This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. We are going to be talking about hardiness and resilience. Over the next 30, 45 minutes, we're going to define resilience, identify characteristics that make people more resilient, and ways we as clinicians or parents or teachers can enhance those characteristics. Then we'll also move on to defining hardiness, which is kind of a part of resilience. It's defined by having commitment control and challenge. It was developed back in the 70s, but a lot of what they had to say really holds true today. And we'll examine why hardiness is important to resilience. So resilience is the capacity to bounce back. A lot of times when we think about resilience, we think about pillows, we think about mattresses, we think about things that bounce back. Emotionally, we can have the capacity to bounce back ourselves. And why is this important? Well, you know, if we don't bounce back, then when we hit some sort of a stressor, when we hit something that is an obstacle, we fall flat. My daughter has a new kitten right now and bless her little heart. She is not very coordinated, the kitten, not my daughter. And she came running through the house today and jumped up and was trying to jump up on the counter and face planted right into the drawer just below the countertop. And, you know, after I stopped laughing, I felt really bad for her. But no, you know, she was fine. She got up and she did it not one more time, but two more times because she was determined to get on top of that counter. She definitely shows a lot of resilience. When we talk about emotional resilience, we talk about people who, when they get angry, they can get another control. They can come back from it when they get upset, when they get depressed, when they feel rejected, all those things that happen. I mean, life happens, but it doesn't hold them down. They don't unpack their bags and live there. So resilient people tend to have an awareness of and minimize their vulnerabilities. So if you're going to be resilient, you want to be as strong and as prepared and as, you know, ready for any challenges that come your way as you can, which helps with the resilience. If you're already worn down, you know, think about that old leather seat that's in your car that may be 10 years old or, you know, something like that. New leather can bounce back. If somebody sits on it with something that's a little pokey, old leather, as soon as you sit on it with anything that is not super soft, it'll start to crack. Same sort of thing with people. We want to make sure that we maintain as much flexibility and as much energy that we can devote to dealing with stressors instead of just dealing with, you know, existence. So minimize your vulnerabilities, get enough sleep, get good nutrition, have a good social support system, all those kind of things. A healthy self-esteem kind of seems to go without saying, but we're going to say it. People who are not looking toward others for external validation, people who can validate themselves and say, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and gosh darn it, people like me tend to be able to bounce back because they're not looking for other people's approval. They're not needing other people to tell them they're okay. A strong social support system is also characteristic of people who are resilient because social support is one of our greatest buffers against stress. We are not made to take on the entire world all by ourselves and live in isolation. That's just not how humans operate. So having people there who can present other opinions, who can just empathize, who can do whatever you need them to do helps a lot in managing stress. Self-awareness. Now, I talked a little bit ago about awareness of vulnerabilities and that's part of it. You know, we want to make sure that we are physiologically minimizing anything that's going to put an excessive drain on our energy. But then we also want to be self-aware of our own attitudes and our own needs and our own preferences. We've talked about using temperament, the MBTI or the Kiersey, in helping people understand what kind of situations cause stress for them and what kind of situations tend to be less stressful or more in tune with their temperament. The more we can encourage people to create environments and situations that are in tune with their temperament and their personal preferences, the less stress they're going to have, the less effort they're going to have to exert to get through the regular day, which means they'll have that much more energy to handle any stressors that come their way and they can be more resilient. Self-efficacy. If people don't think that they can affect change, then they're not going to bounce back. They're just going to get knocked down. They're going to be like, you know, what's the point in trying? So we want to encourage clients to look at their self-efficacy. We want to encourage children to look at their self-efficacy. Yes, maybe you didn't pass that test or yes, maybe you're not good in that particular subject. What can you do to get better? What can you do to change the situation or and or? What else are you good at? You know, we're not all good at everything. So it's important to engender that self-efficacy. Problem-solving skills. Getting outside of the box. One of the things we talk about with them, acceptance and commitment therapy is developing psychological flexibility. These problem-solving skills help people get outside of the moment and look at the situation for what it is, not judging it, just looking at it and going objectively. Is this getting me closer to or further away from my goals? And what are possible solutions? You know, not every time something happens, do you come up with the best solution right away? Think about different ways to solve the problem. Practice acceptance. Just being okay with the fact that things are. You know, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but they just are. There's not a lot that you can do to change things in the moment sometimes. So accepting that there are the unchangeable and figuring out how to live with it. Tolerating distress. People who are resilient are able to experience distress and not let it overcome them. So think about a wave coming in. Somebody who is resilient is able to sort of stand and that wave won't knock them down. Somebody who is experiencing a lot of vulnerabilities, who doesn't have a healthy self-esteem, who doesn't have that capacity to bounce back, as soon as that wave comes, it's going to knock them flat on a keyster. So we want to help people tolerate distress and they have an optimistic viewpoint. It is so much easier to deal with adversity when you try to see the silver lining than when you say, oh well, I expected this to happen or this always happens. And looking at all the negative things. So ultimately when we develop resilience within our children, within our students, within ourselves, within our clients, these are the characteristics that we're going for. We want to help them be strong. We want to help them be on the ready. We want to help them be self-assured, self-confident and have a healthy self-esteem. So awareness of vulnerabilities, being aware of emotional distress. When you get up in the morning, sometimes you get up and you're not having a good day.  Being aware that that's how you are at that moment in time will give you more tools to handle what comes your way. I deal with things and I approach things and I take on things differently if I get up and I'm anxious about something versus if I get up and I'm not anxious. I can take on more things if I don't have a lot of energy devoted to anxiety. The day that I defended my dissertation, huge anxiety. I knew that day I wasn't going to do anything, but get up, go to the gym and then get to the building like two hours early so I knew I had parking and my transparencies and everything all set up. Yes, that's how long ago I defended. We had transparencies, but I digress. If you are aware that you are emotionally dysphoric, you can figure out how to address it, but you can also make sure you don't take on additional stuff to compound that. Mental distress, well, emotional use stress. Let's hit that one real quick. Yeah, it can be a vulnerability. Have you ever gone on vacation and come back and been like, I need a vacation? You're exhausted because you are so on, so happy, so revved, so jazzed, whatever words you want to use, it too can be exhausting. So you're not necessarily coming back and feeling all relaxed and refreshed and zen and ready to take on the world. You may need another week or so just to recover from the vacation. Is that a bad thing? No, we all need happiness, but when we are that happy, you've got to remember that your brain is still dumping a lot of dopamine and all that sort of stuff, which takes energy. Mental distress is when you're foggy, when you have difficulty concentrating, when you're having difficulty with problem solving. When I get a cold, I am all of the above and then some, especially if it's a head cold.  When I get up and I know that, you know, I'm foggy and I'm not getting out of it, I don't take on tasks that are going to require a lot of mental concentration. If I can avoid it, I'm not going to start redesigning a website. I'm not going to start trying to write a new chapter.  Mental use stress again, just because it's stress doesn't mean it's bad. Stress means anything that makes the body use energy. Mental use stress is doing things you enjoy that you get excited about. Reading a book, learning a hobby, anything like that. But it takes energy. It's not just sitting there allowing your body to be kind of like when you're sleeping. Physical distress, you know, we know what this is. Poor nutrition, dieting. When you go on a diet, your body is trying to adjust for calorie deficits. It's trying to adjust to changes in your eating. This can cause some distress. Too much caffeine can put your body on a roller coaster as well. It's important to pay attention to those things, especially if you've got other sources of distress going on. Sleep, if you're getting enough sleep, that's great. If you're not getting enough sleep, that can be a problem.  It can help not, you know, you have to be careful with it. But exercise actually can help reduce pain by balancing muscle imbalances that you have and helping to release some of that tension stress. But it can also cause pain and exhaustion. So it's finding that happy medium. Pain is a vulnerability. Whenever we're in pain, it makes it harder. And not to say that you're going to be pain free all the time every day. Nobody is. Know when you're in pain that there are going, sometimes there may be things that are harder to do and it may be frustrating. Just kind of work that into your plan for the day. And then we already talked about illness. Social distress.   Family. These are all sources of social distress. They're people who are embroiled in drama constantly or can be negative or can be hurtful. We want to figure out ways to deal with this. You can't always distance yourself from those people.  They're your coworkers. They're your family. They're your friends. And you've chosen. You may choose for whatever reason to keep them in your circle. So how do you deal with the distress? If you're going to a situation and this starts to happen around the holidays. Or you may be going to a family gathering and you like 80% of your family, but there's that 20% that tends to be a little bit more critical, negative. Or maybe you're in recovery and they are insistent upon bringing alcohol and drugs and being not respectful of your needs. Those are all sources of social distress. So helping people figure out how to deal with that. But also remembering that social use stress, going to parties, socializing with people. It can be exhausting, especially if you're an introvert, even if it's a good conversation, even if it's a good party that you went to, you really enjoyed it. It can still be exhausting. And then finally, environmental distress is those things that keep you from getting enough sleep, feeling comfortable, being able to relax. If you're always on guard, if you're always sort of hyper vigilant, because you don't feel safe in your environment, that takes a lot of energy. Environmental use stress means being in situations that make you feel more comfortable. And sometimes that may mean doing things like cleaning, you know, but doing that might also make it a more pleasant environment to be in. And to that extent, it's worth the effort. Self-esteem. We want to make sure that we help clients develop the ability to provide validation and acceptance of themselves for who they are. You know, not what they do, not their occupation, not any of that, but who they are. Who are you as a person and helping them focus on things like being compassionate, being giving, being loving, being intelligent, being creative. Those are all characteristics that describe a person. Whereas a lot of people tend to focus on, I'm successful. That's what they do. I am a, you know, whatever their job title is, I am a mother, I am a sister.  And yes, you may be very proud of them. But without all those things, who are you, what characteristics describe you? And that's a cognitive challenge for a lot of people to get away from the what I do versus who I am. Help people identify personal strengths and positive characteristics. One thing you can do if you're a teacher or a parent or, you know, doing group counseling, have people each day, either at a meal or at the beginning of class, beginning of group, identify in their journal a personal strength that they have and a positive characteristic about themselves. They don't necessarily have to share this with everybody. Other things you can do, I've done in group before is give everybody note cards when they come into class and they have to write a nice thing about each other person in the group and then you hand them all back out. So whoever the statement is about ends up with 12 positive characteristics that their peers observed in them. They can choose whether to hold on to those or whether to give them back, not give them back physically. But if they agree with them, they will incorporate them into their journal. If they don't agree with them, they don't have to. But this is also a good way for people to get an idea about how others perceive them. Since most of our clients are far harder on themselves than anybody else, far more critical of themselves than anybody else and tend to minimize their successes and their accomplishments. We already talked about separating who you are from what you do. And then we can also encourage people to explore their thoughts, their cognitions about why other people's opinions matter. I've done an entire group on this with people before. What is it about other people's opinions? And is it just certain people's opinions or is it everyone's opinion? And why do you care what other people think? Most of us, unless we've been asked that question before have never really considered, why do we care? Why do I care what Jim Bob down the road thinks? Why do I care what my neighbor thinks? Why do I care what anybody's opinion is? When we're growing up, we're taught that we are supposed to respect others, respect our parents. We're supposed to do what we're told. And yes, we do want approval, especially from our parents, but figuring out where we can give ourselves approval and where we need other people's opinions as we grow older is really important, but it's not something a lot of us really actually move into doing. And also exploring cognitions about attributions. We've talked about these before. Global attributions are those that are about everything.  I am successful or I am lazy. Those are global attributions. It means it's not applying to any particular thing. Like I am really smart when it comes to fixing cars, but I am really not smart when it comes.  I am simply not smart when it comes to doing calculus. That is a specific attribution. We want people to really look at some of their negative cognitions, especially, and make them less global, make them more specific. Everyone in the world is not all against you. There may be some people in the world who don't want to see you succeed. Looking at the all or nothing thinking addressing those global attributions, especially the negative ones, and making them more specific. This is really important when, especially if you're working with young people, because as they develop cognitively, they go from the all or nothing thinking that children naturally have, and they need to be encouraged to develop more specific attributions. This will help them in the long run. In fact, my kids start talking in all or nothing terms. I have them identify exceptions. You're saying this happens all the time. Tell me about a time when your brother didn't do that. Tell me about the time when your teacher didn't do that. In group, we can do the same thing. We can focus on global attributions. If they say all people of this category do this thing, but all drug addicts are fill in the blank.  I can find exceptions to that rule because I've known some very successful, nice, compassionate drug addicts. I mean, they're the nicest people that you could ever hope to meet. They just happen to be addicted to morphine. So looking at those attributions and taking them from global to specific, stable and changeable is another type of attribution. Stable attributions mean whatever you think about this particular thing or this whole group of thing, if we're global, is there forever and always. It's a stable attribution. If someone is good, you know, I personally believe that most people, you know, there's that little tiny miniscule group that we can identify with antisocial personality disorder. But most people are good and they're good people. They may make bad choices, but in my mind, I still have a stable attribution of them being good people. Changeable means it's something that can be changed. It can be addressed.  I need a tutor. Again, as children grow up, a lot of times we fail to encourage them to look at what things are changeable. But part of the stable and changeable is also looking at the things that can't be changed. The weather, every winter, it is going to get cold in Tennessee. That is a stable attribution and I can tell you that. So I can't change it. How can I deal with it? Encouraging people and in recovery circles, we have the serenity prayer, and we talk about the courage to change the things I can and the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Serenity is kind of a vague term. So how do we accept those things we cannot change? How do we change our perception of it so we're okay with it? Or at least we're not un-okay with it? So global versus specific, stable versus changeable. And then the last type of attributions are internal versus external. Is it about me as a person or is it about something that happens? And the best example that I've ever been given for this is if somebody is walking down the street and they trip, do you automatically assume they're clumsy? Or do you automatically assume that there must have been something in the road or their shoe was untied? The first one, assuming they're clumsy, is an internal attribution. You're assuming it's something about them that made them trip. Assuming there's something in the road is an external attribution. And too often, we attribute things to people based on internal attributions. So maybe that person's just lazy. Well, no, maybe not. Let's look at what's going on in that person's life. And maybe they had all kinds of stuff. Their car broke down on the way to work. Their kid got sick. Something else happened. They didn't get any sleep last night. And yeah, they're going kind of slow today.  So we need to look and try to find other explanations. And that's the other activity I do with clients as well as my kids. When I hear negative attributions, I say, give me three other reasons that this might be happening or try to get inside that person's head, you know, just teleport yourself in there and try to imagine what might be going on that's causing this behavior. So what are the attributions? Those are all ways we can help people improve their self-esteem because a lot of people, adults and kids alike, take other people's reactions or other people's thoughts and what other people say, they take it to heart and then it starts to erode their self-esteem. So if we encourage them to step back and say, you know, how much of this is really about me? Is there something that's changeable? And what are my positive characteristics? You know, maybe I flubbed up, maybe I goofed here. Okay, so what can I do about it? And that's when we start working on problem solving. Encouraging this, well encourage that psychological flexibility that we really need for resilience. Encouraging people to A, not get stuck in the moment and B, be able to look at alternate explanations is very helpful. Social supports are our greatest buffers against stress and can be some of our greatest causes of stress. So for clients and, you know, I'm just going to say for people, clients, kids, students, whoever you're working with, it's important to identify the characteristics of healthy relationships. Again, not something that we often are taught from the get-go. Not something that we learn in school. What does a healthy relationship look like? And what's the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships? If a person has a strong self-esteem, then they're less likely to already be in unhealthy relationships. If they have an unhealthy self-esteem, then there's a chance, a greater chance that they're in unhealthy relationships because they're clinging on to anybody that will provide them validation. We want to look at boundary setting and give and take and emotional support and whatever is important to that person and figure out what does a healthy relationship, how does a healthy relationship support that? We want to help people explore ways to nurture and enhance healthy relationships because guess what? You can't just meet somebody, develop a relationship with them, chat for two weeks, go out, whatever you do, and then drop it and expect it to necessarily stay. Now, we all have those friends that you may not talk to for two or three months or two or three years and you start talking again and it's like you never left each other. That's great, but that is the minority. That is the exception to the rule. Generally, relationships require work, touching base, seeing how somebody's doing, providing emotional support. Not all of us, and I am the worst about birthdays and anniversaries and holidays and things like that. I don't see the point. I can't remember. I don't want to celebrate my own birthday. So it's hard for me to remember other people's birthday. I have to put it in my Google calendar and things like that. I am not one of those sentimental people, but there are ways to nurture and enhance healthy relationships besides just showing up on holidays. Brainstorm that and that's an excellent group activity. It's also an excellent family activity to identify things that you can do for the other people or identify each other's likes and dislikes and shared things that you share in common. We want to identify ways to deal with unhealthy people.  We work with people all the time who a significant portion of their problem originates from their family of origin, which is just dysfunctional. They don't want to separate from their family. They don't want to tell their whole family to go jump in a lake. They want to have that beaver cleaver family, which probably won't ever happen. So we need to figure out how to help them find the happy medium, but also where they can find good social support, good healthy people that they're not having to really work and making everything kind of peaceful. So identifying ways to deal with those unhealthy people and learning about their temperament and complementarity. Again, with the temperament, I know. Our temperament is the way we prefer to be, but if you remember temperament, a lot of it talks about, well, the extrovert versus introvert. You know, I tend to be an extrovert. I like to be around people. I draw energy from other people. I get a lot of joy from being around other people. Not everybody is like that. Some people are introverts and they prefer to have one or two friends. So it's important to remember that you need to look at what that other person wants when you're developing social relationships, when you are trying to do something for someone. I remember when my kid's dad and I got together, the first birthday that we were together, I threw a party for him because I thought that's what he would want. And that was like the thing he would want the least because he's very much an introvert. So it's important to understand that what you want is not always what they want, but there's a happy medium. Likewise, I tend to be a broad strokes person. I tend to be intuitive, if you will, on the Kiersey. Attention to detail, not so much. So I know that I'm great at writing grants, but I need somebody to go behind me and make sure or do the detail oriented parts not necessarily go behind me. But we all have our strengths. The people who do the detail stuff, they have difficulty with that whole big picture concept. So we work well together. We're just different. People who are perceiving tend to be more spontaneous. So if they get into a relationship with someone who is more structured or judging as the temperament sorter would say, it can be a little tenuous because the perceiver wants to, the spontaneous person just wants to fly by the seat of their pants. And the person who's more structured wants to schedule it in. So finding a way to accept differences and work within the complementarity. Self-awareness, again, of temperament, but also of personal needs and wants. Now a need is something you have to have. Again, for me, I have to have sleep. I know some people who can sleep three hours and they're not on their A game, but they can function. Not me. Now I need at least six hours of sleep, if not eight. I need to eat every couple of hours. If I don't eat for four or five hours, my blood sugar just goes through the floor. And it's really hard for me to focus. These are different needs that I have that kind of go along with vulnerabilities. So in order to be as resilient as possible, I have to be aware of what my needs are and get those needs met.  Wants. Now needs you have to have. Wants are the things that motivate you. They're the things that you really want to do. They're the things that you really want to have, which justify doing what you've got to do to get them. Identifying those. What are those goals you are working toward? People who are resilient are forward-thinking. They tend to be optimistic. They think that they have the ability to achieve goals. So great. Let's make sure we highlight those things because when something happens, then you can fall back and look at those wants and go, okay, now you said you wanted this, whatever this achievement is, let's say going to the Olympics. You wanted to go to the Olympics and you're not wanting to get up at 5.30 in the morning to go to practice. So how do those two things work together? You want to go to the Olympics, but you didn't win these three meets. And that's a devastation. So that's a setback. How can we be resilient? How can we bounce back so you can get back on the course to getting to the Olympics? This is what you want. So let's focus on what you want and learn from whatever this adversity was. People need to be aware of their values. They're truly important driving forces, the reason they get out of bed every day. And you can do a whole course on values identification, but those are the things that are a lot less tangible that underscore a lot of the things that people do they want and they need. We want them to identify their goals. Is what I'm doing getting me closer to or further away from what is important to me. Most people have three, four major goals that they want to accomplish in the next year, two years, five years. That's great. So whenever something comes up and they have a fork in the road, you know, we need to ask them, you only have so much energy you can use and you've got to use that to deal with life on life's terms and getting toward your goals.  You're not going to be as resilient because you're going to be spread too thin. So going back to my analogy of the leather, let's think about if you've ever made pizza dough. If you're trying to toss pizza dough and I'm really bad at it, but if you're trying to toss it, you'll have thick areas and thin areas and the areas that it's too thin, it gets weak and it just gets soggy and everything falls through it. So we want to make sure that there's consistency in their energy expenditure. Physical and emotional state in the present, that means being mindful. How do you feel right now? Are you too hot? Are you too cold? Are you tired? Are you bored? Do you know you have a client coming up in an hour and you're wondering when we're going to get finished? These are all things to pay attention to. And triggers, positive and negative. We always talk about negative triggers, things that trigger depression, things that trigger anxiety. Well, yeah, we need to be aware of those, of course. But we also need to be aware of those things that trigger a smile. What makes you happy? What makes you laugh? Encourage people to put positive triggers in your environment. I've told you before, I keep various pictures on my phone. So when I open my lock screen, it makes me smile. For the longest time, I had a picture of a hamster in a sweater. And it was made me smile just because it was a hamster in a sweater. I mean, really, who could not smile at that? Right now I have a little otter. Whatever it is that makes you smile, put those triggers in your environment. Self-efficacy is believing in your own capacity to accomplish whatever your goals are. How effective are you? Encouraging people to set reasonable, specific, measurable, attainable, and time-limited goals are smart goals will help them develop their self-efficacy. Not everybody has taught that when they were little, but if you work with kids, let's start teaching them how to do that now. So they set goals that are small and achievable, and they can have that, I did this moment. They're not always going to succeed. Nobody does 100% of the time. And that's okay. That's where the resilience comes in. But if six out of the eight times they succeeded, then when they have those other two failures, they can look back and go, well, six of the times I succeeded. So let's see what we can learn from this and move on. They want to identify as a survivor, not a victim. And this is all about locus of control. A survivor takes control of what's going on. A victim, life acts upon them. You've probably worked with clients who blamed everything and everyone else for their current situation. They didn't feel any sense of self-efficacy. They didn't feel like they had any ability to control anything. And that's a really extreme, external locus of control. The survivor has an internal locus of control. And we don't want to take it to the extreme where they think they can control everything, because we can't. But we want them to believe that for the most part, they can make choices and do things that will put them in a good place and get them headed in the right direction, which brings us to hardiness. You knew we'd get here. Commitment is your motivation. If you commit to doing something like going to the Olympics, then you say, this is something I really want to do, and this is where my motivation comes in. I'm going to get up and go to practice every morning at 5.30. Control means the goal that you're setting, not only are you motivated to accomplish, it's something you really, really want for some reason. But control means you have a realistic understanding of what is within your control. So you know that when you're going out for those swim meets, you're not going to win every single one of them. But you know that if you go to practice every day and you do what the coach says, that you're going to reach your personal best. So focusing on that and challenge. Anything that's too easy, most of us will put off. It's like, I can do it tomorrow. I can do it tomorrow. And then finally, you're up to the deadline.  So you want motivation to get it done.  So you want something that's challenging. You want to be motivated. You want to have a realistic understanding of what you're able to accomplish. But you also want it to be challenging enough that you're kind of excited to do it. Problem solving skills is the ability to conceptualize problems. Too often people just see a problem and they're like, we need to look at the problem and go, okay, what's causing the problem? What is the problem? What's causing the problem? Somebody comes into your office and they say, Doc, I'm depressed. Okay. That's sort of a problem. I mean, we know that depression exists, but what's causing their depression? In order to understand their depression, we have to know what causes it, what makes it better, what makes it worse, how long it's been going on. All those sorts of things will help us conceptualize the problem. And then we can start thinking about what the solutions are. It's not as easy as saying, okay, you know, every square peg fits into the square hole. So, you know, there we go. Sometimes you need creative solutions. If a client comes in and they say, you know, I've been on every anti-depressant known to man, and I've had some clients say that to me, and medication doesn't work to help my depression.  So we know that we're not looking at meds here. But what other things can we look at that might be causing your depression and what else can we rule out? And my first response is always to send somebody to get a physical, make sure their hormones and thyroid are all in balance and everything. And then we also start looking at cognitions and other things. As we talk, we start to understand what may be underlying some of these problems, which may mean a whole different approach to treatment for Jim Bob versus Jane Doe. A willingness to seek out help because we don't all have the answers. I mean, I know I don't. So when there's a problem and you don't know the answer, the ability to go, I don't know, I'll try to find out. And looking to find the answers is also a sign of resilience. It's not getting knocked down. It's not going, well, I don't know the answer. So I give up. It's going, hmm, I don't know the answer, but that's a good question. Let me try to figure it out. And motivation to actually take action. If somebody has encountered difficulties before and they've tried to seek out help and it's been successful, they're likely going to do it again, you know, go figure. But if somebody has tried to seek help, seek out help before and they haven't been able to figure it out, then they may not do it. And perfect example, I said I'm not good with technology and I'm not. So when I start having computer problems, I used to try to find the answer online and try to figure out how to fix it myself. But you know what? I figured out that I can't do it that way. So I'm not even motivated to go online and try to find the solution anymore. I just call up tech and I'm like, dude, I broke it again. And, you know, they just kind of go, yeah, you walked in the room, didn't you? I said, yeah. So it's important to understand where you're motivated to do and what needs to happen. One thing I've always told not only my kids but also my subordinates when I was a supervisor is to not bring me a problem unless they have an idea for at least one realistic solution. You know, and it may be way off base, especially at first if they're new to problem solving. But I do want them to think about it and not just come to me and go, here's the problem, fix it. No, I want to empower them to get creative and figure out how to fix it themselves. Accepting that some things are just, they just are. They're unfortunate. They're inaccessible. They're unchangeable. Unfortunate things happen.  You can lose a job. Whatever it is, it may just be there. Some things are inaccessible. You may not be able to afford a Lamborghini or, I don't know anything about cars either. And that's just going to be kind of your lot in life. It just is. And some things are unchangeable. Yeah, I'm five foot four. I'm not going to be five foot 10. I gave up on the fact that I might grow a little bit more when I hit 35. So some things are just unchangeable. Accepting that they are without judgment. Okay, so I'm five foot four. I am. Willingness to accept life on life's terms without judging. You know, things happen. And this is one of the places where a lot of our clients get stuck because something happens and they get upset about it and they want to change it, but it's not changeable. So then they get stuck in this never ending feedback loop. Helping people focus. And we'll talk about this a lot when we get into the presentation on, on meditation, but being able to separate what's going on from your emotional reaction. And just focus on what's happening without judging it without getting attached to it and look at it like a fly on the wall. And again, not trying to change the unchangeable. How many of our clients, our friends, ourselves have tried to change other people. We can't. They can only change themselves when they're so motivated to do so. We can provide them all the tools in the world.  It's just not going to happen unless they decide they're ready to do it. Distress tolerance. The ability to feel a feeling without having to react. Feelings are our body's natural response to go, there's a threat or let's do that again. When we experience a stressful emotion, it doesn't mean we have to jump and act right now. Being able to stop and go, okay, I'm angry. What can I do about it? Being able to separate yourself like we talked about in the acceptance and commitment therapy class. I'm having a feeling of being angry instead of I am, which is that global. I'm having a feeling of being angry that's separated from who I am or saying something like I am angry, but can choose whether or not to stew in it. Sometimes people take that anger and instead of working on it or letting it go or trying to change it, they just stew on how angry they were and how put off they were. There are no you made me's taking that victim stance. So people who have distress tolerance can say, I got angry and it's not you made me angry. It's I got angry because of this situation. Now it may be you did something and I got angry, but I chose what to do with that anger with the stress tolerance. There's no active attempt to change it at this point. You're just going, okay, I got angry. You're not trying to make it go away. You're not trying to address it. It's just accepting it. And remembering that feelings are there to tell us something fighting them or nurturing them only prolongs them. And you'll learn a lot about how fighting feelings can be counterproductive if you review any of the work on acceptance and commitment therapy. So optimism, my favorite favorite one finding the silver lining, looking at failure as a learning opportunity, looking at failed relationships with compassion going, okay, well, maybe I learned something. I try to learn something from everybody I encounter every day, even if it's something about myself or just a greater awareness of what's going on. But I try to learn something every day. A rainy day happens and you can look at it as, oh, my hair is going to be a mess. The car is going to be spotted. It's going to be awful getting it to work. Or you can look at it as cool fronts coming. The plants are getting watered and, you know, now I don't have to wash the car.  My best friend just retired and it's kind of thrown in for a loop. But you can look at it as an opportunity to find new direction instead of going, oh, my God, the life I knew is over. All right. Well, that's true. But you can't change that now. People who have empty nest syndrome. It's like, nobody needs me to be home and do laundry and cook and do all that kind of stuff anymore. So figuring out how to proceed with this next chapter, encouraging people to be optimistic, focus on what is good in life right now instead of focusing on all the things that are wrong. Because at any point in time, there are things that are wrong and there are things that are good. What are you going to spend your energy on? So resilience is the capacity to bounce back, wash after wash. Sorry, couldn't resist. It's a quality we can enhance in our clients while also helping them reduce distress. So yes, we're dealing with all of their cognitions. We're dealing with their PTSD. We're dealing with whatever. We're helping reduce the distress. But we also want to help them increase the positive because they're going to feel better a lot faster if they're increasing the positive and reducing the negative at the same time. Characteristics of resilient people. We'll go through one more time because this is the end goal we want for everybody. Awareness and minimization of vulnerabilities. A healthy self-esteem. A strong, sane social support system. Self-awareness. Self-efficacy. Problem-solving skills that include some creativity. The willingness and ability to practice acceptance. And that's a difficult one. Ability to tolerate distress without having to act on it and the ability to have an optimistic viewpoint. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceus.com providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006.


Hello and welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Crowdfunding for Libraries, Technology Tips for Futuristic Fundraising. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. Today we have two guests who will share their crowdfunding success stories. Whether you are looking to start a new tech project or trying to fundraise for a special program or new library, you will walk away with ideas and inspiration for your campaign. Before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. We'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We'll be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and we'll answer them at designated Q&A sections throughout. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. Now you should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email. We've also included that in the chat. If you are having technical issues, please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You will receive an archive email within 24 hours that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag TS4LIBS. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event, so please join us in the conversation there. TechSoup connects nonprofits, charities, libraries, and foundations with tech products and services, as well as information so that you can make informed decisions about technology. Now since 1987 TechSoup has distributed over 11 million technology donations to over 200,000 nonprofit organizations, libraries, and charities in over 60 countries worldwide. Last year in 2014 the TechSoup donation program distributed over 61,000 products to libraries for a savings of over $19 million. TechSoup offers a wide range of software, hardware, and services through their product donation program including CauseBox, an online fundraising platform, Refurbished Computers, and the recently announced Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. Okay, well now we're ready to begin. If you've just joined us, thanks again for attending today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Crowdfunding for Libraries, Technology Tips for Futuristic Fundraising. We'll be sharing tips and recommendations for successful crowdfunding campaigns and for leveraging online fundraising tools. We hope that whether you work at a library, volunteer for your library friends group, or are part of your library's foundation, you will gain a few new ideas for your crowdfunding campaign, for getting your crowdfunding campaign off the ground. And today we're joined by two guests who've led successful crowdfunding campaigns. Mary Ann Antonellis is the Director of the M.N. Spear Memorial Library in the town of Shootsbury, Massachusetts. As director, she has led several successful fundraising campaigns and partnerships in the community. Laura Bartnick is head of adult services at the Northlake Public Library District located west of Chicago. During her time there, she has focused on programming, outreach, and fundraising. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat, we have Becky Wiegand and on Twitter we have Jenny Mies, both from the TechSoup team. Just a reminder, we will be on Twitter using the atTechSoup4Libs handle and the hashtag TS4Libs. Now throughout the webinar, we'll be sharing tools, tips, and additional resources for crowdfunding. Laura will share her experience with Indiegogo in a campaign that brought the Incredible Hulk to the Northlake Public Library District. Then Mary Ann will share two examples of how they leveraged social media to help crowdfund for a new library. We will have time for questions throughout the webinar so please send your questions in using the chat as they arise. We will address as many as we are able to. If you ask a question that we are not able to get to during the webinar, we will follow up later via email with a response. This webinar is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive of this webinar which you should receive by the end of this week.  So tell us, what's your experience with crowdfunding? You can choose your response by checking the radio button and then clicking Submit. And once you've submitted then you should see a graph showing the results of the poll so far. You can also tell us more about your experience in the chat if you'd like to. I'll give you some time here to think about that. I can see the responses are coming in rather quickly. And it looks like we have definitely a large number of you that have either very little or no experience. And as I'm seeing that, I'm very glad to hear it because I think this webinar will give you a good introduction to crowdfunding. Now if you happen to have more experience I hope you learn a few things as well. So I'm going to go ahead and close the poll now in just a few seconds. I'll give you one last chance to enter your response in. And I'll close it now. Great. We got exactly 100 responses. How about that? So yeah, it looks like actually this will be a perfect webinar for those of you who are just getting started with crowdfunding or only have a little bit of experience and you'll get some great ideas today. Thanks for sharing that, your responses in the poll. Just to get started I wanted to give a bit of an overview here. There are many different crowdfunding tools out there. And these are five of the more common crowdfunding tools that libraries have been using. But they are not the only tools out there. Each of these platforms has different fees, rules, and different ways that they work. And it's worth it to take a look at each of these platforms closely before you choose one. These rules and the fees may change over time so it's best to visit each platform directly to learn more about what they have to offer. Now I've included a link to each of these in the archive of this webinar. And like I said, you'll receive that later this week so you can go directly to these tools to learn more. We'll be hearing a little bit about Indiegogo and Razoo in more detail from our guest speakers later on. Cosbox is a tool that's actually available through the TechSoup product donation program and you can learn more about it on the TechSoup website. And if you have run any crowdfunding campaigns and you have a tool that you particularly liked and would recommend, maybe you don't see it listed here, feel free to share that in the chat and we'll share that out with everybody else. And we'll even include it in the archive of the webinar as well. These are five of the more common tools. I also just wanted to start you off with some essential tips for crowdfunding. And these tips are taken from a few blog posts and one archive TechSoup webinar. And again, I'll include those links in the archive as well. But first, be sure to plan your crowdfunding campaign carefully. You want to apply the idea of SMART goals, making your campaign specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant to your library goals. Second, be sure to start with your existing network when you're sharing your crowdfunding campaign. The people who you already know support your library. Then ask them to help spread the word. This is what helps make your campaign go viral. Third, you want to use both email and social media to spread the word about your campaign. By sending your message through multiple channels, you'll reach more people depending on which channel they use more often or are actually reading. Fourth, be sure to tell your story. Let your supporters know why you need the funds and what good it will do for your community. So be sure to include a compelling story. And lastly, you may want to run your campaign for a little bit longer than what you might commonly hear about so that you have time to gain momentum and support. Some sources recommend 60 to 90 days for nonprofits and libraries in crowdfunding campaigns. All right, so now we've covered some of the basics and I want to hand things over to Laura so that we can hear about how her library brought the Incredible Hulk in Thanks to a Crowdfunding Campaign. Laura? Hi, thank you so much for having me. I just want to start by saying this is my very first time participating in a webinar. So I'm super excited, a little nervous, but today I'm going to tell you about the time that we dabbled in crowdfunding in order to get a life-size Incredible Hulk statue. So, all right. So here's a screenshot of our Indiegogo page. But first, let me tell you how we got here. Believe it or not, this all started as a board member's idea to draw attention to the library, specifically our graphic novel collection. He's a huge comic book enthusiast. So he came in, pitched his idea to some of us on staff. We thought it was totally bonkers crazy, but he had our attention. We really wanted to add a tech component to the project, so we kind of got that ironed out. And then we brought it to our director who thought it was also crazy, but liked the idea, saw something in it, and she asked us to present to the rest of our board. So in a nutshell, this was our pitch. Help the Northlake Public Library get a 9-foot tall Incredible Hulk statue, graphic novels, and a creation station featuring an iMac loaded with Adobe Creative Suite, which we actually got from TechSoup. So thank you very much. A Syntec drawing tablet, a 3D printer, and a light box. So you can see on our page, all in all, we asked for 30,000. We raised a little over 4,000 on our Indiegogo page and another 1350 in-house. So 5,600 total we were able to raise in one month. So after we pressed Submit on the Indiegogo site, this particular board member who came up with the whole idea, he actually had a background in PR and marketing. And he went to work trying to get our story out there, all sorts of social media avenues. And it worked. We got a lot of media coverage. It kind of started trickling in with Geekgirl, Chicago, TechCrunch, and various other local gaming and tech blogs. Then AV Club, Huffington Post, The Guardian Tribune Sometimes, and then finally Maxim and Entertainment Weekly. So by this point we were going crazy here at the library. We were so excited. Okay, once we made it this far, other publications and blogs started picking up the story as far as UK and Poland. And here we are, our teeny little library in print and Entertainment Weekly right next to Bradley Cooper's lovely face. Okay, so once the media attention started, then that's when we noticed our donations rolling in, 10, 20, 30 bucks here and there. And then LA Boxing out in Orange County, California, reached out to us. The owner happened to have a Hulk to donate. He was using it on his property and the city decided that it was an eyesore. It was disrupting traffic. So he needed to get rid of the Hulk. We were looking for a Hulk. Fastmore Logistics and Elk Grove stepped in to offer free transportation for him. And they also put us in touch with Ron Jordan of Brutographics who actually needed to saw the Hulk and have to be able to get him into our building, put him back together, touched him up with a fresh coat of paint. A ton of patrons came forward and donated their own personal graphic novel and comic collections, which was so nice of them. So like I said, the Hulk drove from California all the way out to Illinois. Fastmore did an awesome job of taking pictures, documenting his trip, sending them to us so we could put them on Facebook and Twitter and kind of try to build excitement throughout his journey. We kept him under wraps in our lobby for about a week to give us time to plan our project wrap-up party, let the community know that he was here in the building, and on the right hand side, I have some examples of our in-house promotion. We had a special limited edition library card featuring the Hulk. We made some buttons up for staff. And then patrons could also donate in-house and we would put up a green I Made a Pledge sign. So by the end of our campaign, our lobby, our circulation desk was like a sea of greens. These little flyers were everywhere. All right, so we hosted our project wrap-up party. This is the busiest our lobby, the fullest our lobby has ever been. So our director with a helper pulled the sheet off of him. You can see everybody's cell phones are up, taking video, taking pictures. We did demos of all of our awesome equipment that we were able to purchase. We put all of our graphic novels that were donated as well as some from the collection on display. And of course, we had green snacks and drinks. Here's a meme that our team librarian put together. Since he came from a boxing gym, he had his boxing gloves on and we just went with it. And on the right hand side, that's our director Sharon Hyler standing next to him. So you can get a sense of the sheer size of him. You can't miss him. All right, so since then, our Hulk has been a huge attraction. Here he is dressed up for comic falooza. And he just makes the best landmark. Rather than telling patrons that the DVDs or graphic novels are located in this room off the side of the lobby, but not the side that the children's department is on, now we just say he's in the room with the Hulk and they know exactly what we're talking about. All right, and now I'm going to ruin all of our fun and talk about the downside. So not enough local coverage. We couldn't tell the local press what to print, but I will say it was a bit disappointing that we got some really great national and international coverage, but our local paper just did one small article on us towards the end of the campaign. Disorganized social media plan. So after launching our Indiegogo, it was a total world win. We've never done a project like this and we were scrambling a bit. One person started off strong with the social media aspect, but then kind of got burnt out. They were doing it all. The rest of our group was kind of, you know, where do we go from here? How do we divide this? Who's going to do what? So that aspect was difficult. Not having a designated point person, spokesperson, this is also something we kind of figured out mid-project. Only after we had a couple committee members straying from talking points and giving quotes that were just slightly off message from what we had drafted and what we wanted the library's message to be. Not having a plan B, if we didn't meet our goal. This was a big one. A plan B meaning what would be priority if we couldn't purchase everything. There were some people in our group who really saw this as a graphic novel project and wanted all the money to go to graphic novels. Others in the group really saw this as, you know, we need tech equipment. This is equipment that's not possible with our current library budget. Without this campaign we wouldn't have been able to purchase any of that. So again, kind of figuring that out before you even start, not a bad idea. All right, certain donors trying to take over. While we were, you know, of course, very, very grateful to all of our donors. Some of them felt like by donating they had a greater stake in the project. They had tons of ideas of how to make it a bigger, better project as far as what library staff should be doing, what we needed to be doing. Which was good. On the one hand we loved their enthusiasm and passion but we kind of had to balance their expectations with the fact that this project was in addition to our jobs as librarians. So we were all still serving on the ref desk, collection development. All of our regular programs did not stop when we started this project. Okay, now some positive things though. We raised money. So we would have been happy with $100, right? Because that's $100 that we did not have before we started. Thankfully we raised considerably more than that. Between what we raised and donations we met all of our goals. Every time a kid asks us to use the 3D printer or the Mac or even takes a selfie with our Hulk, I feel like it was totally worth it. We got some crazy media coverage, some of the best we've ever received. Most libraries our size get local coverage here and there. We had national and international coverage. Again, we got all of our tech equipment. We were thrilled and we got to show off our fun side. Hopefully change some people's perception of a public library.  This is what we learned, what worked really well for us and what we figured out along the way. We went out this project by forming a committee and we pulled one person from each department. This way all the decisions kind of trickled on down and it kept every service desk informed of what we were doing and what we were up to. One point person, one spokesperson kind of already touched on that but that is so important. Comprehensive social media and marketing plan. Get this together early on. Who's doing what?  Get your timeline mapped out. There really is no such thing as too much planning with a project like this. So here at Northlake we were so excited. We got a little rest list and maybe launched our project too soon.  Get your graphic designer on board early. Or if you don't have a dedicated staff member, whoever it is, that's really good at those posters, flyers, design work. Of course we were asking for tons of print work to be rushed at the last minute for this project and that was in addition to everything else they were doing for the library. So draft your message, stay on message. Again kind of already touched on that. Plan for more than one way to donate. What your procedure will be. Not everyone can or wants to donate online. That's really important to keep in mind. So figuring out what's the plan when somebody walks up to the reference desk with $5 and wants to donate to whatever your campaign is, who will be collecting that, what is the procedure. And I'll say most importantly you've got to have fun with it. For us of course it was a ton of work and stressful at times but at the end this is about getting a life-size hall at our library. So it made it totally impossible to take ourselves too seriously. And that's our story. We're pretty happy with how it turned out. We learned enough to make our next campaign even more successful, whatever that may be. And then this happened a few years ago so by revisiting it to do this webinar I'm feeling pretty pumped for our next project. So again thanks for having me. Great, well Laura thanks for sharing your story. And what I think is most interesting is when we think of something like Indiegogo we tend to think a lot about the technology. And one of the things I think we get out of your presentation is that there's really a lot to think about that isn't just the technology. Setting up the page and understanding how Indiegogo works is one thing but it's really more about understanding the way you can spread that message online. And before we get to it, we've got quite a few questions coming in and I'd invite everybody to send in more questions now if you have them. But one question that came in earlier was just to define maybe what crowdfunding is. And I think we're starting to get a sense of that. But one definition that we have for it is that crowdfunding really is the practice of funding a project by raising many small amounts of money from a larger number of people and that the Internet is often involved. And we have a lot of tools like we shared earlier, Indiegogo being one of them that might help us fundraise via the Internet. But it really is kind of bringing many people together. And in this case I think you found that people were also interested in donating in-kind goods which isn't something you can really account for in terms of that dollar amount. Now in terms of what your goal was, I know you talked about some of the lessons you learned. But Veronica asked that it looked like the goal was pretty high. It was $30,000 but only $5,600 was raised in terms of the dollar amount. That's I think not accounting for the in-kind donation. So would you say that the initial goal set was too high or do you feel okay having set a very high goal like that as you look back at the project? So yeah, it was really high. We kind of plucked that number out of this guy, not really knowing if that was realistic or not.  So that higher amount did accost for the fact that we anticipated having to purchase everything. Plus that amount was to supplement our graphic novel budget for the upcoming year. So yeah. So yeah, it's a little bit of success and also recognizing what you might do differently next time. But now to counter that question, Ryan asks, do you think that if you had not said that you wanted a Hulk, and I assume he means the statue here, that if you hadn't indicated that, do you think you would have received as much national attention? No. I'm glad somebody asked about that because around the same time we were actually in desperate need of brand new computers. We were still using old XP machines, no longer supported. And we did receive some criticism of why are you doing this outlandish kind of silly campaign when your library has a real need for computers. And yeah, you hit the nail on the head. By saying a library needs computers, that's not going to grab anybody's attention. That's not a story. While it's a worthy story, it's not an exciting story. So yeah, that's why like I said, when this board member pitched it to us, we thought he was joking, and then we were like, well wait a minute, that's actually, it's so crazy that it just might work. Yeah, I think you need to kind of like an element of strange with crowdfunding to be successful. And when you look at other projects, you'll kind of see that here and there. Yeah. Now one person also asked, and maybe this is another possible outcome of a campaign like this, did you see any change in your circulation stats as a result, or possibly as a result of the campaign? Or were there any other positive benefits in the library that you didn't already mention? So I'm not sure about CERC staff. I would have to go back and peek at that. But the positive thing is you saw the slide that was just our lobby jam packed full of people. I would say a good majority of those people had never been in the library before. And even our donors kind of, once they heard about the story, came in and didn't even realize that this is something a library would be interested in. What is a 3D printer in the first place? So yeah, I think it got a lot of patrons and a lot of community stakeholders involved that we just had kind of no idea what we were all about here at the library. Great. Well we have a lot of questions coming in, and I just want to assure everybody who is sending in questions, if we don't get to all of them during the webinar today, we will follow up with an email. And so we do have time for maybe one or two more though, and this is a really good question. Thinking about the incentives that come with the Indiegogo campaign, you talked about that a little bit. How did you plan for, or did you budget for those incentives? And did the cost of the incentives end up coming out of the funds that you raised in any way, or did you use other money to pay for those incentives? Or were they donated? Yeah, so a lot of our incentives were donated either by individuals or by companies. Very, very few things kind of came out of the budget because again we wanted to really minimize that so all the money could go towards graphic novels and equipment and the Hulk. Great. And maybe just one last question. So thinking about this method of fundraising again using crowdfunding and specifically using Indiegogo, did anybody have any questions or was there any debate over why you chose this method and why you chose Indiegogo? And perhaps also the fees that are associated with it as opposed to maybe just asking people to drop a few dollars into a bin at the library. Did you have discussion over that? What was it like, and how did you ultimately come out with Indiegogo in the end? Sure. So we actually, this started off as a Kickstarter campaign. We had never heard of Indiegogo when we decided to start this. The thing with Kickstarter though is if you do not reach your goal, you don't get to keep the money. So if we would have gone with Kickstarter, we did not reach $30,000. We would have got nothing. Indiegogo is much more friendly when it comes to that. You can do a flexible campaign where you keep whatever you raise, whether you hit your goal or not, or go over your goal. Also from what I remember Indiegogo was kind of more friendly to nonprofits. I think they have a different structure for kind of the percentage they take from a nonprofit organization. Great. Well that certainly gives us a little bit more information about Indiegogo in particular. And Laura at this point I'm going to say thank you for sharing the knowledge that you have so far. We will get, if we happen to have time at the end of the webinar we will get back to some of your questions specific to Laura, but if not we will email you later with the responses. And thanks to all of you for sending your questions in. Now before I move on to Mary Ann's section, I thought it might be worthwhile if you are looking at learning more about Indiegogo, since this is not a webinar just about that tool, but you might be really interested in learning more. And I want to tell you about the resources they have on their website. They call it the Indiegogo Playbook. And I will share this link in the archive. And basically this is their support page. And they include tips for before you launch your campaign as well as during and after your campaign. And they also have information for how to contribute to a campaign which might be helpful for if you have any more skeptical donors or people who are wondering what it means to donate online. They also have a specific guide for nonprofits. So Laura you helped me segue into this because they do have some information specific for nonprofits and especially how to accept tax deductible donations. In every crowdfunding site every platform has training resources like this which you can and should review before you actually start your campaign just to help you get started. But this is just giving you an idea of what Indiegogo has available. All right, so thanks again Laura for sharing that. And with that we'll move on. And I'm going to turn things over to Mary Ann who will tell us about how she leveraged social media and other tools to crowdsource two different campaigns towards the building of a new library. So Mary Ann, are you there? Just to make sure to unmute your line. Hi, this is Haya. I had trouble unmuting my phone. I can hear you now. I'll let you take things from here. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks Crystal for inviting me to participate in this webinar. I hope the information I share will be useful. This is also my first time presenting in a webinar so I'm excited and also a little bit nervous. Let's see, a little history. So the Spear Library is a tiny one room antique library without running water. Shootsbury is a small town about 1,800 people in rural Massachusetts. There are no other public services in town, no coffee shop or gas station. Beginning in 1970 the town grew rapidly from about 500 people to our current population and we've been holding steady for about 10 years or so. Despite our tiny size our library is busy. We circulated more than 33,000 items last year and offered more than 100 programs. We're open 7 days a week. We're members of a network. And we strive to be a full-service library despite our tiny size and our rural location. About 20 years ago we started talking about the need for a larger library in town. And in 2011 the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners awarded us a $2.1 million library construction grant which was contingent on a local match of $1.4 million. In January of 2012 efforts to secure that local match through a debt excluded override failed. So we were left with five months to try and raise all of the money privately. That's right. After 20 years of working towards a new library, our tiny town had five months to raise more than a million dollars or we would lose our chance. So we decided to launch a National Fundraising Campaign. We made a short video showing the size of our library and our hopes and dreams for a new library. We hoped our video would go viral. We were determined to do all that we could. The video is about two minutes. It's too long to show now but there's a link to it on the bottom of this slide and I'll hope you come back and watch it later. I also want to mention that while we were promoting the video we were also planning and arranging many local fundraising events, trivia nights, dinners, concerts, ukulele jams, balloon and magic shows and more. We did two direct mail appeals during those few months and we were very busy and during this time period fundraising and promoting the video became my full-time job. I was at my computer by 7 a.m. most days and still at it at 11 p.m. most nights. We created a Fundly account but most donations came through our PayPal account that we already had which was active. So everyone remembers that old shampoo commercial I told two friends and so on. Successful crowdfunding depends heavily on successful social media use. Facebook and Twitter were our constant companions. I reached out to the Massachusetts library community posting the video on library listserv and a savvy librarian from Central Maths uploaded the video to Boing Boing and Cory Doctorow shared it. That was our first big break. Thousands of people visit Boing Boing and it turns out they are library lovers. Soon after the Boing Boing post, John Hodgman, a national celebrity with Western Math ties shared the video. He said the video made him cry human tears of happiness. Other celebrities and authors followed Will Wheaton, Paula Poundstone, Neil Gaiman, Tim Daley and lots more. We searched for and reached out to sites that promote social causes. We told them our story and who else was talking about our story and asked them to feature us. The Daily Do-Gooder sends, they email out one video a day and we were featured on the Daily Do-Gooder. New Earth Daily is an online newsletter and then The Daily Do-Good sends a story, a good story to your email inbox every day. And we were featured on just countless newsletter blogs, websites. We contacted every librarian and book-related blog we could find. Most at least included a link to the video. Many wrote appeals on their sites or blogs on our behalf. The press began to notice. The New Yorker's book bench called us Determined and Creative. We really loved that. That gave us a boost. The last of the week we were featured in local newspapers, local radio stations, local TV news, the Huffington Post. There was a front-page article in the Boston Sunday Globe. There were at least three different public radio stories and we were interviewed for Right This Minute, a web TV station based in Phoenix. We had a lot of hope for our campaign but we had pretty low expectations. We knew trying to raise more than a million dollars in a few months was a long shot but we had nothing to lose. We worked hard and we learned a lot. 50,000 people viewed our video. It raised $60,000 with donations from all 50 states and more than 20 countries. But it wasn't enough. The deadline arrived and we lost the grant. So we still need a new library. And although we don't have any immediate plans to try again, we know that a new library will cost money so we continue to actively fundraise. Some of us call it our rake and bake fund. So one thing we've been doing for three years is spring spruce up. So we have, oh, this year we had 16 people volunteer to be on teams of four adults who go out into the community and we'll do spring cleanup in a homeowner's yard for an hour for $100 donation to the library and that's grown every year. In December last year we decided to participate in Valley Give which is a regional online giving day. It's hosted by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. It was in its third year and thousands of local people have been participating in Valley Give donating millions of dollars to local nonprofits. The Valley Give and the Community Foundation used Razoo as the platform for giving in Valley Give. And the Community Foundation gave a lot of training and support for nonprofits participating in Valley Give and they had a whole storytelling workshop to help nonprofits learn how to tell their story and they actually used our video in their storytelling workshop. So that was interesting to go to the storytelling workshop and then have them using our video as one of their storytelling tools. We deployed all the same strategies we learned in our previous campaign but on a local level. We gave out chocolates with little strips of paper telling people about our upcoming campaign. We posted it on social media. We did a town-wide mailing. We made a banner for the side of the building. We posted on local listservs and put flyers around town. We reached out to local craftspeople, artists, and authors to donate items for incentive prizes for donations at different giving levels. And we were trying to make our campaign a positive, fun, and successful experience. When we registered for Valley Give, we had a small goal, $500, but a local donor offered a $2,500 challenge gift increasing our potential and our efforts. This is our Valley Give webpage and this was part of Razoo's platform. We had a slideshow at the top and then we had an appeal letter below it. Townspeople really enjoyed seeing themselves in the slideshow. So Valley Give was December 10, 2014, and throughout the day we were all about Valley Give. We served snacks at the library all day. We were open all day until 8 p.m., usually just open five hours on a Wednesday. We used social media throughout the day to thank donors and we were online until 11.59 p.m. that night. Promoting Valley Give and keeping the momentum going. Valley Give was a smashing success. We raised lots of goodwill, excitement, and hope, and we raised more than $9,400. We wanted to thank our volunteers. We couldn't have done it without them. Lindsay Van Dyke was just a local budding filmmaker and she volunteered her services. Emily Block helped with the video campaign. Suzy Mosier has been by my side for all of these years and we have lots of library friends and townspeople and national and international library supporters. So this spring we reached an important milestone. We surpassed raising $100,000 for a new library fund, and so we thought it would be a good reason to celebrate. So we had an ice cream social that about 150 people enjoyed. And that's my presentation. So thank you. All right, Mary Ann, well thank you for sharing your story. And I think one of the messages here that I certainly see, and I saw this in Laura's as well, is that not reaching a specific goal that you perhaps set with crowdfunding doesn't mean that you haven't succeeded in some respect. And this question came up earlier in terms of setting a very high goal and not necessarily reaching it in the way that perhaps you think about that. So do you have any more words to say on that just kind of looking back at what you've done so far and seeing these high goals that weren't met, but seeing you still making forward progress toward your big goal? Right. And when we made our video all those years ago, it took a while. It was a long, six month debate, well a five month debate about whether or not the town would fund the new library. And we really had been working on it for 20 years to get to that point. And so we had already lost. We had nothing left to lose. And we wanted to, part of the campaign, we also just wanted to change sort of the tone of the debate around a new library. So of course for a tiny town like ours coming up with a million dollars, that's challenging for people because the economy was really bad and people are leery of any increase in taxes. So while we didn't raise the million dollars, we did have a fun, you know, national conversation about libraries that drew attention on us. And it did change the tone of the conversation here. And she's very, people who were opposed to a library weren't opposed to it if they didn't have to pay for it through tax dollars. So it was really a positive experience in the town. There was a lot of support for people who had been opposed to the project, supported the fundraising campaign. And they've been supporting all of the other fundraising campaigns that we've been doing, projects that we've been doing in the meantime. So they might hire a Spring Spruce team or volunteer to be on a team. So we didn't get our new library, but we haven't stopped trying to get a new library either. So we feel pretty good about it. Great, great. And that definitely speaks to the change in the perception of the community, the awareness that you're raising about the library through the fundraising campaign, campaigns that you've done so far. Now Mary asked a question about, well she says how has the money you've raised so far, how has that been invested? Or has it been invested? Or maybe the bigger question here is what are you doing to set that money aside? And I'm not sure if this is a question you're comfortable able to answer right now, but maybe you could speak to that at least in general terms of what you do when you're reaching this larger goal and you've got this money that has been raised so far. Right. It's in the bank. It's in a CD. We're a little leery of putting it in any kind of risky investment. So we've sort of talked it around a couple of times. We've met with the banker and so far our friends of the library are holding the money. And so far they're leery of doing things risky with the money. So it's in CDs in the bank. And that's likely where it'll stay. Great. We'll not speak to you yet. Set aside somewhere in safekeeping if you will. Right. In an account dedicated toward a future library fund. It's not in with the Friends General Fund. Great. And then actually, so this leads me to the next question is maybe you could speak to the way is the fundraising going through the Friends of the Library group in your situation, or is the library running it directly? And are there any limitations based on that in terms of how much funding you can receive from people in your community? So the Friends of the Library are the fundraising arm of the library and any donations that come in are donations to the Friends of the Library for this project. And because this is such a tiny town and a tiny library, I work closely with our Friends of the Library group. I don't ask any volunteers to do anything that I'm not willing to sort of stand right up and do myself. So I work with them. And if there's a bake sale, I bake and I take my shift at the bake sale table. And I'm one of the Spring Spruce Up Crew members. But the money is raised by and held by the Friends of the Library. Great. And actually speaking of the amount of effort that goes into these fundraising campaigns, we also got a question about, you know, perhaps the cost-to-benefit ratio. And while we may not have that math on hand, can you speak to how much perhaps time and even expense goes into these campaigns versus the amount of money of funding that you're generating? And I guess the question here is, is it worth it in the end? Are you getting a return on the effort you put in? So ValleyGIF didn't cost us anything. The video campaign didn't cost us anything. We had, so the videographer was a volunteer. And so she made the video for free. Everyone that was in the video was a volunteer. It doesn't cost anything to put a video on YouTube. It doesn't cost anything to use social media. So I think it's worth it in the end. You can log into Facebook and do a post in four minutes and then go about your day and hope that people are taking your post and sharing it. The same thing with Twitter. It didn't cost anything to participate in ValleyGIF's day. And the Community Foundation. And these online giving days are happening regionally.  That was a percentage of the donations. There is a percentage of the donations that go through PayPal, that go. But having those online giving platforms makes it well worth it. And then Razu, which the Community Foundation used for ValleyGIF's day, also takes a little bit of time. And so I think it's worth it in the end. Razu, which the Community Foundation used for ValleyGIF's day, also takes a small percentage of the donations. But especially the ValleyGIF's day, we just look at that as that was beyond our wildest dreams because we don't have an actual plan for a new library and we don't have even a timeframe of when we're going to be trying again but to raise nearly $10,000 in one day. And I bought a bag of Hershey's Kisses and we printed up some postcards. There wasn't much expense that went into that. My time, but I enjoy doing this kind of work. And I like to have projects to do to keep me busy and out of trouble. Great. Well, that certainly gives us a good idea of maybe what you've put into it so far. And I think maybe now I just maybe move into wrapping things up a little bit. And Marianne, what's your future look like at this point? Do you think you'll do some more crowdfunding in the next year or so? And what might that look like? I do think we will. So the Community Foundation is skipping 2015 for ValleyGIF and they're doing an evaluation of the whole program in ways to make it work even better for nonprofits. So they're planning to have a ValleyGIF day in the spring of 2016 and we're planning to participate in that. In the meantime, we'll continue with dinners and concerts and spring spruce ups and local tag sales and bake sales and book sales and those will all help benefit our new library fund. But we're looking forward to ValleyGIF in the spring of 2016. So again, participating in that local online giving day which our supporters are already expecting and looking forward to and looking forward to helping us make it a successful event once again. Great. And Marianne, before we go back to Laura for one last question I just want to ask you, do you have any advice or kind of closing words to share with people? We thought that there were a lot of people starting crowdfunding for the first time, didn't have a lot of experience with it. So what would you recommend to somebody who's getting ready to start on this path and try some crowdfunding? I think what I would recommend is that crowdfunding starts with a crowd. You want to have a group of people like Laura's board and that group of staff people. And with us it's people who are passionate about providing a new library for Sheetsbury so they're friends of the library core group and the people who had been involved in the designing and planning phase before.  I don't think you can. I think just starting with an online campaign without some buzz beforehand is probably harder. Our new library project had a lot of attention before we started crowdfunding and because of that attention and the fact that we keep working at it and we keep having events and we keep talking about it and we have these highly visible events in town. We'll serve a turkey dinner to 150 people or have a balloon show or have a giant book sale that takes up half of our town common. So we do all of those things to keep our local crowd engaged and having fun so that when we're launching a crowdfunding campaign there's a crowd ready to go and spread it through social media and the Internet to attract that attention. Great. Excellent advice for cultivating that crowd for your crowdfunding effort. So Mary Ann, thank you for sharing your expertise and experience with us. Laura, are you still there on the line? Yes, I'm here. Great. So Laura, I also just wanted to ask you then for any last words of advice for other libraries who might be embarking on a crowdfunding campaign based on your experience, what would you tell them? Yeah, well just like Mary Ann said, other than staff time, again this campaign hardly cost us anything. So really, I mean there's very low risk. It's a lot of fun. You learn a lot. If you kind of just peek around like in the last couple of years, I think more and more libraries are doing this. As you kind of tap into your community and ask them for donations and things like that, it's nice to be able to go beyond your immediate community and get people to help you out who support just libraries in general or whatever your mission is to get support nation and worldwide. Great. Well thank you both. Thank you Laura and Mary Ann for sharing your stories and also your advice with us today. And for those of you who had questions that we weren't able to answer, we'll be following up with email within the next week or so. We'll get back to you with some of your very specific questions or some of those questions that came in kind of at the last minute there. Thank you for asking them. And if you still have any questions, you can still put them in the chat for the next few minutes. Before we sign off, I have a few resources I'd like to share that may help you as you continue on this goal to start some crowdfunding campaigns in your community. I do ask that if you would stay online, we'll have a brief survey at the very end as well. We'll let you tell us what you thought of today's webinar. But if you're still interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend these resources that are available on the TechSoup website and the links will be in the archive. The first two are some additional webinars that are archived from some crowdfunding experts. And the last is a forum post that outlines the differences between several crowdfunding tools that we mentioned today. So I do recommend taking a look at those to learn more. Also, if this is your first time attending a TechSoup for Libraries webinar or even if it isn't, then I hope you'll visit us online to learn more about what we have to offer. TechSoup for Libraries addresses the specific needs of public libraries. And TechSoup for Libraries gathers stories about how libraries are utilizing technology. And we share them via webinars, blog posts, and our monthly newsletter. Learn more at TechSoupForLibraries.org. We also have three upcoming TechSoup webinars that may interest you. Tomorrow we have a webinar with Microsoft OneNote which is a digital note-taking app. If you are interested in the social media aspect of things then you may want to learn how to accomplish more at our webinar on Thursday, August 6. And our next library-specific webinar will be on Wednesday, August 19 focusing on technology planning for small libraries. You can register for these webinars and view archives of past webinars at TechSoup.org. Just a reminder that we will put the links in the archive and you'll also have access to the slides. You'll get that by the end of this week so you'll be able to access all of the links that we've shared today. Thank you for joining us. And like I said, please stay on the line for just a moment longer and take a survey about today's webinar. Thanks again to our guests for sharing their crowdfunding experiences. I'd also like to thank ReadyTalk for being our webinar sponsor. ReadyTalk can help you collaborate and share information and is available as a product donation on TechSoup.org. Have a great afternoon everyone. Bye-bye.