Nonprofits Can Organize to Harness Social Web

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Social web is maturing, and that’s great news for nonprofits. In the early days, we complained about navel-gazing Facebook posts and Tweets about the dog throwing up. Now I see posts like a series from a videographer friend who tapes useful side by side camera tests and puts them on his Facebook Page.  Or this interesting study by Twitter showing that some of the heaviest volume retweets are coming from evangelist pastors, not famous celebs.  With the evolution of crowdraising sites like Crowdrise, virtual engagement around conferences, and flexible editing tools like FinalCutPro X and Adobe Premiere, nonprofits can compete with corporate communicators.

Where I see the lag now is in learning how to curate and manage all the assets these great organizations are busy acquiring. I have several nonprofit clients who have literally millions of untagged photos, and they are still out shooting more at every event. Can you imagine if you walked into a library and there were just random boxes of books on every surface? And the librarian–if you could find one–told you “yeah, we probably have that book here somewhere. I think the cover was green.” So I’m doing a lot more training on building systems to archive, tag and curate all the digital assets that can then be re-used by nonprofits, bringing down the costs of telling their mission story.

Along with asset management comes a need to have the Right Kind of assets.  So if you are planning to post a flip-cam video to a large conference screen, you’ll probably be disappointed when you see lots of pixilation and unusable audio.  And if you want to post a fun series of shots from your conference on YouTube, along with a soundtrack from Billy Joel, you’ll need to be sure you’ve got sync rights cleared first.  Things were a little more loose in the early days, but now social web consumers are expecting High-Def videos that they can actually see and hear, and license-holders are expecting payment when their copyrighted materials are used online.

Asset workflow, curation, management and rights clearances can all be stumbling blocks to nonprofits communicating around important, mission-driven work. Don’t let them trip you up. Take action steps instead:

  1. Build a library system—it can be as simple as creating a useful folder structure on your server—and educate everyone on the communication team on how to use it.
  2. Assign asset curation and metatagging duties to team members BEFORE an event occurs at which you will be photographing/videotaping/interviewing. Interns can tag, but leadership must be involved in setting up the system.
  3. Create standards, so that outside vendors know what formats you like to acquire in.  For non-professionals, be sure to get the highest quality versions you can—not just the miniature files they post on Facebook.
  4. Engage your donors in building a wonderful archive of images, stories and video content that tells the story of your mission—from the past to the present.
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What’s On Your Summer Reading List?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” What’s on your must-read list this summer?

I’ve got a couple of different buckets for my summer reading. One is purely recreational. Like finishing the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy.  One is “stuff I was probably too young to understand the first time around.” Last summer I re-read several secondary school classics, including The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice (followed by–from the fun bucket–Death Comes to Pemberly, the P.D. James murder mystery using Jane Austin’s original characters and setting). The old novels have the added advantage of being very cheap downloads for my Kindle.

For this summer’s school reading list, and with a budding teen in the house, I’m thinking it’s time to re-read Catcher in the Rye. Plus maybe one of the Henry James classics, like The Golden Bowl.  Then I need a title or two for my third bucket, non-fiction.  I’m just finishing Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, which is the most fun you’ll ever have thinking about Puritans.  So I need something new in this category.

Post your suggestions and have a great summer!

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Fighting Founder’s Syndrome

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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Senior Associate Dean of the Yale School of Management, did a great piece in the Washington Post this weekend on Facebook’s challenges with a Founder/CEO.  He points out that good governance practices often go out the window, and directors kow-tow to the mystical leader, when a founder is at the helm of a company. Public and private companies are not alone in having leadership challenges—or what I call “founder’s syndrome.”

Many nonprofits have also been created by visionary leaders, and have the same challenges Facebook may–like boards of directors who aren’t willing to stand up to the founder, or even at some point look for new leadership.

There are ways to avoid this dynamic.

A Diverse Board.  Facebook’s board is all-male.  Don’t make the same mistake. A diverse board, though, is not just gender or race diverse. It should be age-diverse and made up not only of donors, but of people from the communities the organization serves. It should also include several individuals from related institutions (perhaps in other states), who can lend relevant expertise.

Free-Thinking Leadership. Board leaders are often hand-picked by the Executive, so that they get along well together. This is great. But more important is leaders who can speak their mind to the Executive and be sure all ideas and options are on the table.

Financial Compliance. It’s not uncommon for nonprofits still being led by their founders to have some squishy numbers in the books. An Audit Committee—separate from the Finance Committee—should oversee an annual audit process that follows current accounting standards.  Independent Sector offers a checklist for accountability that includes these standards.

Mission-Driven Decisionmaking. At the end of the day, every board and leadership decision should meet this simple litmus test “Does this further our mission?”  It sounds easy, but sometimes Founder-led organizations can get sidetracked with pet projects of the founder, or conversely, projects the founder doesn’t find particularly interesting but need to be done to move the mission forward.

Succession Planning. Every business owner needs to do it. So do nonprofit organization founders. It’s a conversation that needs to be had with the board, with real plans and timelines drawn up on paper so everyone knows what role the founder will play and how the organization will continue to succeed after he or she retires.  Consider planning for an Interim Executive for 18 months after the founder leaves. No one can match the zeal and history of the founder, and a leader who is experienced in helping organizations make transitions can be just the right person to bridge to your next visionary.

 

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Making an Old Brand New(ton)

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I’m a fan of the Fig Newton. Sorry, I mean the Newton–its new moniker in a  rebrand campaign rolled out by Nabisco this week. Other old brands needing renewal could take note of their strategy.

Born in 1891, the Fig Newton was billed as a “cake” rather than a cookie. These tasty morsels featured heavily in my after-school snack repertoire as a kid.  Something to do with the texture–soft on the outside, chewy on the inside, with a touch of crunch from the fig seeds. But now Nabisco has decided figs aren’t sexy. They’re too much like prunes. But the Newton still has healthy ingredients that can be touted. So Nabsico took away the modifier, added new flavors like raspberry and blueberry, threw in some whole grains, and rolled out a new ad campaign. Plus they launched Newtons Fruit Thins, which target boomers like me, rather than our kids. (And hey I have to admit, they’re pretty tasty. Though my advice to Nabisco would be to go easy on the Rock-Hard Pieces of dried lemon in that variety—we oldsters have fragile teeth!)

Declines in sales were reversed, largely thanks to the Fruit Thins. Other aging brands could take a page from this campaign by McGarryBowen, part of Dentsu—launched this week.

  1.  Understand Your Unique Brand Promise.  Newtons were always about containing real fruit. That hasn’t changed. The packaging of the message has.
  2. Be Relevant.  Don’t stick with a name that doesn’t help you sell who you are. Consider your core values and those of your customers/donors/prospects.
  3. Be Different. If you want to stand out from the other “cookies”—don’t try to blend in. Dare to be different and flaunt it. The Newtons campaign avoids animation and other kid-targeted elements common in cookie ads.
  4. Your Market May Be Aging. Change with them. Give them new offerings that meet their needs, while still putting out a core product that can attract new, younger fans.
  5. Invest in Your Change. If you’re going to roll out a rebrand, you can’t just change your name and logo and hope the customers will follow. Of course you don’t have as much money as Nabisco, but every department involved in communicating to customers or donors or volunteers (which is pretty much everyone) needs to be briefed, vested, and ready to engage as a new brand.

 

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Convergence. Customized. Customer-Focused. Welcome to TV 3.0.

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Filed from the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, Las Vegas.

Convergence. Multi-platform distribution. Mobile TV. Integration of social media into the viewing experience. These were the buzzwords on the floor and during workshops I’ve both given and attended at NAB this year. The future of broadcast, and all mediums really–whether web or mobile web– is creating dynamic content and interactivity with the user/viewer at the center. For content-creators, the challenge is creating programming that works whether someone is viewing it on an iPhone or a ginormous flatscreen Hi-Def TV, and that has social content that the user can interact with while viewing. For content distributors, the challenge is rethinking broadcast, and creating standards that work for an entirely customized and mobile user experience. For viewers, the opportunity is taking their content with them, on any device, to any location they wish.

What’s the takeaway for the non-broadcast community?

The Consumer is at the Center. For-profit and nonprofit organizations large and small need to ensure that their communications strategies encompass a multi-screen, interactive world. The time for the billboard approach to PR and marketing messages is long since gone. The personal user experience is the focus–whether that means your donors, your association members, or your customers.  If your content is not focused on what the audience wants to take with them, they’ll leave it–and you–behind.

Powerful Stories Matter More than Ever. In a multi-channel, overly-busy world, compelling stories–real people, real issues–are still what is engaging viewers. Authentic stories are what is sticky in social media and in video, in all its formats and delivery devices. It’s true on television. And it’s true for nonprofits and companies who have good stories to tell. And now you have so many tools to tell them, and to distribute them to your audience. So for every new product roll-out, for every fundraising campaign, ask “what is our story?”

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Ask the Right Questions to Create Web Video with Impact

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With YouTube now the second most-used search engine, plus the exponential rise of mobile web and convergence technologies, organizations realize that producing video content is as important as updating the website. Here are a few key questions you need to answer to be sure your video has impact.

1.  How does the video fit with your brand? You have a great story—someone touched by your organization, or some important piece of information that needs to be disseminated to the public, a hilarious short video sure to get loads of follows. Great. But how does it fit into your overall brand plan? Will your name or the name of a particular product/service be mentioned? Do you want people to take some kind of action, linked to a new product roll-out or campaign? Are you trying to promote organizational recognition? Gain new supporters? Engage the existing ones?  What will support the video content? (i.e. direct mail and/or email campaigns to drive traffic?)  Will there be other lives for this content (see #4)?

2.  Do you know your target audience? Or, as often happens, do you have too many audiences for this video and need to break it up into multiple streams of content?  Think about sub-demographics and what kinds of content appeal to them.   If your story has multiple parts/levels, consider breaking into smaller pieces and placing the content with different headings/links in order to attract the right audience.  If your story has multiple parts or levels of detail, consider breaking into smaller pieces and placing the content with different headings/links in order to attract the right audience.

3.  Can you afford what you need? Can you afford not to produce this well? It’s like what your mother once told you about buying a dining room set–buy the best you can because you want it to last. Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that if something is going to appear on the web, it can be produced on a shoestring because it’s a one-use item.  To the contrary, every penny you spend should be powerful, credible, and the source material should be useful in multiple ways. For example, if you have an interview-driven story, outtakes can be used for other projects. So can the background footage (“b-roll”). My personal preference is to shoot high definition, widescreen video because it makes a bigger impact when it is compressed for the web, since it degrades less.  But whatever your format, a polished production, professionally produced, will also allow you to “multi-purpose” the end-product more reliably, pulling parts for your website, your intranet, an email campaign, or a large-screen projection at a major donor event.   Many organizations have effectively teamed their in-house capabilities with outside vendors to achieve both cost efficiencies and good quality.

4.  Is it short enough? I produce a lot of short form projects for live event venues, but these are not short enough for the web, where the average drop-off comes after 90 seconds. When watching an event production, the audience is engaged together, with a common mission and few distractions. When someone watches your video on their laptop, desktop or mobile device, chances are there are other distractions in the room.   So make every second count. That means using visuals, music, audio, graphics–everything at your disposal–to make a message with impact.  And then cut the length in half.

5.  Are you prepared to measure impact? So many organizations throw video on the web and then have no real method for measuring its impact beyond views.  What is the drop-off rate? Where does it happen? Where do people go next after viewing? Do they return? If you can’t answer these questions, you’re losing valuable insights to help you refine your approach the next time.

Join me for social media and video production workshops at NAB/Las Vegas.

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Santorum Accidentally Boosts Higher Ed Brand

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Mr. Santorum’s “snob” remark about higher education is getting push back from surprising quarters.  That’s because millions of Americans look to higher education as a way to pull their families forward both economically, and in increased job satisfaction. While fewer than one third of Americans hold a B.A. or higher, 75% of Americans polled believe that a college education is “very important” in today’s economy. And 92 percent of public school parents believe that their children will go to college. (Both stats from Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, September 2010) That’s because they know intuitively the what many of us in my region show students through a program called Achievement Counts (AC), created by the  Maryland Business Roundtable for Education (yup, a group of business executives). That is, that with every year of schooling you get beyond high school, your job opportunities and income level increase. Despite his rhetoric, Mr. Santorum knows this, given the millions he’s made as a Washington, D.C. consultant with his B.A., J.D. and M.B.A.  When I’ve led these brief AC classes at my local high schools, I always poll the kids about what they want to be when they graduate. Many of them plan to play in the NBA or NFL.  “What if you get injured?” I ask, knowing it’s hopeless to make the case that a tiny fraction of American athletes could ever even qualify.  That’s when a light-bulb goes off for a few of the kids. If you like the science of the body and athletics, I say, consider getting trained in Physical Therapy, one of the fastest-growing careers in the country. (This requires a minimum Associates Dgree to be an Assistant, and a full B.A. and post-graduate work to become a PT.) Maybe it’s worth getting an accounting degree (B.A. and CPA license required), so you could help those NFL guys manage their millions. Maybe you might even want to go into business for yourself—so you could buy your own team one day!

Mr. Santorum’s father was an Italian immigrant. My dad’s grandparents immigrated from Italy a generation earlier.  And while my grandmother completed junior high and my grandfather elementary school, it was a point of great pride that they were able to send their son to college. He worked the entire time he attended Fordham University (run by the Jesuits, hardly the bastion of radicalism Santorum paints for campus life), driving a laundry truck to deliver linens to the fancy yachts at the docks on the river.  He told me once that while it was tough to get up so early to make his deliveries and still stay awake for classes, the job reminded him of the tedium he could avoid by getting that college degree. He went on to get a graduate degree from Columbia in Economics and worked as an economist his entire life.

The road through high school is hard for many kids. College is not for everyone. But getting a foothold in 21st century life requires more training than a high school degree can offer. Mr. Santorum knows it. And those of us who care about and work in the education field need to keep reminding Americans that higher education is a brand worth celebrating.

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Employees are the Key to Pre-Empting Brand Threats

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My family and I have come to love Pizza CS (Come Sempre), http://pizzacs.com/  a new Neapolitan-style pizza joint in our neighborhood started by a couple of guys who love great ingredients and honor the art of creating a truly Italian crust.  But what I take away from Pizza CS, besides a great food experience, is that a great brand is always about two things: delivering what you promise, and how your people communicate.  This place has both, and that’s why we keep coming back.

When a “brand promise” is broken, it is often because an employee doesn’t realize that everything they do communicates your brand.  Or doesn’t. When my husband was on a job search last year, I can’t count the number of institutions that created a bad name for themselves because of how the point person on the search conducted him or herself. Everything they said was a poor reflection on the brand. By contrast, several institutions shined through that process, and presented a unified “face” to their brand for prospective employees and customers alike.

So, what’s the best way to pre-empt the potential brand threat that is your own work force?

  1. Listening. The first tool is teaching good listening skills. Any employee who speaks to clients, staff or prospects in either category—from your receptionist to your HR department—should have training in good listening skills. Learning how to repeat back what the concern is (“I hear you saying you did not receive the package your ordered on time”) is the first step to solving the problem and defending your brand. This is more important than ever in a world where any disgruntled person can start a blog about how they have been wronged (the famous Jeff Jarvis “Dell sucks” blog post as case in point).
  2. Crisis Planning. Another key component to workforce training in a 24/7 media world is crisis response.  That doesn’t mean that every employee is part of your crisis response team. However, every employee should know How to Recognize a problem that has reached crisis level, and What to Do Next when that happens. I often see organizations in melt-down when a crisis occurs because the problem was still being dealt with at a low level, with the back and forth spilling onto Facebook and websites, when it should have been pushed way up the management chain immediately for a more unified and brand-focused response.

You need to be engaged with critics (and lovers) of your brand, at all levels of your organization.  Because, in this world of 24 hour news cycles, social networks and the blogosphere, one unhappy person can be a very powerful voice. And so can one very happy customer who dealt with a well-trained employee.

Amy DeLouise offers staff development workshops in branding and social media.

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Interviewing for Great Results

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Perhaps you have to interview your boss for a video clip on your website. Maybe you are hosting a podcast. Maybe you have to interview a job candidate.  Whatever the reason, interviewing is an art form and not just a list of questions. Here are a few tips to creating a better outcome for both participants that I’ve developed over my 20+ years as a successful interviewer.  These tips apply primarily, by the way, to the friendly interview and not the “gotcha” news interview.

  1. Do Your Homework. Just like an attorney doesn’t ask a question at trial to which s/he doesn’t already know the answer, you should have a good sense before the interview of what the content will be. Spend time learning the narrative of the person, conducting a pre-interview by phone if at all possible, and be well versed in the important content points you want to clarify.
  2. Make Eye Contact. If you do your homework, then you shouldn’t be referring to notes too often, if at all. (It’s a point of pride for me not to do this when I do video interviews.) Breaking eye contact breaks the personal connection between you and the interviewee, which is essential to keeping them comfortable and focused. Even if you, the interviewer, are not seen, the interview will be significantly more successful if you maintain eye contact throughout.
  3. Understand Your Interviewee’s Learning Style. There is significant research on people’s learning styles, which broadly fall into three categories—visual, kinesthetic and auditory.  When you can identify which learning style best fits your interviewee, your questions can be better tailored to generate a good response from them. This all comes from the science of Neurolinguistic Programming, and I’ll let you do the internet surfing for more details. But basically you can develop several quick questions at the start of your interview which will help clue you in as to the learning style of your subject. From this you can craft better questions. “Describe what a typical day at your factory looks like” is not a great question for an auditory learner, for example. So, if I’ve got a visual learner, I might say “what does success look like to you at this company?” If she’s a kinesthetic learner, I might phrase it this way “How did you actually build the company for success—give me the steps?”  For an auditory learner, “What kinds of feedback do you hear from customers that tells you you’ve hit on a successful formula here  at Company ABC?”
  4. Plan the Arc of the Interview. Every interview has a beginning, middle and end much like a story. I never ask my most critical question first, but rather build a story line to the entire experience, that both my subject and I move through together. If you have to edit video, this is the most successful way to create editable content that won’t eat up valuable editing time.
  5. Know How to Get A Better Answer. The worst thing you can say to an interview subject is “can you repeat that?” because it generally makes people become self-conscious and/or entirely forget what they just said.  If you instead use body language to indicate you couldn’t hear the answer properly 9even if you did), or a simple “Sorry…?” people almost always repeat their answer and improve upon it.

For more interview techniques and hands-on practice sessions, contact me for one of my workshops. I bring these into organizations and also give them at major conferences and events across the country.

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A Word of Thanks

While getting a jump on holiday food prep, I’ve been thinking today of what makes me thankful.

I’m thankful I get to work with organizations and people who spend every day trying to make the world better than how they found it.

I’m thankful to so many talented individuals whose ideas make me look good, and who have become friends. DP’s like Richard, Matt, Jim, Ben and Mark. Editors Jamie and Adam. Sound ops like Dwayne, AJ and Jonathan. Graphics gurus like Xi and Ed. Makeup artists like Kim and Barbara. Production support like Jay, Brenda, Sara and Pam. And all around techno wizards like Rich.

I’m thankful my husband got a great new job. And to those of you who reached out during all those months of looking.

I’m thankful my family is healthy and my kids are turning into pretty cool and interesting people.

And despite the shenanigans on Capitol Hill, I’m thankful I live here and not somewhere we have to walk miles to find clean water, or fear secret police will come knocking.

Have a great holiday and thanks for following my blog!

-Amy

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