Take your seats, get comfy. I am so happy to introduce the McIntyre family to you today. Many of you were at the 2022 conference where we had Michelle Singletary McIntyre with us and that was the one that we did in the Chicago area. And we knew she would be great but I don't think I had not expected how great she would be. I was literally doubled over laughing at certain points in time. I was crying, real tears at other points in time. And when we knew we were doing this conference in the DC area, I reached out to Michelle and said, hey, would you be interested in joining us again? And she said, well, yeah, I'd love to do it. And she said, I'd love to bring my family and we can talk about our financial affairs a little bit and talk about how we've found harmony around financial matters because those of us who are married and have families know that it's a process. So that's what they're gonna talk about today. Michelle is here in the stripe jacket and many of you know Michelle Singletary but I'll introduce her just in case. She's the longtime Washington Post financial columnist. She's nationally syndicated. We ran into someone yesterday who said that she is his go-to resource wherever he lives, I think somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. So she's everywhere. She's the author of numerous valuable books and she's also won some of the biggest awards in journalism for her work at the Post. So in 2021, she won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary and then in 2022, she won what is widely considered the biggest award you can win as a journalist, the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award. So we are really thrilled to have Michelle here. Her husband, Kevin, is here and we know Kevin less well but we're very happy that he has volunteered his time to be with us. Kevin, I'm hoping you can share a little bit about your personal story. It sounds like you've recently retired. So maybe you can talk about that and then we'll hear from daughter Monique who is 28 and daughter Jillian who's 23. But let's start with you, Kevin. Okay, great. Good afternoon everyone, good evening. I'm Kevin McIntyre. Let's see, I'm 62 years old. I am a former federal employee. I've recently retired at the end of June of this year after 30 plus years in the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department, which is unusual because my degree is in that mechanical engineering. So how I ended up there is a long story. And so like I said, I've just recently retired and a lot of, if you've been reading Michelle's columns there's a little bit in there about me and that journey and the stage that we're in right now in terms of making decisions to set ourselves up for the future. So we'll probably get into that a little bit. Sounds good. So Olivia, maybe you can go next. Hi, I'm Olivia, like she said, I'm 28. So right now I'm working at a group practice in College Park, Maryland as a mental health therapist. I graduated undergrad in 2013 and then I went and got my, or no, sorry, in 2017 and then I got my master's in 2019. And then I spent a year in Texas working and living with foster children. And then I came back and started at the practice that I'm at. And then I just, this past August, passed my license exam and had my independent license. So I'm very excited about that. Thank you. So now I'm kind of looking into what I wanna do next with that license. So. Hello, hi mom. I was in in 2022 as a last year with a degree in early childhood and special education. I'm currently my second year in teaching in regard and then over the summer I taught special needs three-year-olds. So, Kevin, I'm gonna put you on the spot, but one of the things we were laughing so hard about last year was Michelle's thriftiness, which she described to us in great detail and made us all laugh. So would you say you're on the same page with her with respect to thrift? Mm-hmm.  Oh, starting off with the tough ones. So we are of a similar mind. She is probably more conservative than I am, but I am also thrifty. I mean, I think we both came from humble beginnings. And so we both have a similar mindset about money. We're both, we both live rather modestly or believe that that's how we should live. And so we live below our means. We both are good savers and investors. And so, and in terms of, you know, the kids, I think we do agree in terms of, you know, what we, how we would like to talk with them about their financial futures and that sort of thing, what we explained to them about our situation. So yeah, I'd say we're pretty much in sync, not in a lockstep, but in sync.  Can you discuss, have there been any areas in recent memory where you, there was a little bit of a disconnect where one of you wanted to go one way and the other wanted to go the other, another way? From a financial standpoint? Yeah. Okay.  How much time have we got? I don't know.  Well, the thing that comes to mind most immediately is my retirement. So I actually retired in June and it was a little bit sooner than I was planning to. I was planning to retire probably at the end of the year, but there was a difficult situation. I was in at work and it was to the point where I had to do something, give you a change or a retire. And I didn't really want to at this stage of my career start over into something else. And so we talked about retirement. So we went back and forth about, can you hang on to the end of the year? Or, you know, and so it was a good conversation to have leading up to my retirement and we've even continued going forward because it brought to the surface a lot of things that we have to think about for our long-term future in retirement. So like one of the decisions that we made along the way was that we paid off our mortgage because we agreed early on that we were not gonna retire with a mortgage. And there's been some discussion around that. We had a good discussion at the other night at dinner, last night at dinner about it. But that was a decision that we made personally. But even as we agreed on that, there were other things that we didn't agree on in terms of, you know, can I afford to leave yet? Should I hang on to the end of the year? Even after we paid off the mortgage, should I hang on and then take the mortgage payments and put that into a savings account? So we have a little bit of cushion by the time I retire. And obviously we retired sooner than that. So yeah, that was probably the most recent thing where we had a little bit of intense discussion. So I wanted to ask about that.  So Michelle, maybe you can talk about kind of making peace with that, which we all must do eventually. We're gonna have to, that was the point, right? That we saved to retire at some point. So talk about that. In theory, yeah, in theory. I love the last panel was Mike said, get therapy, yes, I'm getting therapy.  And so I grew up with my grandmother, who was very frugal. And I've always had this fear that I'm not gonna have enough. And so I actually did write a column about my husband's retiring.   And then all of a sudden people are like, well, you can spend.  And I said, I don't want to stand. And so he wants to buy something. And I'm like, well, no. And he'll put something in the Amazon box and I'll take it out of the Amazon box. And so he says, well, honey, we spent all this time saving this, let's enjoy it. Cause we don't want to leave it to, cause he said, if we are gonna enjoy it, they're gonna enjoy it.  I'm not there yet. And the only way he is allowed to put stuff back into the Amazon box is he'll say, this is, we have phrases that we say in our marriage should help us not fuss and cuss. And so he'll say, well, let's go to the net worth statement. I hate that. Because a personal net worth statement, you know, all the assets and all the liabilities and at the bottom half it's 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. And then the net worth, which is, and so he'll say, look at that. And I just get mad because then I have to put, let him put something back in the Amazon box. But it's very difficult. And I think Mike was right. I think those of us who are the, the aunt and that example of the aunt in the grasshopper, we do have to come to the point where it's okay to spend some of it and live a life that you've spent your whole life trying to do. And what I loved about this conference this whole weekend is strategies to do that to make yourself more comfortable. And I have to say that you really have relieved me. You've helped me this weekend. I'm not saying he could buy everything in the Amazon box, but a couple of more things because we have a good plan. So Michelle, like in addition to, you know getting therapy or something, what strategies will you use to help you over this hurdle when you eventually retire and your income stops altogether? Ooh, see that right there? Just, my heart started palpitating. So I think the whole weekend was like plan, plan, plan. And so we started retirement planning like 20 years ago and I'm not exaggerating. So one of the big things was to pay the house off. And I wrote a column about that and oh my gosh, people lost their everlasting mind because we used some funds, we did a mortgage recast, we made extra mortgage payments for the entire time we had a mortgage, we had, now some of you will probably cringe, we had like a 2.75% mortgage and people are like, how could you give that cheap money? And I was like, mind your business. So that was one thing to pay off the mortgage. I like pots. I'm a pot person, not that kind of pot, pots, plural. So we have a travel fund, we have had, we set them up, we saved enough that none of them have education debt. They actually even have money to go to grad school. So we made sure that was okay. We have a cash fund. So we have set things to the point where we know how to pull stuff out. And so now the next thing is to do some more tax management, things like that. So we made sure we keep our expenses in check and we just made sure that the groundwork was there to allow us to spend. Now I just gotta get the mental thing together. And I'm not, I'm just not gonna lie, I'm just not there yet. He is. So I don't know. So Olivia and Jillian, I wanna bring you into this. Michelle said that, you know, when you're growing up, there was a lot of like, no, we are saving for, I want you to graduate college debt free.  Yeah, there's lots of stories. I actually, I don't know what age I was, but for Christmas or your birthday or something, we made like a booklet of all the like sayings that she would say to us, like over and over again. Like, is it a need or a want? Do you have McDonald's money? Like it's a lot of, you know, college fund, college fund. Like do you can't have that because we're paying for your college fund. Like it was like a lot of stuff whenever we would ask for things or just lots of money conversations. It was, it was pretty intense, I'm not gonna lie. It was pretty intense. It was quite a lot of like money conversations and a lot of like she was saying like a lot of denying, you know, like we would get things after it was like not cool to have them anymore. And they were like on sale or nobody cared about having that thing anymore. Then we got it and it was like, well, thank you. And also like this is maybe three years behind like what everyone else is doing. So then we just kind of learned to stop like paying attention or caring, you know, about what people were having. So we were like, well, we're just not gonna get it. So you kind of have to like self soothe and say that it's fine. You know, we'll focus on other things, I guess. Yeah, I think that I remember a lot of the rules the most. Like my first memory asked for like somebody a lab or a kidney bed. She got the one that had like a saving, a spending and investing and a charity, little slots in them. So of course I thought all of the ones would save anything like that. What does anyone has to invest? I don't know. But you know, then I was like, if you went to a grocery store and I picked something up and I didn't know the price of it, well, what it was, I automatically had to put it back. So when you started to have to remember the price and be like, let me get this, this is 3.25, I promise I'll put it down. And then sort of like back to the stuff again. What was sort of the light bulb moment for you? Like, oh, here's why we're doing this. Like when did you feel like you really got the method to the madness? Ooh, it was late, I would say. I would probably say after graduating college or maybe sometime in college and hearing people talk about kind of the loans and being stressed out about, you know, repayments and being able to graduate and not have to worry about that. It really started to click for me and I could make different decisions than my friends were making. And I was like, oh, okay, this has a really big impact. And especially when I went and got my masters and that was also debt-free. Like that was like a huge game changer because I was talking to people in my program who had undergrad debt and then also had master's debt. And I went into social work, which depending on what you do is not like a super high paying career. And so a lot of the people in the program were talking about that and, you know, kind of the stress of that and saying like, I have this passion to serve and I have to go to school and, you know, get all of this debt and then my earning potential when I graduate, it's a really stressful circumstance for them. And I just felt so grateful that I didn't have to worry about that. And I think that's when it really started to click, like, okay, maybe, you know, like all of the silent resentment, you know, not having the things like it actually really mattered. And like all of that stuff is kind of irrelevant now because I'm in a position to have so much more flexibility and freedom than a lot of my peers. Yeah, obviously mine was, my experience was similar. Like, I think maybe after my first year in college, just talking to my peers and like realizing like how much like they actually had to take out already just in the first year. And that was actually when I was starting to be like, oh, but on the master's degrees, I started applying to scholarships. And then I got full ride when I last few years in school and I was like, okay, now I can have my master's definitely. So it really just really like, I was just thinking much more ahead to cancel the foundation that we had.  Yeah, you know, I will have to say we're, I don't want to say, because we're without people. So y'all acquire too. So, but out there, the abnormal people, you know, they'll say things like, well, I'm not going to pay for them to go to college because they have to learn how to do it on their own or, you know, those kinds of things. But my husband and I, I have to say, from the beginning of our marriage, we're very intentional about a lot of things, paying off our mortgage, living below our means, and making sure our kids had the choices when they graduated from college. We didn't know obviously what they wanted to do for a living, but we wanted them to operate in their God-given gift. And that meant we did not push them into one career or another.   And there's so much pressure on that. And so we wanted them, whatever it was that they wanted to do. And I think it's a blessing that that one is a teacher, that she was born to be a teacher. This one, she tries to tell me what to do. She is born to be a therapist. And with the mother she had, she needed to do that, right? And my son, our son is on the autism spectrum. And so we didn't of course know that when he was born, but because we were so frugal, we had the money to be able to help him as well. And so we wanted them to have the freedom to do what they wanted to do. So this one, they're all living with us, by choice. Well, okay, I did kind of force them. We forced them so that they could save money. But she now, she's gonna transition to another job. So she's gonna take too much to travel. She's gonna go to Australia, New Zealand. She wouldn't be able to do that if she had a lot of debt. This is the time that she can do this. And this one, her job is so stressful. Being a teacher is so stressful. It is one of the most amazing careers. And now she can do that. And not have all the stress of money. And we really wanted that for them. That was our gift to them. And so that's why we did that. We wanted them to be able to not have that. In order to do that, they had a, hey, it was not an easy childhood. Cause they, like she said, they didn't get a lot of stuff.  So they go smother us in our sleep. You know, you can imagine it was not easy living with us to say no all the time. Because we have a culture of yes. And we have a culture of raising entitled children. And a lot of people in our position, in your position, maybe not your adult children are not very good with money because they were given everything. And I think my husband, I could say, these kids are so good money managers. And they know how to save, but I'm so glad they're here at this conference because the next step is to get them to be, it's enthusiastic about investing as they are about saving. And so I'm thanking y'all, talk to them. It's why she that one on the end. Cause she still get this. She still hasn't signed up for her World 3B plan. So can y'all like, yes, right. Get her, get her. She's gonna do it, but we, you know, she's looking through the offers, but y'all still get her. But so that's why, you know, I mean, you know, we don't come from money, none of our families has a lot of money. And we wanted to, we wanted our wealth to be well worth something for them.  They don't know what it's like to have debt. This one is still driving the car that we gave her when she was 16 years old. She's 28. And she's gonna, her next car, she's saving up in a Vanguard non-retirement account to pay cash for it. That's amazing. So I just want to mention, Rick Ferry is walking around, looks like he's collecting questions for the McIntyre family, which we will take. But I just want to ask Olivia about your savings habits. Sounds like you're in really good shape, that you're a disciplined saver and probably doing that, not on a high salary. So let's talk about your tricks of the trade there. What are you doing? I mean, I'm just kind of doing what I was raised to do. It's actually, it's gotten to the point where now she's trying to convince me to spend money on things. Like if I want to go on a trip, like for, you know, my birthday. And I was like, oh, like maybe we'll go here.  And I'm like, but that massage is like a hundred dollars. Like, I don't know. So I think it's just a lot of the, you know, like a lot of the knows that I heard in childhood are now like my own voice. Like I'm walking around and I'm like, no, you don't really need that. Or like, it's fine. Like, you know, like don't go out to eat. Like there's stuff in the fridge that you can eat. And so I think it's just a lot of those little choices. And then also I've like figured out what it is that is like really important to me to spend on. And so I really do enjoy, like she mentioned, I enjoy traveling a lot. And so, you know, traveling is really expensive. And as I get older, I'm less inclined to like stay in sketchier places. And so I want to stay in nicer places now. And so I need to, you know, make sacrifices in other areas in order to spend on the things that are really important to me. And so a lot of those knows are just kind of ingrained in my head now. And so it's not like anything extravagant. I just kind of live on less, I guess, because that's how I was raised. What, what, how stressed out I am about it? Yes, it's very stressful. So I guess two, maybe two years ago, I was talking to my dad and I was like, okay, I have like a relatively large like lump sum of money that I have saved. And I was like, oh, like what kind of like savings account should I put it in?   And I was like, okay, so I mean, I, you know, to a certain extent, I trust their judgment. And so I was like, okay, like what are you doing?  And so he was like, okay, this is what we're doing. And he was like, okay, these, these are the, you know, the funds that you can put the money in. And I was like, okay. And so I did it. And then shortly thereafter, I just started losing money. And I have been maybe like in the positive for like two weeks over like the two and a half years, I guess. And I hate it. Like it's really, I hate it a lot. And they keep, every time I go and I'm like, see, like, it's like, I'm losing money. Like if I had just put it in the savings account, like I would still have all of my money. And they're like, no, this is the best time, like put more money in. I'm like, this is a scam. They're scamming me. Like I feel like I'm getting robbed. Like they had me set up automatic payments. So like every month Vanguard like robs my bank account. And then they just like, it's, it's really stressful. And they're like, no, no, no, like put more in. I'm like, this is like a snake oil, like salesman pitch. Like when things are bad, that's the best time to put more money in. Like what kind of logic is that? It's so backwards. But because I trust them and like my mom was saying like my dad is like the, the calm one. Like he's a little more like even keeled. And so he's like, no, like it's going to be fine. Like just stop looking at it. Just stop looking at it. Like you can stop showing us, we know. And so because I trust them, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to move it. Like I'm going to leave it alone. And then being here and like listening to the talks and going to the dinner, I'm like, okay, well there's more people who are bought into this. And so I'm like, okay, maybe it's okay. Like maybe it's not just them. Like there's some other really smart people here who are also doing the same thing. So I'm like, all right, it should be fine. And then, you know, my dad like showed me kind of the graphs like over time, because one of the things I want to do is retire early. And so he was kind of putting it in the projections. And I was like, oh, that looks really nice. Like, you know, like, because there's like a calculator that you can do and like depending on how much you put in, you can retire at a certain time. And so after we did that graph, I was like, okay, let's put a lot in. Like, let's put as much as we possibly can in because I do want to retire early so I can travel a lot more. So even though it's like really painful for me emotionally, like they've been like really good support, emotional support systems of like just leave the money where it is. And so I'm hoping that they're right. And when I get older, I will be very happy. I'm not happy now, but I trust them that I will be happy later. And if I'm not, I'm coming for all of you. So that is where I am in my investment journey. So Jillian, how about you? It sounds like you are, have some reservations too and you can contribute to a 403B, but haven't done so yet.  Yeah, I think that I was reflected on it this weekend in the past couple of months. I think part of it is my perspective of like my future goals and my perspective of time. Like if somebody asked me what are your long term goals, I would say, oh well, two years from now, five years from now, I don't know how many. And I think of that as long term because I'm thinking of that as a quarter of my life. So I had to shift my perspective from thinking of like five years from now as like a short or quick quarter of a term goal. I'm like my retirement has been a long term goal because there's things that I want to do now. And then I think kind of realizing what is important to me and what I'm going to want to be able to do. And it's mostly even lean, but I'm not here to do it. My wife and I are just going to travel in so much because they're tired, so I would like to be able to do that. So just watching my dad enjoy the fruits of all of it has kind of influenced me into like making the decision too with us. What are your, you have like shorter term financial goals as we all do. What are the things that you want to achieve? Well, before retirement. Yeah, so I would like to move out, love them, but I would like to move out, you know, and I would like to maybe not rent and just buy outright and then just be able to support myself like independently and like have my own growth would be like my short term goal right now. So Olivia mentioned that Kevin is really calm with respect to investments. Are you two on the same page, Michelle and Kevin with respect to taking investment risk or is one of you more nervous when the market is going down? We are on the same page in terms of long term investment and have been for a long time, but in terms of investment risk, I have a much higher risk tolerance than she does. And that's probably reflected in our portfolio. What she brings to the, I think we work well as a team, what she brings to the table in terms of our investing is the discipline, the starting early, the maxing out on the 401K, maxing out on the TSP, being consistent over time. And that's what she brought. What I brought was, hey, let's put the pedal to the metal and go. Let's find those equity investments that are really gonna do well for us, put it there and stop looking at it. Now, I'm okay putting it someplace and not looking at it. Maybe periodically six months a year, whatever, considering that it's long-term. And I'm thinking back now 20 years or so when we first started this. So she watches it much more frequently than I do. She watches it probably, I don't know what, monthly or? So. And yeah, let's go with that. Okay. And so she watches it and she sees it go up and down and up and down and it does take a toll. On her mental, on her peace. And I said, look, set it aside, don't worry about it. We don't need it right now. Look, it's down 5%. Particularly during 2008. Oh my goodness, that was a really, but I think one thing that we did, that I'm proud of that we did was we left it alone. We didn't move anything. I had friends in the federal government, we all TSP account, we would talk about what we're doing with our accounts. And many of them got out at the bottom and they never recovered those losses. And so I'm really glad that we stayed in, market recovered and then some. So I think, you know, but we, that was a very stressful time looking at those. We lost probably 30 or 35% of our portfolio value at that time. Yeah. Kevin, I wanted to ask, you mentioned TSP and I would imagine there are some federal government employees here with us. And a question is like, do TSP, I think we would agree as generous, through savings of plan is really a stellar plan in so many respects. Is it something that you think you will continue to hang on to through retirement or what's your plan there? Yeah. At this point, I don't have any plans to move the money out of TSP. I think that, you know, because TSP has some of the lowest fees, some of the lowest expenses associated with it. And there were some changes made recently that improve some of the flexibilities in terms of when you can take withdrawals and that sort of thing. So right now it suits our needs. We don't have a need right now to go in and start pulling any of it out because Michelle's still working. And I get a small federal pension. And at some point we're gonna start taking Social Security. That's been part of what's interesting about this weekend is there's been a fair amount of discussion about when is the right time to take Social Security. I'm inclined to take it sooner. Michelle's inclined to wait until 70 to take it. And so we're probably gonna compromise in there somewhere in the middle. But yeah, I think that's so far, I think as far as TSP is concerned, I'm gonna hang on to it. So we've been getting questions. Here's one for Michelle, which is, can you summarize the most important financial lessons you learned from Big Mama that you passed on to your daughters? Well, they could probably answer, but you wanna answer that? Say who Big Mama is for people who don't know. I went to go live with my grandmother when I was four. My older sister was eight. I had a sister who was three and twin brothers who were just under two years old. So we went to live with my grandmother. And my grandfather was in the home, but not in the home. He was an alcoholic. So a lot of times his money didn't make it home. And I don't know, I always tear up with this. But this woman with an alcoholic husband, five grandchildren, a job where she didn't make very much money as a nursing assistant, was able to save. And she paid off her house before she retired and she just was a massive money manager. And I think the one lesson that she taught me that has just been the root of our wealth is to save a percentage of every dollar that crosses your palm. And I remember, I don't know if I told you all this story last time, but when my first week at the Baltimore Evening Sun as a full-fledged reporter, I covered a major fire. I got on the front page as a big deal in our business. And I called my grandmother, who do you call first? And I said, Big Mama, oh my gosh, I want a front page. And I'm trying to tell her. And she said, did you go up to HR and make sure they took money out of your paycheck to put it to a savings account? No. And click up. I thought she dropped the phone. So I called her back and I said, oh, the phone dropped. And so I started to tell her again, I have front page byline. And she said, did you go up to HR and make sure you put money in a savings account? You know, you split the deposit. I said, nah, I haven't gotten to that. Click up. And so because I knew my grandmother would never listen to me, I left. That moment went up to HR, put money aside, went back, called her again. She asked the same question, did you? I said, I sure did. And then she said, tell me about your day. And that was the beginning of making sure that every time I got a money from, we took, I got a buyout from the evening sun, we took all of that money and put down paper for our house. Every time I get anything, we put money aside. We taught them to do that. In fact, they used to have an allowance. They never got the money because we would make a point. It's rude, right? I think, right? To say like, oh, you're getting whatever, like $6 or whatever it is, like at the certain interval.  So I was like, you know, okay, you're getting it. And I'm like, okay, like, where is it? And they're like, oh, like, it's in this account. I'm like, how do I access the account? Like, oh, well, you know, we'll talk about it later. And like, I'm just like, um, this is technically my money, right? So like, I really actually never swore that money. And then I was like in college. And I was like, oh, I need something.   I was like, okay, rude. No, yeah, same thing. I like never saw any of that money for sure. I think the biggest thing was just like realizing like the value of saving. And again, like using that money for things that really matter to you later on. Like I'm not, I don't miss like the McDonald's that I never got or like this really important like pink Barbie toy when I was a kid. But I do still remember like all the really nice vacations we used to take and like all the Christmas stuff. So the stuff that was really important, I never missed out on. So I just realized that like, you know, just save it until you have something that you really truly value that you want. Yeah. So I have a question for Olivia and Jillian that came in and you kind of just answered it. But maybe you have a different answer. What was the best or most relevant advice financial I would assume, or maybe anything that your parents have given you?   Cause I think for a while, like I didn't realize kind of like where we sat in terms of like middle class or like upper middle class but I kind of assumed that we were like, not poor. But I was like, oh, we just must not have money. Like I was like, we must not have a lot. And then people would be like, you just said that you went on a two week vacation. Like what are you talking about? Like your family must be well off. And I was like, do you see my shoes? Like can you see like the pants that I'm wearing? Like I don't understand.  It was actually really bad. But like we would have the nice things cause those were the things that were important to spend on. Like I said, I still have my car. Her name is Charlotte and I love her to death. And I will have Charlotte until she like sadly dies on me. And however long that is, it's however long I'll have her because I don't necessarily care about what kind of car I have. People laugh as they get in my car and it doesn't have a backup camera. And people like, what's going on? Like your car doesn't have a, like how do I, like how do I, you know, like back into the spot? Like you have to turn around. Like it's not, it's not that hard.  But like Jillian said, I'm still living at home as well. And one of the reasons I made that choice is because I also want to move out and not have to rent. And so one of the things that the investment account that I have that is not doing so well right now is for, is so that I can put a down payment on a house. I don't have to move out and rent. And so I think that lesson was really important in terms of save the money and then spend it on the things that really matter to you. Jillian, how about you? Ditto. Yeah, same thing. Like the foundation of like being debt free and saving provide you to be able to like have more opportunities and do things you want is really important. It would be like the biggest lesson. So question for Kevin and Michelle. Were you comfortable sharing what you make with your children? If so, at what age? I'm telling it what we make? No. That's actually, it's a good question. So we did not share how much we made for them for a very long time. First of all, one that had been this and we didn't want them, I mean, in the beginning of our career, we weren't making that much. But you know, now we make some good duckets. And we did not want them to feel as if they could live a certain way because of what we earned. So we actually wanted to keep them in the dark about our wealth.  Can I tell you all something really quick? I don't know, this is crazy. So she's gonna be ahead of us. We have a will, but now we're gonna update it now that she is 28. And so we sat down at the table and we have paid off her home and my desire was to have a house that someone could always live in and not have to pay rent, right? And so there's three of them. So I say, well, all three of y'all could live here, one of you. And so this one, go ahead and tell me what you see.  You wanna do something? So she says, I say, you're not gonna ever sell this house. You just gotta use it for the, and so she said, no, we're gonna sell. I said, you're not gonna sell my house. She said, no, we're gonna sell. And so they get along really well. The siblings are really close. And so she said, well, but mommy, we grew up in this house, it's too big for us. We really don't want it. If one of us had it for free, the other two of us might feel some kind of way about that. And wouldn't it be better to sell it and divide the proceeds so that we each, and because we live in this area, they really could almost buy a house with the value of our house now because we've been in it for a long time. And she just laid it out like that. Like, that's what we're gonna do. So, my house. Because especially in our community, as African-American, home ownership is just such a prize. And the idea that she wanted to sell this house, it took us so long to pay off. It just hurt my heart. But then I realized she was absolutely right. They can make a different way. That money can go a long way for them to be mortgage free long before we were mortgage free. And it took me a while to understand that that was okay to let the house go. So a lot of you all, and maybe not you, but others, they wanna keep this house that the kids don't want. And so we said, okay, finally it's okay. So then I said, well, okay, you're gonna, we both wanna be cremated. I said, well, you're gonna at least have my ashes, right? Like you're gonna, you know. She wants me to wear her ashes in a necklace, carrying you around like that. It's not, it's so bizarre. It's not, it's not happening. They don't want my house or my ash. Like. Just real quickly to add to that. So, you know, I won't repeat what Michelle said about how much we make, but how much we have is also a question. When do we reveal to our children how much we have, right? And we didn't talk to them about it very much as they were growing up, because again, for the same reasons, you know. And, but I think at this point now that they're adults, we were starting to do that. And so Olivia knows more probably than Jillian does at this point. Which is like 2%. They're making it sound like we have a lot of knowledge. We do not know very much. So like when I, when we have that will conversation, I'm like very excited. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get the real information on like what's going on. But I think it's important that we do that because I think back to my own situation with my dad and he, this is going back maybe 10 or 11 years. He lived with us just before he passed away. And during that time, we were doing some estate planning for him. And he was not willing at all to talk about how much he had and where his assets were and that sort of thing. So it made it rather difficult for us. So I resolved in my mind that our kids would know as we get closer to that time. So that it's less complicated and easier for them. So by his standard, I'm doing pretty well. That's not really the standard I know that we want to use for our kids. But we are now in the stage where I think we're more willing to talk about what we have, where it is, what our wishes are and that sort of thing. So I think it's a process. It's a process. A question came in for Olivia and Jillian. This is a fun one. When and how have you been able to convince your mother to spend money she didn't want to spend? Have we been able to do that? I don't. Certainly not, no. I don't know. I think actually, like I said earlier, I think it's more so that now she's trying to convince us to spend money on things like I remember. Well, I don't know. I don't know if you have seen her talk or whatever, but I wanted a North Face jacket.   Right, so I really, really wanted a North Face jacket.  Like you have to save up for it for yourself. And I remember it was $180. And I saved up for it and we went into the Nordstrom and I like got the jacket and I put it on and I was like, yes. And I was like, okay, I have the jacket. And then we like got closer to the register. And I was like, do I really want this jacket? Like I don't know. And she was like, what do you mean? Like you saved for it? We drove all this way. Like you like it? It fits, like buy the jacket. And I was like, well, you know, like I have other jackets. Like it'll be fine. And so I was about to put it back. And she was like, no, like this is how money works. Like you saved, you worked for it. Like get the jacket. And so I did, I ultimately got the jacket and I wore it for a very long time. And then she gave it to Jillian, but it's fine. It's fine, I came home from college and I was like, where's my jacket? She's like, oh, Jillian has just a Towson. I'm like, that is my $180 jacket. But whatever. I don't necessarily know if I have any memories of like trying to get her to like spend something. And then she'd say no. And then she said, yes, because she's very determined when she makes up her mind to like say no, that there's not a lot of wiggle room on that. So it's probably the other way around. I think that's probably the answer to why they don't tell me how much they have. I think my sister gives up, but I think I'm still, you know, I still have hope that one day I'll ask for something and it'll be a yes, but maybe not. But I have very early memories of asking for stuff and the answer being no. And I would try to be very creative. I think she told the story last year about the rule with commercials where like we were never allowed to buy anything. Or she was never gonna get us anything that we saw on a commercial. And so I went to her and I really wanted something. And she was like, where did you see it?  But I think that if I stop asking for things then maybe they'll tell me how much they have and then, you know, we can go from there. But no, I still have never been able to convince her to buy anything for us. I wanted to read, this is really true. So we, there is an appropriate time to tell them and the time is now. So we are gonna sit down and lay everything out to be comfortable because they're ready now. But a couple of years ago, I think you were in college who was sitting at the table, you know, talking about a state plan and this, I know, it's like crazy, right? This is where we talk at the table.  And she was like, how much this one? How much?  She said, is it a lot? Are you rich?  She said, so, when I get the money.   And I said, okay, so I'm telling all of y'all now, if I, something happens to me mysteriously, you know, send the police that way. But we try to, you know, they really didn't know. They thought we were, like, we didn't want them to know how well off. And I think one of them did say, oh, you're rich. I said, no, she said, we are rich. That's what you said. We are rich. I said, no, you mistake it, we rich. So there's another question here that I think is a good one. What can I do to educate my college son about the realities of money without squashing his dream job, keeping him from pursuing his dream job of being a zoologist? So are they, do they not want them to be a zoologist? Well, maybe it's not the highest paying job. They want him to be aware of money, but still reach for that job that isn't the highest paying job. Well, you might want to ask them, but I wouldn't do that. I think you have to let people operate in the gifting that they were.  I love what I do. I love being a journalist. I love writing. My husband loved being an engineer and then a manager and we want that for our children.  What we have taught them is how to live as a therapist and maybe they might not make six-figure salaries, but trust me on that, they will retire with more money than people who make six-figure salaries. And so we never steered them. I don't think we ever steered them in a particular where she said she wanted to be a teacher. It was like, it was the proudest moment because I don't know about you all, but it was a teacher who changed my life and I would not want to rob another child of that. Because it was a teacher who I won a scholarship to the University of Maryland at College Park and when the scholarship came out because of my background, I didn't want to apply for it because I thought, first of all, how are you going to give it to me? I come from this broken home, my grandfather's an alcoholic. We ate, but we didn't have a lot. I had like a couple of outfits to wear to school. They're not going to give this to this little poor kid from West Baltimore. And I wouldn't apply for a scholarship. And she ran me down and hunted me down for weeks. And finally she just like took me by the shoulder. She said, listen, if you apply, you already have a no if you don't apply. Imagine if you apply and you get a yes. And so I applied for the scholarship, 10 finalists. I was one of 10, two from my school and the other person who won from my school was in a fashion at club. She came from a wealthy family and it's like, oh, she's going to get it for real. And I went down to the son for the interview and I just told him, you know, my life was like, and I won that scholarship. And I would have never won that if it hadn't been for that educator. So I don't think you discourage your kids. You just show them how to make money for where they are. And eventually if they're good money managers and they can't quite make it, they will figure out how to get a second job or maybe in their case, all three of our kids living at home. And everyone is like, oh, you just don't want to let them go and you just got to let them be out there. But my God, they can, she can save, you know, nearly $1,000 in a non-retirement account. And she's 15%. She saved, I think this past year, probably 80% of her salary. And if I could just get her to sign up for her four, one, three, two, three, four. Their brother is the same way. And so they, you know, it is, it was intentional for them to live at home. So instead of paying, and we don't have anything a problem with renting, but we know that they want to be homeowners. So that they stay home long enough and save 80% of their salary. When they walk into the door of their house, their house will be almost half paid off. What a legacy if they could be homeowners, true homeowners without a mortgage. By the time they hit their 40s or 50s, my God, that's life changing. And they won't have to worry so much about spending down their retirement account because they removed the most expensive thing on their budget. And so don't discourage your kids. Encourage them, show them. Say no, say no to your grandkids. It's not, I mean, it's a legacy. You know, this didn't happen by accident. I am so, we are so proud of these girls. It didn't happen by accident. And it wasn't easy. They are nuts and loving and look at them smiling, but trust me on this, they hate it. Or me, I should say, because their dad is like really like, no, baby.  That's really intense. There was a lot of like, what's going on over there? Like, why are there being, you know, so annoying about things? But we didn't like hate them because eventually we adjusted, right? Like kids are really adaptable. And so I think when they are living under a certain, you know, rule system or parent household or like money management system, like they, we adapted. And so it got to the point where then I started to look at other people funny when they were judging me for not having things. And so then, you know, my mindset shifted over time. And so like, yes, there were a lot of times where I was very angry or I didn't understand or it was really annoying to be told over and over again, is that a need or a want? Is that a need or a want? I'm like, I just want it. Like, why can't I like just, I just want it. Like, you know, like I'm not allowed to want things. But over time, you know, like we came around to it or I just stopped being something that we will maybe not for Jillian, but I just stopped asking. So I was like, well, after so many knows, it's like, okay, fine, I just won't have the thing. And that's fine. And so I think it's, you know, just about like the trusting that your kids will adapt to it and then they'll grow up and eventually, hopefully they'll come around to it. Well, Mac and Tyra family, we are so grateful for you to have come here. We knew you loved Michelle, but thank you all so much.


There are just three rules for taking wildlife selfies, but breaking them has even worse consequences than you think. Not only can people food be bad for wild animals, but the more comfortable they become with humans, the more aggressive and dangerous they might be. No matter how cute or sweet it seems, wild animals never benefit from being touched by untrained people. They can also carry dangerous diseases that can spread to you. Invading an animal's personal space can lead to everything from emotional stress to lower birth rates. Not to mention the physical damage they can do to you.


I'm going to be leading us through the conversation today. You may have noted as you join, we have the default to be microphones muted and cameras turned off. And so just know that that's the expectation for today. We are going to go through the webinar and we're going to get started real soon. As we go, we do encourage everyone to ask questions. And as you have them, we ask that you put those in the chat. The rest of our team will be monitoring there as we go. And we do plan to save some time at the end to answer some of those questions that have come up throughout the webinar. Last but not least, the webinar is being recorded and we are going to distribute this after the session. So if anyone's scrambling to take notes or if you have things or you want to share this with colleagues later, just know that that link is going to be available to you when we send that follow-up email. So just getting started from here, this is our webinar on how to use search data to improve your communication strategy, communications and outreach. Before we get started, a couple of comments. So first things first, we are Parsons TKL. So we are a consultancy that has pioneered an approach we call engagement architecture. What engagement architecture means is the idea that your organization is a interconnected system of people, platforms and processes that drive audience engagement, drive impact. And so we look at all of those pieces across departments and we see how they work together to accomplish these goals, accomplish organizational missions. And so that's a little bit of background about who we are and the type of work that we do. Of course, as the head of the data team, we focus a lot on how data moves throughout these systems and how they can be used both to improve your capabilities from a technology and product standpoint, but also from a process and team standpoint. How does data help empower your staff to do their work more effectively? So that's a little bit of background about us. So a little bit about us, I think in a couple of moments, you should see a poll pop up. I would like to just get a little bit of sense about who's joining today and what roles you play on the team and recognizing that in the mission-driven sector, sometimes that's many hats. So we'll just take a couple of minutes for you guys to fill out this poll here. And one of the big reasons why I want to have this information is data in general and I think search data in particular can do a lot of things. Every one data point can be used in many different ways. And so knowing a little bit about what your role is can change what's possible with the data that you have. So these are the types of ideas and insights that we're gonna wanna bring into the discussion today, but then also I want you guys to have in mind as you go back into your work and think about how you wanna use search data on a day-to-day basis. Okay. All right, so I think everyone should see the results. It does look like we've got predominantly communications, but really not exclusively. And I think an interesting correlation between communications and marketing, those are roles that overlap a lot, especially in this sector. And then also some program, public relations, executive leadership. Okay. All right, this is all really helpful. So we're gonna keep going here. So let's talk about search data. What is search data and why should we be focusing on it? First things first, for anyone who is just getting started, has heard of, maybe you looked at, but doesn't make search data a daily part or weekly or any kind of regular part of your work. We have seen consistently that search data is one of the most underutilized resources. It's something that every organization has access to, whether they know it or not, but we rarely see it being used as a part of sort of a standard kit of analytics. And so that's one of the big reasons why we wanna focus on it. In this webinar, we're gonna talk about what it is, we're gonna talk about where to find it, and we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the specific tools and the places where you'll find it in your organization. So specifically Google Search Console, on-site search data and a couple of ways and some of the most common. But then other places where you can get search and search-like data, including publicly things like Google Trends, and we'll talk a little bit as well about social media, sort of an honorable mention there. So search data is particularly valuable when you are trying to understand your audiences, you're trying to understand their interests. Search is where people express their interests in their own words in a way that they often don't elsewhere. So you think about Google Search, people are typing in as they would phrase it, the things that they want and they expect the magic of Google to return it to them. Once they actually get to your website, a lot of you will have your on-site search configured. And so with that site search, you can then also type in exactly what you're looking for. We'll talk about it a little bit more, but there's a key difference here. In Google Search, people are looking for what they want and then ideally they find it. On your website, people often use site search when they want to find something, but they can't. And so then they search for it. So similar experience in terms of what the user is typing in, but they have very different implications for you, for your user experience and the types of insights you can draw from them. So I mentioned and we'll talk again about social media, but that is another place where people go and where they are typing things and directly sharing ideas from their head. So it's another place where you can look at the text that they enter and learn about your audience from that. And then last but not least, we're focusing on search data today, but this is just one part of all the different types of data that you can collect. And so there's lots of other types of interactions with your site, whether that's just simple page views or things like downloads or scrolling on your website. All of those are other things that you can use to gauge and evaluate interests, but rarely with those are you getting as direct a sort of a human language input about what people are wanting. So we like to correlate these with the search data, but it serves a different purpose. So just to go by analogy in a couple of ways, thinking about what search data represents. So you could imagine that you own a storefront. You've got your rose, you've got your food, your drinks, all of that would be the content on your website.  Where's the milk? Where are the things that I want and that I need? And as you were hearing that, you would start to notice the patterns, you would start to get a sense for what people typically want and how you might change the layout of your store to serve those needs. That same thing is happening online. You are getting those same types of quick, I want this, I want that. And a lot of that information is hiding in your search data. So where it might be more obvious and intuitive how to do it and how you should respond in person, you have to do a little bit of digging in your data to get that same benefit from your online search data. So one of the things that we hear often, a little bit sometimes with Google search, but especially with site search, is people say, oh yeah, but that's just, that's such a small volume of my data. Google search typically runs in the realm of 30 to as much as 70% of the website's traffic. But site search, a lot of people are only seeing site search being one to 3% of their traffic, which may sound small, but the first thing to remember is that these are people who are motivated to find your stuff. That's somewhat true with Google search, it's definitely true with your site search. The fact that they haven't already given up and that they're actually going into that extra field to look for things that they want means that they really want it. So those are important people to listen to. But even just thinking about the numbers, here we've got approximations, let's say your site has a million page views in a year, just based on the lower edge of these estimates, that means 300,000 people have typed something in to Google search in order to find your content. And all of that is saved data. And so those are all questions that people ask that you can look at. Even site search at 1% of your million page views or a million visitors is gonna be 10,000 people who used your site search. Compare that to things like focus groups running surveys where you might have on the order of hundreds or maybe thousands of people. This is slightly different type of feedback you're gonna get, but it's orders of magnitude more people that you could be learning from by using your site search and Google search data. And then last but not least, to close out the prelude, there's a good question of why now? Why is now a good time to look at, think about and use your site search data. One of the analysts on our team has a experience as a trail builder and he brought to us a saying from the trail builder community that the best time to build a trail is in the rain. It may sound terrible. It's unpleasant out there, it's muddy, things are washing away, but that's exactly where you get to see the weak points in your trail that where the erosion is wiping away the trail, where you need to reinforce things. And I think with a lot of what's going on in the world right now, non-profit organizations are experiencing that. They are experiencing erosion. We are all having a rainy day right now. And I think in some cases where you've got a lot of traffic, this is your first time to get a sense of who these people are, understand what their needs. Even if you have your existing audience, your core constituents who are coming to you, their lives have changed, their needs have changed. So you might need to readjust what you think you know about them. And your search data is a place that you can look for that. So it is, with everything that's going on right now, we really encourage people to be looking at their data and search data in particular is a great way to understand your audiences. So I'm gonna jump forward and we're going to start talking about tools in particular, but as we begin, I wanna put up one more poll and just get a sense of overall in the audience here, how much experience we have with and how much access we have to these types of data in your organization. So we've got two questions up right now about what you do or don't have access to in terms of data. And I'll use the feedback from this to help guide a little bit how deep I go into talking about some of the different tools. But I think also it's just gonna be useful to get a sense of how much work there might be afterwards after this webinar for this group in order to start taking advantage of their search data. So we'll just take a minute or so to get that input from everyone. Okay, all right, it looks like we've got pretty consistent access to Google Analytics data directly and also about half of folks have access to Google Search Console, but I think it's also gonna be worth spending some time talking about that platform, what it is. And I think we have also seen access does not mean awareness. And so we're gonna spend a little bit of extra time on that platform in particular, talking about what it is and what we can start getting from it once we get access. All right, so your tools, what's available today for getting search data and search insights. So first things first, Google Search Console. Google Search Console is Google's gift to the world. They have become the first stop for seeking information for much of the human race. And so they have a tremendous amount of information about what people want, what they need. And Google Search Console is a platform that they have created, that they make available to anyone who owns a website so that they can see what are people looking for that leads them to you. So in Google Search Console, well, first of all, let me talk about getting your Google Search Console. This is Google's own dashboard. It's something that they, data they have and it's a system that they manage. So it's not actually that you need to somehow get it or install it. What you have to do is claim it. You are proving to Google that you are the person who owns your website, that you are a person who should have access to this data. And there are a few different ways to do that. Sometimes just having your Google Analytics access is enough to get in. Other times you are gonna need to actually put little bits of code on the website to prove to Google that you deserve to have access. So this is something that you may and likely will need to work with your technology team in order to claim access. Once you are in there, Google Search Console gives you a lot of deep information. And so we've got a couple of screenshots here that give you a sense of what's in there. So they are gonna give you the direct queries, things that people have typed in that resulted in your content getting featured in one way or another. It also shows you the specific pages. That people are finding when they search for things related to your content. You can also look at countries or sort of by geography where people coming from. There's information about devices, how your content appears in search appearance, and more. I think there's a lot of other edges to that platform. We could spend a whole webinar just talking about it. I think another important distinction here is Google Search Console tells you about the people who found you and came to your website and actually showed up there. But it also is going to tell you about people who searched for things, saw your website and the results, but did not come. And so I think that's something that often gets lost. You can see here for this website, again, orders of magnitude, more people searched for things that Google thought was related to your website, but they decided your website wasn't the one they wanted to click on. And so there's a lot more you can learn about your potential audience, not just your existing one, but the one that you're almost getting. So a lot of different uses for this. So in terms of the data itself, this is giving you search terms and search queries that you can mine for insights. You can mine for trends and words. If there's a particular term that your organization uses, takes pride in, you can see where that's showing up. You can see trends in it. So a lot of information available there. So I'm gonna stop on Google search console for now and we'll jump forward to internal site search and learn a little bit about what that data looks like. So on-site search can be powered by a lot of different platforms in terms of your actual website's technology. But I'm gonna focus right now and a little bit of how we're gonna be talking about is gonna be in the context of Google Analytics. We do know that that is by far the common analytics tool. We have found that some 90 to 95% of nonprofits seem to be using Google Analytics. So this is probably gonna be the most obvious place for you to get at this data. But just to say, there might be other places. Your own website, your CMS and the search tools you use might also have search data that you can get at. Within Google Analytics, first thing to note, how do you get it? How do you start capturing it? It is something that needs to be turned on. You are not collecting that data by default necessarily. So that's something, if you have never looked at it before, haven't started accessing that, you may need to work with your tech team to start collecting that site search data. But the experience here is one, again, that's gonna be pretty familiar to everyone. You're looking at a website, you want something, you don't see it right there on the homepage.  Once you do that, Google Analytics starts learning a lot. So it learns about how many sessions, how many people are actually searching. It tells you a little bit about their behavior after they have completed a search, how many of the results are they actually looking at? Are people giving up entirely and jumping out of site search even before they've clicked on anything because they didn't see what they were looking for? Are they changing their search? If they search for US and don't see what they want, do they then search America? So you can sort of see when people keep trying in order to find what they're looking for. And then behaviors after search, how much time are they spending? So a lot of different types of insights that it automatically starts collecting once you turn it on. And then with that again, I think these are the real goods, being able to see what are the individual terms that people are typing in. And you can get these sort of different engagement metrics on a term by turn basis as well. So this is very helpful. I think it's useful in a way similar to Google search data where you are getting a sense of just what people want. But again, as I alluded to before, there's a slightly different user experience that sometimes applies to site search. It's not necessarily, I wanted this, I searched for this, it came up and I'm thrilled. Sometimes it's, I have been looking for this and I couldn't find it. And I'm starting to get frustrated. So I'm gonna type it into site search. So a slightly different feel and mentality that users have when they're using this. And again, I'm speaking in general terms, the specifics of this will change site to site, how you encourage people to navigate your content. So, but yeah, just some overall takes there. All right, I'm gonna jump on to the next one. Google Trends. If anyone isn't familiar with Google Trends, Google Trends is another tool that is provided by Google where Google Search Console is telling you about your website and how your website engages with the world and what people are searching for. Google Trends lets you know for the entire world how are people searching for certain terms. And it lets you type in things and sort of see how things are trending. Again, by geography over time. And it lets you explore related interests. So it's a great research tool for this type of data, search data in particular. The things that you learn from your Google Search Console, the things that you learn from Google Analytics are great to bring here. And you can see how they plug in with Trends overall. It helps you find other queries that you might run and it helps you put things into context. It helps you compare things. You compare yourself against global trends but also compare individual word choices that you might be making. So a very helpful research tool in that regard that deserves mention while you're working with search data. And then lastly, Twitter monitoring and other social insights. Because of the nature of working with language working with user input language, it's hard to think about what you might learn from search without also wondering what's happening on social media. And a lot of social media platforms but Twitter in particular makes it easy to get at their content. So you can get at tweets very, very easily. And you can explore tweets, you can explore those conversations. And so we can certainly talk more about use cases for using search data when doing social monitoring and social listening. But just to know that this is another platform where you can pull up people's human language, enter it interests and explore them for similar insights as what you might look for in search data. What is gonna be different here is you don't have as tight a connection between the words they're using here and the words that they might be using to find your content sort of page by page content. It's a little bit more removed from your content than search data is. So it can take more work at least in order to reunify those two. So those are the four universes of data that I would just wanna make sure everyone has in mind as they start thinking about using search data. Having data is one thing, using it is an entirely separate thing. And a hat tip to all the analysts out there, it is not easy working with search data. That's one of the biggest reasons why it doesn't get used is that when you open it up, it's incredibly dense. In the example I showed, which was a relatively small site, you still had 28,000 searches that resulted in that website's content showing up. And so that means 28,000 people typed something in, which means 28,000 rows of human entered text. So it's important to, those tools themselves I should say first are built for exploration. They are built so that you can click through, type things in, search for things, do a little browsing as well. But they are kind of lightweight research tools. They're okay as reporting tools.  Which sounds scary, but I just wanna assure you that these things are also pretty close at hand. Excel is an extremely powerful data analysis tool. You can do a lot in Excel to extract, explore, unpack, and turn your data into visualizations that are ready for sharing around the rest of your team.  But with a little time and a little elbow grease from an analyst, you can start turning that data into insights that are much more digestible. So important to think about that. And then once you have the data cleaned, organized the way you like, structured to answer the questions that you have. I would say putting it into things like dashboards. We use Data Studio often with our clients and having ways that make it easier for people to consume is how you're gonna start to get more value out of your search data. To support the analysts. And this advice is I think for everyone and especially everyone else. Getting good insights out of your data depends on asking good questions of your data. And so a few tips on that. What and why questions are very thought provoking but can sometimes be the hardest to answer. And so if you're just getting started out with search data, you're just sort of trying to get a sense of what kinds of things you can know. Try to ask yes, no questions. Is this word commonly used? Is this word used more than it's synonym? Can we get sort of simple yes, no questions about things that might help us? I think that that can be a much easier way especially if you're at an organization that does not have an analyst. And you're just sort of bringing somebody who's not really as experienced in data analysis. This is a good way and it makes it easier to get started using the data. That being said, be very clear about the decision that you're trying to make based on the answer to your question. Again, open-ended questions I encourage. I think they can be very thought provoking but when you have an action that your organization might take based on the result, it can really help with focus in exploring this data. It can also help in deciding how confident that you are. So yeah, it seems like this term is better. Okay, well, we're going to change the name of our organization based on that. Well, hang on, hang on, hang on. I don't think, I'm not quite that confident about it. So being clear about what you're gonna do based on the results can change what you learn and how you wanna use the data that you have access to. And then lastly, trying to pose your question in terms of data that your analyst has available.  If you can ask your question in that context and sort of say, I want to know based on the frequency of this term, as opposed to I want to know just what impact we've had overall. A lot of times if you ask questions about just starting with the impact of somebody who only has access to on-site consumption, it's a lot harder to connect to those dots. And so trying to meet in the middle between the analyst and the stakeholders can make those conversations a lot more productive. And a big asterisk there. Again, I do not wanna discourage those big open questions. I think those big open questions are critical to having a healthy data culture and also can help you lead to new capabilities. But even as you're on your way towards that, being able to collect new data, use it, being able to make use of what you have today. I think these are some tips to support that. So yeah, I'm gonna move on from here. We've got some examples and we'll have the deck afterwards. But examples of the types of questions you might ask and what you might do with them after the fact. Okay, I'm gonna jump forward. And I actually think we're doing, yeah, we're doing quite well on time. So we're gonna put up a poll, another poll just to get a sense from the group. How, what do we wanna do now? Do we want to keep rolling with the deck? We have a couple of potential use cases that we could talk through. Or if everyone's got questions bottled up, we can jump straight into Q and A right now and maybe switch back to the content later. Okay, all right, it looks like we're hungry for more content. So that's great. I think very clear answer there. Okay, so we have talked through what is search data? Why is it useful? Why is it important? We've talked through a few of the tools, the places where you can get at your search data. We touched very briefly on what it takes to analyze it and how staff and stakeholders can help ask good questions. So what we're gonna jump forward through now are a couple of thought examples. So sort of hypothetical ways in which you might use search data. One that has certainly come up for us and that we've done work on is evaluating the value of your brand. So how can you find audiences that are using your brand terms when searching for content? And what can you learn from how frequently they do that? And again, brand is a pretty big term and it can represent a lot of things. So the brand could be your entire organization, but the brand might also be certain programs or initiatives or campaigns that you're running within the organization. Or it could be things like a product. A lot of organizations have, again, product is a big term, but it could be the brand of your annual gala or it could be the brand of a certain resource that you publish once a year. And then last but certainly not least are the people of your organizations. Your experts, any sort of celebrities, your board members who might be important boosts of your organization. Being able to look for those terms in your data can give you a sense of how much lift your organization is getting from them. And that can be very useful just internally, from a messaging perspective, being able to show the effect of brand work that you have done. But then I also think it tells you a lot about audiences and sort of what those different audiences want because people who are using your brand terms have more affinity. They are not just looking for the topic that you cover as somebody who doesn't care who you are, they just wanna know about the topic. These are people who wanna know about that topic and know that they wanna know your opinion. So these are really some loyal audiences. And so being able to sort of see how their patterns and what content the people who search for your brand are consuming. And it can be very, very informative. It can also show you as you look at brand, across your whole website and brand traffic across your whole website, where is your brand having the most impact in what parts of your content might actually need more help. You might need to focus more on brand because the brand isn't actually saturating in the community that's looking for educational materials. Your brand is really good on healthcare but you could actually do more to help the education market recognize your brand because you do good work on education. So I think these are just some examples of the types of questions you might ask when doing brand analysis. Putting it into practice. So first things first, you have to have good definitions of your brand. Being able to map your brand to the actual terms and phrases that people are gonna use is necessary and sometimes fraught because sometimes it's not always clear. Is this term a brand term or is this just an English language word that does or does, it may or may not have to do with your brand. So there might be some internal consensus building that you have to do before you're ready to even do this analysis. Actually exploring those brand terms can and be very quick at a base level. Just jump into Google search console and type in the name of your organization and voila, you've got your first insight. How much of your search traffic comes from people using the brand name. It can get more complicated from there very quickly as you start looking to just subsets of your content. That's the kind of thing you might wanna start pulling the data offline to do custom analysis. But why should you do that? Some of the things we described, being able to elevate the brand, figuring out what audiences you might need to work harder on to elevate the brand with and otherwise as an input to your brand strategy. If you're starting a brand project, absolutely do this. I think this is critical information for any brand strategy. And then again, how else might you use the results from this? Having those insights that you can report up to leadership to help give them clarity and confidence over, yes, our brand is working, our brand is making a difference. I think you'll have to think through what the expectations there are in terms of how you present the results of brand research in your search data. I think there's a lot of art in that, being able to sort of think through what those expectations were. But in the absence of data, this might be the first time to start, drawing lines in the sand, having benchmarks and being able to show what the value and the history of that value of your brand was. I think the next one I wanna talk about is being able to understand how well your content is serving audience needs. And so this is thinking a little bit more about how to tie search to engagement. And this is an admittedly tough one, but the idea here is we wanna be able to get a sense on a term by term basis. How do words match up with audiences that are coming to the site and then engaging well? And there's a lot of details into that type of analysis, but what it takes to put it into practice is first developing the sets of high and low quality terms based on engagement. And so that's gonna mean having good definitions of engagement, I should have put a bullet above there. You need to be able to evaluate and measure engagement on your site, first and foremost, before this really becomes possible. You can do it at a very base level with just Google search data. You can see term by term, our people clicking on our website when they see the result. That type of search analysis is a good first step and can be done much more simply. But if you wanna start connecting it to things, concepts like impact, you're gonna have to start bringing together from sort of throughout that user journey. And so yeah, so I think that's one of the steps that you have to take there. Once you've done this though, I think the results of this type of analysis can be very, very powerful in terms of informing your editorial team, giving your editorial team direct input on these are words that people are using, these are words that people aren't using. And then also when people search for us with these words, they are taking the next steps. It leads them to content that helps us accomplish the mission versus you may have popular words that are bringing people to the site, but those people don't stick around or those people are coming to content on your site that actually isn't as mission critical. You might have pages on your site that are very interesting and informative, but perhaps there was just the description of your company picnic last summer that's got great pictures. Is it really mission aligned? There's some good hard questions about content strategy and then about the editorial process of creating content that helps you with the satisfying terms, gets you more term A traffic and then either reduces or redirects term B traffic to content that's gonna satisfy those people more. And then being able to monitor engagement based on those changes as a sort of real time feedback for your content team, your editorial team, your marketing and promotions teams and being able to let them see what the impact of sort of SEO type work might be or even taking it into the social media email outreach. Yeah, so I think that's sort of another use case being able to use search data and this content and content production context. Last but certainly not least, we talked before about the relationship between search and search data and social media, both being places where people are really giving you very direct and candid insights and feedback into what they like, what they don't like. There are some great opportunities to use search as a way to learn about the language that your audience uses so that sort of as I alluded to in the last use case so that you can change the way you conduct your outreach. I think again, from an editorial perspective you can use it directly. You can just say, hey, social media team, here's a report on what we've learned about the use of key terms in our lexicon and these are things that we want you to know and terms that we want you to start using more, terms that we found nobody uses so let's maybe downplay those even if it's in the report but I think the real power of this comes when you start introducing new social listening tools. So with social listening tools, you can again, take those terms that you found to be particularly on brand or particularly engaging for your audiences and you can start looking, listening out on social media for communities where those conversations are already happening, perhaps and very likely without you. So it's a way that you can discover individual users or whole communities where you should be and perhaps aren't. And so as you have that going on you can do this sort of strategically and sort of say, okay, comms team, let's, you know, we're going to Reddit. There's a great community that we found by searching for these terms and that's just a place that we should start generally participating but you can even get really, really tactical with this. So you could have real time alerts that say, okay, whenever we're talking about defense policy in Afghanistan and somebody with more than a thousand followers mentions any of these individuals that's something that our scholar on defense in Afghanistan needs to know about because they can then jump onto Twitter right away and say, oh, hey, Colonel so-and-so, we've done a report on what you just said about Afghanistan and here's our best insights and they can start a conversation and sort of have that real time social engagement. In order to do that, and in order to do that at scale, it really helps to have confidence in your lexicon and what you've learned about your lexicon and the ability to sort of bring that back as a feed-in. So I think those are three examples I wanted to talk about. There are so many more. If you're doing any work on taxonomy, I think that's an obvious one. Here are your audience's own words that you can use to inform what your organizational taxonomy should be. So that's a really clear one. Another one that I didn't go into detail here but I also have no monopoly on this one but it's the idea of using your search data to inform your SEO strategy and inform your search engine marketing strategy. And so you could set up AdWords campaigns based on what you learned from your search data. These are, no, that's a much more traditional use of this search data whereas here we're sort of focusing on more unusual and sort of edge cases but lots of thoughts of ways in which you could do that. Yeah. So those were the use cases I wanted to walk through. We're gonna go into Q&A before I do and we'll encourage this again at the end about four things you should do today. Whether you already have, if you already have access, I encourage you to go into Google Analytics, navigate your way to the site search reports. It's under the behavior tab and Google Analytics and in Google Search Console, go to the website, log in to the Google Search Console website. Again, that's Google's own dashboard that they have set up. Navigate your way to that data. Make sure you have access to it. If you do have access to those just give each of them five minutes. Just poke around if you've never done it before. I think you can learn so much so quickly about what's possible and you can start getting answers. But then otherwise, if you don't have access to either spend those five minutes instead, trying to find the person at your organization who can help you get access. There is so much data available to you and access and awareness are the biggest blockers at most organizations. So do that favor for yourself and for me. It makes me happy when people get at this data. And then I would say the last step here is schedule a meeting with somebody on your team where you're just gonna sit down together and just look at this data together. Just give it 15, 30 minutes. Again, the data only helps your organization when you use it and just putting that time pressure if you can get it on your calendar then it's gonna happen and you can know that. It's easy to put this off as a resource indefinitely. You can get by without it but it can do tremendous things for your organization if you start using it. And I think these first steps will at least get you on the road. So that is, got some other advice that we can talk about the sort of a summary of what we just described. But I think that otherwise is the end of the content. So I'd love to jump into questions and answers. I know our team has been looking at the things that you guys have been typing into chat the whole time. So we're gonna have Lisa from our team be your voice. So Lisa, do you wanna let me know what we've been hearing? Yes, we've gotten a few really good questions in the chat. I've been really excited to see. One of them, one of the first things we got pointed out was that your screenshots that you used in your presentation GC, GSC looks a little different in our screenshots than it did for the user. So what's that about? That is interesting. I'd be very curious to talk to those. So GSC- It sounds like that that person was using an integrated search console with GA? Maybe we are. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, okay. Thank you, thank you. That is a great call out. Yes, Google Analytics has a Google Search Console integration. It was developed at a point where the relationship between Google Search data and Google Analytics data was much tighter than it is today. It's a few years ago now, Google stopped reporting individual terms and keywords to Google Analytics for privacy reasons. So Google Analytics lost about 90% or more of the individual term and query and keyword data. So that connection is still there. It's a little bit vestigial. I don't love it personally and I rarely encourage it. Do not look for your Google Search keyword data and Google Analytics. It will disappoint you and perhaps even mislead you. Go directly to Google Search Console. Google Search Console still gives you all of the terms, but there they've taken steps to make it harder for you to say, oh, this specific word is what my aunt Betsy typed in in ways that could violate individual user's privacy. And so they've done it to protect the public, but it makes it harder on us analysts to sort of get at the data, which is now in these two different places. And we have to do more work to get those insights out of it. So yes, yes, that's probably the biggest difference. I will also say of Google Search Console, there's a lot in there. I'm going from memory right now, but I think when you get in, you want to click on the performance tab on the left. And that's where you'll start to see familiar screenshots to the ones I took. Cool, very helpful. Yes, thank you. We also had a question of how often would you check terms on Google Trends? Are they changing daily, weekly?  It's gonna depend entirely term by term and what's going on in the world, but you will find some incredibly wild swings in there when things hit the news cycle. If you're working on something and you're curious about terms that are on the front page of any major news outlet, I would go in there on a pretty regular basis to get a sense of trends. I wish I brought it in, but we did a sort of fun analysis on coronavirus-related terms, things like shelter in place, things like case counts for coronavirus, and things that you might think people are searching for because they are sheltering in place, things like food delivery and people wondering what to do with their money. And you can see how interest in the virus itself spiked early on and has been gradually waning as people, we get it, we're in a crisis, whereas the sort of more personal needs, how am I gonna take care of myself? What am I gonna do with my money? How do I take care of my kids? Interest in that is sustaining and even growing in some cases. And so I think there's a lot to be learned by exploring Google Trends about what's going on in your audience's world. Another good question, what are some listening tools that they could use? Listening tools, yes. And I've got, I have a blog post about this. I don't remember if we had already planned to put it in our follow-up note, but Lisa and Andrea, let's make sure we get it in there. If you search social media listening tools, you are gonna get hundreds, there are hundreds of tools out there. Some of them are very, very expensive. A lot of them are gonna have more power than your average non-profit here is gonna have the time and attention to take advantage of. So I would say starting simple is good. I know that Google Sheets in particular has a plugin called Twitter Archiver.  You can set it to automatically refresh. So I think that one for Twitter data in particular is a really good starting place. In terms of Amores, that's good, especially if you have, I've got very focused question I wanna ask and I wanna monitor it in just this way and I wanna do things with it afterwards. But a lot of tools that you already have, things like TweetDeck, I think HootSuite itself also has social listening tools. So I would say first look at the tools that you already have and already use, a lot of them will have some even lightweight social listening capabilities. Beyond that, we've got a blog post that we'll pass around afterwards. And I think there's a lot of options there. And that one is for GA site search, what's an okay range for a percentage of search exits? I've searched exits. I would hesitate to answer without actually looking at the site, looking at the search and sort of thinking about the user experience of your site search implementation specifically. I a little bit going on memory here, I think I often see things in the range of 10 to 40%. So that's a pretty big range. And I think a lot of that comes down to what tool you're using to manage your site search. And then also specifics about the user experience of your site and the type of content that you have as well. If you're a site with a lot of content on a narrow set of topics where you should expect people to find exactly what they're looking for, then I would expect your exits to be a bit lower. But if you're an organization that has an incredibly broad range of things that you're gonna talk on, maybe only a little bit of content in each of those categories, you should expect to have a higher exit rate because people might come in looking for something that, oh, well, I guess they're not, they're not quite the right fit here. That's also gonna change based on your marketing and outreach strategy. A lot of, that's an engagement metric. Other engagement metrics include things like bounce rate, time on site. A lot of people will get nervous when they see those metrics turn bad. But that's just because you just did a big blast and a whole bunch of people who've never heard of you before just came to your site for the first time. These are people who you should expect to be less engaged. And so having those bad, bad, lower engagement rates is more a sign of your activity as much as it is the value and quality of your content or even of your outreach. So how's that as a, it depends, answer. I think you can catch that one really well. Yeah. Another one, does Google Search Console provide insight into the not provided terms? Yes, yes. So that is, that's the piece that I mentioned before. So a million people go into Google Search and they type something in. Google Search Console is going to give you the text that they typed in for, I don't know exactly what percent, but a very, very high percentage of those people. Google has that data, they are letting you search that data. They broke the connection between that data and Google Analytics. So in Google Analytics, if this many people searched and then maybe 90% of that data is in Google Search Console, I would say about one, five, maybe 10% of that data is in Google Analytics. So it's gonna give you a huge chunk, maybe like 80% of the data is lost in that step. So Google Search Console will give you a lot of information that shows it was not provided in GA. Kind of a follow up to an earlier question. What about the query data that we can see in Google Ads? Like most nonprofits, this is the instance getting here, like most nonprofits, we've been using the Google Grants for Ads and have a variety of ad terms. There is a search keywords in there. Okay, yes. That one might bear a little bit longer. I know we're just coming up on time now. So that might be a better one to talk about offline.   And so you can start targeting more specifically just people who are using this term that we do really well with or just people who are using this term that we don't really have, we only have one piece of content for it, but we wanna make sure everyone finds it. And so I think it can guide your search engine marketing, your AdWords strategy and really fine-tune sort of ways. And those fields would be the ones where you do that. Thanks for grabbing that was our last question. All right, very good. Well, thank you everyone for joining and for everyone who stayed all the way through. We really appreciate it. This is the first in a series that we plan to be doing over the coming months. I think especially given the way the world has changed on all of us. So we will be having a follow-up note coming out. And I do want to apologize for anyone who got stuck at the beginning. We had a little bit of a delay in getting the webinar started. So thanks for those of you who stuck through it. We'll have a survey coming out. We'll have a follow-up email with resources that are gonna help guide us forward. All right, well, thanks everyone. We're gonna sign off.