Well thank you all for coming out, really excited to be doing this here. My name is Sartreau, I am with Northwest Justice Project and I run something there called the National Technology Assistance Project, it's at the intersection of law and technology and we try to help individuals in legal services programs nationally implement new technology. I've also worked with organizations including Disability Rights Washington to set up their first big public social media based website on the board of Northwest Consumer Law Center and I also have some gaming social media channels, so this is both a professional and personal area of passion to me. I'm given a little bit of an overview of kind of the landscape of social media and then we've got three wonderful experts here that are going to be covering different areas. We've got Brian Robick who is with ACLU of Washington, we've got Claudia Johnson who is with ProbonoNet and we have Elizabeth Fitzgerald who is with one of the volunteer lawyer programs. 50% of adults use at least two forms of social media at this point in time, most of them use Facebook and either Twitter or Instagram, although it's very demographic specific, if you're targeting a particular audience you want to figure out what they use, not just choose one generally. For example, Seniors is one of the areas where Facebook is growing, I believe it's the Grand Kid effect, your grandkids get online and you want to see pictures of them. Teens prefer Instagram or Snapchat, there is something about the ability to use a service that your parents cannot monitor all the time that tends to attract that younger audience and where your grandparents might not be where you want to share what you did last weekend. LinkedIn is up in use for individuals that are college educated, LinkedIn is trying really hard to be a social network, a lot of individuals though use it only when they are ready to change jobs or need to brush up their resume, it's a good way to find volunteers but it often isn't the best way to reach out to clients. Stats that we're going to be looking at here on the next few slides are from Pew Center for Internet Research, they do updated stats every year, smartphone dependency is actually going up, broadband adoption is going down, we see that somewhere around 30% of households have smartphones as the only way to access the internet and that access may have limited data or may in some cases rely on outside Wi-Fi at coffee shops or at libraries. So making whatever choices you have, mobile accessible is essential, for example if you're doing a video, make sure to get it on a platform like YouTube that will automatically resize it and cut down the resolution when somebody is on a slower internet connection. The dependency on smartphones is also much higher among lower income individuals, we are seeing 31% of individuals that make less than $30,000 a year and those stats are particularly high for both the Hispanic community and the black community who is dependent on smartphones. Facebook has also went to de-prioritizing content that is from organizations, it really promotes individual sharing and to get people to see your stuff even if you have a page that they have liked, you really have to pay to play, you have to put money into it or you have to find other people to share your stuff. One of the big differences between social media and other forms of media and a huge mistake that I see for people trying to dive into this is that they treat social media like public radio where you talk at people when it should be like a good conversation show where you ask questions and you engage people back and forth. The broadcast versus interactive is extremely important. This is a post from Northwest Justice Project where we ask the question, do you have medical debt and cannot afford to pay? Our normal posts get maybe 100 individuals interacting in any way, including looking at it. This was over 2,500, that asking that personal question and asking them to engage does so much better than talking at your audience. One of the big things you need to do in social media is make sure that you are not seen as a robot and there's a quick rule to help you out with this, it's the 80-20 rule. You need to avoid being a spam bot, so 80% of your social media should contain non-self-promoted content. You need to be sharing things from other people, you need to be asking questions of them, you need to be engaging, you need to have comments turned on, answer people's comments. The ability to be heard and listened to is what creates fans, followers, potential clients for life. Getting past that robot spam test is extremely important. I'm turning it over to Brian Robick at this point in time, the Deputy Communications Director at ACLU of Washington. Hi, so I guess I have some news. Maybe I have to jump on LinkedIn myself, but I'm now the Communications Director at the ACLU of Washington as of a few days ago. Congratulations. Thanks, so I'm excited to share that with you and I am also excited to share some planning tips with you. I wanted to, so a little bit about me, I am the Communications Director of my 12-year tenure at the ACLU of Washington. I have worked at the intersection of technology and online communications and so that's sort of how I come to running a communications department and have grown up in this space along with a lot of the social media platforms that have been created since I started my job and have changed over time. So I find this to be a very exciting topic and one of the things that I also think is really exciting is planning. And so I wanted to focus my talk on planning at the 10,000, 20,000 level and talk about the work that you can put in advance that will save you time throughout your social media execution process. Now all of the things that I will present should influence what goes into an editorial calendar and possibly a post-scheduling tool, which I believe are things that Elizabeth will cover in the next segment, and these planning tools should guide your day-to-day work, but they don't represent work that you invest on a day-to-day basis. You should do these things at the beginning and then periodically revisit them to make sure that they are helping you to achieve your goals. A fundamental question is where you should be focusing your efforts, not just in social, but in your online efforts in general, which would include your website and your email list, among other things. All of these different channels are linked and each has pros and cons for achieving specific goals. The key is to choose the right set of tools for the job so that you are reaching your audience with actionable info in a useful format at the right time. Ultimately, you want your social efforts to promote your organization's goals, so start there. Do you want to provide services to people? Are you looking to raise funds? Do you want to reduce actual requests for services through providing self-service materials and education? Your online presence can help you achieve these goals, but you'll be more efficient if you put some planning into how you use the various tools. And a tool that I particularly like to use to help me make these decisions is a channel strategy grid, which is one slide back. There we go. So there is the ICOU of Washington's channel strategy grid. Throughout the lifecycle of a grid, it starts out really large, works its way down to something more concise like what you're looking at and like to walk you through a little of the process of the thinking that goes into the grid and then what we use it for. So for our social media presence, we have some very specific goals in mind. We wanted people to recognize the ICOU and think of us when thinking about civil rights and civil liberties issues. We wanted to distribute self-help materials to expand the number of people we can assist even though we have limited resources. We also wanted to connect those who need more help with our intake services so that they can get more personal assistance. And then finally, we wanted people to take part in our advocacy work and to look for us when they're looking for opportunities to take action. Further complicating matters for the ICOU, we have a really varied set of audiences and we work in multiple spaces and so we have to kind of account for all of the various issues that we work with in addition to all the people who are interested in all of those different specific issues. So thinking about what social media and your online presence can do, we boiled it down to four things that you can achieve using online tools that map to our goals, which is brand affinity, which is essentially building a relationship with the ICOU online, recognizing us, coming to trust us, and having us come to mind when you are thinking about the issues that we deal with. The second is public education. We also wanted to provide services directly online through distributing New York rights materials, et cetera, and we wanted to provide an outlet for advocacy. These go in the first column in the grid so that you can eventually map various online channels to those jobs. We then listed all of the places we could potentially be. This was a really, really big list. And I would encourage you to make the list really big, even though there is no way that you are actually going to work in all of those spaces. We had Tumblr on there. We had Pinterest on there. We had Snapchat. We had SoundCloud on there. There were a number of services that we just wanted to make sure we considered at the beginning, even though we know that given the number of people that we have to work on this one, that we wouldn't be able to be in all of those spaces effectively. And we started to, for each of those, we gave each of those channels a role that we felt fit their primary strengths and what we wanted out of them. And we then started to cut down the columns as we did that research. We also looked into the audiences that use each of those channels, which is something that SART covered. And if we owned the platform, we did research into who was using it. So we sent out surveys to our email list to ask them what they used our list for. And we asked our online users. We did some informal focus groups to see how people were using the site. And with those insights, we then mapped various jobs, the four jobs in the first column, to all of the channels in the grid. We used this grid not only to decide where we should focus our efforts in terms of channels, but then also what types of content should go on each channel. And this affects, it's generally best not to broadcast out the same content to all channels because people use each channel in a different way and for a different purpose. So this helps us to decide what kind of content we'll do best in what platform. We also have an overall goal of trying to drive traffic. So we're trying to get people to engage with us on Facebook, but ultimately get to our website where they can get materials to download, or they can take action, or they can join our email list. And so the grid also helps us to see the paths that we should be trying to lead the audience on. So for example, rather than trying to promote videos on YouTube, which is something you can definitely do, you can buy ads, you can do all sorts of strategies, we just use YouTube as a hosting platform and we use our other channels to drive people to watch the videos there or those videos embedded on our website, et cetera. So that's the channel strategy grid. And once you've built this toolbox of channels, the next decision is getting the right message at the right time to your audience. It can be difficult to fill out a web form during a rush hour commute on a bus. It can also be difficult to find the privacy necessary to submit personal information about certain issues, like legal matters or health problems. Considering how your audience will receive your messages will make them easier to digest. I'd like to touch on two ways to do this. One is a highly detailed way that is very useful, but can be very complicated. And the other is a quick and dirty way, if you can't go the whole nine yards. So the first way that I'd like to talk about is building personas. These are profiles of fictional people that represent different groups of your users. So what you do is you think of the various different groups that you want to reach and you flesh those ideas out into a set of people that you can imagine and kind of relate to in your mind when you're creating and planning content. You want to think through what they want and not what you want them to want, which is often a very different consideration. I know at the ACLU we would really love for everybody to come to us with our goals in mind, but they're actually coming to us usually for help. They're usually looking for materials that will help them and then we get to introduce them to systemic problems that we can all work together to change. And we also want to look at the constraints that are around them when they look for what they want. And using this information allows you to tailor your resources and your services into their lives and schedules and not the reverse. So looking at a very short persona, this is extremely short, we gave this gentleman the name Jose and in age 16, he's Latino and identifies as male, he's a student in Skyway and he has LGBT rights questions, particularly in school, but he lives at home with his parents and maybe he hasn't disclosed his orientation to them or to others and so maybe needs some privacy and has some concerns about reaching out or sharing information, but is in desperate need of resources. So when you're creating content to satisfy Jose's needs, you have to ask yourself if it would be useful to him, am I sending this in a way that helps and does not hurt him? And am I sending this at a time and on a channel when he would see it and when he would have the privacy and space to interact with it? The truth is, however, creating personas can get really complicated and you want to make sure that when you build personas that they're correct for your audience, so that you don't end up going off in the wrong direction. The good news is you can experiment and check your results to see how things are going and adjust as necessary. You can change posting times, you can switch channels to see if you get results that are better for your overall goal, distributing resources, et cetera. And then you can adjust the grid in your personas as you make discoveries about the effectiveness of your planning. I have a link in the course materials that you may find useful if you wanna give personas a try, it goes into how to construct them into more detail. But if you don't have time to vote personas, I also have a quick and dirty rule that you can keep in your head that is less audience specific, but will help you to choose the right message at the right time. And it's the difference between leaning back and leaning forward. Just ask yourself, am I sending this at a time when it would be convenient to use? Long web forms that ask for private information are probably not for rush hour when people are leaning back in their seat and have people looking at their phones and they're on their phones and it's hard to fill out long forms on your phones. Instead, maybe we should be sending out short value statements, infographics, things that build a connection between you and your audience where basically they only just have to like or maybe write a comment back to you. Something easy to do. And instead, save the web forms and things that bring up privacy issues for people for times when your audience will have access to a computer and have some privacy. So now that we've talked a little bit about how to plan for the how, the who and the when, the next is to talk about planning for the why. And in general, I'd like to talk about campaign. So when you have a whole lot of content that you would like to string together into a conversation. In addition to having news related and one-off materials, you should think about structuring your content to achieve your goals. Marketers and fundraisers talk about a funnel that your audience moves through. At each stage, hopefully, they become more engaged with you and it drives them towards whatever goal you're trying to achieve. We at the ATOU have a four-stage funnel. We start with awareness, move to activation, conversation, I'm sorry, conversion and stewardship and I'll say that activation and cultivation are the same thing. So starting with awareness, this is when you educate your audience about the existence of a problem. When you're linking a problem to shared values or linking an issue more generally to your brand. Activation and cultivation is when you're getting people on board with a concept. You're interacting with them. This is definitely the home of a lot of very interactive content. When you get them to do just a little bit more so that they start to become invested but it's not actually the action, the final action that you're hoping that they take that maybe is a hired bar for them to jump over. Then you ask for conversion. This is the goal, this is the action whether it's activism, donation, asking them to reach out for help and share private information with you.  And it also gives you an opportunity to continue engaging with them so that you can move them back to the front of the funnel on other issues or for other efforts. So the look at some of the things that we've done in the past for these different stages, starting with awareness, we'll post news articles and statistics and infographics. We also use this as an opportunity to elevate our community partners and post their content because it's good to show that you are a part of a community rather than just being yourself and off on an island. And also value statements which sometimes make it easier for people to buy into the beginning of a conversation that they may have trouble talking about. So we're doing a lot of work right now on the way that the government deals with homelessness and we wanted to take our audience on a journey starting with something that we know that they would agree with us on and getting them to move slowly towards agreeing with us on deeper parts of our platform. And so we created a series of these graphics that are around the police having to get a warrant before searching things and emphasizing that private property is private period. And so they show the types of property that would be owned by people of all sorts of income levels. And we ran these for about two, three weeks and they got a lot of interaction. They got shared, lots of great comments. It was exactly what we had hoped for. The little symbol there that says get a warrant, ACOU, that's also a cell phone sticker that we give out. So we also had the benefit of tying to something that people had seen in the real world and it helped to get people ready. And then we started to introduce, using similar branding, some content that gets into the activation and cultivation stage. And here, and I think this is the hardest part, we started to release a series of quizzes that delved deeper into the issue and that also served a myth-busting function for us. So we have two quizzes. We're right now in the middle of quiz number one, actually, so we're not fully through this campaign. This is one that's going on right now. And what we do is we use Twitter specifically, although we have sent out a few test messages on other channels, where we ask the question and give the choices in the text with a link that leads to the entire quiz and the quiz page has a little widget on it for each answer that shows and hides the answer, whether you're on a phone or a desktop, so you can take the quiz in its entirety even though you're only seeing one question. We find it's really effective to ask the question and have people click to get the answer and we've been using photo galleries to illustrate the multiple choice questions, which makes the post more attractive to look at. These have also been doing well. And we are getting a lot of interesting comments, some supportive, some not supportive, but the ones that we're really interested in are the ones that are in the middle that are kind of indicating that they are starting to see some things differently. And so that's really the goal that we were trying to achieve there. In addition to these quizzes, which I think are a really powerful tool, we also put out really quick and dirty infographics. These aren't super fancy. These can be drawn in Canvun, a number of other tools that are really easy to work with, that bring awareness to some of the issues that we're working on and really highlight the things that we're concerned about. This particular one is meant to bring awareness about the dangers of pulling kids out of the classroom for discipline issues. And when trying to offer services, in addition to providing paper downloads, a source like PDF or web pages to go to, we also created a set of videos which they require a little more investment from the audience. These are maybe 15 to 30 second videos. They're really short. They only cover one question and their captions so that you do. And that's very important to caption your videos because people won't always be in a place where they can turn on the audio to listen to you. So it gives people an opportunity to take advantage of the video and to see that there's a face attached to the questions that you're asking and the answers that you're giving. From this point, we move people to action. We either ask them to sign a petition or to send letters to their legislators. We ask them to donate or to download and know your rights guide or to take a survey. And then when results come out of the specific action, maybe it was a political action, et cetera, like a new policy or a law that was passed, we always try to close the loop and we announce the results of the effort and try to target the same people that we were targeting to ask for help so that they feel like they are included in the entire effort and not just used to further one particular tactic or one particular moment, but that they're partners with us. And at the end of all of these campaigns and during, we tried to measure our success. And so the last thing that I want to talk about are some ways that we measure success at the ACLU and hopefully give you some tips on how you can facilitate and make measurement easier. So metrics are, of course, really important for planning because even though they come after, they create a feedback loop that allows you to readjust all the things that you planned and we're constantly doing that. We never think if the planning process is linear, it's a circle, it's a loop. So social media offers a lot of out-of-the-box measurements, but only some of them are useful some of the time. It's only worth tracking how many people have seen your posts if exposure is what defines success. It's only worth tracking how many people like what you have to say if building public sentiment around an issue is your goal. For us, we give each campaign a goal that is measurable. These form our key performance indicators or KPIs. When advertising a rights guide, we don't focus on the reach of our Facebook posts or how many people have seen the posts or like them. We focus on who has downloaded those guides. If the number is very low, then we look back to see if maybe we had to put some money behind it on Facebook and then the reach number becomes useful. But for the most part, our overall key performance indicator is how many people have downloaded the guide. Similarly, when we're looking at petitions, et cetera, we're actually looking at the end of product that moves the goal forward and not the so-called vanity metric that social media providers will make available to you through insights or analytics. Sometimes it's useful, but make sure that you're actually focusing on what you're trying to achieve. So, and it's also one of the things to keep in mind too that some of the platforms are engineered and they look for ways to keep their users on the platform.  They don't send your users away and they may get more difficult. So you might have a very successful looking post with lots of likes and comments and even shares which can be helpful, but if they're not actually able to get through to the thing that you want, it's not really a successful post. One of the ways that we use to determine whether our efforts to move people from a platform to our conversion point is successful is to create a tracking link. Now, these aren't tracking links like Facebook likes, like buttons, et cetera, they gather all sorts of information about people. These tracking links basically just say, this anonymous person comes from tweet one and they downloaded the guide. And so the way that we construct that is by adding to the end of whatever URL your download is at or the page that you're hoping to get to people, a little appendage that is in this format. It's a question mark, a variable, an equal sign, and a value. So, but the question mark and the equal sign are the only things that really can't change. Those are the things that have to be there. For us, the variable that we always use is just NS which is short for market source. And if you do action alerts, et cetera, from the ATLU, you'll see the NS. And you'll know what we're looking for. It's whether you came from a particular post or whether you came from an email, et cetera. And then for the value, we put something that indicates that you came from a specific post. This could be as simple as if you have five tweets numbering them, so TW1 through TW5. Another thing that I think is really easy is to rather than using serial numbers, just put the date, because if you're not posting multiple times on the same issue in one day, depends on how you have everything scheduled, then you know that it was the post that you sent out on that day that was super effective compared to all the others. And you can mimic that content in the future. And then to gather the results, you use your website analytics program, which could be Google Analytics or the open source program pilot. And this will show you how many people have taken your downloads. And I have a copy here of Google Analytics. Hopefully you can read that. It's a little hard on my tiny screen here. But you can see that there is a download that doesn't have tracking links on it. That's how many people just got there organically in various different ways. And then there are tracking links that are after it's choice number three and choice number four, two different types of tracking links. These have more variables in them than I introduced, but you really only need the one that I showed you in order to do this analysis. And then in the other columns, you'll have the numbers of times that those were downloaded. And that will give you a good indication of whether you're posting at the right time, in the right places and using the right content by comparing all of your attempts to get people to download this stuff with each other. And just as a little hint, if you are using Google Analytics, one amazing thing that you can do is you can bring this screen up, tailor it so that it looks the way that you want it to look, and then you can tell the system to email you this report periodically. So you do not have to keep going back in here. You can tell it, I want this report every Monday at nine for the past week. And then you've got an instant report delivered to you that will help you to adjust your plans without having to go through the effort of doing all of this. And then the last thing that I wanted to share with you are some resources. Metrics are really great, and comparing against yourself is really great, but it's also really important to be able to compare against others in your sector and in the nonprofit sphere more generally. M&R, a consulting firm, puts out a wonderful benchmark study every year that you can download at the link on slide. It's free. And it will give you lots and lots of benchmarks from all sorts of things like audience size, number of people donating, average size of donation, people who take action on calls for activism, how many of your emails are being opened, how many people unsubscribe every time you send an email. It's an amazing resource and it's broken out by sectors of the nonprofit sphere and also by the size of the organization. So if you're very, very small, you can get benchmarks that are still relatable to the work that you do. And then I'd like to close out because I've been talking a lot and I realize I have some very boring, generic looking slides. So I'll let Elizabeth take over, but I wanted to mention two quick things. Not necessarily social media, but I think they're wonderful resources for people who work online and do communications. One of them is that you can get free hardware, software and services at TechSoup if you're a 501C3, so you should Google that and if you need software, et cetera, you'll have to get licenses and things there. And then the last thing that I wanna try your attention to is a wonderful online and real world community called the Nonprofit Technology Network. You can find them at N-T-E-N dot O-R-G. And here you'll find wonderful collection of peers who are able to give you advice on social media, online communications, fundraising and so much more. Thank you. All right, thanks, Brian. So my name is Elizabeth Fitzgerald. I'm the executive director down here in Vancouver at the Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program. I have been in this role for about a year and a half and I have not, I'm not an attorney. I have no legal experience and I have a very small staff. So we just added our fourth staff person last month. None of us are attorneys and everybody's doing about eight jobs. So something I find myself saying frequently is I've never been the social media manager where I've worked but I've always been the one who manages the social media. And I see that definitely in the work that we're doing here where in addition to being the executive director and keeping the lights on and getting funding and doing our bookkeeping, I'm also trying to build our, build the awareness of what we do. When I came in, we didn't have, we had a pretty outdated website and that was it. And even though our organization has been around for about 30 years, very few people in our community who didn't work directly with us had heard of us or the work we did. So we're definitely in that gaining exposure phase that Brian talked about where that is one of our biggest goals with our social media and our web presence. So I can talk forever about what we do and all the cool tools that we have but I kind of wanted to take you through the journey that I've had to go through in figuring out how to prioritize what's actually most important to get to our end goal. So these are some questions is a very crazy overwhelming slide but there's just some questions that I definitely ask myself when I think about prioritizing the social media channel who are you talking to, but who's actually listening? These are things that both Sartre and Brian spoke to. What's the best channel for you to be using at this time? What are also your goals, right? Don't be using Instagram if you have like no pictures to post ever, which is something that we deal with. We see everything's protected under confidentiality. We don't really have a lot of self-produced photos. And so what we're trying to do is just continue to build our community. So with all that, I know it's pretty overwhelming. So what I have always found to be the number one priority when looking at your web presence is actually starting with your website. So you should think of your website as a home base. This is where you store the timeless information about your work and it's what still carries the highest credibility for accurate information. So I see a lot of times people trying to use a Facebook page as essentially their website, especially really small businesses or private practices or tiny nonprofits, they're like, hey, people are out there, we can talk about this. But actually there's been tons of studies done on this. There's 30%, I think, of consumers won't trust a business without a website even if they have a current update Facebook. And almost half of people say they decide on a company's credibility based on the website design, layout, typography. So what the text looks like, if you're using like green font on a purple background, it might seem a little less credible than just a clean, simple website. So that can be kind of an undertaking to build a website. Though I built our entire website from scratch, there's a lot of good templates for that to be able to do that, whether you're using square space, WordPress, whatever. And if you can't put everything on there, there's some very specific things. Even if you have just one single landing page, you didn't link to anywhere else that you should be having in your website.  So something that says this is what we're all about. Something that says, that's gonna be clear, concise. A subheading, which is a tagline of what you do, but make sure you leave out the jargon. So, hey, we're the volunteer lawyers. We help you if you don't have a lawyer. That would be something really simple. And a call to action. So for ours, that's a giant orange donate button in the middle of our page. But maybe you are someone who schedules appointments, you have a schedule button, learn more. But whatever you're having there, what I think is the number one thing is something pretty. Because everybody has seen those studies that say, people spend, I don't know, 10 seconds on a page, 20 seconds before navigating away at most. So that's why our webpage, and this is just a screenshot of our webpage, is just a huge picture with seven words and a button. And that's our homepage. You can scroll on, you see more, you can link to other things. But we want this to be a landing base for everything that we do. So as we add channels, as we add some Facebook presence and Twitter presence, anything that is connecting what the content that we put on that social media channel, anything that connects it back to the services that we do at our core, there's always a link driving people back to our website. And then finally, we have search engine optimization or SEO, this is super important and super easy. So as a free tool, I didn't stick in here in my little chat, but Yoast YOAST is just a plug-in that you can stick in WordPress or most other web builders and it lets you just call out so when somebody's searching for certain words to make it so that your website rises to the top if you're trying to get that presence. And finally, making it optimized for mobile, as Brian said, and start, that the dependence of mobile phone use is going up. One in five households don't have their own internet in the U.S. and they rely only on mobile devices. So you wanna make sure that whatever you have on any of your platforms is looking just as nice mobile as not and if you're building any of these things, especially in a website, there's usually a really easy way to click a couple buttons and make it optimized for mobile. Once you've got your nice, pretty website, then you have to start looking at expanding if you wanna try to reach more people through social media. So if you're the only person managing your social media, like I am, and web presence, and it's not your full-time job, it's likely not in your best interest to put the same effort into every one of those social media channels. So you look at what's your audience using. You can either look at some data or find out by just sending out a quick survey monkey. If you have an email list, what do you use? How do you wanna talk to us or engage with us? Or just set up a landing page on multiple platforms and monitor engagement either through that interface or through Google Analytics, which is what we use. We found that our community used Facebook primarily. So even though we have each of these three things, Facebook, Twitter, and a LinkedIn, Facebook is where we put most of our eggs. So we actually, we maintain a landing page on LinkedIn. And I think it was a hair of a starter, Brian, who said that that's a great place to get volunteers. For us, most of our volunteers are attorneys. They use it sort of like either a Rolodex or a place to say, yeah, I also volunteer at the Volunteer Lawyers Program. So it just allows them to connect or our employees to connect their association with the organization. We don't really put a lot of content there. And we use Twitter to engage other entities. So that's where we're connected with other nonprofits, with agencies that are pursuing similar missions so that we can retweet that and show our support. We can find something. We use it to follow a lot of other agencies. And then we say, hey, that's an issue that we also address, and this is how we address it. And so we'll retweet it and we do that thing where we're sharing in the issue rather than just demanding something of our audience. And so we say, hey, what about this? If you're having this concern, remember, you can hit us up and we've got this information for you. But our Facebook is definitely the most active of those channels. This is just a really tiny screenshot of our Google Analytics page, but it's free and it's quick. And by quick, I mean like you can get pretty much anything you need there within 30 seconds to a minute for using it once you've linked it to the page that you need. But I know I've just done all of that and this is not things that I monitor or even pay attention to every day. So since I'm trying to focus on identifying some tools and tricks for automating what you're doing, if you're the person who has to manage all this and you just don't have time for it, here are the things that you wanna consider. So just as there's tables that you can build, there's schedules that you can build or the audience you wanna reach based on the type of information that you're releasing, this is a good thing to think about is scheduling posts. So we work in the legal field. I see a lot of really small single practitioner law firms running their own blogs. I don't ever read their blogs. So many of them are good friends of mine and I know they're pushing content because they've heard that this is how you get engagement. But if you've got a website that's a blog and you aren't driving traffic to that blog and you're not reminding people to go back and read that blog, then you're just putting empty time into writing content that nobody's gonna read. And so you wanna be thinking about if you're putting the work in to publish a blog post, then you're getting the most use out of it possible. So depending on the channel, sometimes like on Twitter, you can be just reminding people over and over again. Here's a whole bunch of different angles to look at it. Remember, we wrote a blog post on this, go back and read it. Facebook, it's all about playing with that algorithm that the guys spoke about. You gotta do a lot of tricky stuff to try to get your posts to ride to the top. But Facebook, you can continue to call back to it. And then LinkedIn is a, I don't see stuff really recurring to post there. Somebody sticks something out, it's current. If you happen to be on the site, you see it. But we're of course focusing more on Twitter and Facebook. You can either schedule those things internally, which is great, or you can use one of my favorite tools, which is Buffer. And so this is free. I actually have a, I use Google Chrome as my web browser and I've got a browser extension. So it's just at the top of my browser. If I'm on a site, if I'm reading about an article, we don't publish blog content, but it could work very similarly. I'm reading something, I'm like, oh my gosh, our network really loved to hear about this. I literally push a button and it brings this screenshot that you see in front of you, which allows me to write something and customize it for each network. So if you want to push the same thing like, hey, remember, this thing's coming up, or did you hear about this event, it might work across platforms. But as Brian said, it's not always the best to broadcast out to all channels. So customizing is usually your best option, but you'll just see just three separate text boxes. You can add the same images to all of them. Before this webinar, I pushed something out on all three of our channels, and it took me 25 seconds. I timed myself to say, hey, Liz is doing this webinar, come check it out, and I added four images to each. And already started getting engagement with those posts. So I love Buffer, and I will talk at length about it to anybody who wishes to listen. But here are three other tools that I use to help automate. And it seems like you're investing a lot of time, but each of these things is very simple. And at the end of this, I'll show you a real quick breakdown of the amount of time I actually spend in doing any of this. So Brian mentioned doing an editorial calendar, which I think is crucial. You shouldn't just be blindly throwing content across the web without strategically thinking about when and where and how you're engaging your audience. And so what I use as our editorial calendar is Trello, which is, I've heard it described as a whiteboard with superpowers, and that's one of my favorite descriptions of it. You could just be a sticky note person and maybe that works for you. You could use an Excel spreadsheet. But this is like a drag and drop masterpiece. So this is just a quick screenshot. This isn't even my Trello. This is Peg Fitzpatrick who's a social media blogger, but this is very much how it looks on most ways. You can monitor how you're doing any of those little boxes. You can drag across to the next step. So for our social media Trello, we have, the first column is like things I want to write about. The second column is in composing mode. And the third is queued up. And then the fourth one is published. And so maybe I have two hours miraculously on a day where I just want to write a bunch of content, make some pretty stuff that I know I'm gonna be pushing out over the course of the next week or month. So I'm sticking all that in there. Once I've stuck it in queue, which you can do in buffer, or in any of those platforms, you can schedule a post that you don't have to be up at 2 a.m. to post something that you want to go out at 2 a.m. Once that's all queued up, I move it over to my queue and then once it's gone out and I'm regularly, I just check my Trello to make sure that everything's on track. Then I'll move it over to the published column. So Canva is, if anybody asks me what my very favorite free tool is, Canva is absolutely it. I do, when I took over this position last year, we paid a printing company to do, to make our brochures, to design them to print for us. And I brought that all in-house. So that's something that myself, with a little help from my program director, we make all our own content on Canva. And Canva is a beautiful, super simple graphic design. You can get templates, so you're really just changing out the images, you can start from scratch. But it's really great for making those infographics that Brian is talking about, as well as all of our content, all our brochures, any graphics you ever see on our Facebook, our website. For the most part, I probably made it in Canva. So this is just a real quick screenshot of content on our Canva. We just had an event, we've got our trifold brochure and there's also options to develop your brand. So if you, we're still in kind of reviewing our branding mode right now at our organization, but if you have specific colors, a font, things that you use, there's an option in Canva to say, here's all that. So I want any content that I produce to reflect that and it'll shortcut for you. But speaking of, oh, and then yeah, here's another little thing I just busted out. So, Canva's great, I'll also talk to anybody who wants to talk to me about Canva. So when I mentioned colors, maybe your branding, I think that's one of the biggest holdups when people try to make pretty content by themselves is they're saying, I can't get the colors to look right. I've got this image, but the font looks funny. Adobe Color is free. It's just a web app. You can drag an image into it and it'll automatically push out a color spectrum of things that go with that image. So here's a screenshot of something. Yes, it's me and the friends, and my friend Jamie, we're attending an event. And if I wanted to push this out, maybe say, hey, you should come to this charity event that we hold. We're always really interested looking when we're attending. And you wanted to make sure that whatever colors you have, you can choose, you can either customize. So I intentionally dragged the dot over her hair or so that I got the pink color. I got the green in the background. But if you want only muted tones or if you want bright tones, there's just that drop down on the side to change the color mood. And you can copy and paste the hex codes from these until whatever you're using. If I go back to Canva and I say, I want my background color to match this exactly. And I do that. Or you can just save the color theme because you're like, I want everything I ever do in the future to have this color scheme. You can do that as well. So here's the rule I try to adhere to. You know, I'm the director, so I probably work 60 hours a week. And most of that time is absolutely not even thinking about our website, our presence online. But my goal is to spend 30 minutes a day two days a week. So I usually just stick on my calendar like social media checkup. And I know that that day I'm gonna be checking in on my social media. So I will come in and I just, one day when I was doing this, I just wrote down what I did. You could see realistically what it looks like. Made a cup of coffee, checked my email. I checked my task list. I actually use Google tasks. I didn't talk about that either, but that's another Chrome extension. And then I spend five minutes planning for social media marketing and communications tasks. That's where I get into Trello and I say, okay, here's the things that I wanna do this week or over the next two weeks. And then I give myself 10 minutes to do what I can in that amount of time. So it's probably drafting things or going and trying to scope out if I'm gonna build something in Canva, what that's gonna look like.  But then before I leave, I go back in. I spend 15 minutes. I check on my Google Analytics, my host interactions in Facebook, in Twitter or I complete building the actual post. And with that, we have a pretty thoroughly engaged Facebook community. Something that I did remember after hearing Brian say it was talking about answering comments and questions on Facebook. So because we have such a small staff and most people who are trying to reach us, our prospective clients, we feel like we one can't answer all the phone calls that come in. We spend all our time, I have staff who are just constantly trying to return those calls and make sure that people get the information they need. And so we try to open up as many channels as possible. So we accept comments on Facebook. People will leave weird Google reviews because we have a Google presence. But I do feel very strongly that you one need to acknowledge that not everything that's coming to you is gonna be positive, but also that if you're opening up comments, you need to be responsible to addressing those and answering them. So sometimes it's like, hey, it sounds like you're having a really hard time. Here's a phone number. Give us a call, leave a message, or hey, we've got this clear hotline. If you need help immediately, you should call them. And sometimes it's, someone wasn't happy because they're divorced and go how they thought it would be. And so they leave a Google review because our page is open to that. And so it's about acknowledging that not everybody is happy. And in opening yourself up to the social media community, you need to deal with the positive feedback as well as the critical. So addressing each of those timely and with courtesy is what helps ultimately build your community with that. Finally, Brian had mentioned the N10 nonprofit tech network to you guys. And I actually sit on the planning committee down here in Vancouver, and I think that is an amazing thing. So if you have any, you have an N10 group locally where you are, usually it's a space for people to come and meet once a week, once a quarter, once a month, whatever the setup is. And just hear about free tools. Maybe how do I clean up my data and Excel, things like that to keep you continually learning. And putting something like that on your schedule to attend rather than having to go and learn by yourself all the time is gonna keep you up to date, but also clear up your schedule. So with that, I will turn over to my good friend, Claudia Johnson. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. So I'm excited to be here. Lots of really good suggestions, and I'm actually learning a lot. I'm Claudia Johnson. I'm with Pro BonoNet, and I am based in Eastern Washington. Pro BonoNet is a nonprofit technology company where we look at what technology we can bring to bear to help close the justice gap and support legal aid and pro bono projects. I am not an early adapter, I'm very much an exer, and I came to social media much later, I would say five to probably two years that I've been experimenting and adapting. So I wanted to share with you a little bit about how do we talk to the real world about what we do in civil legal aid, and some of what we've been sharing like Facebook. Facebook is where people are. Twitter, that's how you push a specific blog post and things like that, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the slow world because Eastern Washington is the tech, but by the slow world, I mean that not everybody is living in a hyper-connected, hyper-internet-based world. They're parts of the country that because of geography and other barriers, they're large pockets of community that may have some access to the fast world, but a lot of what's happening is not like that. And so you need to have a mix, and if you wanna find between fast world activities like the social media that we're talking about, but also you as a person, as a legal aid lawyer, as a supervisor, as an executive director, if you're in a community that's more rural or has deep geography or weather barriers, you may be able to use some technologies to talk to people that are not in your world. So that's what I'm going to be sharing. And what I do is I manage Low Help Interactive, which is an online platform that has created today probably a little bit over four million free documents, and I spend a lot of time talking with 40 to 43 states about how to create online forms, how to get self-helpers to use the forms, e-filing, all of that. My life is in that world, and I speak to lawyers and pro bono coordinators and court administrators and stuff like that, and I don't get to talk much about the great work that civil legal ladies doing, or that the forms are doing, or that technology is doing, with real average people that have nothing to do with the practice of law or courts or anything like that. So I started to think, well, what can I do about that? Because I'm somebody that's very much like to test and challenge things and challenge myself. And so when voices for civil justice, which is a support group that's based in Washington, D.C., was originally created, and I really encourage everybody to check out their blogs and subscribe to the information they're putting out, they came out probably about three years ago, they were funded to be a support group to legal aid and do research, public opinion research, they brought some of the best people, and they started researching what messages resonate with people about civil legal aid and stuff like that. When they came on board, I was like, wow, this is amazing. They're really giving us guidance on how we can talk with the real world. And so I started thinking, well, how can I take that and actually bring it to this concern I have that I want to get the message of what civil legal aid does and provides as guidance for us to talk about the work we do with real people, not with the industry. And so I decided, okay, I'm gonna check out what opportunities are there, and I decided that I was gonna compete for a TED grant, a TEDx competition. And I didn't know what I was getting on into that, but I thought, okay, if this is a challenge, this is going to be a challenge. And I'm going to take, because at the TEDx, I'm gonna have my community, which is not necessarily a friendly audience, and I get to talk to them about civil legal aid, technology, and all the things that we're doing, that I love doing, that I know my partners love doing. And so I did the TEDx, and that was amazing. And I actually did a little blog for voices. And so I'm not gonna get into, you know, I shared the lessons on the challenges and how scary it was and all that, but what I wanted to share with you, I seem to be missing some screens here, is that the feedback was amazing. After the voices presentation, using the voices to develop my TEDx, I've gotten a lot of feedback. And what's happening now is that I'm being asked to go to other places where they have never thought, you know, there's a little video going around right now that was created by Elinor Legal Aid Online about how there's no representation in civil legal aid. And that's how I started my TEDx. That message is a message that most regular people have never, ever thought about. Most people assume that they're always gonna have a lawyer. And when you talk to real people about how there's no civil representation in school issues, in housing, et cetera, people are really totally shocked. And what has been happening is that in Eastern Washington, people are now more aware of that. They're more aware of the online tools like Washington No Help, because that's one way to get people information and referral. And they're also more aware that there's actually legal aid offices there. So what's been happening after the workshop for me is that I'm being now requested to go talk to other groups like educators, librarians, groups that are not necessarily in clinics, like nonprofit clinics that are not in the legal aid world and they're requesting to come and hear about what civil legal aid is or is not and then how they can connect with civil legal aid lawyers. So what I've been doing is that I've been teaming with the managing attorney of the Pasco office, Carla, from Northwest Justice Project. And we go together and we talk together about, okay, what is civil legal aid and how people don't have representation. And then she talks specifically about the type of cases that the office is doing and how to connect with them. So my main goal in doing this was to really start changing my lens. And instead of always talking to the same community, which is inside the legal profession, is let's just really make a concerted effort to talk to people outside the legal world and let's go talk to the real world. And in the process of doing this, what I have found out is that when you talk to the real world, meaning outside of the legal community, people start feeling empowered, people start helping themselves, people start seeing what you're putting out, their groups, what you're putting, your groups are putting out in Facebook and all of that. But sometimes you do have to have that human perception, you know, connection. The other thing is that, you know, all of us in the legal aid community come from diverse groups, but we're not as diverse as that real world. And so if you look at the data that LSD publishes, you will see that, you know, the majority of people being served by legal nonprofits, at least the LSD funded at once, are 65% of them are not white and a great majority of them are female. But that's not who is in our programs. And so we have to make an extra effort and change our lens to go and connect with these communities, talk to them, develop relationships so that we can address their issues. So what I'm doing now is that, you know, I've come to realize, wow, you know, so there are other ways to connect with the community and there's a lot of civil organizations that are constantly looking for speakers and that have a lot of sometimes economic power or connections and those include groups like Lions Clubs. In my area, we have Badgers, which is like intellectual lunch that happens once a month where people go talk about a specific issue. The most recent one that they did was about mental health for the youth, is that a myth or is that actually a real issue? And there's a lot of other groups out there that are looking to learn and connect with about topics that they may not know anything about. So I think that if you have the opportunity to start connecting with these networks, that maybe networks of leaders themselves or influencers, you will start finding that you can have conversations with them, even if they're in a complete different spectrum using some of the materials that voices is doing and what that does is that that creates an awareness that there's civil legal aid that's doing amazing work, that there's actually experts living in the community that are actually tackling these issues and you can have a chance to impact the community that you work with positively. So I'm going to leave you with some resources and I'm sharing my TEDx video. If you wanna watch it, it's on YouTube. It was a lot of fun. If you are living in an area where they do TEDx competitions, I encourage you to consider participating on topic talking about your case or a challenge or something that you're really passionate about. It will make you a better speaker and it will get your topic out there. As much as it is, it's incredible. I think that you can also really encourage you to look at the voices for civil justice, look at the materials that they have. They will help you message across social media like we talked earlier but it would also help you if you decide that you're gonna take the challenge of going and talking to people that are not in our world but that are in the real world.  And I think that at the end, you will find that your impact will be better and higher and you may be connecting with other groups that may never have thought about becoming legal aid allies and I think that at the end, our work is so important and there's so few of us that it's really important that we can leverage our presence in the slow world and also in the fast world. So I'm gonna leave it at that and see if people have questions or comments. So thank you. I wanna open it up in four questions on pretty much anything at this point. Please type them into the question box. We can read those out for individuals. The first question that I've got here is on using a scheduling tool like Buffer, I realized that there's a free version, there's some paid versions. Which version do you use, Elizabeth, and why? Did you make that choice? Well, I use the free version because my budget for social media is $0. So that is the answer to that question. For what I need, I don't need any of the other premium stuff for Buffer. But I mean, if you become just like a real aficionado, I think you can, or if you have a whole bunch more channels, I think that's when it's good to upgrade. If you're scheduling like a huge campaign, I think you can do like 100 posts or something. So I tend to use it more short term. Here's something I'm gonna wanna push out. So I'm gonna stick it in queue and I've only got a couple channels. But if you are just maybe much larger than us, then you're probably gonna wanna go, you're gonna wanna upgrade, but I am happy with the nice little free version. And Brian at ACLU, what tools to use, what are the costs around that and why have you made those choices? So we've used a number of tools over time. What we're currently using right now is we're actually scheduling natively in Facebook and in Twitter. For Twitter, we use TweetDeck, which is just a free format for looking and posting on Twitter that Twitter provides. It's at tweetdeck.twitter.com. And on Facebook, we use the scheduling tool. There's a dropdown next to where it says post or publish. And in that dropdown, you can use to schedule. In the past, we've used two tools that I really like and I can tell you like what we liked about them and why we decided not to stick with them. One of them was Hootsuite, which is a competitor of Buffer, but it's been in the space for a very long time. I actually think I like Buffer better than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite also includes some analytics that can be useful, but since we've then moved from looking at social media native analytics to ones that are off of social media, like did you download this? Did you donate this, et cetera? That became a little less useful for us and we were paying for Hootsuite, because we dropped it. And then the last tool, and I love this one, you do have to pay for it, but they do have a nonprofit rate that is very affordable. It's a tool called Meet Edgar. And what it does is it fills in all of the gaps between the posts that you intentionally want to put out because they're on the news cycle or they deal with specific points in time, like events, et cetera. And it allows you to basically promote know your rights guides, resources, et cetera, over and over again in this giant library. So you load up all of your tweets and Facebook posts in here with all of the art and over time working on this, even 15 minutes a day, within like two months, you've got hundreds of posts in here and it randomly selects out one of them, posts it at a window that you tell it to. You set up these windows. So for us, it was all of the times when we knew we had some audience, but we also knew that we weren't going to be around to directly react to things. So it was stuff that we knew we could reply to comments in a delayed fashion, et cetera. And it would automatically publish those and then reshuffle them back into the deck. So it was really useful. We got rid of it maybe only temporarily because I really liked the concept because after all of the Russian interference scandal stuff broke, Twitter in particular changed its terms of services and they do not allow you to directly tweet the same tweet twice. And the way those terms of service are written is it's not time bound. It's that you're not allowed to tweet the same thing exactly twice ever or you put your account in danger of being shut down. So you can definitely use a tool like Meet Edgar and Meet Edgar is adjusting to this by making it easy to create variations on the tweet and so that you're talking about the same guide and you're talking, you may be even using the same picture, but you're changing the language just slightly to obey the rules. It certainly adds a little bit of challenge and time to repeating your content. We used to just repeat the same thing but a week later and then a month later. And we actually used the same grid that Elizabeth put up in her slide, which I really love. So we're kind of reeling due to that but we may go back again. Yeah, that's very interesting because eviction doesn't go away and you have a whole different audience that's facing that unfair eviction next month but having to tweak the content to make sure it doesn't get hit by spam filters is interesting. How do you deal with negative comments or people who are frustrated? How do you respond to that type of stuff on each of your networks? So let's start with Brian and then go back to Elizabeth on that and then Claudia if you have anything you would like to add to that please do. Well we've been lucky to have our platforms up for a while so we don't necessarily always react when we get negative comments because our community tends to start a conversation around negative comments and sort of handles it for us and we really wanna provide a platform particularly where people can feel free to say things that they agree with us on or disagree with us on and we're lucky to have a community that engages in those conversations. If there is a misrepresentation of fact then we will engage to correct the fact but we try to do that in a way that isn't directly addressing the specific person but even though you wanna get into conversations lots of conversations on social media we like to pick the conversations that we get into and so oftentimes we will look for ways to engage with folks who either are confused about the dialogue that is going back and forth and provide facts for them or support those who are trying to support us but we generally don't ban people and we don't delete comments. We do have a policy which we post in our notes I believe it should still be there on our Facebook page where we only delete comments when they are direct attacks on another user. That makes sense given your history of free speech. Definitely. Elizabeth have you run into negative comments or? Yeah, so we are starting to now that we have a little bit more of a presence even just locally it's really nice when someone else steps up and addresses a negative comment so like Brian, if they address it then we're just good. If it's just like do we do a lot of work and advocacy around services to people who are living on house and so sometimes we get some like more like political area of comments and you know we might just like someone comment back if somebody in our community took care of it or we'll just leave it. If we get, it's when we get something that is more like Yelp review-y or they're like these people don't blah blah blah kind of that may hurt our image as what we want it to be that's when we get a very like we will not address the issue on social media that's for a private channel and so we say that, we say hey we 100% wanna make sure that everybody is well informed about what we do and why we make the choices that we make and that if you're dissatisfied with anything we'd love to have a personal conversation with you contact us at this number or stop in or whatever, right? When I have said that I've never had anyone follow up in the comments stop but that it's, I think it's more important that our community know we're listening and that we are willing to engage but also that we're not gonna get into a like Twitter war that is not something that we do. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think that those comments make a lot of sense I think that when you're dealing with a presentation where you're talking to people that are not in our world and don't know our world the best thing is to listen and hopefully you have had a chance to explain or share some information about how there's not enough legal aid for everybody that needs an attorney because generally the comment is that I call legal aid, I called, I looked for help and I didn't get any help or that's one type of comment, right? So laying a foundation of why if you get 200 calls a day and you can play six cases in that week for a particular subject matter explaining how the legal aid is also making really hard choices and that they are very aware of that. So that's one way of handling that but the other thing is when people come at you from a legal aid is a waste of time it doesn't do anything for anyone and on that if you have specific stories I think that you need to humanize the work that we do and you may have one or two anecdotes not very long on a person, a case where it impacted a family, a community and the legal work that was done was just really unbelievable healing for the whole community, that goes a long way and I think that my third tip, what I've learned as I've gone a little bit older is that sometimes you don't have to react either. Sometimes you just have to listen and acknowledge and particularly if you're in a group you can take the conversation one on one at a later time so sometimes you just have to stay calm and acknowledge and offer to talk later on or give a card after the event and the other thing is sometimes people who are asking really hard questions or that are making really proding comments and I think this is also online they're doing so because maybe they're trying to help you. You never know the intentions behind because nobody reads mine so I think that when you're talking with non-legal folks it's important to kind of have these things in mind because you need to be prepared for anything that gets thrown at you but I think oftentimes just stay back and then think do I use an anecdote, do I provide some facts or do I make an approach later on and offer to have a one on one? Yeah, Claudia has too many wonderful points there but two that I would like to reinforce is if you can take and use client stories, client images, those things along, make sure you've got their permission, your post will do so much better. If we put down this case, we recently won as a short intro that has a very small impact compared to picture of the litigant, why it's important, talk about how it helps someone regain access to their kids that were trying to be deported out of the country unlawfully and that picture of the family there, that personal message goes so much further. Also, unlearn all of the terrible language we were taught in law school for how to talk about things precisely and focus on using plain language. There's a wonderful resource out there called Write Clearly that will help you look at legalese and give you suggested plain language but your audience is going to be turned off by the legalese, they're going to go away. You need to focus groups, some of the messages. Daniel Edgar worked with us at Northwest Justice Project putting together a guide for taking our legal help videos and he actually went out to community centers, put them in front of individuals and then got feedback and again and again it was legalese and things that everybody in our office would know but that actual clients had no idea what we were talking about and we ended up redoing the script on almost every video that was focus groups. So get out there and let real people take a look and give you feedback and make sure they know that if they don't understand something it's not their fault, it's your fault for how you're conveying it, they're evaluating the material. This is not a quiz to see if they got it, it's to see if we're conveying something. We've got another minute or two here I'd like to let each of the panelists go through one last tip or one last thing that they think is important if there's anything else they would like to add. There was a question in here which is will we be posting all of the materials? Yes, they'll all be available on the website. Nathan Resnick who works with me at LSNTAP, he is attending the webinar. He will put up a summary blog post in about a week that will include the links and the slides also. The video will be made available. Is there any closing comments, Elizabeth, that you would like to add as we're in our last minute or an a half here? No, that is good. I know that my email is in the materials. I encourage anybody who has any questions about what we do or wants some insight on what you're trying to do, please just reach out to me and I love to chat and have an open door and that includes an open email, so thanks. That is a great piece of advice in and of itself. Get advice from somebody else who does this. Take them out to coffee. Talk to them in person or online. That's one of the best ways to learn. Brian. I'll throw in one more tip. It has to do with the use of TweetDeck. Even if you use a tool like Buffer, I still recommend opening up a tab in your browser with TweetDeck. TweetDeck allows you to put in search terms that monitor not just your own feed but Twitter more generally on subjects. So that's how you can find out some allies that you might not know that you actually had and retweet them and start to build relationships with them and you can find active individuals who really care about your topics and amplify their message and get engaged with them. I think TweetDeck's pretty amazing for a listening tool too. Yeah, finding somebody who is very active in that area of social media can do so much to boost your platform and be a wonderful ally. Great tip there. Claudia, any closing tips? Yeah, I think that we all need to approach this with a spirit of humility and also a spirit of self-confidence, which seems contradictory. But I think that going out there, the work that we do is extremely valuable and important and it's meaningful, not just to us but to the families and the communities we represent. So you need to always keep that as your standing base and as you go in and experiment, be it with social media or talking to the real world or talking to people who are not at all interested or know anything, keep it simple, be humble, and be willing to learn because it's not gonna work the first time. It may not work the second time, but keep trying and challenge yourself because the only way we're going to have allies we're gonna grow, we're gonna become better is by experimenting and putting ourselves out there. And so let's just get out of the comfort zone. Let's use the technology that's out there and then let's go out and use our own relationships and talk outside of our world to start really breaking the legal binary and really bringing lawyers' work to be meaningful in the context of the society that we're living in.  Excellent, well thank you everybody for coming out today. We will have a follow-up email that has materials. There will be resources put up on both the WSBA's website and on lsntap.org that will have all of these materials archived. If you've got any questions, please reach out to the panelists. We are happy to help you learn how to do this and we look forward to having more partners that we can actively engage with.


Good afternoon, Howard Wiig, Cold Green Think Tech, Hawaii. Welcome to another scintillating program this time featuring none other than the honorable Dr. Victoria Keener, Senior Research Fellow for the East West Center and in her capacity today as the Chair of the Honolulu Climate Change Commission. We read more and more and more about the need for resilience. We've seen disasters in our Northwest, Canada, Siberia, our South, Central China. The list goes on and on and on. And I think a lot of us will agree the list is going to continue to go on and on and on.  And front and center is Dr. Victoria Keener. Thanks so much, Dr. Forth, joining us today. So why don't you start by seeing something about the mission of the Climate Change Commission and the way you operate and then we'll get into specifics later. Sure, well, maybe I'll skip to slide four, which gives a little bit of information about what the Honolulu Climate Change Commission is and what we do and how long we've been around. So actually I'll correct you on one thing first. I am the outgoing Chair. So I served over the last year as Chair and the last month actually transitioned over to Dr. Chip Fletcher, who will be the Chair for this upcoming year. So... Let me interject. Chip Fletcher, one of the world's leading climatologists. You're very, very honored to have him on board with you. He is literally worldwide known. Yeah, he's definitely our go-to for sea level rise both in Hawaii and in the region, not just with the physical science, but also social impacts of climate change and sea level rise and looking at planning and policies as well. So he's a great resource on the commission and for the state and the region. But if we go back to slide four for a second about the commission. So the Climate Change Commission started in 2018 and it's actually voted on by City Charter. So we're in the City Charter and our charge is to gather the latest science and information on climate change impacts to Hawaii and to advise the Climate Change Sustainability and Resilience Office in the city, the mayor and the city council and the executive departments about the future climate scenarios as relevant to current and future planning and policy and the impacts that we could see across different sectors that are relevant to city planning. So there are five members. The State Energy Office and the Resilience Office were very, very, very closely. So we're deeply aligned there. So you're in good hands. Yeah, they're wonderful. And they're independent from the Climate Change Commission but at the same time they serve as kind of our key office for liaising with the city. So there are five members that are appointed for five year terms and we have expertise in different things. If you can go forward one slide. We have five members. So this is the previous iteration where I was the chair. My background is in hydroclimatology and kind of interdisciplinary applications of climate science into policy and management My vice chair was Dr. Rosie Alagado. She works at UH and she does a lot of ecosystem work and works with indigenous Hawaiian communities. McKenna Kauffman who was actually the previous chair for the last two years. Dr. McKenna Kauffman is at University of Hawaii in the Economics Department. She's a specialist in greenhouse gas and energy policies. As I said, Dr. Chip Fletcher is a new chair who's a sea level rise specialist and works very heavily in climate change education and conservation and community resilience. And finally Bettina Menert who's a green building design leader and works in construction and design in Hawaii. So we've also had quite a few outputs so far. So the kind of guidance that we've released has included a briefing just about climate change impacts in the state, sea level rise guidance, shoreline setback guidance kind of building on existing shoreline setback regulations. We put out a memo on a one water framework. So integrating all different types of fresh water across different departments into a single management framework. We put out climate change and financial risk guidance for the city. More recently, we've done a climate and social equity guidance document and one looking at the social costs of carbon. And the one we're working on still that has yet to be released is a guidance paper on climate change in the construction industry. Impressive. So what are some of the specific programs that you work with then? I'm looking in particular that encourage density and mixed use Yeah, so I can give a little bit of why don't I start with kind of how I see the commission what we've done over the last year and how it's being useful for the city and state. And then I can move into some of the products that have come out of the CCSR including the climate action plan and the resilience strategy and we can go into those from there. Absolutely. All right, so I'll start with kind of how I see the commission working. We're supposed to be a trusted and authoritative source of science-based climate information that's relevant to planning. And kind of in the academic lingo what you call a group that works across both academic science and so researchers, community members, decision makers what you call that is a boundary organization. And so if we go to slide two we actually see ourselves as a climate boundary organization in the Connolly the Climate Change Commission. And what that does is provide an interface between those three groups. So academic science to community to policy makers. So whether in basic science you would just stay mostly in that kind of publication and data role this you really work across both the impacts in the community work and getting the right knowledge to inform different policies.  Right, yeah, that's kind of what the term has come to mean and it's kind of performative. So if you label yourself a boundary organization you can act as one. So other famous climate boundary organizations global ones you might know the IPCC of course the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So they work with creating scientific guidance translating that into impacts in different sectors and then creating guidance for policy makers as well. So that's on a global scale. And I really see the Honolulu Climate Change Commission as taking that down to the local level. So instead of working on global projections of climate in different sectors we're really looking at the local level. And the two major roles that I think that the boundary organization in this case serves is being supportive of policy makers and planners and being critical of different policy debates with the science-based providing science-based information to that. So that's just kind of a little bit of background on how I see us. But one of the things that the CCSR put out in 2019 was the Ola Oahu resilience strategy. So if we go ahead to ever slide that is seven we can go over the four areas that came out and this was an extremely inclusive progress process that interacted with thousands of people over the course of a year to inform this both community members, planners, leaders, academics, people all across different parts of society on the island. So they came out with four resilient strategies for the island. And the four were long-term affordability for island residents, resilience in the face of natural disasters, climate change adaptation and mitigation and leveraging the leadership of communities that we already have. So a lot of this was within each of these four categories I think about 44 actions that came out of this were identified in terms of increasing the long-term resilience, short-term and long-term resilience of Ola Oahu. And so these strategies have been identified and really where we need to go next is how to improve them. The next thing that came out if you go to slide eight very recently was the one climate, one Oahu climate action plan. And this is a five-year plan going from 2020 to 25. It starts to really identify if you will where the rubber meets the road in these strategies that it's going to take to reduce green house gases, meet our energy goals and our emissions reductions from both at the city and the state level. And they identified nine major actions that you can see here on the right of this slide. So some of those are encouraging density and mix land use strategically enabling multiple modes of transportation, encouraging mode shift through parking efficiency, electrifying the city fleet, reducing energy demand by increasing efficiency, maximizing efficiency and renewables through city operations, expanding renewable energies, promoting waste prevention and maximizing waste resources efficiency. But really where we need to go next is how to make these happen. We've identified what needs to happen but the specific actions I think is where it gets really tricky. Yes, yes. Yeah, I'm with the Hawaii State Energy Office and our goals are very, very similar to this because we're deeply involved in transportation efficiencies also. So I'm hoping that rather than stepping on one another's toes at all, we really, really collaborate in our efforts. Yeah, and I think that's kind of a natural next step and exactly what the city wants to do and what we need is to get good partners in on each of these strategies as well to make, to kind of actualize them. So that they haven't laid out a roadmap of how to get these things done. What they've done is identify the goal and some strategies and what the city and the state now need is partnerships and both within government, academia, business, working together to really figure out how to cross those silos. Because as you know, it's not just Hawaii, it's really everywhere where silos, people get really locked into their own kind of sector and silo and they don't talk to different departments that could be really helpful in actualizing some of these things. And these are massive, massive undertakings. We need all the help, all the expertise we can possibly muster. Right. Yeah, so. Oh, go ahead.  One item that intrigues me is because I don't think that the energy office sort of this yet is encourage both shift through parking efficiency. What is that? Yeah, so one of the things, and this was, I believe that it was, I'm gonna get all my bills wrong. I believe it was bill 20 that went through that really looked at how to optimize parking and the parking regulations that would go through for either developing new buildings or working on old buildings and the different types of parking regulations that developers and builders are required to include. So when they're looking at parking efficiency, is there a better way to use the land that's now being designated for only parking? Or is there a different, are there different rules on the difference, like putting electric vehicle charging infrastructure and what are the different types of efficiencies that could be improved upon? And I know that now I'm not up on this now, but there was something that just went through with some of the kind of an addition to bill 20, looking at some of those specific parking efficiency implementations in the city. I can find that for you later, but they're really starting to think about actualizing some of that. So that's actually going forward faster than maybe we had planned for, which is great. Sounds good, we, from the energy office standpoint, we worked very, very closely with the city last year on bill 25 rather than bill 20. And that was specifically to adopt the 2018 or 15 International Energy Conservation Code and the most controversial provision therein was to mandate EV-ready access for both residences and multifamily and commercial buildings. That's where when you're building a building, you plumb the lines so that you have a little plug available, say in the garage of your home.  And that took a long time to pass and many, many compromises, but we did it. At this, I'm kind of interested if you wouldn't mind going into it, what were the biggest issues at the state level for doing that? You mean our prerogative or our incentive? Yeah. Number one, we're shooting for 100% clean electrical energy by the year 2045 and that is a combination of course of basically solar energy and wind energy coming increasing, increasing, increasing while energy use decreases, decreases, decreases until the two lines intersect and electric vehicles are something in the order of at least five or six times as efficient as our gas burning vehicles. And the goal is to get all of that electricity from renewable sources. So all you've got 100% clean ground transportation there. That's our thinking. Right. Yeah, maybe I'll go back to one other product that the Climate Change Commission, the Honolulu Climate Change Commission put out, I believe last December and that was our social equity guidance document. So really looking at how to achieve more equitable outcomes in climate adaptation. And I think it's kind of relevant to all of these discussions as we're looking for it. All of those, whatever nine areas identified in the climate action plan going forward. And if you could go to slide six. So this was, these guidance recommendations came out of months of work with different stakeholders in reviewing equity plans from cities, states and countries at different scales and seeing what would really work. And what we came up with were, so we took a pledge as a commission to try and increase equity considerations in climate adaptation. But the five recommendations were to really think about centering social equity and all adaptation and mitigation plans, identify our frontline communities that are going to be experiencing both climate stressors and shocks to integrate equity into the resilient strategy. And of course now the climate action plan and to find areas where that could be improved to collaborate with communities more, to share information and to focus on outreach to underserved communities both in the past and right now through it's expanding options of participation. And I think a lot of these are really relevant to the energy guidance policies and not just that but parking and EVs and going forward as well to consider what types of communities might have been left out of these conversations when we're looking at what might first seem like a very straightforward, a very straightforward positive goal for decreasing climate emissions. So yeah, maybe I'll leave that there and let you respond. Yeah, I'll go back to the lively discussions we had during for along bill 25. And that was the original proposal was to put EV ready stations in all multi-story residential structures and then people came forward and says, we need low cost housing or affordable housing and all you're doing here is increasing the cost of housing and I don't know if you've been in these specific debates but our estimate was that it would increase the cost of an individual living unit by about $800 and their estimate was all the way up to $10,000 with intermediate estimates in between. I don't know if you've been through that sort of debate but so finally we had to, this is ironic decrease the number of EV ready installations in affordable housing. So we're doing an inequitable choice in this case. So this is a type of, this is all new territory and this is a type of conundrum that we are coming up against all the time. Yeah, and I think it's clear that these are very complicated questions, right? But keeping that equity focus at the forefront will, when we're conceptualizing these problems I think can make the conversation go forward faster. So not only thinking about affordability but also thinking about access. So who has access to these resources in the first place? And when you look at, for example like the renewable energy project siting so solar farms or wind farms we've seen a lot of controversy about that on a WAHU as well. So some of the strategies that I think we need to embrace going forward or not just working with kind of the regular group of high-level stakeholders representing industry and academia and businesses but also bringing communities in from the start to really talk about what it is they want for their community whether that's more EV spaces whether that's a more equitable use of land or siting of renewable energy projects but just making that line of communication more open. Yeah, people in our office who are very heavily engaged in exactly those types of the issues somehow the community of Kahuku comes to mind especially. Yep. We were. Yeah, and one of our, excuse my cat meowing in the background, one of our one of our climate pledge things that we pledged to for equity in the commission was to hold our meetings in different places regularly. So people at different times of day different communities in different places around the island not just at Honolulu Halle in the middle of the day where different communities can't regularly show up and we see the same faces showing up again and again to our meetings. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to hold in-person meetings because of the pandemic for the last year and change but we are committed to when we are able to hold in-person meetings again starting to move around the island and working harder to engage in-person with different communities. Yeah, the city in general has been very, very, very good about that before the Bill 25 debates opened up in city hall or in the council rooms I think the city went out all over the island and had I don't know at least a dozen different meetings and a dozen different locations. So it's following in some really equitable footsteps there. Yeah, and it takes up so much time, you know but I think that that's looking forward on some of these really difficult implementation questions that we have looking at the climate action plan.  So action is more about mitigation of greenhouse gases those key strategies that we're looking at to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the city level across different departments and sectors but the adaptation plan is saying, okay well, some of these climate impacts are already baked in we are going to be experiencing them to larger extent for the most part as we go forward. So what do we need to do and how should we prioritize getting these adaptation projects done? And so that's being done by CCSR right now and they're starting to hold meetings or they've held a series of meetings already around the island all virtual but they're continuing to engage with people. And really, I think a lot of the question is how do you prioritize risk in these environments? So some of that is going to be making sure you're not just listening to the loudest voice who shows up to all those meetings. Again, that's a question of equity how do we balance exposure in different places versus access to resources versus historical impacts, frankly. Yeah, we at our level, we've just had a big debate about passing another building code which has to do with resilience and the proponent civil engineer said we've got to beef up new buildings to X strength to withstand a mega tsunami. And then other engineers came in and said that's a very nice idea, but it'll increase costs. So what do you do that? Yeah. Yeah, and again, I run into this over and over and over again. Yeah, and it's again weighing those financial and risks versus the impacts, right? Which we saw in Florida with the condo collapse very recently. So that was a risk that they had built into their plans to greater or lesser degree and had chosen not to act yet. And I think that that should be a real consideration for Oahu and the state going forward as well. Yeah, because we have like Southern Florida we have a high salt environment and that can corrode the heck out of the rebars that hold concrete structures together. That seems to have been the culprit in South Florida. And I remember somebody in a high rise here in Honolulu was leaning on a railing and suddenly the railing gave and down he went and the culprit again was corroded the rebars in the concrete. I think there are probably very few people who live in Hawaii who didn't read that news item with a little bit of alarm. So maybe it's good to start the conversation. But I see we're coming up on time. So would you mind if I talked about some kind of priorities for the next year that we've already identified in the commission? You've got about two minutes but actually we can move a little bit over. So please, please go ahead. Okay, let's go to slide nine. And these are priorities for the next year that we already talked about with the director of the CCSR office, Matt Goncer, as well as stakeholders and the commissioners representing people across different departments in the city. So there was a big emphasis on extreme heat actually, how we prepare for extreme heat and ways to shore up our existing infrastructure and who's going to be impacted by that. That's actually one of the most sure impacts of climate change that we can plan for. We know that rainfall might be a little more uncertain but we know it's getting hotter. And so we have to plan for that. And we already see kind of the urban heat island effect. CCSR did a really great study last year looking at the different temperatures all over the city and the island, seeing some big differences between areas with trees and green space versus just pavement. Also integrated stormwater management. So working across different departments to work on ways to manage stormwater across different departments who might be dealing with that. Implementation of the climate action plan like I already mentioned. So we have these nine priorities but how do we actually implement them? How do we provide guidance to actually implement them and meet those goals? There's also interest in looking at economic consequences of different climate change impacts because if we're honest, we can give lots of data and lots of projections but they go a lot, they're a harder pill to swallow when they have a dollar sign attached to them both in how much that costs and how much they'll cost to fix. And then finally, the adaptation strategy from CCSR. So doing community engagement with the city on meeting their adaptation strategies and helping them prioritize their needs. Yes. Wow. Nothing ambitious about that. Nothing whatsoever. So I give you hearty, hearty congratulations, Victoria. And we have come to a close. Thank you so much. It's been a great honor getting to know you and learning all about the commission's work. So until next time, this is Howard Wigg, Code Green, Sync Tech, Hawaii, Mahalo Nui Noa and see you next time.


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