. They’d share these great mission moments and celebratory moments and they invite their fans and followers to celebrate with them and they get a lot of comments and a lot of shares. I always comment. I’m always like, “You go, Joana. You’re so awesome. You’re so great,” because it makes me– I’m assuming they read them. I know this organization they’re super authentic and wonderful people, but it makes me feel good. It does. It just makes me feel good. It makes me feel like, “You know what, there is a little piece of social media that’s good. I can leave a helpful note for someone, and I can make somebody’s day.” It’s helping me and it’s helping the organization as well. All right, in the last five minutes or so before questions, and Adam is generously going to read out the questions to me after I go through the tools, I just want to share some of my favorite ways that you can increase engagement on social media. While I do want to give a shout-out to CauseVid, CauseVid is amazing for increasing donor retention, reaching your donors, and sharing videos all over the internet. For video editing, I really like Animoto. This is another one that you can use really easily on your app. You can use the app, you can use the desktop. It’s pretty cheap. I know they have a nonprofit rate. Usually, what I do is I just Google Animoto nonprofit rate, and then you can find the nonprofit rate. I think you have to apply, but it’s fine. This one you can pull in photos from your computer and create a little montage. You don’t even have to have video content. I also really like Lumen5 because you can take a listicle like the top eight hiking tips for kids, whatever that one was, and they will make a video for you. It’s all, of course, a lot of stock photography, a lot of stock video if you want to add to it and personalize it. I’m just thinking of what’s going to save you time, what can you drag and drop just to make some kind of visual moving element for your social media because the very first step is to grab attention. If you can’t actually stop the scroll and grab someone’s attention, then you won’t ever have the opportunity of making that deeper connection with them in terms of your mission and explaining what you do. Six videos you can make today, tell me how to do something really, really quick. Give me a behind-the-scenes look even if you’re just in your home office. Give me a testimonial in your words. Explain a new story. This is what’s happening in the news today. This is the latest on breast cancer research, this is what’s happening. Tease a blog post. Tease an event. Share how you were founded and why you’re unique in what you do. You could easily make all of those videos today with your phone. If you want to get fancy, you could use Canvas video editor or Animoto, whatever you want. You can make those videos with your phone, and you could share them out, and I know that your audience would love it. Not many people share video, and that’s why you’re going to be standing out. Graphic design, we all know Canva. I made this with Canva in like 30 seconds, this little graphic. Word Swag is another one I love. Adobe Spark for those Adobe people. Canva has really changed the game I think for everyone in terms of just making it very easy to create graphics. Just try to spice it up a little bit with your own either logo, or colors, or fonts to make it look personally yours. For scheduling and management, I like Buffer. I use scheduling pretty sparingly. I really use it just for Twitter, sometimes for LinkedIn. I know Facebook and Instagram their algorithms don’t like outside scheduling tools, so you might not show up as much. That’s just my personal experience. Later is great for Instagram. Storrito is great for stories, Instagram Stories. If you feel constantly challenged to keep up with Instagram Stories, you could just schedule a whole week inside Storrito. Digitile is a phenomenal– I don’t know if it’s an app or a software, you can organize all your files across Dropbox, Google Drive, Sonar, 10,000 different places. It’s really helpful one-stop place for all your digital files. Of course, we need to take some time for ourselves. We need to make sure that we’re looking after our own mental wellness and our own tech work-life balance. Inbox Pause, If you’re like me, your inbox is basically your to-do list, but you don’t like to constantly have the influx of emails, the tidal wave that keeps crashing on you. You can work inside your inbox but pause the new emails. Boomerang is basically sending an email off into the abyss and having it come back at a set time, which I love. Momentum, Headspace, and Brain.fm, those are all apps for meditation, for wellness, for relaxation, for detox, and they’re really, really helpful. I think that’s so important, especially if we are social media managers that we do take some time to detox and to really figure out our priorities and our goals, and our strategies to become more intentional. All right, what tool are you most excited to try out? If you can put it in the general chat where I will see it. Which tool? Which tool do you love that you generally use? I hope you’re excited to find a new tool, something that you haven’t used before. I’m sure most of you have used Canva. Yes, just throw out whatever tool you like. If I didn’t mention a tool and you happen to really like it, just put it in the chat. Let me see, a few things, oh, I love Inbox Pause, Animoto. A few things that I want to leave you with, some thoughts, trends come and go. We know this. Look at this. [chuckles] Look at that graphic. How to futureproof your strategy, meet your donors where they are, not where you want them to be. Make every interaction frictionless, so that means I don’t need to do 20 steps to complete it and clear as possible. Think about your donors first. It’s not about you and your agenda. It’s about your donors. Please don’t get overwhelmed. The only constant in online marketing is that it’s constantly changing. Platforms come and go. Focus on building a real community that will follow you no matter where you set up shop. Awesome. Let’s go to some questions. Adam, what do we have? We’ve got about 13 minutes left for questions, so that’s really good. Adam: Thanks so much. A lot of complimentary messages here, too, from people who really enjoyed everything you’ve shared so far. One of the first questions that came in was, and you spoke to it a little bit, was around when fundraising on Facebook whether to use those native tools that Facebook provides or to point people to a GoFundMe page or your own donation page. I’m wanting to know if you know of any data that might show and compare how effective it is to use Facebook’s Medium fundraising tool versus sending people over to another platform or forum. Julia: I don’t think any nonprofit has done a study. I have done some informal studies with my clients for sure. It just comes down to preference because I do think you need both because there are some people that aren’t on Facebook. If you are running a fundraising campaign only on Facebook, you’re excluding a huge percentage of your audience that can’t participate. However, think about the user on Facebook. I’m on Facebook, I’m on the app, I’m scrolling through, I see, “Oh, my friend, Melissa, is raising money for St. Jude’s, but it’s a link.” This is me, this is a lot of people, I’m like I click on a link, got to go to a donate page, go to the donate page, I have to pinch and scroll, I have to enter all my information, I have to find my purse, which is never easy. [laughter] Julia: Enter my credit card information, and then do all of that without my children burning down the house. That’s just for me, I prefer when I’m on Facebook, I prefer the donate button because it is two taps. It’s easier to do. It’s a preference. I would test it out, and I would use both. Obviously, if you’re doing a huge fundraising campaign, you need the page, you need the donor page on your website because what are you going to– From Twitter, from everywhere else, from LinkedIn, from if you’re on YouTube, if you’re on email, you need that other page, but those posts don’t do as well as the donate button. The other thing that’s– It’s just so important for us to know, Facebook wants people to stay on the platform, they don’t want people to click off. If you’re running a fundraising campaign using the donate button, more of your fans and followers are going to see it. Rather than if you’re running a campaign where people have to click off. We have to fully embrace, either we have to reject or embrace the nefariousness of these platforms. They are businesses, they want us to stand. That’s why by the way, Facebook created the donate button. They saw how many nonprofits were using Facebook to fundraise, but sending people off of Facebook. They said, “Oh, we want them to fundraise, but we don’t want them sending their donors on Facebook, so we’re going to create something so they stay on Facebook.” The same with Instagram. It’s just a preference. I don’t think one is better than the other. I absolutely don’t think you should put your eggs all in the Facebook basket. Because what if you were running a campaign this week. I think of the people that were running their fundraising campaign this week, and Facebook was down for a whole day. You just can’t put all your eggs in that basket. It’s a useful tool, but don’t rely on it. Adam: It’s a great point. Next question and this is what I know, I’ve heard you speak on before, when you have multiple varied audiences, such as students, parents, and donors, should you target each one by platform? Should you focus content aimed at one audience for social media, and vary how you present that information based on platform in the age of the people who are likely on that platform? Julia: First of all, it does depend on your bandwidth. If you have a lot of bandwidth, a huge department, if you’re a university, then it might make sense to have an alumni page dedicated to alumni but you’ve got to think about donors, donors don’t see themselves as donors, they would never say I’m a donor. They’re like, “Oh, I’m this, I’m an alumni.” I’m just thinking of my dad, who I was talking to last night, he went to Colgate and his relationship with Colgate, he would never say he’s a donor. He’s an alumnus. That’s how he identifies. Your donors are spread across all these groups and there’s not going to be any one way you can grab, you can’t really say, “Oh, this is a donor,” because donors come from all sorts of different groups. It really depends on what the audience wants, like, do the students want a separate page or not? Do the students want something on Instagram? Is this something that people want, because what happens is, we tend to create things in our mind because we think people want them and we’re creating a solution where there wasn’t a problem. If parents are like, we want to connect with each other, in a private platform, great, private Facebook group. If students say, “Oh, we really want a platform to showcase our artwork or our music,” then maybe Instagram. You have to look at the goal of the platform and also who’s going to be using it and what the purpose is. If you don’t have the bandwidth to create a lot of different things, think about the thread that runs through all of them. Think about the problem you’re solving that parents care about, students care about, and donors care about and community members care about. What is that thread that runs through everything that can tie all of your content together? Adam: Now. Next question. You talked about using ads when targeting a warm audience only, someone asked you in several people going to upload it how do you recommend people increase their followers in the first place, especially when they’re a newer organization, just building its social media presence? Julia: Oh, well, if you’re just starting out, it’s going to be really hard. The ads that you run, the more reach you get with your warm audience, the more that their friends, their family, other people will be introduced to you. You want to start out preaching to the choir and what you want to do is get the choir really excited, so that they start singing your praises to everybody else. Because purchasing fans and followers or setting up ads and trying to get people to like you and follow you especially in 2021, 2022 that just doesn’t work anymore. I guarantee you that not everybody on your email list follows you. Not all your donors follow you. Not all your board members follow you, your volunteers, your staff. Start with the low-hanging fruit, grow your audience with them, and then the real key, Seth Godin talks about this all the time, my favorite marketing author, he says in order to be remarkable, you have to be remarked upon. You have to do something that’s worth remarking on. You have to do something that’s going to get them excited and get them to share out but focus on that low-hanging fruit first, get them all fired up, and then get them to spread the word for you. Adam: Here’s another question about video. I’ll ask that one. [laughs] I have an answer to this one to some extent, but I’ll have you comment on the social media side of it. Someone’s asking about the recommended length for videos specific to Facebook and Instagram, I can share data just that shows that [inaudible 00:55:30] in 10-second mark is where you see this massive drop off in people viewing a video but do you have any specific comments on video length when posting on social media, specifically Facebook or Instagram? Julia: Well, is it a Facebook Live? If it’s a live video that’s a very different question because live video should be between maybe 7 and 15 minutes in order to grow a following growing audience. If it’s an on-demand video, yes, it should probably be 30 seconds or less in order to– If you want people to get a lot of views, if it’s really just to grab attention and stop the scroll, you could do five seconds animated GIF, could be enough to grab people’s attention and get them to read the caption. I know on Instagram, you can’t do more than a minute, but in my experience, actually, I really like the animated GIFs unless you need someone speaking and in that case, I would say 30 seconds probably no more than a minute and like you said, Adam, there’s a huge drop off every 10 seconds of a video. Adam: I want to share in the chat I just tried to link to a video that I’m doing a perfect client of ours sent. Julia: Cool. Adam: Where they created a pretty simple video showing impact about 45 seconds long they sent it to all their laps to donors, and that 45-second video raised over $4,400 directly. Julia: Nice. Adam: One simple 45-second video and this particular case, I think what we learned from that is that you have a group of lapsed donors you might be touching via different channels, but for some reason, the video is what prompted them to renew their support, whereas other touches didn’t necessarily or hadn’t done that in the recent attempt. Julia: We were just talking about this before I started, I have a client I’m trying to convince them to use video in their email appeal this year because they are a rare disease organization. It’s a little bit of a complicated heavy topic and I thought having a video from the founder even if it’s 30 seconds is going to lighten up, it’s just automatically going to lighten it up but also it’s just making it more compelling. You can put in the subject line I made you a video and that’s going to get your open rates up and that’s going to get a lot of engagement. It’s something that I don’t see a lot of nonprofits doing and because I think they think that it needs to be perfect. I think they they are like, “Oh no, we needed to be $10,000 and produced and perfect.” It really doesn’t have to be impactful. Adam: Now even you mentioned editing tools and we’re talking about Animoto, I’m always impressed with the extent to which I can edit a video on my iPhone. I can record that video, I can crop it, I can trim it. I can create a video pretty quickly, I did one of my son’s literally this past week. Julia: Oh, nice. Adam: Really quick. Take a 30-second video [crosstalk] Julia: You can absolutely do that. Oh, they’re so many tools on our phones now. Adam: Oh, yes. Next question here. When it comes to giving programs like a monthly giving program, how critical do you think it is to specifically brand that program for the organization? I know, for example, something like Charity Water has the spring which is their monthly giving program should these organizations be trying to brand their monthly giving program in a certain way to capture people’s attention and connect it with something? Julia: I know two experts that you should follow. Just First I want to give them both a shout out Erica [unintelligible 00:59:08] She is, oh, man I don’t know her website. Erica [unintelligible 00:59:14] I’ll put her name in the chat. Lynn Westar donor guru, she talks a lot about this. To me, I think creating a special group of people and giving them something that they can say, “I am this,” that’s always going to increase conversion rates. Like I am this, I am a champion. I am an advocate, giving them a bumper sticker, stickers for their hydro flask, or their notebook. Anytime you can create that kind of identity and community it will work. I don’t think it’s going to make or break your monthly giving program. I think having a compelling reason to give monthly and stories and that kind of thing but branding, it certainly can help if you’ve got a fun name, and then you can announce it and you can send out shirts and do all sorts of fun stuff with that. Adam: I see Eleanor back joining us. Looking at the clock looks like we’re ready to close it up. Eleanor: Yes. Thank you, Julia and Adam. That was amazing. Such a great session. I hope everybody had some takeaways. We have a 15-minute break where everybody can head over to the rooms and lounges. Our last and final sessions will start at three o’clock. Giving Tuesday and Donor Search, both two great sessions, engaging. Make sure you guys hit the booths and the lounges now, and the rooms, and then check back in at three 3 o’clock. Thanks again, Julia and Adam. Great work. Adam: Thank you. [unintelligible 01:00:48]. Julia: Bye. Thank you. Eleanor: Take care. [pause 01:00:50] Eleanor: Hit add to stream, Adam. There you go. [01:01:25] [END OF AUDIO]