Welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kay Lee Akina, president of the Grassroot Institute, and I'm delighted today to have one of our staff at the Grassroot Institute with us. If you live in Hawaii, or if you've had to move away from Hawaii, you know that one of our biggest problems is a shortage of housing that people can afford. As a result of that, many people simply leave the state in order to find more affordable housing for their careers, for their livelihoods, to raise their family, and so forth. Well, one of the reasons that we seem to have housing that can't be afforded is because of an apparent, perhaps a contrived, shortage of housing due to what we consider to be an artificial scarcity of land. Although there really is more than enough land in the islands to have all the housing that we need and still preserve the beauty of nature and the aquifer and so forth, we ultimately end up developing on only 5% of all the land mass. Did you realize that? And there are strange reasons for that. But one of the problems in getting enough housing for people that can be afforded is an agency that creates a bottleneck. It's called the Land Use Commission. Now, if you really don't know what the Land Use Commission is or does, you're in good company, because hardly anyone does. I'm so proud of the Grassroot Institute staff who've put together a recent research brief entitled Reform the Hawaii LUC to Encourage More Housing. And I'm going to say that again. Reform the Hawaii LUC to Encourage More Housing. And you can get a free copy of this on our website, grassrootinstitute.org. I'm with the staff person who led that project and wrote the report for us today. Research associate Jackson Grubb, a graduate of Brigham Young University up in Laie, and a student at the University of Virginia School of Law right now. He's an outstanding researcher, and we're so glad he's on the Grassroot Institute team. Jackson, welcome to the program, Aloha. Aloha, thanks for having me. Well, you know all there is to know about the Land Use Commission. I'm sure that's good talk at a cocktail party. Well, I wouldn't say that I know all of it, and you're right, that it's not a particularly glamorous issue, but I think it's extremely important. It is, indeed. And why don't you start right at the beginning and tell us what the Land Use Commission is. And in particular, how it may differ from other boards that we're familiar with here in Hawaii? Sure, so the Land Use Commission was created in 1961 under the Land Use Law, and its purpose was to stop subdivisions that were spreading throughout agricultural conservation lands. You would have subdivisions on places like lava fields. And so the government stepped in and said, we need to centralize this and make sure that land use regulations are more structured and predictable. In a way that doesn't, as you mentioned, that doesn't compromise natural resource protection. Well, how is this Land Use Commission different from the county planning boards? And in fact, one of the major differences, of course, is the fact that the Land Use Commission exists on a statewide level, whereas planning boards exist at the counties. So Hawaii is unique in that it's the only state that has a statewide land use commission or something like that. Most jurisdictions have something where they handle everything at the county level or some multi-county land use authorities. So in the case of the Land Use Commission, what its purpose is to do is to handle district boundary amendments. And first, we'll have to explain the difference between land use and zoning. So land use in Hawaii, it involves there's four categories, and that's urban, agricultural, rural, and conservation. So when someone wants to reclassify a piece of land, the Land Use Commission is the board that oversees that and oversees the request to change the land use designation. That's different from a zoning board, because a zoning board is a matter of specific uses and specific impacts. So within an urban classification, you might have residential zoning or you would have commercial zoning or mixed use zoning, industrial zoning, those kinds of things. So land use is bigger picture. Zoning is more specific and smaller picture. Now what kind of challenge does it create that the land use is situated or the governance of that is situated in a statewide board with overall control as opposed to at the county level, at the most local level of government? In talking with various developers, one of the main problems that it poses is delays. And so delays are a problem because in any development deal, any increased risk can jeopardize a housing development. Any added time, partners might back out of the deal, financiers might change their interest rates, you might have legal changes in terms of just laws that get passed for different regulations. Let's say that there's certain requirements that the project would have met before. And then if the law changes, then they have to go back through that. And any amount that you extend the building and approval process, that creates more and more possibilities for things to jeopardize the ultimate completion of the project. Now, challenges such as the one you're talking about, for example, delays for developers are things that you became aware of, not only theoretically through your research, but by actually talking with a broad spectrum of stakeholders, developers, citizens, and so forth, government leaders. Tell us just really briefly about the extent of interviews and so forth you conducted in the research project. So I wanted to get a, as you mentioned, a broad spectrum of people who are interested in this. So I spoke with developers, I spoke with certain government officials. And yeah, I'm just chatted about what are, well, with the government officials more, what does the Land Use Commission do, trying to get a background? How does that relate to, as you were saying, zoning and other kinds of regulators? And then with the developers, it was, what is your experience with the Land Use Commission? Have you done projects that involve the Land Use Commission? And actually, multiple developers that I spoke with said that they didn't, they specifically didn't do any projects that required LUC, Land Use Commission, approval because of the possible delays and possible lawsuits that can arise throughout the process. What was the LUC supposed to do for us here in Hawaii when it was created? And how does it compare to what it's doing now? Well, it was supposed to stop the, again, back in 1961, things weren't as stable in terms of the county's ability to handle permitting, planning, land use through designations. And so it wanted to, it stopped to centralize everything in order to control the Wild West approach that didn't involve any, again, centralized authority. And so it curbed that by requiring everyone to go through one agency. That compares to now where even though counties have become better at planning for urban expansion and development, the Land Use Commission still handles a lot of centralized, or it still has a lot of centralized authority. And so its effect is that at times it can create delays which increases risk for developers. And when risks are increased, then it's less likely that deals will go through meaning that ultimately housing can be stifled or delayed. Well, ultimately, how does the process affect the average person who wants to build a house? So the average person who wants to build a house wouldn't necessarily be affected because the Land Use Commission only handles district boundary amendments or petitions for reclassifying the land. Again, we talked about those four categories, urban, rural, agricultural, conservation. So they handle larger parcels. So when it comes to developers who say that the LUC hinders construction, can you give me some examples as to how that takes place? Sure. So from a bigger picture perspective, in the counties, you have, when you go to seek a district boundary amendment, and this is where it kind of gets technical, but the Land Use Commission handles district boundary amendments that are larger than 15 acres and counties handle certain district boundary amendments that are on parcels that are smaller than 15 acres. You know, just looking at some of the process, what are some examples of the delays that are caused by the LUC for developers? And I know you know several of them, you've cited a handful in the study itself. Sure. So again, as I was talking, the Land Use Commission handles larger parcels, the county handles smaller parcels. So at the county level, all of the land use approvals have to be changed at the same time. So that would include the district boundary amendment and then what are called CPAs and CIZs. But when a project requires Land Use Commission approval, it has to go through the Land Use Commission process first. So it needs to get the statewide district boundary amendment. And then after that it, you have to get the CPAs and CIZs, any of the other local processes. So that's one aspect from a more structural perspective. But on the ground, what happens is the LUC often requires conditions of approval, which are essentially, if I'm a developer and I say, hey, I want to build, you know, this housing development here, the Land Use Commission will say, okay, that's great, but you need to meet these certain requirements. And that could have to do anything from environmental concerns, public facilities, infrastructure, those kinds of things. However, when you go to do the county approvals, counties require similar things. They look at environmental concerns, public facilities. And so because there's a lot of overlap, it will take the LUC process and make it a little bit longer instead of just having the county review certain things. Now, that's not to say that the Land Use Commission should not exist. It's purpose in terms of addressing statewide issues during district boundary amendments, that's important. But the point of the report is to say that there are certain avenues that we could take, certain options that legislators could take to make more efficient Land Use approvals. Right, you know, one of the areas where developers are very frustrated is in the time it takes to develop affordable housing. And affordable housing has become an important part of their being able to do their business because of concessions that are needed to be made in order to get certain permit permissions to build. In what ways does the LUC hamstring the development of affordable housing, something much needed throughout the islands? So it's not so much that it specifically targets affordable housing. And by the way, Jackson, I'm talking for our viewers, I'm not talking about housing that's affordable. I'm specifically talking about partnerships with the government for affordable housing projects. Sure, so the delays that the LUC imposes, that's across the board. So it's not necessarily affordable housing targeted, but it does happen to affect affordable housing developments if they are above that 15 acre threshold that we talked about. For example, there was one on Maui. I forget the exact name right now, but it was just above the 15 acre threshold and it was pushed off a couple of years because of the process and the added conditions and the LUC process in general, instead of just going through the county. Very good. Well, I'll ask you a little bit more about that when we come back from a quick break. To my viewers, we're listening to Jackson Grubb who is a research associate at the Grassroot Institute who led a project recently in which we published a brief on the Land Use Commission. We'll have more questions for him and he'll have some great answers when you come back in just a moment to think Tech of Hawaii's Hawaii together. I'm Keely Iakena, don't go away. Back to Hawaii together, we're talking with Jackson Grubb about the Land Use Commission and I hope you've enjoyed learning the rudiments of what that is and how it impacts the development of housing across the islands. I'm gonna go back to Jackson right now with a question that goes to something you mentioned earlier about the Land Use Commission's mission that somehow it has gotten mixed up with zoning regulation. So how did this happen and why does that create a problem? Sure, so again, going back to the difference between land use and zoning. So what has happened is that the LUC in their reviews of these petitions to change the category of the land, they'll look at the same kinds of things that the county would look at in a permitting application, for example. And that has to do with development designs, associated impacts, economic feasibility. And the reason it's a problem is because those things could already be handled at the county level. And so again, I don't wanna be confused. The LUC does have an important role. I think that the LUC is well-equipped to handle issues such as natural resource protection, conservation land, the things like potable water availability and those things that the county isn't necessarily equipped to handle. But when it comes down to looking at an individual project and requiring the same kinds of conditions that would be required anyway at the county level, that's where it just creates delays that it doesn't need to. And that's a departure from the original mission of the LUC. There are certain advantages of the ability to make decisions at the most local level, at the county level. What are those advantages for the consumer and for the developer? As well as just for the entire state and in terms of the benefit of managing our resource as well. Sure, so here's the big picture. It's that when you have a more efficient process, or I guess if you were to reallocate some authority that the LUC has by giving some of it to the county to handle the issues that could have been handled on the county anyway, and we'll go through that a little bit more later. It makes the overall approval process more efficient. When the approval process is more efficient, it signals to developers that it's a less risky process, meaning that more housing developments will be able to exist. They might not, anyway, again, some of the developers that I cited in the research report mentioned that they specifically avoid the land use commission process because it does take longer and it opens them up to greater risk. So with lower risk, more housing, obviously with more housing, it will reduce the prices. Well, I've spoken with many developers and in exasperation, many of them raised their hands and say we should completely eliminate the land use commission. Now, we don't take that position at the Grassroot Institute. We have looked at various options for modifying or reforming the land use commission and you discussed some of these in the report. What are some of the ways we could reform the land use commission in order to spur on more housing supply? Sure, so again, I do not think that eliminating the LUC is the correct option. I think that what could be done first is to give the counties the authority to handle petitions for the district boundary amendments, those reclassifications that have to do with agricultural and urban land. I don't think that the county should handle conservation land and I think that that's what the LUC should be retained for. So when talking about these policy proposals, it's important to distinguish what the counties will end up doing and what the land use commission will end up doing. In my report, I say that the land use commission should be retained for conservation lands, important agricultural land designation and again, other natural resource issues like potable water availability. I think that the LUC is better equipped than the counties to handle the larger statewide issues but I think that in terms of redistricting certain parcels of land for individual developments, that's something that the counties could take kind of a workload off of the back of the LUC. Not only that, they're closer to the developers and the people on their islands and so they're able to be more responsive and create a more efficient process of permitting development. I like the fact that you point out that the land use commission, if freed up from the other duties that the counties should be doing, would be able to pay more attention to conservation and I think that's an important point that land use commission reform doesn't need to be a step backward from conservation but can actually be something that spurs conservation forward, which I think is an important value throughout the islands. Now- Right, and that's in line with what the original purpose was, right? Because these subdivisions in the 60s and 70s were blowing up everywhere and again, being built on lava fields and things, they absolutely should not be built. I think that's kind of going back to the core of what the LUC was all about and it's just looking at those broader picture perspective things and then, but since the counties have become better at planning and permitting issues, those more local issues, it's just more efficient to have counties handle a little bit more and for the land use commission to stay focused on that bigger picture perspective. Jackson, what are some of the more notable attempts at reforming the LUC that have taken place in the past? Well, in 2015, Senate President Kim introduced a bill to eliminate the LUC altogether and again, I don't think that that was the right move and that bill ultimately failed. Aside from that, the counties, I think it's the Association of Counties introduces a bill every year to increase the acreage at which the LUC gets involved in district boundary amendments. Well, this is quite an interesting subject and I'm interested, Jackson, in knowing how you got involved in studying land use commission and the related issues. Sure, so I guess the start of it all was that I worked on a political campaign doing policy research and that led me to housing and just the issues involved with that because it's the biggest issue in Hawaii and in addition, the land use as it's associated with environmental impacts and infrastructure, all those things kind of playing together. And so when I came to Grasser Institute, I took my experience and I expanded on it and I wanted to learn more about housing and land use. Again, it's not very glamorous of an issue. To other people, but I find it fascinating because what's more important than land use? Everything is land and it's especially important in Hawaii. Absolutely and we care very much at Grasser Institute to Ma'alama, the Aina, which is an important value held by the people of Hawaii to care for the land. But at the same time as we care for the land, we care for the people, that there need to be places for people to live where they can afford and thrive and have that relationship with the land, with the Aina that is so important. Before we go, can you discuss how some of our policy proposals may actually empower or impact this supply of housing, land available for the development of housing? How does it work nuts and bolts of that? Sure, so I didn't even get to the second proposal. So the first proposal I mentioned is give the district boundary amendment to counties for agricultural and urban designations. The second would be to just increase the acreage at which the LUC gets involved. So currently that cutoff is 15 acres, but I proposed and other bills that were proposed last year suggested that we should make the acreage cutoff 25 acres. So while it's not a perfect solution, it does increase the cutoff for when the LUC gets involved. How that translates into measurable results for the people of Hawaii is that with more efficient land use regulations, more housing will be able to be built. And that's because developers will have less risk. And so more deals will go through, there will be less stifling, less filled projects essentially. And ultimately that will result in more housing. And with a higher supply of housing should drive down prices for overall. Now, some who care deeply about the environment as well as the pono use of the proper use of the land and respect for Hawaiian culture as well, we're very concerned with the legislature started to talk about increasing the 15 acre rule to allow the land use commission to come in at a later time with a larger amount of land. Now, our proposal is somewhat different, but what would you say to those concerns? How can we allay those concerns? Sure. So just by increasing the acreage doesn't mean that, it's gonna be some divisions everywhere, destroying all of the natural resources. I think there absolutely is a balance. And that's why I think that the LUC should be retained for those environmental concerns. But it's a matter of how large the 25 acres is, for example, the difference between 15 and 25 acres isn't substantial in the sense that it's not gonna affect the entire state. It's not a point where the state needs to get involved. But just, again, a more efficient use of resources is different from attacking natural resources. I want to be clear, the natural resources are absolutely essential to Hawaii and what makes it great. I don't think that this change, these changes will result in widespread construction and going through those conservation lands. I think that it's just a matter of placing housing more efficiently. And for example, since only 5% of the land currently is designated for housing, if you increased the amount of land available for housing in Hawaii by 1%, proportionally, that's a 20% increase. And that's an important topic for us to discuss. It's an increase that will make a massive difference in terms of providing more housing availability. And yet it's not something that's going to impact the environment, it's something we can manage. And one note I'd like to make as we close here is that you mentioned earlier that if a proper division of labor is struck between the counties and the land use commission, the land use commission can spend more energy and focus on conservation, which is one of its major purposes. And so we shouldn't be too afraid of some of the reforms that we're suggesting. Before you go, Jackson, I just want to thank you so much for being here today and for working on the team of the Grassroots Institute. Can you just share with our viewers a little bit about why you value working on the Grassroots Institute and what you're doing for Hawaii, which is your... Absolutely. Well, I got interested in Hawaiian issues just because I lived there and I enjoyed my time there and I hope to return. I recently moved actually, I'm currently in Virginia, but I just, I want to give back to the people of Hawaii and I see my work doing research and handling these very difficult issues that ultimately affect housing and land use, which are so important to Hawaii as a way of giving back. And I hope to make Hawaii my home for the rest of my life. That's great. Well, Jackson, thank you for being with us and to everyone dealing today. We'll see you next time on Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network until then, aloha.


Look at this flea jumping through the air. With a lot of effort and some luck, the flea could land on one of its target and the whole itching cycle begins. How can the flea jump like this? And what is the velocity with which a flea should jump so that it reaches the height that it does? And finally, what is the height that humans would reach if they could jump like a flea? Let's try to answer all of those questions in this video. So here we have the flea, all ready to jump. And usually fleas they weigh around 0.5 milligrams and their height is 2 millimeters. On an average, a flea could reach a height of 30 centimeters when they jump. So let's say that a flea is jumping from the ground, here is a flea, and it jumps and reaches this height which we say is usually 30 centimeters. This is, and let me write this in meters, this is 0.3 meters. Now when the flea jumps, there will be some take-off velocity, right? There will be some take-off velocity, we can call this speed. And at the highest point, we can say that there is some velocity, but it has reached a height, so it has gained some gravitational potential energy. All of this initial kinetic energy has changed to gravitational potential energy. And we can apply the conservation of energy principle. We can try and figure out the take-off velocity from that. We are not considering any form of air resistance. So we can write half mv square, that is the initial kinetic energy, equals to the gravitational potential energy, and there is no kinetic energy at the highest point. So this is equal to mgh. The good thing about this is that mass gets cancelled off. So m, we don't have to deal with m, v square is equal to 2gh. So v, this is equal to under root of 2gh. And when we work this out, when we plug in values, g and h, g we can take as 10, h is 0.3. So this is really under root of 2 into 10 into 0.3. And this is, this is 6. So under root of 6 is approximately 2.5, 2.45, 2.45 meters per second. So these are the take-off velocities for fleas mostly. Now despite not seeing much, but let's try to understand this from the perspective of a flea. So a flea is only 2 millimeters tall, and it can reach a height of 30 centimeters. How would that look like in human terms? Let's say the height of some human, that's, it's 2 meters, let's say it is 2 meters.  So let's try and work that out. If this is, we are considering the ratios to be the same. So we are considering the, how tall the flea is, that is 2 millimeters. This is divided by 30 centimeters, and, and a human, human's height, we are considering this as 2 meters divided by the height that we want to figure out if a human could jump like a flea. Now these are in different units. This is centimeters, this is millimeters, this is meters. We need to change, let's keep all of them in meters. This is 2 into 10 to the power minus 3 divided by 30 into 10 to the power minus 2. This is equal to 2 divided by h. Now many things get canceled off and when we work this out, the height, this height comes out to be equal to 300 meters. So this really means that if a human could jump like a flea, they would be able to reach a height of 300 meters to put it in perspective. That means in a, in a single jump, you are able to reach the top of this building from the ground. And if we try and understand the velocity with which a human should jump to be able to reach that height, we can again apply conservation of energy principle. We can, we can write, let's, let's remove this again. We can, we can write half mv square that is equal to mgh. So that's really, that's really half into mv square equals to mgh. Again m gets canceled off and v is under root of 2gh, but h here is 300 meters. So this is 2 into 10 into 300. So this is 20 into 300 under root of 6,000. And this, this is 77.4 meters per second. This is just incredibly high. Now the big question is how can a flea jump like that? What does a flea possess? What does a flea have that it can jump? It can make that incredible jumps. So, so it, it comes to a kind of protein which is called resilent. Let me, let me remove this, let me remove this all together. It's a kind of protein which is called, which is called resilent. And this protein makes the muscles very elastic, kind of like how a spring would act. So if you have a spring and if you have a ball on top of a spring, when you compress it, when you compress it like this, and then when you let it go, the ball would reach incredible heights, kind of like this, the ball lifts off and reaches great height. Similarly, how a flea's legs act when, when a flea compresses its legs. Because of resilent, the muscles act like springs. They store all of this, all of this elastic energy. And when the flea takes off, when it lifts off, it kind of extends like a spring, giving the flea some incredible speed so that it can reach a great height. And unfortunately, we don't have that. So we are nowhere close to how a flea could make a jump.


Victoria's Aboriginal communities are rich in history and culture. Throughout the organisation, CFA is broadening our community partnerships and cultural exchange and knowledge sharing. Experiences like the site visit in the north-east I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was an eye-opening experience and it truly deepened our understanding of our Indigenous culture. The ability to identify Aboriginal cultural heritage sites means we will be able to aid in the preservation of Victoria's rich history. Our shared history is vital to our future and we embrace the opportunity to broaden our knowledge about how Indigenous Australians have managed this land for thousands of years. And we are committed to our Aboriginal inclusion and engagement. This can be seen through CFA's CURY inclusion action plan. CFA has invested in upskilling our people in cultural burning too. In June, more than 30 CFA people attend the upcoming Fire Stick Forum in Barma. With this year's seam in mind, grounded in truth, walk together with courage. I encourage you all to have a look for local opportunities where you can further your understanding and knowledge of Aboriginal culture and history.


No, I haven't done the macarain in a long time. I don't want to know about your personal life.  This is Corbin, that's Rick, I'm Corbin, and that's Rick. And I'm whatever he said. Please follow us on Instagram and Twitter. It's all juicy content. Coming to you in 3D. Where's the starting to get hot in here? No, Rick, you're just hot. Thanks, baby. No, you're not. Anyway, today we're reacting to a dance by Prabhu. Oh, yeah, baby. And it's actually a newer thing. We've been doing a lot of that lately. If you've gone down the list of videos, you'll see that in recent days, it's like when we started the channel, it was nothing but undercut. It happens. It happens. We go on these trends. We get infatuated. What do you want from us? Actually, I wouldn't even call them trends because we're way behind the trends. We're way behind the trends. We get infatuated with stuff that you guys have forgotten about. Yeah. But it's actually one of his newer things. Okay. So it's from ABCD. I'm concerned that this won't make it to the channel. Yeah. We did ABCD. We've done ABCD and ABCD two dances. Yeah. Twice. And they both got them blocked. Yep. So I don't know about this. If it's only Patreon, I'm sorry. That happens. I can't do anything about it. I'm sorry. But this is a, I think this is a solo dance by Prabhu. Oh, sweet. It's called ABCD Original Dance with Prabhu. Oh, this is going to be just a solo of his? I believe so. I hope that would be awesome. I'm waiting. Here we go. You all know who it is. Yeah.  You want to have a dance off with this man? You've lost already. Before he's even started. I bet people are crazy because they didn't know who it was. Oh yeah. Come on. Different styles there. Yeah. Obviously the first one was very Michael inspired. Yeah. Crumping. Yeah. And then at the end it kind of went back to Michael. Yeah. Because the beginning he had had a couple of shout outs to Michael. Shout outs, of course. And I love to know how much of that was actually definitively choreographed. And I felt like a couple of spots in there were some measures where he just was allowing himself to just improv something. Yeah. He's so fun to watch dance. He feels like a very improvisational. Improvisational, doesn't he? Yeah. That's what he feels like. He really does. Which is a skill in and of itself. It's a dangerous skill to, I mean, if you watch Michael do improvs, Michael's improvs were very much repetitive movements of stuff he's done before. Whereas, and that's partly because Michael was more a dancer than he was a choreographer. I mean, Michael could do choreography, but that wasn't his primary skill set. He had choreographers work for him. This guy's a choreographer. And choreographers are the ones who create the movements. Like even the moonwalk, that wasn't Michael's. He found out on the street in New York. That came from street dancing. Is the difference between, because I'm not a dancer, as you know, I can dance, but I don't dance. Like I can dance with my wife. But is the difference between a choreographer and a dancer the same as a songwriter and a singer? 100%. Yes. Not all singers are songwriters. Most songwriters are singers, but they may not be really good singers. But yes, a choreographer like the songwriter is the person who can come up with the movements and the music itself inspires them. And they will listen to the music and they'll visualize and they'll come up with the movements. And then the dancer takes what the choreographer did and interprets it. And the same thing, like a songwriter from out of thin air comes up with the song. And not all dancers are choreographers. All choreographers are dancers. The same thing with a songwriter. You may not be a good singer, but if you write songs, you sing what you write. You're not going to be a great singer necessarily. And some are both. Some are singer songwriters. He's a dancer slash choreographer. And you can see it. And that's why I think you're right. A lot of his dance, because it's like example. If you would just give a microphone to Eminem and say go, he'll just create something on the spot. And any rapper worth their weight is going to be able to just create right there on the spot. A choreographer could do the same thing. Just give him some music and they're going to start to create right there. And I felt like we saw him doing that. And also it's really impressive because he's still as fast as he was in the younger videos we've seen. And this was probably a good 20 years later. So I find that quite impressive. He's probably around here, Rach. Wouldn't you say? I would think so. Maybe a little bit younger. But clearly he's kept his chops up and is clearly untouchable in terms of his dancing. And that's my favorite thing about this guy is I have long said, don't imitate Michael. It's great that you'd honor Michael. But enough, man. Michael would want you to go, there's the bar. Now go fly above the thing, man. Show me. And that's what I love about him. He gives these little shout outs. But he's not a... Like the whatever dance move. Yeah, the little move where he does something. And even the things where he's in and his legs go in out and out. That's a Michael thing. But he just kind of takes it and is like, okay, yeah, that's what the chef gave us in the past. It tastes like Michael, but watch what I'm going to do. And I love that about the guy. And the fact that he can do so many different styles. He's a much, much more diverse. I would love to see him do as many different things. I'm sure there's not a dance form this guy can't do. If you just give him the time. I'm sure he could do any dance form. I still need to send us a tap video because Rick is obsessed with tap dancing. Yeah, I love tap dancing. And part of Michael's footwork is because he could tap. Yeah, so if there's an insane tap dancing thing, I don't know. Yeah, do you have any... Because I haven't seen it yet. I don't want to just see somebody who can tap. I want us to know if you guys have like tap dancers. Like blow my mind tap dancers. Because if you do, I want to see them. I don't know how to tap or... I mean, it sounds impressive. Thanks for watching.


The Italian Genic Sina surrendered the opening sets but battled back to seal a 3-6-6-4-6-1-6-2 victory over American Brandon Nakashima at the US Open. Sina, seated 11th and 56th place above Nakashima in the World Rankings, dropped his serve in the sixth game of the opening set to fall behind but came back strongly with two service breaks in each of the next three sets to complete his win in the early hours of Sunday morning after just over three hours of play. Arenas Balinka of Belarus, the former World No. 2 and semi-finalist at Floshing Meadows last year, demolished Qualifier Clara Borrell 6-0-6-2 in just 68 minutes, hitting 27 winners past the 21-year-old from France. So Balinka will next face American Daniel Collins, who amped 52 winners past experience Aliza Connett or France in a 6-4-7-6-9 victory to book a sport in the fourth round of the US Open for the first time.


Welcome to Mobile Impact 201, Digital Content Strategies for Mobile. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm a program manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for about 6 years, having been previously spent a decade working for nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California, where I was usually the accidental techie, where I had no tech expertise by trade, but often had to make technology decisions for the organizations I worked with. That has brought me here to TechSoup, where I was a user of TechSoup services before joining the staff, and now running the webinar program. Our presenter today is Amy Sample Ward, who is the CEO of N10, the nonprofit technology network. They provide a variety of great technology resources for nonprofits, including their annual conference, the nonprofit technology conference each year, that a lot of us attend and love, and they also run 501 tech clubs or organizations around the country that are local groups that help you connect with one another and meet technology experts and share your expertise and experiences. Also joining us on the back end you'll see Allie Bestikian, who is a TechSoup interactive events and video producer. She'll be on the back end to help you with any questions and flag those questions for our presenters throughout the webinar so that we can make sure that those get asked. A quick look at today's agenda. I'll do an introduction of TechSoup and the Mobile Impact webinar series for those of you who may not be familiar with us. Then I'll hand it off to Amy to take over, giving us an update on the state of mobile and where we're at in using mobile technologies. Then she'll talk about mobile content strategies with mobile and social planning. She'll discuss some trends to consider and how to get started. We will have time for Q&A at the end but feel free at any point that it moves you to do so to chat in your questions because we may have opportunities throughout to raise up some questions here and there. So TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit working toward the day when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has access to the technology knowledge and resources to work at its full potential. That includes providing events like today's webinar. We have been around since 1987 serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. We have a catalog of product donations available to you from companies like Microsoft and Cisco and Intuit, and we are continually adding to that to provide new services like consulting for technology, Windows 8.1, and QuickBooks 2014. You can find all of that and more by coming to TechSoup.org. And just a quick note about this webinar series. This is the second in our four-part mobile impact webinar series that we're doing with sponsorship from TechSoup but also from Better World Wireless, PayPal, and Network for Good where we've all kind of come together realizing that nonprofits need help in figuring out how to navigate the mobile space and how to leverage mobile for your organization's benefit. So in doing that, we've provided this series of webinars. This is the second today, and we have two others coming up. So we'll provide links to those in more details toward the end. We also have a number of partners that are helping us get the word out about this series so we want to give them credit quickly that we have social media for nonprofits, Volunteer Match, Mobile Beacon, and Ten where Amy is from. The Case Foundation, Foundation Center, and GuideStar who are also all contributing to this series of events to help you leverage mobile for your greater impact. So with that, I'd like to take a moment to invite Amy Sample Ward to join us on the line to share some of her great expertise on mobile impact and digital content strategies for mobile. Thanks so much for joining us today, Amy. Welcome to the line. Amy Sample Ward Thanks so much, Becky. I'm excited to be here, and I've already seen one chat come in from Norman. So I'm excited to see so many folks are on the webinar and recognize that I'm probably not the only person on this webinar who's tried to do anything with mobile. So I really invite and remind everyone to use that chat box, not just to chat questions, but if you have an example. If you've tried something that we're covering today before and are willing to share some of your experience or your knowledge, please, please, please do use that chat box to share your ideas and we can read those back or unmute your line if it's easier. Whatever it is, I want this to be a space that is not just me having the opportunity to talk, but really anyone on here who has experience or ideas, please do share them. So welcome and thank you for having me, and let's get started. I want to, as Becky said, share just a little bit of some data for context setting because I think for many of us something happens. I don't know why this happens, but I see it happen all the time. And that is that as individuals we are using our phones, many of which are smart phones, all the time. You know we're at home, we're using our phone, we're maybe on the bus on the way to work, we're using our phone, and then we show up at our nonprofits and we walk into our office and sit down at our desk and put our phone over on the side and then go into this place where we kind of pretend that phones don't exist. And we think, okay, I'm going to work today, craft the most beautiful email message that I can and I'm going to send it out and every single one of our subscribers is going to read this email in full and that's going to be it. We put all of this energy into certain pieces of content and certain pieces of communication and forget that our subscribers, our supporters are just like us and using our phones all the time to read email but also to engage in social media and to really use the web. So I want to share some context about how much the web is being used through mobile phones and other just a couple other data points to remind us all that we should be thinking about phones while we're at work and not treating ourselves differently than our supporters are probably treating our content. So a few notes from, so this is data as of January of this year. I'm sure that there's even more recent data and I'm happy if you are looking for specific data that is maybe more aligned with your cause or your mission. Feel free to let me know and I'm happy to help make sure you have data that's appropriate for your use. So 90% of American adults generally have a mobile phone and 58% have a smart phone. So I'm guessing like I said that a number of folks on the webinar today probably follow in this category and have a smart phone. 32% of American adults own an e-reader so that's like a Kindle and 42% have a tablet. So something that they're doing much more than an e-reading on but are accessing the web, using apps, all those kinds of things. And here's just a trend map over time. I think it's helpful to see all of these kind of against each other, how different tools are getting adopted, and something to really highlight here. I often get questions about this but you can see that the orange looking dots and lines are related to a game console. So for as you can see on here, a good number of people actually have game consoles that are internet enabled and are actually served as portals to browsing the web, often accessing other applications, not just other games. So all of these different technologies kind of play into a whole ecosystem of opportunities for individual people to be accessing your content. But what's most important to note is that all of these pieces have very different screen sizes and very different optimal viewing settings. So if you've crafted a really beautiful campaign message but it's mostly text and you have folks pulling up that message on a game console or a smart device that's using a TV screen as its display, oh my gosh, I'm sure that no one is going to read that. I wouldn't be able to read a text heavy campaign message on a huge blown up screen. So this combination of media, text, and pictures, and video, and all those other pieces coming together really starts to make sense when you think about how many different sizes and access points people may be using to review that content. So here's a note just about people with cell phones going online and what isn't indicated here that I can tell you from this same report is that 34% of people said that they use their mobile phone more than any other device to go on the internet. So it is mostly their internet provider, 34% of people which is I think for many folks kind of a surprising number that that's their primary access point to the internet. But even though we are talking about folks using their phones to go online and browse the web and read your emails and download apps, it is important for nonprofits to remember that the primary activity for most people on a phone is to send and receive text messages. And I think that there are plenty of examples out there of organizations who have incorporated text messaging into their kind of messaging and content plan for their organization and have found great ways not just to do text to give, which I know will be covered in the next webinar in this series with other fundraising tactics, but really to engage people, to remind them of call to action, or to keep them engaged in ways that are pretty lightweight just through a text message. So there are definitely opportunities not just to try and think about mobile as a place where you have to develop an app or is a web-only space, but really text messages are still a huge, huge portion of what we are doing with those devices. And here is a breakdown. So these are going to only be smartphones. iOS is the iPhone series, and Android would be any different make or model that is using the Android operating system. So here is a breakdown of how people are spending their time on those phones. You can see that Facebook has a large enough percentage of time that it is getting a pretty hefty chunk of that pie chart there. But also important to note are there are various pieces that add up to just web browsers. So there are Google browsers, Apple Safari, etc. So those are people that are not inside of an app or inside of a game, but they are really getting content on the web similar as they would on a desktop on their phone. So of course do that question then of that balance between time spent in apps or on the mobile web. Here is a pretty clear chart. But just a reminder that that doesn't mean you have to have an app in order to engage with people. So as we saw, if I can not make anybody seasick by going back a slide, let me grab my little arrow. It's not letting me grab that, but that's okay. Everyone can see that Facebook is right there on the right side with 17%. Twitter with 1.5 social messaging. Thank you Becky, social messaging. Otherwise 9.5, YouTube 4%. All of those channels are showing up here as people spending time in that application, but there is content in that application from you. You can be engaging on Facebook or other social messaging tools. You could have some great YouTube videos that are maybe even linked to from an email that you send out to folks, encouraging them to watch this video. So I don't want anyone to look at this chart and think 86% of time is spent in apps. Well, we need to develop an app. That's not the case. What that's really saying is that people are using existing channels where they already know there's a lot of different people or a lot of different content, and that's where they're spending their time. So it really does reinforce that it's a great opportunity for you to go to those places where your community is already engaged instead of necessarily trying to create another space for them to know about and download and try and engage with. I hope that makes sense. So here's a chart that just kind of illustrates what we've been getting at here that folks are using their phones for the web, and even 34%, like I said before, indicating that they use their mobile phone as their primary Internet access point. So it's right at the very edge on the right side of the chart, but you can see that total mobile app usage has taken over just slightly now on desktop usage. So that certainly is the trend that these other devices, be that tablet or a phone, are taking over in a pretty lasting way how we're using the Internet. And then one note here from our, every year we do the Benchmarks report with M&R Strategic Services. It's totally free to download, and it covers primarily email and list information, so advocacy and fundraising as well as just general community or newsletter type content, so breaking that down by open rates and click-throughs, and the number of times messages are sent, etc. But we do include a section on social media, and that includes some mobile numbers. So I wanted to include this as just kind of a general guideline to help give you some perspective, at least of the organizations that we have access to in this research each year. So for every 1,000 email subscribers, so for every 1,000 people that you have in your database, on average this is not going to be empirical, but on average that means you have 199 Facebook fans and 110 Twitter followers and 13 mobile subscribers. And that does not mean 13 people who are reading your Facebook posts or reading your emails on their phone, but 13 people who have given you their cell phone number to subscribe directly to text content from you. And we will get more to that in a little bit, but just as a general rule and helpful also to give many organizations perspective, oh my gosh, we've got 10,000 people in our database, and I only have this many Twitter followers well for many organizations. That average really is a pretty small piece. So if you're doing better than that then you can, this is your good congratulations for the day. You can go share with your team that you're way ahead of the average. So I'm just going to move ahead. If you do have questions about any of that data, or like I said, if you've been looking for some mobile data that's maybe specific to your organization or the community that you work with, feel free to send me an email anytime. I'm happy to make sure you have data that can help make your case whatever it is you're trying to work on. So diving into some planning because as I mentioned, you really want to fold mobile into how you think about all this other social engagement and community outreach and your communications, etc. First step is to review that content. So of course what content do you want to have, but what I think is most important is what content do you already have? Do you already have calls to action that could be easily translated into an SMS, a text message that people could respond to? Or are your calls to action, do they really require people be at their computer and can sit down and read that message? So figuring out which pieces of content and calls to action you have, and of course what channels are you already using that content in? Have you learned something from that? Have you seen that that content really does work well on Facebook, but it just hasn't been working well maybe on your website? And that can tell you a lot about where to go next. This is one of my extremely highly designed graphs. I'm going to launch my career as a designer of course. So the point here is really just to remind us, even though we are talking about mobile, which is a tool and we are talking a lot about our content, that those two things don't get to decide what you do and they're not necessarily going to indicate whether you're going to be successful or not. Ultimately you need to know what your goal is and have that goal be in direct relation to the people that you are trying to communicate with or that you are working with directly. And those people and your goal are the most important pieces before you ever talk about mobile or SMS messages or anything else. Really figuring out who the people are and what they need from you and what you want to do with them, what you want to call them to do is key. And from there when you are looking at these tools and content pieces you can focus on the people because you know that you have now sunk your goal in with them and you can look to them to say are these people who are on their phones, are these people who are maybe heavily in Facebook on their phone or are they more text message focused? Are they using their phone for everything? And then what content makes sense based on the way they are using those tools? And let the tools and the content decisions really follow from the people that you are working with and not just the content that you want to post to that channel. And I think for many folks this is what content planning meetings feel like in their organization. So many different questions emerge. So I wanted to share just a really simple template for planning out some content for your organization that you can use in an ongoing way as a resource across the organization. So the first part of any content map is identifying the content that you have. And again this is all the different pieces of content you have. You are not saying in this content map that all content goes everywhere but we are going to get to that in the next couple of slides. The first step is having an understanding of all of those different types of content that you are currently creating or that you may be creating soon so that you don't create a content map, share it with everyone on staff so everyone knows certain types of content work best wherever and then you go to your next staff meeting and someone says, oh now we have all of this content and you haven't planned for that. So you really want to categorically cover all of those different departments. And the more nuanced or granular you can be, the better. This is of course pretty generic and pretty high level buckets because it is just here to provide some examples and context but ultimately you might not just say any of our program updates you might say using N10 as an example. Tech Club updates, so updates about our local offline events versus online education program updates versus our conference updates. So the more specific you can be, the better. From there of course as we showed in that previous slide, you want to make sure that goals are a central piece of this. So listing out goals for why you are actually posting that type of content, why you create that content in the first place is key for you to know how to frame it, how to position it, and who in your community to post it to. And a reminder that sometimes you have a piece of content that has multiple goals. Promoting for example program news about the NTC, about N10's conference is of course trying to get at the second goal here of increasing participation in the conference but it may also be to find sponsors or partners because we have promoted that there is something new going on about the conference. So you don't have to winnow down to just one goal for every piece of content but including the relevant goals in this content map when you share it across your staff can help everyone feel like they know why that content exists and why it gets shared. And then the third piece is figuring out all of those different outlets that you have access to. So separating SMS messages from an email newsletter that maybe, and we can talk about this, you've mobile optimized every different social media channel that you use. And a reminder here that if you do any work with a coalition with an organizational partner, maybe even with a funder, and those other organizations have a Facebook page or have an email newsletter, this is a great opportunity in your kind of infrastructure of content planning to include and identify who all those partner networks are so that when you are thinking about releasing an update about your conference and you know that you have three funders who have Facebook pages too, you can reach out to them and include them and help kind of widen the field. So this is what it looks like and you can get a very simple template. That URL on your screen right now is case sensitive so you'll need to do the DIY as a capital. Just a note because inevitably there's always folks who say it's not working. And at N10 we use X's and O's and blanks. You can use whatever system you like. You can make it much more sophisticated with colors, whatever you would like to do. But the point here for us is that X's or Y's is zeros are maybes and a blank is a no. So for us if we have information about an upcoming conference or event and we know that the reason we want to post about it is for visibility and to get more people to register, we know that every time we are going to post about it to Twitter. And we know we are going to post about it on our blog because on your blog as everyone knows you have much more room to write about your event. And then Twitter you can point people to that blog post where there's more information. But we've listed the newsletter as a maybe because timing-wise maybe it doesn't make sense to try and include it in the newsletter or maybe it does. So that's how we use this as a guide. And of course welcome you to improve on it. And if you make it better please share it back so that we can also learn from your improvements. I'm going to pause just for a second because I think there has been some questions and I just want to check in with Becky really quick. Thanks Amy. Yeah we have had a couple of questions come in. So one person, Wendy asked, so I think the smartest thing we can do is figure out how to engage our constituents with or on existing apps. So going back to that app discussion. And she asked specifically, for example, how can we reach millennials on apps that they already use? So is there a way to design your content so that rather than creating your own organizational app which may be not fruitful, how can you target millennials on apps that they are already using? Great question. So for channels where you maybe already have a profile like Facebook or YouTube and I suggest those too because they are just so commonly used. And if you are not using either of those that is fine. But if you already have a page on Facebook or a channel on YouTube you can click into your analytics and see on your different videos on YouTube or different pieces of content or updates on Facebook what the demographic breakdown is of people who are engaging with you regularly. And I think it is really helpful just to use N10 as an example. Again we have seen certain videos of ours on our YouTube channel are getting most engagement by like a 45 to 55 year old age group is the predominant one, the highest one. And yet that same video on Facebook has a 25 to 35 is the highest group. And so for us that didn't mean the video, the content itself isn't engaging with millennials. It was figuring out which channel certain age groups are on where they are interested in a video versus maybe if we embedded that video just in other channels and could put it on the blog and maybe that hit a different group. So I think remembering that sometimes it isn't just that channel and who is there, it's which pieces of your content on that channel engage with those groups. Looking at Facebook's data or other major social networks there are people of every age group on every platform. It's just are those people in your community using Facebook in that way? Or are they not?  And other organizations say our folks really don't use Facebook that way. Our folks are much more private on Facebook. They are using it for photos of their kids or engaging with their friends and not really engaging with organizations. So it's more about figuring out which pieces of your content do engage those people and then getting more of that content into that space. I know that's probably a cop out of an answer because it just means we have to follow the data and do some investigation. But ultimately there's no silver bullet unfortunately because every organization supporters can be so different. Very true. That's very true. So Google Analytics is one that we use as well here at TechSoup and it does provide a lot of depth of data. Like you can really get deep into seeing what kind of activity people are doing and where and how and who they are. So I would also second that recommendation. We had a couple of other questions that came in. Let's just take one more for now and then we'll move forward. So Daniel asked, and this is going back a little bit to the statistic about how many people are using their phones and that most are still using it for text. He asked, is there a site or software that you can recommend to text and engage your customers? So it's an SMS platform that you would recommend? Yes, there are quite a few actually. And I think I'm happy to follow up with some links that maybe you guys could include in the follow-up email, but I'm hesitant to make a direct recommendation because when selecting a tool for that, you're going to want to consider what database you have. If you can directly connect it into the central database you're already using, that will be so much easier because you'll be able to track and send an email to folks who just received a text message for example, instead of having two separate databases. So that's one consideration. And then the other is if you plan to only do communications or if you do plan at any time to add in the fundraising element, that will make you maybe consider certain tools over others. So I think because of that I'm more comfortable maybe Becky sending to you a list of some resources that folks can review knowing that they're going to want to bring some questions to that analysis. Absolutely, that would be great. And I'm sure we can also put together some resources to include in the follow-up email. And just as a note, the webinar that we have coming up on June 19th, the third part of the mobile series that we're doing is on raising funds and money through mobile. So it will include a big section that's on particularly not just engagement but on donations through things like text platforms. So why don't we go ahead and move forward. We have a couple of other questions that have come in but we can hold those for the next pause. Thanks. Okay, perfect. Yep, this next layer, so we've now reviewed our content and we've now created a content map and everyone in our organization knows what content we create and which channels we send it to. And it's a beautiful thing of glory. So now we're going to talk just really briefly about reviewing our programs. Not every program that you do needs to have some connection to mobile. And also not every program that you do now needs to necessarily find other channels Everything you're doing now is not broken is my point. Some of what you are doing is great and in some of your programs you may have an opportunity to not necessarily change too much of your structure of that program but there may be an opportunity to layer mobile into that. So a few examples. First is a great organization. They work with young people and I think any time you are trying to work directly with and not just advocate for young people looking at including SMS can be a really huge piece for engagement for them. And the Alliance for Climate Education which is based in San Francisco, right near TechSoup's office actually is a great example of doing this well. So they have in-school presentations. Sometimes that's in a classroom, sometimes it's in an assembly, but they have trained educators who go into schools and they are putting on presentations not kind of in a theoretical sense about climate action and taking actions in a pretty local small scale but they are really giving kids in those schools examples of things they can do in their school or in their own homes to save money, make things more cost efficient, save energy, but also maybe green the school or make it a more environmentally friendly space. And after they give these presentations and help kind of get the kids excited and really inspired to take some of these small actions that when thousands and thousands of kids are taking them adds up to so much change, they ask everyone to send a text message to their short code with that thing they are going to do. They call it do one thing and so they can send in a text message that I am going to change all of our light bulbs to energy efficient ones or I am going to create a team at my school that organizes to paint our roof white, paint the roof of the school white. Whatever that text may be and now that they have texted in, they can opt in to continue hearing from the organization and they can similar to the way many of us in our organizations have email campaigns so anyone who is new gets a welcome email for example. They can have a similar kind of engagement process that those kids are kicked into where three weeks later they get a text that says hey it's the Alliance for Climate Education, have you put that team together? Have you done that one thing or do you need help? So if they write back in a text message that says they do need help, they can send them a link to their website where they have tool kits and resources for how to take these actions. So it's just a great example of not changing the way their idea of this do one thing. It doesn't change the way they deliver those in classroom programs and it also doesn't change their goals of getting young people to take these actions and to follow through. It just plays up a channel opportunity that really gets those people engaged using a text message right in the classroom when they're thinking about it so they can follow up with them later. Another example of a program that's not trying to be created all anew but just expanding for mobile is Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties where they had already invested in a support line with health educators where you could call them or do an online chat to ask some questions that maybe you didn't feel comfortable coming into the clinic in person and asking or didn't really know who else to ask. And with SMS, they're able to expand that and have one additional channel that doesn't require more health educators. It doesn't require a different knowledge base. It just means that people could call or they could do an online chat or they could send an SMS and reach that many more people provide that many more answers to questions. But again, just make it feel even more accessible because there are more angles to ask that same health educator important questions. So I'll pause before I jump into the communications piece. Becky, any questions you want to throw in here, or should I do this one more slide? Well, we did have some other questions. One person just asked specifically how you feel about Instagram in general when we're talking about the different channels. I think Instagram is a really interesting platform. It has a lot of potential. What I actually see happening and maybe it's because it's in comparison to things like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter is more relatively new. There are of course organizations who are getting a lot of engagement in Instagram and have good follower numbers and are getting lots of likes on their photos, etc. But what I've seen more examples of are organizations using other platforms like Twitter or even their website and calling for photo content with a hashtag. And because a hashtag is becoming fairly ubiquitous across the web now, just encouraging people to use that hashtag and pull photos from Instagram. So you could have a gallery up on your website for your campaign where those photos were posted, but they didn't need to know that the organization had its own Instagram account, or they didn't need to follow the organization's Instagram account to participate. But they saw, I don't know, just to make up an example, like if N10 said, everybody take photos of the oldest piece of technology in your office and people were taking funny photos in their offices and posting them to Instagram. Some may post them to Twitter, some may post them to Facebook. But if you included that hashtag, N10 is that organizing group could easily pull all those different photos and tweets and posts and pull them into one place. So I think it's a really great tool for getting people to post rich content because photos are naturally more engaging than text. But it isn't necessarily a channel I think that requires success does not mean you have followers on Instagram. Does that make sense, what I'm saying at all? It does. The engagement matters more than the followers or the like. One clarification question, Ryan asks about this Planned Parenthood image that we have on the screen right here. Do you know what the software was that they used, or what their call chat text tool is? The last time I talked to them I did not ask if they were using the same software, so I'm happy to follow up with them and ask what tool they're using. Great, that would be helpful.  Great, so let's go ahead and move us forward. Thanks. Awesome, sure. And this next one we're getting a smaller and smaller number of slides for each of these sections. And this is just a reminder now that we've really talked about the content pieces and the way that programs may be supplemented with the inclusion of mobile is to review the actual communications that go into that. So recognizing that if you are sending out an email and it's pointing to all these different channels but you may see in your Google Analytics or your email newsletter statistics that you have, N10 has over a third of our subscribers are reading our emails, including our newsletters on a mobile device, whether that be a tablet or a phone. And so if we're then including all of these links to other places, what does that experience look like? So really thinking not just will we add it in SMS or we've found that we have a bunch of folks on Facebook who are using Facebook on their phone, so how are your communications reflective of a good experience throughout every piece of content or clicking through every call to action you provide? So it isn't just a matter of knowing that they're using those devices but giving yourself a chance to review what your communications look like in that space. And as Becky said, Google Analytics is a great place to learn a little bit more about how folks are using your website. So in the interest of time, because I know everyone already has these slides, I'm going to skip these couple trends and I want to spend a few minutes talking about how you can get started with all of this today. I hope that's okay. I'm happy to talk about trends anytime. Send me an email. Okay, excellent. So just a few things that are hopefully somewhat tangible and not overwhelming. So first is to, I know that everyone is going to have like a bajillion pages of your website and some of them you don't even know exist and then one day someone emails you and says this page is out of date and you're like well of course it is, I never knew it existed. So I'm not trying to advocate that tomorrow you have redone your entire website or reviewed every page of it but that you have focused on your forms and your sign up pages so that people who are maybe on Facebook on a tablet or on a phone and they click through to your organization because they just love your Facebook content and they want to donate to you or they want to sign up for your newsletter or your emails that when they do that it is not so wonky and ridiculous and ugly that they are unable to complete the form. So make sure that those donation pages and subscription pages have only the necessary details, only the pieces you absolutely do need like their email address or their credit card number or just the bare bones because you can always follow up in an email that says great, you're in if you want to add to your profile click here or something but really just collect what's necessary and think about how they get to that page. Is your donate or your sign up button on the home page and you know that that's how they are getting there or are they getting there through some navigation on your site. If that's the case you really might want to make it an easy navigation from a phone. Next is to think about those actual email templates. I think for many organizations creating a fully responsive, completely redesigned website is not an easy thing to set aside the budget for and make time on staff to do but if you can already focus on your forms and your sign up pages and you can really make sure that your emails are coming through in a legible way regardless of what size screen people are on. It will go a long way to making it an easy space for people to continue actually reading your content. I mean it's not too difficult to make your emails look nice on a smaller screen. The first is I know many organizations especially for your newsletters have a kind of hard template that you put new content into every month and many of those have two columns. So almost mirroring your website in a way where you have something on one side and then you have a column of your main text, those are really difficult to make responsive because they are trying to put a table into that space. So looking at how to really have just one column in your emails can help right away. And then I think there's a lot that can be A, B tested or try two different versions and see which works. But something that we have seen work from any organization is a call out button. So something that's an image, that's a larger text and makes that call to action really clear so that even if on their phone they are not reading the whole message they do see the big call out button and they want to click on that and go straight to that donate page or go watch that video. It's easy to do. And of course make the calls to action in the email really easy to scan if you are just kind of browsing through your phone and you can see it in bold with a link. It's so much easier to notice than when you have this really long email on your tiny screen. I know for many organizations we feel like we think we know how people are reading content or we think we know which pages are most popular on the website, but going into Google Analytics can really help you know that for sure. And that doesn't just mean you look at which pages are kind of in aggregate most popular, but you can see how people are getting to those pages or what pages are they finally leaving because they never found that information about volunteering for example. So look at the visitor flow. You can also set up some campaigns so that if you know that you are going to be pointing people to a certain page in your next email or even in an SMS it can help track how people migrated through after that call to action. And you can really learn a lot about maybe where, where to focus on some web improvements on the site. And of course you can see which devices people are using to come to your website whether that's their phone or tablet or desktop computer, etc. And then last, not that there are no more ways to get started, but hopefully one more piece that's somewhat approachable and that is trying to set up in your organization a culture that's open to testing some of these things. With mobile there is so much to test and learn for many organizations because it just hasn't been a part of our communications toolkit. So don't feel like you have to have this perfect plan for how you are going to include advocacy messages through SMS. You really want to have a space where you can talk about this with your whole staff. Encourage people across the organization to talk about, oh I don't know why we haven't thought about Instagram. I use it all the time and all my friends use it. What if we could test using Instagram? So encourage people to talk about how they use these tools because ultimately like I said at the very beginning, we do know a lot more than we think we do. We just show up to the office and then tell ourselves to kind of forget everything we did until we showed up that morning. So really encourage staff to try things and participate in whatever pilot you may set up. And of course if you can and always happy to share from N10 how we do this, create a standard process so that any staff person who maybe has an idea of something they want to test or a new channel that they think could work for the organization has a path for making that suggestion and can surface it with folks who may want to engage in that pilot with them. So I know we have just like three minutes I think for questions. Becky any that you want to highlight? Becky Sure. Well we had one person who asked specifically Nancy wanted to know what your thoughts are about Pinterest since we already talked a little bit about Instagram and some of the other ones, and how to use that channel to engage people mobily. Becky Sure. So Pinterest is another social platform that certainly has a lot of non-desktop computer usage. It lends itself really well actually to tablets and smartphones. It has a pretty specific demographic of users. So if you are already using Pinterest and finding it to be successful then that's great. If you are already using it and not finding it to be successful that is also okay. If you are not quite sure I give it a test. But I think it can be similar to Instagram where it is such a photo rich of course place and something easy that people can really quickly browse through and engage with. A couple of notes I see that Nancy asked about the demographic. So it is depending on the time. I have seen stats that show a range but it is very heavily female users and slightly older. So not like, I mean old is a funny word because we all have an image of what we think old means but where some social platforms are really heavy on the 18 year old end of things, Pinterest is a bit older than that of course. So I think it can be an interesting place if you know that you have a certain type of supporter and they really engage there. But about 80% or so, I've seen different demographics on this, a great number of posts on Pinterest are just getting re-pinned. So it is less about original content and more just about taking content that may already be in the Pinterest ecosystem and reorganizing it into new boards. So again I think if you are trying to get more content into there it's a bit harder but if you are really just trying to engage people it could be a good space. Great. And one of our participants, Norman, just commented and I think this is a valuable piece to think about is that you can risk trying to be in too many channels at one time and not doing a great job in any of them. So that really does speak to the need to look at your analytics and really target where your audience is already at and work in those channels as you are starting place, especially if you are just getting started. You don't need to be in all of them at all the time, especially if you don't have your audiences there. We also had a question, Alyssa asked from your last slide when you talked about creating an environment for testing. She asked, could you share your organization's process for new channel suggestions? Like how do you add those to the process if somebody says, oh we want to do this new cool thing on Tumblr? How do you determine if that is worth your time? For us we first do a review of who is on that channel. So for N10 we are often sharing nonprofit technology related content. That is what we do. So if we are thinking about a new channel we will go to that channel and do some searches for nonprofit technology or NPTEC or prominent people from our community. Like we would look up TechSoup, do they have a profile that we could learn from? So we first just try and test what is there. If we do a search for NPTEC and see a certain number of returns, well are they all images? Are they all videos? Are they all blog posts? What can we learn just from what is already on that channel? And then we actually like to be really honest and forward with the community and say either post it on another channel if that seems relevant or put it out to the membership committee or do different things to say, hey we were thinking of using this channel. We saw there was a lot of content there. Do you think N10 should have a profile? If we did how would you want to engage with us? So get some direct feedback and only then would we set up an actual profile and start testing it ourselves. I think it's important to learn what you can about a new channel before you set up your profile so that you already know, oh gosh it looks like a lot of people have this kind of information in their profile or people have focused on this kind of content so that you don't set it up and then have this kind of bare bones profile and not know what to put on it. Yeah, it saves you from being the noob as we like to say in terms of embarrassing yourself by not knowing how the community that's already there is interacting and working. This is great. We are almost out of time so I want to go ahead and move us forward quickly just to talk a little bit since Better World Wireless is one of our sponsors of this event. I just want to quickly tell you a little bit about the program that they offer through TechSoup. They are a wireless offer that they make through TechSoup and they are nonprofit. And they offer discounted mobile services and devices to nonprofits, charities, and public libraries throughout the United States. And you can find more information about their program and their offers at techsoup.org slash betterworld wireless. And feel free to go there. If you are looking for more about mobile, they have discounted mobile devices that you can get for your staff. So if you are looking to have some organizationally owned and distributed mobile phones for your staff, and if you are looking to have mobile service for your staff, and it extends to staff throughout your organization, and it is discounted. And they also donate a portion of the proceeds from each of those mobile plans to Social Good as well. So it is a B Corp Good organization that we like to support. So I know that we had a couple of questions we may not have had time to get to, so we would like to invite you to go to our forums. We have a mobile and wireless community forum on TechSoup site where if you have additional questions, you can come there and ask them. We have a variety of experts and tech consultants and nonprofit users who would share their expertise and help answer questions for you. And I would also like to invite you to the upcoming webinar. So I mentioned that this is part of a four-part series. We have two others in this series that are coming up. One is how to raise more money via mobile. So for those of you looking for specific information about text services or mobile fundraising, mobile donation platforms, mobile survey programs, things like that where you can also collect donations, this would be the webinar to come to you on June 19th where we have Network for Good and PayPal experts to come and share their expertise. And then the last one is on July 10th where we will be talking about mobile technology for offices and people. We will spend time talking about things like mobile policies in your office and what kind of devices, whether you want to allow your staff to bring their own devices to work and leverage the use of them for your organization. So we will talk about that. You can find all of these events including next week's event which is about getting technology donations through TechSoup. So if you are not familiar with our programs and want to learn more about the donations you can receive through TechSoup's programs, that's a great one to come to. You can find all of these on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. With that I'd like to thank you Amy for the great presentation. Again, folks look for the email later on today with the full recording and slide deck so you can review it and share it at your convenience. Lastly I'd like to thank Allie for helping manage chat questions on the back end and ReadyTalk, our webinar platform sponsor who provides the use of this program for us to present these webinars to you on a regular basis. Please take a moment when you close your window. A new window will open up on one of your browsers that will have a post-event survey. Take a moment to let us know how we did today so we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Five is excellent, one is poor. So take a minute and give us your thoughts. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific day.


Anybody can rebuild their life, one day at a time, one step at a time, and over the course of time, those good decisions compounded and brought her to where she is today. I had two life events that I didn't deal with very well, I had two deaths in my family. I became really addicted to alcohol, and then when that didn't work anymore, I started using drugs, and it was a time when I found myself at a shelter run by the Salvation Army. She once said to me, if my mentor or my coach would have said, to get out of these addictions you need to take a peanut and push it with your nose down Assembly Street, I'd have done it. And that compassion and passion has transferred over to her work at the Salvation Army in the City of Columbia and the success that she's had in helping people navigate out of those addictions and homelessness. I think her impact was one of great influence with the unsheltered. They trusted her. So if Melanie was to communicate something with them, they honored that. And so as I transitioned from someone who needed that help to a person who was wanting to help somebody else, I could think of my experiences and I could know right away that that person's family life was probably pretty rocky. And that person probably couldn't work because they might not even have a photo ID, you know? There's some basics we need to do here. She was compassionate about the people that she served. She did everything from the heart and it wasn't a job for her. We interact with hundreds of cases in a year. So you take 15 years as the director and then more years prior to that, multiplying that by hundreds. But that's a lot of people who have benefited from Melanie's expertise, her compassion, her passion to get people off the street and into permanent housing and stay in that permanent housing. We have youth programs and programs for children that I have been involved with and I just am so happy about. And reading skills are so important for young ones in elementary school. Hey Melanie, I love you and I appreciate all the work that you have done and I know that in your retirement, the Lord is going to bless you with great favor.