Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, How to Create Captivating Digital Content for Your Non-Profits. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. If you have any questions, feel free to use the chat box that you see on the left hand side of your screen. All callers will be muted, so again if you have questions, please use the Q&A box that you see on your screen. If you lose your Internet connection, just reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. Sometimes ready to talk can be quirky, so refresh your browser and just use the link that was emailed to you to reconnect. If you have to leave early or if you want to watch the webinar again, it will be hosted on our website at www.techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. We'll also be sending an email with the presentation, a link to the recording, and any relevant links that were shared today. If you are on social media, feel free to send us a tweet at TechSoup using hashtag TS webinars. But like I said earlier, we'll be using the chat box that you see on the left hand side. So just a little bit about TechSoup. We are located in 236 countries and territories. We serve over a million nonprofits around the world providing either donated or discount hardware and software. So just to make sure that the chat box is working, if you guys want to chat in, where you guys are calling in from, and I can read out a few. All right, we have Ottawa, Canada. Let's see, Boston, Texas, Kentucky, Anchorage, Alaska, Detroit. Do we have any international folks on the call? I did see Canada earlier. Brazil, we have somebody from Brazil, that's awesome. Great, okay, so we can see the chat box is working. So if you're curious about what TechSoup offers, we partner with several technology companies like Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, and several others that you can see here on the screen. If you want to find out more about our nonprofit tech marketplace, you can visit our website at techsoup.org slash get-product-donations to see what products are available to your nonprofits. So before we get started, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Sima Tucker. I'm the online producer here at TechSoup. You've probably seen Lashika's name in the chat. She's the associate program manager at TechSoup. And then today's featured speaker is my colleague, Steven Jackson. So he is the digital content manager at TechSoup. He writes and produces blogs, articles, and videos, and coordinates the syndication and promotion of content across multiple channels here. He holds a master's degree in learning and instruction from the University of San Francisco and comes from a strong background in education, journalism, and media production. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Steven. Okay. Well, welcome everybody. And I'd like to first just start off by saying how much I appreciate everybody taking the time out of your day to join us here. I hope that everyone is able to take away some actionable knowledge from the time we spend together. So I'm just going to dive right in and kind of go over to the agenda and we'll move forward from there. So again, we're going to be talking about digital content and we're going to get into what that means and actually how to produce everything. And it's going to be what I hope to be a very engaging time. But the first thing we're going to do is start by going over some best practices in the art of storytelling. We're going to be taking a look at exactly what digital content is. We're going to look at how to determine what type of content your nonprofit should be producing and when. We'll go over a little bit about producing content, some logistics items. We'll talk very briefly about analytics and how to measure whether or not content is successful. And then finally we'll sort of wrap things up with why it's important and really how creating all this can benefit your nonprofits. So hopefully if you do find yourself in a position where you're trying to sell the idea of producing digital content you'll have that many more tools in your toolbox. So today our objective is fairly simple but we'll be talking quite a bit about developing a roadmap for producing digital content at your nonprofit. We're going to learn some tips to produce more captivating content and we're going to learn some of the basics behind digital content management at your nonprofit. So we are just going to jump right in here. So storytelling, best practices in the art of storytelling. One thing to start with is the reason why people like to tell stories and the reason why people like to hear stories in general is because people are interested in connecting with one another. Whether or not this has to do with your friendships, your family, your colleagues, or anybody that maybe you've even just met, people want to feel connected. But they also want to feel connected to ideas and causes. And it's important to create things that help people feel like they are a part of what you do. So this can look like a lot of different things but it's all again, it's really about building this connection. So that can happen through sharing news about what your organization is doing. That can happen through sharing helpful information that somebody who is interested in the area of your cause can take with them to do maybe at their own nonprofit or maybe just in their own life. And then inspiring stuff also helps build a connection. So a lot of these have to do with the idea of an emotional connection. But you can also create an emotional bond, a really strong one through education. And like Seema said, I was an educator before I was here and I was a full-time writer and media producer. I was an educator for 10 years in San Francisco. And then at the same time I was also a local journalist in San Francisco. And it was during that time that I really learned how powerful it is to teach somebody something. So in a classroom that's one thing. If you're reporting on something that affects somebody in their local environment that's important, that's something useful. But what I learned through education is that it creates this immediate sense of trust with somebody when you can teach them how to do something.  So if you know enough to share your information with somebody in a meaningful way then all of a sudden you are presented as an expert. And then lastly when you're teaching somebody something and I mean in a lot of the way I see it in a lot of ways it's sort of your mission and action too. It's showing that you do care about effecting change in different places. You care about helping people. So I think it's really a win on a lot of different levels to focus on education and just to understand how important that emotional connection is when it comes to education and how you can build that. So I'm going to be going through a lot of examples today. And I'm just going to go through one very quickly here with an organization that I think is really great and that I think really kind of creates some cool digital content. So this is Sprouse Cooking Club. It's a local nonprofit here in the Bay area. They do a lot of different work. They do a lot of work with teaching kids how to cook and thereby promoting healthy sort of eating habits and teaching people how to do a useful skill. But here's an example of something that I found from their blog up in California. We have this kind of small batch cheese farm producer that's up north of the city. So the summer camp that this organization did took a field trip up there. So this is a great way that this organization was able to build a connection with people. This is showing that hey, we're out there. We're helping kids. Let's take a look at this cool stuff our organization is doing. It's really photo rich here. You can really get an idea right off the bat of what this nonprofit is all about. So when I saw this particular post, I was like, man, I really feel connected to this nonprofit. I know more about what they're doing. And I want to help those kids too. So how can I get them? Maybe it might not go all the way that way, but in certain respects you can see how that could happen. They also go the next step by actually providing cooking tutorials too, which I think is actually really, really cool because again, I'm this kind of education guy. And I just think this is such a neat thing because you can sit there, go to their site, learn about what they're doing, but you can also learn how to cook a dish yourself even if you're not involved in the nonprofit. So right there I think that's just a really great idea of building connection through storytelling. So I'm going to go back now. And the next important thing about storytelling is to remember that it's also about engagement. It's about engaging people. So you want to draw or kind of hook somebody into what you are writing immediately.  You want to be able to stand out in one way. And one old school kind of trick to that is creating a really valuable hook to draw your reader in immediately. And I'm going to give you two examples of that. But in one way it could be a very bold statement. There's a whole sort of science behind writing which you could go and do your own research on, but you really want to bring them in right from the beginning. But then another tactic is to really clearly state the value of that content near the very beginning. So to go back to an example of this, we're going to take a look here, sharing my screen once more. Here's one example of a blog that I wrote for an organization that is dedicated to securing land and by creating land trusts and all that sort of stuff in the southeast portion of America. And this is a blog post I wrote where they were using a product they got through TechSoup in order to back up data that quite literally helped them secure land by securing data that secures that land. Sorry, that was a little bit of a securitist. But a hook that I used was right here at the very beginning over the years some of the most pristine land in the U.S. Land with high conservation value has been recklessly destroyed. And the damage occurred because of careless residential and commercial construction projects, harmful industry practices, or other negligent actions by human beings. So what I was trying to do there was grab your attention with this thing that's happening that you shouldn't be mad about. So let's learn how to fix it. Another example of looking someone in right off the bat is this piece where I was writing about how to broadcast a live event. Again, this is straight up educational content. But in this one, I just go right out and say it. After reading this post you'll be able to broadcast a Facebook live event of your own. So people don't have time to weed through three things that you are trying to take this roundabout route to get at. They want to know if they're busy. I'm going to read this blog post and I'm going to learn this thing and see if you can gauge them like that. And then lastly, I'm going to talk a little bit about the importance of clarity. So information when you're writing it should be presented in a really structured manner. It's really important that it's very easily and logically laid out. You also want to make sure that you're not using too many idioms or phrases, especially if you're writing for a global audience. A lot of times when we're talking we say a lot of really weird stuff. That's because we speak in idiom and we speak in dialects and there's all these sorts of different ways of speaking. But when you're writing especially for a global audience, you want to try to stay away from those because even if somebody does speak the language, even if someone knows how to speak the language in which you're writing and it's their second language, those sort of terms of phrases will throw people off. The economical, really like what you want to do is again less is more. There's a time for long voluminous sort of prose and literature is one thing but really when you're writing for the web and you're writing about trying to get something involved with your nonprofit, the economical gets to the point. And that kind of goes into like this is sort of the mantra that I use a lot. And basically when you're writing one thing to keep in mind, you want to make your reader have to work as little as possible. Don't make them have to sort of work to figure out what this great high-fluent point you're making is. You want it to be as laid out for them as much as possible so that they can just get what you're saying. And again, it's easier to read. This isn't a webinar about how to write a novel in which case it's really nice sometimes to have this dense, really figurative language that you've got to crack the code of and then it presents itself as this beautiful thing for you. We're talking about writing for the web. So make them work as little as possible. And one thing that is really great to pick up is the book Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White later on. It's just a great book. If you get a chance to go to your public library, check it out.  But if you really want to learn some of the true nuts and bolts of writing, that's a real must-have. And just as an example of kind of clear writing, and we'll be stopping all this much time. Excuse me while I pull this link up. I think it's a whole lot more clear than this. Four things your nonprofit actually needs to do before 2019. This is really structured writing here. No guesswork. This is what you're going to learn. This is why you should learn it, and this is how soon you should learn it. And then it's really broken up here into four distinct sections. Each section with a very specific message and actionable kind of item to it. So this first one just talks about the trend of increasing amount of remote workers. And again, and we're sharing out these links so if you get a chance, you won't take a look. But it kind of continues like that. Connection, engagement, clarity. Those are all things to remember when you're going through and thinking about digital content. So let's get right into it. So what is digital content? It's a really broad chart. There's a lot of different definitions. I think for the purposes here, the best thing to do is to understand it as it's media that we consume online, including but certainly not limited to articles, blogs, videos, both animation and live action, infographics, podcasts. We're going to really be focusing on articles, blogs and videos, but there is a – there's just so much out there. And I actually grabbed just a cool link. It's like 101 different types of digital content that I believe Lashika will be sending out to the group right now, giving you an idea of really like the depth and breadth of what we mean when we talk about content. But digital content, articles, blogs, videos, it also refers to the stuff that is just written on your website as well. And there's a certain approach to landing page copy that is very different than writing blogs and things like that. But we want to hear, talk more about blogs, videos, articles. So what should digital content do? I think that's sort of a question that comes up a lot. What should it do? The first thing it should do is – these are sort of signposts really. This is like not a very high level understanding of what it should do. But the first thing you should think about is that your content should be engaging. It should engage your audience. And we went over that in the best practices section, but it should engage your audience in a couple of different ways. So engagement can look like sharing news so that they feel like they're a part of what you do.  That's a way to engage. There's a lot of different ways to engage. It should also inspire. This was kind of the most inspirational looking photo that I could find. It should make people feel good about what you do. It should make people want to do more good work in the world. People should read your content and they should feel like – especially when we're talking about nonprofit stuff – people should read what you're doing and feel the urge to go out and become a change maker in the world. That's not going to happen every time. That's an ideal situation. You should keep in mind that it's really important to inspire people. And your individual content has the ability to do that because rather than having sort of a quick hit about like, hey, this is what we do, mission statement, boom. You have a chance to sort of be in a more long-form fashion to go through and say this is what we do and this is how we've affected so much change in this particular area and look at the lives that are better because of us. And maybe you want to volunteer or maybe you want to start a nonprofit of your own. But there's so much room for inspiration especially in our industry. And lastly, again, this will come up a lot. You have to educate. You know, digital content in many ways should be educating people and giving them information that they can read or watch or listen to and then use. And then for talking about nonprofits, use to better the world. So the next question is, what kind of content should my nonprofit produce? And the first question is to ask, and this is really what's cool about content is that it's this thing that happens at your organization that helps you or forces you sit down and ask these foundational questions about yourself and your organization. So before you start creating content, the first thing you have to ask is, who are we as a nonprofit? What do we stand for? It does this job of digging into what you're all about. You know, it's not just the tagline. It's not just the mission statement or copy and a landing page. I mean, this is a chance to tell a story about who you are. Another thing that you'll think about is, what is your goal for creating content? Is it raising awareness about your cause? Are you writing to increase giving at your nonprofit? Or are you even trying to attract a new donor? Or are you just out there trying to educate the public? So your goal should be very clear about creating content. And to be honest, it's probably a little bit of all four of these things and maybe some stuff that I haven't listed there as well. And lastly, you want to ask, what's our voice and tone? Who are we? What's our personality out on the Internet? What's our personality out in the world? Your voices have a lot to do with the characters or nonprofits. It helps define your personality, which is something that's difficult to do, especially when you're thinking about how people are viewing who you are and what you do from an external vantage point.  So you know what you do and maybe the people that you've already been involved with know who you are and they know the type of people you are, maybe from working with you in the field or they understand your organization from a bunch of different channels. But if someone doesn't know that, your voice and the tone that you're taking when you're creating digital content can really do some great work in terms of defining that element of who your organization is. And then last, you want to ask yourself, where will this content exist? There's a lot of different channels and we're going to go through all of that. But there's some things that should be a blog. There's some things that maybe should be a longer form article. There's some things that maybe you know that's just going to be something like a social post. But whenever you're creating your content you should always have the end game of thinking where is it going to exist. And that also has to do with where might this end up? Is this going to get picked up in some newsletter? Is this going to get shared, hopefully shared around the Internet and then land somewhere else? You always have to keep in mind about not just what you're creating but what it's going to look like and how it's going to come across where it ends up. Both in terms of where you know you're going to put it and also where it might end up. So that's kind of a nice segue into talking about media. So what kind of content should we produce? How do we determine what the proper medium is here? So a blog, and these rules are all just sort of suggestions. The cool thing is depending on who you are and depending on how you would like to be running your organization or running your content plan or anything, these things can be different for each organization based on your particular personality. So I'm just going to go through, this is how I see it. And this is how to be honest, a lot of people see it too. So the first thing, a blog. This is generally shorter content. It's a lot of times more relevant content, meaning that it could be something that you're writing and you're reporting on a field trip that you just did, kind of like that cowgirl creamery example from earlier, or something that again like some of the other blogs I've already shown you that have a very specific purpose. They're really scannable. They're really readable and they're generally shorter, talking like 500 to 1,000 words. This tone can also be more conversational. So a blog in terms of voicing tone and your character as an organization, blogs are a great way to sort of show who you are. So next up is an article. In articles, this is an example here. You can see the articles. This is from the landing page of all of our articles. They're a little bit more serious. They last a little bit longer, meaning that they can be more in depth. They last longer both to read, but they also last longer in terms of being something called evergreen, which gets its name from the evergreen trees, meaning that you can post something and there's a good chance it's going to be just as relevant today as it will be a year from now. And a lot of times the tone here tends to be more formal. Another thing to consider here is videos. So shorter, meaning that it's like about 2 minutes max unless you're doing a long form documentary or something to that effect. This here is an example of video, just a screenshot from our YouTube channel of an animated explainer video that I produced with our team here at TechSoup that explains, it kind of takes people through different Microsoft Office options. Again, what we do is we provide nonprofits with low cost technology solutions. So when we're not thinking about content that we're making for us, if I want to educate somebody, I want to educate people on the way that certain solutions like this can help people. So a great way to do that is through an animated explainer and we'll have some time to take a look at some examples of that too. But again, with video, the best thing you want to do is try to remember to keep it short unless you are making an actual document. In infographic, these things should be data rich. It should just be a pretty picture. It should be something where a great rule of thumb is, okay, if I'm going to show somebody like a chart just full of numbers and jargon, and they're just going to glaze right over it. If that would be better explained with a bunch of graphics and visual aids, that probably means that that information would be a great candidate to be transformed into an infographic. It should be also used as like adaglance information. Think about it. Maybe it's something that they put up on the fridge at the office or at your house or above your desk. So you can just look over if you really need some quick hits sometimes of numbers or some kind of information like that. And it should be really easy to understand. So here's just a quick screenshot. I'm going to take us through some more in-depth examples here of an infographic we did here at TechSoup where we were illustrating the impact of our refurbished computer initiative at TechSoup. And lastly, a social post. So this is going to be your shortest content. You can actually be a little bit more creative with this type of content. And it's really supposed to be catching in social media as we all know is this deluge of information now. So stand out in social media is a very challenging thing. So you want to really have an idea of what you have a really strong grasp of how you want to look as an organization and how to produce visually enticing images that are going to make people want to click through. Okay, so let's go through and take a look at some examples. So I'm just going to pause for a moment while I pull those up. Give us all a moment to catch our breath. An example of what I feel to be engaging content. Some people from TechSoup went to this big Microsoft conference that happened in Las Vegas last month. And they were tasked with kind of coming back and bringing some information, among other things they were tasked with bringing some information for us to share with the nonprofit community that we work with. So they went and found some information that they felt would be useful to our community. I then took that information, did some interviews with the people who went, did some research and broke it down into some key insects. So in this way, this is how we're engaging with our community by sharing information that matters. It also shows that we're engaged in the tech community, that we're going out and we are keeping current on best practices that we're out there kind of being who we are in the world as TechSoup. And we'll be slacking around all these links. Just a quick also note, we have just an awesome graphic design department at TechSoup who helps us who creates these awesome illustrations. You don't need all of that to create a great image. There's a lot of options that will go over later about like how to source some of these images and things like that. But it is important, I think, to be including both images and text because it's easier on the eyes. So again, if we think about examples of something that's meant to expire, this is that land trust piece that I was talking about earlier. I genuinely found what they do inspiring in terms of going out there and finding these tracks of land and rivers and streams that are at risk of being developed upon and like messing up the whole ecosystem where they are in this organization that went out and is using law to save the environment. So I thought that was really cool and I really enjoyed being able to share that. Another thing from an inspirational standpoint is you can create a video that really helps tell an inspiring story. The show oftentimes can elicit a much stronger emotional response. So we will be sending out this link too. I'm just going to hit play on this video that we produced with this organization called Remake. That's a storytelling organization that's dedicated to kind of exposing bad practices in the fashion industry and getting people to think about rethinking how they shop and buy and close with some sustainability in mind. So we're just going to play this right from the player on our site. And just to give you an idea of sort of the tone in this looking feel of a video like this. Hi, Doreen. I believe I'm going to read through the products to make our film short. It is my dream that for every label that's in your closet and for every label you have made in whatever country, short-label products actually want the technology. So again, we are sending out the link there but you can kind of get an idea of what we're trying to get across there and create this inspirational, tiny little story. And the whole video only runs about under two minutes too. When we're talking about education, again, this is a Facebook Live event post that I created a couple months back. The idea is that like, hey, this is a free thing that your nonprofit can do at your next event. And you can create either. Here's this platform that might seem a little daunting to get used to or dive into, but it's not that hard. And if you take this little blog post, you can share it with your team and chances are you will be able to do a Facebook Live event the next time that you're out. So again, this is really just straight up educational content. Here is another. We're going to try the video audio again. I hope it's going to be a little louder this time. But here's another. This is an example of an animated explainer that we did. Again, with the very specific idea in mind to educate people about how this particular Office 365 license that's very affordable can help other nonprofits power their volunteer staff without having to get full-blown versions of the software they could save money. And so this is sort of explaining to people, hey, this can help you and learn more. So let me show you this real quick. With lots of volunteers, if so, consider F1 licenses of either Office 365 or Microsoft 365. F1 licenses are useful for volunteers or employees who only need limited access to Office 365 features. These licenses are available for a small monthly fee. You can also turn monthly subscription on and off to fit your requirements. You only pay for what you need when you need it. So that goes on. This is kind of a really standard explainer video type of animation. It's a 2D. It's really clear. One thing that your nonprofit could do is make one of these types of animated explainers or a live action like the other one that I showed you that just basically explains who you are. Just about us, this is what my organization does. This is who we help if we want to learn more, continue to play on our website. Which is another thing I should mention when we're going through these examples is that one thing about content is a big goal should be bringing people to your website from maybe the posts shared on social or maybe someone included it as an attachment or as a link in an email that they can impact your site. They understand who you are. They understand what you're all about and then they're encouraged to continue to sort of play around on your site and maybe look at some work that you're doing or maybe decide to volunteer or anything like that. Content is really great for bringing people from the outside into your world. Here's an example of an article. Longer form. This is educational content. Everybody is talking about moving to cloud computing lately. You can't go really anywhere without anybody talking about it like a cloud migration or something to that effect. So we picked up on that and we wanted to explain to people some really basic high level steps that they need to take to migrate successfully to the cloud. We had our very own Michael Enos guest blog, a guest write this article. This is a great example of a hook too. Here you go. This is what you can learn. It's a longer form unless everything that's happening with the cloud was going to obviously change inevitably. But this will last quite a bit. This is a high level enough too that it will sort of stay evergreen for a while. And it takes you through some really great insights and information. So I also want to take us over to this infographic that I should do this screenshot of. But what I'm going to do here is just slowly scroll through it. So we have this refurbished hardware program where we are able to basically recycle computers and get them out into the hands of people who need them. So this was during April. This was the kind of surrounding birthday. We decided to create this infographic that takes you through some of the key data. So it gets you into the numbers. I mean this is so much more interesting to look at than a spreadsheet. And it's not like you could really in good conscience publish a spreadsheet on a blog and expect people to read it. Let me go through here, sorry. So let me switch back over to some examples. Let's get back over to some examples of some social posts. Here is an example of a post we put up for Mandela Day. So this is just a great image, a great inspiring quote. It helps explain, it does help to define who we are as an organization, what we stand for by celebrating this day and by including this quote. You can see more about what we're all about, where we're coming from. We also here, we were aware that Mandela Day was this trending topic on social media. And so we wanted to jump on that trend. And there's a whole sort of strategy to planning your social media operations. And I'm not going to get into that at all, but it is important to notice that we did want to include this because we knew this topic would be trending. People come back and again we're just trying to get people to interact this morning. Here's a great example of an Instagram post that just shows our office culture. One thing that people use content for which is very important is to show people what's the culture of the nonprofit. What are you guys all about? If they don't know you, they don't know you unless and unless maybe you show them certain pictures of the people at your office. And what you do is enrichment activities. They're not going to know that. So in this case at TechSoup we do something called Walking Wednesday, promoting Healthy Lifestyle, all that kind of stuff. And this is a group of our employees who are out on a walking Wednesday. So social media posts can be quick hits like that and they get a lot of really interesting, kind of really get your point across in a really unique way. Social is a great place to share articles with your community, especially if you get a lot of followers and you have something where you think they're going to be really useful information to them, reposting things with intentionally reposting things where it says something about who you are and what your values are is really important. This kind of is focused on how to attract millennial workers to nonprofit organizations. And again this does add to our voice and it does contribute to how people see us as an organization. So content, you're creating content but the way in which you're intentionally sharing content is also very important. Okay, so let's get down to the logistics and I definitely am going to be mindful of the time here because I want to be able to open this up to questions too. So the first thing when you're talking about producing content you want to be to the content management system. And that word and that whole term I know if you're not like involved in it, it can sound freaky but really what it is is that the content management system is what you're using to produce content on the Internet. The majority of websites in the world are produced on something like WordPress which has a blog function. There's also kind of paid things like Squarespace and HubSpot and all those sorts of things that help you produce content, visual content and written content on the back end. But the truth is you can also use something free such as Medium. There's nothing stopping anybody from creating a Medium account. There's also free WordPress accounts as well. You want to just choose whatever you're going to be using to produce content, get to know it, take the tutorials and all that. If you already have a website, take a look at what it's hosted on. A lot of times there's a blog function already built into it. So the bottom line is you just choose and get to know some sort of content management system. The next thing you want to do is develop some kind of project management system. Now there's a lot of really intense project management tools out there and we're not really going to go into them. But the bottom line is you want to come up with a system that's determining the following things. Who does what? What's the timeline for producing a piece of content? Where are the images being sourced? There's a lot of free images, places to source images all over the Internet. Or you can be taking your own photos. Or you can be asking constituents to allow you to use photos. What's the process of quality assurance? Who's doing the copy editing? You should have a copy editor have somebody at least have one other person than yourself take a look at anything you publish. It's really important. What is that process? And it could be really basic. It could really be you showing your coworker this piece of content, Sam approving it, put it up. You can go really, really in-depth into content. Or you could do things in a very accessible, very easy way. So just have something that there's a process of quality assurance. And then have any of it determined about who's publishing what and how that schedule works. Are also going to be looking at how to build an editorial calendar in developing a syndication plan. Let me share my screen once more. I think this might give a lot of someone doing it. So we are taking a look now at a content calendar. And again, a lot of really expensive tools that can be used here. But you can also do something using your existing tools that you likely have you're using at your nonprofit in this case. Here's a sheet that basically just takes you through week one through four of a month in the days of the week. And right here you can see that there's some intentionality about the type of content that we're producing on a certain specific schedule throughout the month. And that can change for you. This is a really, really generic version of that. Mondays we do organizational news, Tuesdays educational content, Wednesday success story, Thursday thought leadership. I mean that could be two minutes with our founder on the state of education in America or something to that effect. And then Friday leave something open for the inevitable variability that you want to have in your content. And then I like to use, so this is a great view here to give you kind of a plan. And then you also want to kind of create sort of a syndication plan too. So as you're developing, oh a blog is going to happen on this day and an article is going to happen on this day and maybe finally a video will happen down then. However you want to be doing this, up to you. But this is an example of how you should at least be thinking about creating content and producing it. It's really easy to also do the same thing in a calendar review. I only did, since in this example I repeated the two weeks twice throughout the month, this is just an example of a two-week plan. I'll have to really see what's going on. You can also use any functionality in that calendar to assign the plan to people. You can really hack project management using the resources that you have at your disposal quite easily. So the bottom line is that the philosophy is the same. You should at least know what you're doing, who's doing it, when they're doing it. I'm going to move over to the idea of just measuring good content. There's a lot of different – the Google Analytics is free. There's a lot of different sort of paid ways to be measuring how people are engaging with their content. You can also be looking at your social media statistics, how many likes, and how many shares, and all that stuff goes. But the bottom line with taking sort of stock of how you – the bottom line is to do this, take stock of how your content is doing online. And that should help inform some decisions about what type of content you should continue to do, what type of content you should be doing less of. It just comes down to the idea that you shouldn't be just creating content, throwing it into the wind, and not paying attention to it again. It's really important to come up with some sort of way that works for you to determine what successful content is and what isn't. And again, the whole idea of analytics when it comes to content is an entire can of worms that we won't be diving into right now. So to wrap things up, why is digital content important? Basically because it defines who you are as an organization. It says what you're all about. This is beyond just web copy. It's beyond your mission statement. It's something that you get to really dive in and say, this is what we are, this is who we are, and this is what we do and why. Again, digital content is important because it's able to engage, inspire, and educate the people who are interested in your mission and everything you do as a nonprofit. These sort of three things in mind is a really good idea in terms of how to make sure that you're staying on the right track of creating this type of content, any type of content. Digital content is important because it provides value. Providing, it makes it so that your website isn't just a place to go donate money. It's not just a place that exists on the Internet. It's a place that is valuable to people. It means that it's a destination. That if you create genuinely helpful or genuinely inspiring or genuinely engaging content, people find your site valuable and they want to keep going there. And once they're there, they want to learn more about what you're about. And that might be what it's really all about right there. Because if you think about it, if you weren't creating these stories online, how would people know? From a nuts and bolts perspective too. Content helps you rank higher in Google search. It gives people something to share. If you're not creating a blog post, what are the pairing of your organization other than just the link to your organization online? And again, it establishes your site as a destination for a certain topic as an authority on a certain subject. And then lastly, content helps people make decisions.  And whether that maybe looks like a tracking donor. Maybe that looks like tracking people to want to volunteer to decide to pitch in and help your cause. Or maybe at the very end of the day, it's as simple as just sharing a great blog post that they wrote on your site. They read it on your site and they decide to share that with their own community. Great digital content really does a great job of pushing that needle and helping people to make decisions ultimately to support all the great things you do. Okay, so I'd like to thank you. First of all, thank you guys so much for already just sticking with us, sticking with me as we were going through a lot of content, a lot of information in the past about 40 seconds I suppose. And I'd like to open up this webinar to some discussion and some questions. And so I will be taking a look over at some questions that have been chatted over to me now. Hi Steven, I can go ahead and send you some of the questions that people have been asking. Just to be mindful of the time we have about 3 minutes left. So I think there are one of the questions that we got a few times was in terms of frequency and how often people should be posting, what is your recommendation especially for a smaller nonprofit that has limited resources? Oh, okay. So the idea of how much you should be posting is really a function of what the bandwidth is that you have at your organization to do quality content. So you want to do as much as you can without spreading people too thin. But in terms of how much you should be posting, it is good to post with a certain amount of consistency. So you don't want to just post once one week and then post five times the next week and then post maybe two times the next week. You want to create a certain cadence of how you are putting content out there so that people can learn to expect when they should be seeing something new on your site. Perfect. Okay, and then another question that we got, when you were showing the Microsoft animated video, people were wondering what tool you used to create that video, or if you have any recommendations on resources to make animated videos if budget. Totally. Especially if you are on a budget, going to any of these online marketplaces that there is a global community of freelancers that are ready to bid on jobs for you to create a simple animated explainer. We used an affordable animation studio that basically, that's fine, this type of thing. The price points for these animations are really varied. I've seen things for a few hundred dollars. So basically there are things like the Envato market, there are things like cyber in different sites like that where you can take a look, and there are hundreds of offers for affordable animation services. Exactly, yeah. I think also just to let everyone know for social media there are also resources available like Hootsuite so if you can't post them on your own, you can schedule stuff in advance so that you are not having to go in there every day to post things. So do you want to maybe talk about a few recommended tools for someone who has a small team to use? To blog with? To blog, yeah. So like if somebody doesn't have the capability to blog on their site or if social media going in every day and posting becomes a little bit difficult just in terms of common tools for a content creator. Oh yeah, so a medium is a great way to set up your own blog right off the bat. There's WordPress again is a very common tool. They have a lot of different themes and sort of skins that will make your site look really unique. And there's free WordPress sites. It's initially free but it's also at an annual level it's very affordable to do something on WordPress.  I would say I'd focus on those two or take a look at if there's a blog function on the type of theme that you have using a different site. Like some people use or decrease their sites on Wix and there's definitely different themes in Wix that support a blogging function and they have a little blog tab on them or not. And so I would just take a look when you're searching for different themes in these things like Squarespace or Wix or WordPress that you just in your search share make sure that that site supports blogging or kind of a media player or anything else that you imagine you might need. Perfect. All right, so I want to be mindful of everyone's time. Thank you Stephen so much for today's presentation. Thank you to everyone who attended today and asked questions. Hopefully you guys all learned a lot. If you guys don't mind it's always really helpful for us to hear your feedback. So if you don't mind just chatting one thing that you learned in today's webinar you'll also be receiving a post-event survey. So if you don't mind taking a couple of minutes to answer I think there's about five questions on there. It really helps us dictate future content so you should be receiving that once you close out of ReadyTalk. Also if you're on social media feel free to give us a follow. We're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn so please give us a like, heart, follow, whatever the actions are on each of those. And then also we have our blog which is blog.techsoup.org. We post fairly frequently there with tips and tricks. So if today's webinar was helpful we try to post things that are useful to you there as well. And then just if you are available we have upcoming webinars on our website www.techsoup.org. So keep an eye out for future webinars. Again thank you Stephen today for today's presentation. Thank you to our sponsor ReadyTalk and thank you to LaShika for answering questions on the back end and we hope to see you guys soon.


Which we, which shortlisted, which was shortlisted to earlier round were really good.  You know, the type of creativity which we had shown was really really good. So it was a tough fight between three, clearly, you know, when we kind of, you know, made our second round of screening, clearly three of them were emerged as the shortlisted one. And when we were choosing, repeating, you know, what was going on, I think it was a tough fight. You know, we were divided. But then we had to debate a little more on the which we never had before in part of you and, you know, you share a wide number of things to be taken as a whole. All right, we have three medals to be won in this category, which is Best Auto Creative Telecom Product and Services. The shortlisted nominees will correct, select their certificates from the registration desks. The rest of us would enjoy our beer right now and applaud for the very first show we're doing one day in this particular category. Hopefully it's the right one, Dhagan.


My name is Kevin Umstetter. I'm a financial management analyst for the fleet. I am really from here. I've been here a long time. I guess you'd say I'm from Mobile, Alabama. I'm being recognized as a civilian in the spotlight for my work in the budget office with the fleet. I do the civilian personnel program amongst other things. We're down in our manning so I pretty much do anything that comes through the budget office that has anything to do with funding. There's a lot of moving parts in the APS in the Africa Partnership Station so we've got a lot of different exercises that are going on simultaneously and apart from one another. We've got to track the funds to make sure that those funds are available should something arise quickly. We try to get those funds out to the people as quickly as we possibly can. It's more to make their life easier so they have to worry if the funds are there, if the documents are going to get in place or whatever. So I do the best I can to get that stuff out as quick as I can. If I had to thank anybody I would really have to say a great thanks to Irene Seac. She was just an unbelievable help to me and I'm very grateful for what she did to help me get here because as I said if it weren't for her I don't think I'd be recognized as a civilian in the spotlight.


library, I guess. Anyways, it takes 9.25 hours to fly 3,925 miles from London to Chicago. What is the average speed of the airplane? So average speed is going to be the distance divided by the time, right? So we have both of those factors given to us. The distance in this case is 3,925 miles, the time, 2,5 hours. So speed and velocity are effectively the same thing. So like we said, velocity is distance divided by time. So we have those. So distance in this case, 3,9. And it doesn't specify what units it wants to do. We'll just keep it in miles per hour. That's cool with me. And I just take one minute divided by 30 sig figs, 4 sig figs, so the answer is going to be 3. Very good. So I got 4,24 miles per hour. So that's the average speed this plane is going to be. Any questions on this? Again, after doing those kinetic energy ones, this one should be probably a breeze, though.


The Yarmouth wastewater testing team, YWTT, used an asset-based community design framework to develop a successful wastewater surveillance program. The team's efforts resulted in early detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission in their community, allowing them to issue timely warnings to residents about potential risks. Additionally, the team's correlation analysis showed that SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations were most strongly correlated to reported COVID-19 cases the same week and the following week. This suggests that the team's surveillance program could provide valuable information on the spread of the virus in the community. This article was authored by Yolanda M. Brooks, Paley Griskiewicz, Ailee Sidoway, and others.


So welcome everybody here to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschka. I'm the director of the CUNY Siegel Center here. So it's a great pleasure for us to have hosted the workshop, the Parliament workshop this afternoon. The second we did and I welcome Emily, Corey and Michael to be with us. We had a three hour experience of a workshop of what's called the Parliament and we're going to find out all what it is we have here with us about 20, 30 members of the workshop. I don't know if everybody can see it. Welcome to our viewers on HowlRound and thanks for HowlRound to cover this on the national nonprofit live stream platform. And we also published this book about Parliament because we thought it's such an important work. And the editor is here with us, Corey, who is also a PhD student in theater here at the Graduate Center. So first of all, even so, it was not a traditional piece of choreography, but I think still Michael deserves an applause. I don't know, did you ever hear one yet in Kaliamans? Do you get an applause? No. So before we come to the discussion and talk about this unusual animal of what Parliament is, I think we do not really know, but everybody who tastes it likes it. I had a friend who was a Japanese curator and she says, my goal is to let people taste the Iwami, something that looks a little bit odd, but once you taste it, you know, it tastes really good. And you know what it is, but you didn't even know that it was missing from it. And so this is one of these pieces, I think, that are of real significance, the idea behind it, but also the experience. So we have with us Emily, Corey, and Michael.  First of all, not everybody loves Parliament. Some people really hate it. Is it on? No? Yeah. Okay. Can you hear me? No.  Some people really hate it and have a very difficult time, and that's okay too. And they talk about it five years later still about it, which I appreciate too. So it's an experience. I'm Michael Clean. I'm a choreographer, an artist. I originally from Vienna, but via various European countries, up in the South in North Carolina at Duke University, where I'm a professor in dance, and I also run the laboratory for social choreography at the Keenan Institute of Ethics. So a lot of the work is actually supported or emerges out of thinking and creating interventions in the field of ethics, which means you have a much broader conversation with a broader kind of demographics. Since we are close to Broadway, we will have that broader conversation here. Corey, tell us a bit about you. I'm not sure if it's Michael's work. It's on, but it's on. Is yours working? Oh yeah. Okay, so we'll share. I'm Corey Tamler. As Frank said, I am in the PhD program in theater and performance here at the Keenan Graduate Center, where I am writing about co-authorship and performance. And apart from having put together this book, I also have a creative practice largely working with water and working with a collective in Maine that makes work with bodies of water and also doing some similar work in Berlin. And I am also the co-program coordinator for social practice CUNY, which is co-sponsoring. This panel tonight and co-sponsoring the Bringing Parliament here. Social Practice CUNY is an initiative across CUNY initiative that supports graduate students and faculty at all of the different CUNY campuses as many of them as possible who are doing socially engaged artworks in various ways. So I can also talk more about that, but just wanted to say that SP CUNY also with the Segal is co-presenting today. And that's awesome. And I work for them and they're cool. My name is Emily Roboto. I'm a CUNY professor. I teach at the City College of New York, which is the Harlem campus of the CUNYverse. I teach creative writing. I'm a creative writer. I'm not a journalist, but I'm kind of a little bit of a journalist, but I have more creative latitude than a journalist. And I write about social and environmental justice issues from the lens of motherhood. And I am participating as a fellow in the social practice CUNY cohort this academic year. One of the things I'm really enjoying about it is getting to talk to artists at different disciplines. I'm also married to a writer is a little boring because I mean it's wonderful, but it's so delightful to talk to visual artists who are socially engaged, choreographers who are socially engaged, to kind of think about what does social engagement look like in art. So this was a wonderful experience for me to participate today. I live mostly in my head, not in my body. So when you invited us to think about, well, body thought, that felt very exciting to me and pushing some boundaries for me. So thank you. Maybe we share that one, Mike, give it to Michael. So, Michael, I don't know if this works at all, but Mike, what is Parliament, what is social choreography? Oh, yeah, I was hoping that we kind of, I don't have to answer so many questions, but especially the difficult ones like that, because what is social choreography? And I think the book lays it out quite clearly as well. It's sort of like a, what do you call it, a heavy term or a loaded term? A baggy term. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it's sort of a catch all for a lot of different practices, I think, that came out of a root system of movement and dance and choreography. In the case of the laboratory or high, look at it. I think of social choreography as something where you engage the kind of existing, where you're trying to deconstruct the existing social socialization or the fabric of socialization. At the end of the same time, you're trying to present something else in its place or you're kind of trying to cultivate something, some alternatives, some alternative realities. And there might be very short realities. There might be little climpses that last a couple of hours or there might be prolonged environments or initiatives. For all the HowlRound audiences who weren't here today at four o'clock, and a little bit later because it rained so much, about 30, 35 people came here to the room, took their shoes off or not, and then for three hours spent time in here, most of them kind of starting out lying on the floor or sitting, and they were watching each other. Michael gave an introduction talk where he said, be in the room, do not talk, don't be creative, don't have any ideas, and see how you relate. What are the distances? What do you experience in that time watching others, knowing that others watch you and also in some way, in a consent way that there can be a contact in between each other? So it was over three hours, which is a very long time. There's a great Harvard professor in art history who says, if you go to a museum, don't run and look at each piece for two or three seconds, take a notebook, stay for two hours in front of one painting, and experience it. And I often do it, and it really is a completely different experience.  Is that your idea? You want to change the world, the person? There's a quote, you must change your life.  At the end of the poem. And yeah, sorry, novice.   But what it does, it subtly goes to work, to destabilize kind of existing realities. A lot of people who leave parliament, especially when you do it as a practice, like more than once or continuously, something is destabilizing outside of the room. And you find yourself moving through the supermarket aisles differently, talking to strangers. It just starts behaving differently, and it sort of bleeds out. But like any good intervention, usually it's being pulled back after a couple of days, returning to an old normal. So it has to be a practice. But what I often say, it sort of should offer psychedelic thunderbolt to take you out of your day-to-day world and present a kind of different way of being in the world. So and make you feel what it could be and why it's so weird that it's not like that and what happened along the way. In traditional dance, we see well-trained dancers who have trained for decades in front of us doing beautiful work. We pay a lot of money. We sit in our chairs and we watch them dance and actually in a way destroying sometimes their bodies for us. Here it's different. The choreographer gives some instructions. You wrote some beautiful notes over there, a scoreboard, a little Torah roll which you rolled out. And you leave the room and then people are among themselves. So it's radically different. And you worked with Forsyth. You did also great choreography. But you thought, thanks thing needs to be different. Something has to change. Corey, my question for you. You are one of our great students, brilliant students. You've seen a lot. You have participated a lot. Why is this so important to you? Why did you say I even want to make a book about? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about, I mean, I've only done parliament one time before this. It was quite a while ago at this point. It was before the pandemic. It was the first time that we did it at CUNY. I've talked to Michael a lot about it. I've talked also to other people who have participated in it. A fair amount about it. And the book itself has also some contributions, short contributions from people who have participated in various parliaments over the years. So it was interesting to experience it again after quite a long time and after, I don't know, the world's changed a lot since whenever we did it to end of 2018. I think recently I kept, in the last couple of days, I kept coming back to thinking about how, I don't even remember if it was you who described it as a medicine at some point, or if that's something that I came up with, or maybe came up with in conversation with someone else. But I think I was thinking about what made me think of it that way. And it also has to do with this, it has to do with this kind of unbuilding while building that social choreography does or aims to do this need to take down and build at the same time. I was also just reading a piece of Emily's writing where you were kind of talking about the basically experiencing the built environment in Harlem and I was thinking about that, knowing we were going to have this conversation in relation to some of the things Michael just said about what parliament can do to you, the sort of lasting effect that it can have on you, making you feel kind of thrown out of place in your built environment, making you feel how fucking weird it feels to be in a place with corners and walking in a city that's a grid and how it can make you, it doesn't have this effect on everyone, but last time certainly had this effect on me, how it can sort of make you conscious of those things and of the constructedness of it. And so I think that's one of the primary things that's interesting for me and what I just was thinking about a lot in the last couple of days is like, you know, if that's true, if that's one of the things that it does, it's sort of like a, and if it's a medicine that can basically give us sort of a sense of our world ending, what it might be like for our world to end.  And yeah, I mean, we know a lot of that for a lot of people, the world has already ended or the world is ending. And it's something that like for us, we maybe get to experience like a safe version of that. Emily, for you, who is not directly coming out to theater performance or dance world, how do you look at this? What is of interest to you in this project? One of the things that was interesting to me was the length of time. We had the gift of time, two and a half hours, almost three hours to move through different sets of emotions. And I was interested, Michael, when you shared at the beginning, the first parliament was held in Greece. Is that right during a time of social rupture? And so that invited me to think about, well, what is the rupture we're living in at this moment? There's a, we're in a moment of poly crisis. There's so many things that are tearing the social fabric. And so to be invited into a room full of strangers with very little instruction felt a little bit risky and also exciting because we had to put our phones away and we spend a lot of time distracted, at least I do. And so interaction had to look different. And one of the things I enjoyed was how swiftly we turned to playfulness, a kind of childlike state. And there was laughter pretty fast. I think maybe five, 10 minutes in there were a group of people laughing and I teach climate writing at city college. And I think about environmental writing as something all of us can do because we all live in environments, even though sometimes we tend to think of environmental writing as being nature writing. It can take place in a city and I do a similar exercise with my students that's about length. Like I do it around Thanksgiving. I teach them a Malosh poem, try to praise the mutilated world. And then I have them list a hundred things they're grateful for around Thanksgiving. A hundred, not 10 or 15 because that's going to be my mom, my cat, you know, but it forces them to be strange. And we were forced to be out of our element because we were given the gift of a length of time amidst one another. And I moved through, I'm sure it would be interesting to hear from others what they moved through, but I moved through feelings of delight, discomfort, both kind of physical and mental at some points, boredom, at some points like whimsy or just extreme interest in others. And I don't think we're asked to pay attention at this level often. So that felt like a gift to me. And it's something I think a lot about as a writer as well, just paying attention. In the way you pay attention when you're falling in love, right? Or when you're traveling. Maybe we take the mic and have some, like someone wants to share an experience. Is it fine? Let me go to a question. How was it? Oh, okay. I can talk. I feel like, first of all, like I'm a professional dancer. So come back to this. Really giving back the focus to social function of dance. And how dance all started. It's almost like a ritualistic warm. It will all gathered. There's a certain rule, but there's a no hierarchy. So that's kind of like all God, all spiritual is invited in this, like whatever you believe is real. So kind of like what do we, the world we're living in now, like we all have different realities. And that was the best version of, of course. I want to talk a little bit about I want to talk about the awkwardness. I feel the politic of touch. The permission you're giving people, why it can be so simple and a non, non like linguistic communication, but just simple a message, not even a gesture, but you know there's consent to touch. And why cannot, I don't know, like if that's a part kind of struck me the most is why we need the four, like what consent means why that just deliver such message is so clear and so strongly. Yeah. Yeah, for me it was I have been here in New York City for like seven months or eight months. And I am always feeling like my body is constantly I am always feeling that there's a lot that I am not complaining or that I am being to something that I shouldn't be or to it's colonization, of course, but it's very difficult to untie that kind of understanding inside of your mind. And these kind of experiments let you play with that fears with those the third eye that is watching you and also with the scenic in your head the scenic that it's saying hippie mother fuckers, what are you doing this is so really cool. And at the same time you coexes with that scenic but then you let yourself be a more childish and play and not take it too serious and not be too transcendent and then you find having fun time but the exercise of reaching spontaneity through the other I think it's very important. I thought it was wonderful how this consent led to a tenderness and an intimacy that does sort of go back to your essence but what was also really fascinating and wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had this in the length of time was that I then observed people who I had really beautiful intimate exchanges having intimate exchanges with others and it was all in a spirit of generosity it was a joy for me to watch observe someone else express something ineffable something untangible with someone else when I had also had in my own a very unique experience with that individual and I saw that happening all throughout the throughout the time. One more? Okay then before we come to the question part which is of course the important Michael question to you where did it start and why did you do this? I sort of mentioned that in the introduction a little bit that it started out of a conversation with a museum in Athens in Greece What year? In 2012 probably we started discussing it and I wanted to really when I went to Greece I moved to Greece from Ireland and Greece was really breaking apart at that point and it was very fascinating we moved there because we had a house there my wife's Greek so we and I was starting to integrate myself into the troubles in a way to kind of figure out what's going on in this place that I have no clue about that really I don't know much about and it felt like such a binary the way the protests were the way everybody was pointing the fingers at everybody of guilt nobody took any responsibility for anything it was such an interesting situation and I just thought what could be a meaningful contribution choreographically which is sort of a ridiculous thought because as a choreographer in dance you don't necessarily think of it a meaningful political statement or something like that and so we started I started out with this process and kind of workshopped it over a year I also fell from having a big production base to having no production base so I kind of realized okay maybe I just going to work with whoever I work with whoever is in the room and what can we do and we started out in the first time on the island of Idra we did it with eight people a few people half of them locals from the island half of them artists and it worked out really quite interestingly and then it moved into the binaki museum where it became like hundreds and hundreds of people engaged in it and that didn't work out that well I thought there was something wrong with it I didn't probably have the right vocabulary and then it sort of over the last then I brought it to Durham to Duke and in Duke we really did a lot of parliaments in the last years and it it does something bringing professors together with undergrads together with together with the community and actually doing across the ages and experience bases it creates a different kind of quality it creates an interesting community that I think was missing before at Duke so it introduced that and now I feel like it's on the cusp of actually going more out into the world again I think there was a period where it was going out into the world those people were doing parliaments as well as an open source technology if you want then it got sort of retreated back to to a research base and now I feel like it's opening up again but yeah so people hundreds of them have been done if I understand right and often you are not even there people guide it so we always I think we show interesting work here interesting artists but it's important for us the audience and we have a great audience and it's important to be a good audience also for the artists and to think about how does it change our life, our world what you want so we would like to hear from you and now I think we could go to what questions do you have for Michael after having been in the room for three hours taking out an entire almost day which is a very tough thing to do in New York City but thank you all for doing that and so here we go who you first, yeah thank you so when we were practicing it it reminded me a lot of the meditative retreats that people do that you gather in a room and you can't use technology you can't talk to each other I was just wondering how do you distinguish that with distinguish this with a retreat and where is the choreography when we often comes as opposed to something that happens as like an improv or something like there is usually something is dictated to the performers where is the choreography in that hmm well two things first of all I'm not very well schooled in retreats or meditation I might have some personal practice but I don't practice it widely I see parliament really as a political project so I come at it from a different kind of perspective and also in terms of choreography I think choreography is such a as well a baggy term in a way that it's always churning itself it's always changing in fact we didn't have that word a hundred years ago so it in a sense to choreograph we didn't have the word to choreograph and choreography meant something completely different a hundred years ago we talked about dance making and so the term is constantly changing and for the last 20 or 30 years it has been really under scrutiny kind of this because of its sort of authoritarian voice upon the body and this kind of dictating the flesh how to move which is a very particular western phenomena and there's been a lot of discussion around that in academic circles and in artistic practice of how to change that and maybe turn it around how choreography and dance could become partners and I define choreography as creating the conditions for things to happen so actually I'm much more concerned with creating appropriate conditions in which new systems could emerge and that's what the interest is so I'm not interested in telling people how to move, when to move, where to move that's just past I used to do that, you can google it but for the last 20 years I didn't do that Thank you Michael for being here thank you all for organizing this today just a couple questions one, I'm curious if you've drawn any conclusions Michael over the 12 years of doing this about how power is operative in Parliament or if you've observed any trends about how power operates in the room especially in relationship to the title Parliament you're not in the room I'm curious how intentional that is or why that's important and then Frank mentioned something earlier about instructions to not speak and I actually don't think you gave us a parameter around speaking or not speaking, you did? just those two questions then, thank you totally what was the first question just from Wendell oh the power there is definitely first of all I don't see Parliament so there's a practice part of it where I participate in Parliament regularly and I've done so in the beginning very actively but then I also noticed when I go to places where they don't know me people start copying what I do I'm sort of the authority in the room and that becomes very this derving to me but also destructive to the situation because I don't know what I'm doing so I'm like as lost as everybody else with these strangers so I decided to take myself out of the situation but I gather a lot of stories people tell me stories they write me emails so I gather a lot of material of their journey through this and there is always a real reflection of society within Parliament so it's not like this utopia that is just it also breaks open who's participating how are they participating when are they participating and I often say well you don't get the Parliament you deserve you get the Parliament you get and you have to deal with it and you have to position yourself and you can go like oh I don't like that it's whatever but it's what you get and whatever you decide is actually also a real reflection of your ability to engage or disengage at the outside of a certain discourse and so that is part of it I mean the work in itself might be at times dystopian it doesn't need to be just great love that's wonderful that is happening and I experience that strongly as well within Parliament but at the same time there is real power structures that are breaking open but sometimes they take over the room and it's very fascinating to for me it's fascinating to observe it or to even learn about them and figure out okay that this is real and maybe if I change a couple of words within the introduction I can actually yield against certain things or enable other kind of things so yeah these introductions that are only 15 minutes they're very very careful in fact so it sounds like it looks like I'm relaxed but I'm actually thinking about it from the day I wake up on the flight I'm like trying to get the wording just right if you're too funny it becomes very funny Parliament it's incredible how mimetic the whole system is I think we totally underestimate that on a genuinely how mimetic it really is and how you have impact if you're in a position of authority how it just translates so I hope you don't mean me with this no I'm just kidding here you go thank you and thank you for that idea of setting the container and how you start it can really set a chain motion in effect so it was interesting to hear how you think about the words as soon as you wake up I actually have a question for Emily who just experienced her first Parliament because you mentioned that you're drawn to this length of time that we had together and drew a connection to the assignment that you give to your students to write a hundred things right in that length thing and I'm wondering if there's any other connections or parallels you thought of in a social context of this social experience of people kind of playing off of each other in this Parliament situation or noticing each other that you also see in a writing classroom and writing practice yeah one thing we were communicating about Cory and I over the weekend was an interesting co-authorship I'm becoming increasingly interested I'm also 20-25 years into my career as a writer you mentioned you haven't really told people how to move their bodies in 20 years that way we typically think of choreography and I'm increasingly moving away from an interest in single ownership that was always a fallacy anyway because you're edited by others so to have your pure name on something doesn't feel right to me anymore and I'm trying to introduce my students to the practice of thinking about what does it mean to maybe author something to co-author something something I tried myself as a writer that I could share with my students what it means to do with paying attention and observation was really inspired by this climate scientist named Katherine Hayhoe who says the most important thing we can do to combat climate change is to talk about it there's a big distance between those of us who are appropriately concerned and frightened and those of us who talk about it with any degree of regularity and so in response to that I gathered well I asked important questions like how do you feel about climate change in your body and in your habitat I asked everybody I knew that question and recorded what they said and I wrote I can't say I wrote that I literally put their words hundreds of people from across across the globe right it's like a chorus or a dirge or something and I show that to my students what is this what does this open up for you what are the possibilities for working through on the page together what I liked about today is that it wasn't on the page at all it was it was embodied and it wasn't always easy and beautiful there were lots of moments of play but there were some moments of discomfort too some moments of touch that maybe weren't negotiated appropriately that needed to be cleansed and moved through and all of that so I hope that answers your question in some part yeah thanks for the opportunity to do this it was really exciting I think one of the things that came up for me is this idea of a reflection and I do think I realized that I was in a room with very creative people or people who had self-selected to come to this type of experience and so then I was curious to hear more about times that you've done this with people who are not artists or people who would self-select to come to this sort of experience and if you have witnessed that or what's come up for people in communities that are not artists or like you're saying there's some mixed community and artists yeah so just like hearing about what that's like Michael it's different first of all I mean often there's a self-select artistically minded crowd in especially closed parliaments because of the institutions that are interested in presenting it when we do it in museums it has a different quality to it because you actually carefully curate who's coming to it so actually the three months preparation of curation to convince different communities to partake in parliament is actually the most labor so that is definitely very different for bigger situations bigger parliaments I'm okay with dancers coming to it because dancers are citizens too right but it's more it's a work for citizens in general and it's conceived as a kind of technology for citizens and I'm getting excited when people who never in a room together when you simply have never been in a room with this kind of demographics of people and start parliament then that's exciting just the room itself you hardly ever in a demographics like that anyway from the immigrant to the billionaire in the room doing parliament so we did that for Greece and it worked not dissimilar I have to say you know maybe a slightly different but that's more country to country specific like in Greece there would be a couple of people who sit in you know whatever just outside open the door and smoke and you go like well we said there's no real brand they're like don't worry don't worry and it's just normal of the cultural kind of it has a different cultural feel to it and in each country that I observed the parliament there's a clear difference but there's also a more self similarity than difference but comment thoughts I thank you for coming again I thought maybe because you have this beautiful book that you've been passing around that you could talk about the process of co-writing the book I've read it and it's a remarkable piece and it really gives you process on the page and so and I'm grateful for that as a person who likes process and I'm interested in your process or Cory Cory and Michael we didn't really co-write it, Cory wrote it I'm just saying you know I've been involved and we've been closely communicating but she did the labor and I agree it's a great book I actually re-read it started re-reading it and I just I read it completely different it's always a good sign if you suddenly like you pick it up a year later and it can reflect something completely different back to you and it's I just love the structure that she's created and I let you talk about it yeah thanks Jess um it is it is a very multi- vocal book um for sure so I also think it makes sense that you use co-writing to describe it the process was that we did Parliament here Michael and I had um I had met Michael through an earlier piece of his and then we brought Parliament here and we did a conversation afterwards it was very similar to this basically and the conversation was a really good one um and and Michael and I also talked a lot about about the piece and other iterations of it and Michael said you know it's never been written about I don't even know how you would write about it and that for me was also kind of an exciting challenge to sort of think through how you might write about it and Frank was sort of encouraging us to to turn just the conversation that we had into some kind of publication and we both wanted to go kind of further than that so I did a long interview with Michael over a couple of days and we looked through the sketches that that he still had from the very when he was first sort of trying to think through just trying to design Parliament and stumbling towards what it how it could work and also reached out to a bunch of people um who had participated in Parliament in the past and asked them if they'd be willing to reflect on their um on their experience in it and then and then I had all of this material and and also did a a lot of journaling myself basically about a lot of a lot of written sort of memory of my own going through Parliament and um spent a long time wrestling with how to sort of fit all of that together um in a piece of writing that attempts to kind of lead you through it attempts to be like or kind of one of the driving ideas was um to sort of think through what a what a book might be that could give you a kind of Parliament like experience. I don't know how successful it is in actually doing that but um but that's where the form came from is trying to play with that. I think that um it looks so unusual in the representation of idea. Um yeah it has uh I mean it's meant to be turned uh this is also Raphael Kozakowski designed this book sort of took these ideas that I had about um the book being an object that you have to really like uh you know work with physically as you read it and he really um translated that very well to a design so that's part of like as you're going through it the text goes in different directions I'm trying yeah it's true I know I'm showing you to myself sorry thank you Emily um and and then there are so um let's see there's like there's a central a central text central text and then there's a the interview runs along the side so you have to turn the book to read that um and then there are also uh the reflections from um from participants kind of interrupt the book they're the blue pages um and uh and they're yeah so they sort of interrupt the flow of writing which actually makes me think another one of the another one of the images that became important I mean part of one of the instructions uh that Michael gives at the door that belongs to the beginning of parliament is to sediment and um and that's an instruction that um just ask you to sort of sit with and bring back to feel free to bring back things that happened to you throughout the course of um of the parliament and to sort of like let them build on each other um I had a really beautiful experience with that today I'm like literally looking at the person who I know knows what I'm talking about and I was like there's a sedimentation and uh I almost cried when it happened like it was really nice um it was just a gesture that we had shared early very early on in the parliament that came back in a way that was a very surprising like private moment of dramaturgy between us um so sedimentation is sedimenting is uh is a kind of key instruction for parliament and uh and also just a very special has become like a special word for my practice that I'm really grateful to Michael for um because I work with water I know Emily also has a recent project um working with Tibbets Brook Broker Creek here in New York um and so I was like my own practice with bodies of water was kind of weaving through my thinking as my formal thinking as I was putting together the book and um and sedimentation of course is also a word that's used that that describes how a body of water how a flowing body of water sort of builds and unbuilds itself at the same time um and so a body of water is also one of the images that drives the design of the book and the sort of interruption also of um that it flows and turns but that also gets interrupted by different perspectives um and voices other than mine kind of like splitting the flow of the book and letting it come back together. Yeah and to point out it's a Siegel Center publication and so I think it's about beautiful book we ever did any more um we have about five, eight moments a more a comment, a question yeah. I think well I've done this before and we've spoken about this but actually I'm curious about other I know that you've been developing like different new choreographies at Duke and I'm actually curious is Parliament yeah how is Parliament related to them and the instructions giving I've never experienced any other ones besides Parliament but is it something that kind of was a seed for like a whole new area of work because you said it's kind of started at this point that you were switching from everything you were doing in Ireland and is that yeah just how is it the seed for something or it just started in a chapter and how they're related. Yeah it took me a while after Parliament I was sort of in a little bit of a pickle as in where do I go from there uh like where do you build that out in what way and it sort of took me probably another five six years to come up with a follow-up work which is called amendment so and it really tried to amend this notion that if we only negotiate between each other what's happening the ecology in terms of where the animals where is all the other sort of and so it's a score or similar situation but it's just amending the Parliament in a way and it's with electronic noise so it's a different kind of situation with electronic noise and light so it has a completely different experience it's shorter it's more compressed also Parliament usually is six hours long I think you people should do six hour Parliament this is just a taste of Parliament you have to fall asleep deep sleep and wake up in the Parliament and continue to really appreciate it I think amendment is shorter and it's almost like works faster and then there's a third one which called constitution which I Premiered last year and so that's the whole trilogy and constitution is like a starting culture of difference and it works again different but it's similar it's all one trilogy and now I'm getting more comfortable with these situations for citizens and I'm building them out I've got a Premier in April called D11's Organ and that's where citizens I haven't got it down yet so obviously I'm struggling but citizens together imagining what could be done together how to move together like an augmented reality of a completely imagined dance floor if you want in which everything is possible but actually nobody's really moving and so it's one hour with electronic noise the wildest dance floor of the imagination who can really stretch the imagination and so I mean the rehearsal process of that with a research group of about 20 people and figuring out every week how this could could potentially work or not I just thought that maybe because you brought up amendment as as something that pushes more into the ecological possibilities of social choreography but I also think that in general like I think Parliament has I think it's interesting to talk about this work in general for the implications for ecological thinking and I know for you it's always it's part of your thinking from the beginning and that I'd be interested to also maybe talk about that with Emily right largely since you're an environmental writer largely I don't know if you have I don't know if you have thoughts about that but I guess for me like one of the very basic things in performance I think I think on the surface people wouldn't think of this as an ecological work because the content is not making an ecological statement but but I think that the very basic way in which it it makes you as a participant so aware of your networkedness of your embeddedness in the entire situation to the point where how sensitive the entire situation is just it makes you aware of yeah makes you aware of your of your sort of larger embeddedness which is also an important part of ecological thought so even this one though this one in particular is very human it's very much about throwing yourself onto the other and onto the other person there are still have deep implications for for like espousing ecological thought I think it's interesting to talk about that I know we're close to the end of time just to say very briefly I was thinking about that because increasingly I'm thinking about you use the word network but in indigenous practice we often think of web of life and so you think you're very aware of being part of a web when you're in a room like this with other people and though it's we're not thinking we're not being asked to think about the non-human world so much we were invited very in a very calculated way I now understand to negotiate touch would have to be negotiated that was so interesting to me because behind that I'm thinking in my own practice I think how do we lay most lightly on the land how do we not how do we not cause harm to be very very deliberate about that our touch was so tentative at first you remember we just reached our fingers out like this it's like our fingernails and our fingertips and then we were laughing but I think there was a lot of deliberate thinking about our connectivity with each other in a way that would that would not harm others I just say I believe in that there is something like or my experience points towards the fact that there might be something like mammalian wisdom in us that we know what touch is appropriate what touch is not appropriate and it has been sort of torn or kind of confused or but there is actually a simple return to it I mean there are thousands of people who've done so many things and I've never had a real complaint that you will always have psychopaths I mean that's important there will always in the metro in the subway you can always encounter I mean somebody who breaks the social contract but within such a situation where there are so many people touching each other without any sort of formal instructions except negotiated people can do it it would be great trust in our mammalian wisdoms that we can actually coexist well if we if practiced or if allowed to do so yeah so thank you thank you all for coming and again it's a great 21st century work I think it's non-traumatic post-traumatic it could be done outside with sunlight even in a big field you don't need stages and nobody needs to have expensive lights up in theaters as we normally do and also theaters where big consumers of energy we forget it all the companies that fly back and forth it is a great piece it's inspiring it really makes us think and I think this is really what art is about that we see something really completely different all of a sudden and and thank you all for being in that space even so it was just three hours instead of six but in New York that's 12 hours maybe so thank you all and thanks to our viewers in the whole round thank you