Hi everyone, thanks for coming to my talk building teams for the upstream. So hi my name is Emma, I work on Microsoft's open source programs office. You can find me on Twitter and lots of other places if there's questions that you have after this I'd love to chat with you. I'm happily coming to you from Souk, British Columbia on Vancouver Island in Canada and the land of the Souk First Nation. I am sadly not in Dublin for this event, which I was really looking forward to. I really hope that 2023 is the year that I get to see you all again. So this track is part of OspoCon. So I'm not going to spend any time talking about open source programs office, although of course that's a great conversation. I'm going to focus more on how we build teams, as I said, for the upstream and the opening. But through our mission to enable individuals and organizations to achieve more through open source. As part of this talk, I was using the word good open source citizen. And so just to be respectful of the many ways that other people have described good open source citizenship, I went out and read a number of blogs and other writing about what that meant. And then I kind of thought about how I felt that fit into the Ospo and how I'm thinking of good open source citizenship, especially from my history, which before Microsoft, I was with Mozilla and worked with a lot of open source projects over I think the 20 years that I've been working in open source. And this is where I landed. A good open source citizen is someone who personalizes and prioritizes the success of their community in their individual goals and actions. And so what this means for me is just kind of the knowledge that everyone that turns up at an open source project has a personal reason for being there. It might be that they need to get something patched, a feature added. It might be that they're trying to change the world through someone's mission. It might be that they just want to learn from others. But when they leave that contribution or the day ends, they have left that community a better place. That may be something as simple as having follow the documentation and use templates and follow the code of conduct or maybe a deeper investment, sort of running events and chopping wood and carrying water, sometimes talk about those non-glamorous things that help a community move forward. So that's how I think of a good open source citizen informed by many of my peers in the industry over the years. And I think this is what informs open source community building. So I think, especially from my time at Mozilla, working with community building, the main goal is to attract and inspire folks like this, right? These are the people that make your community a great place to be. They are the people that make your project sustainable, rewarding, and successful over time. So I think that is what all community builders are focused on for open source anyways. And so then I also step back again two more steps and ask myself, what does it mean for a company to be a good open source citizen? Especially from the perspective of an Ospo, where we're not really responsible for any one upstream project or participating in any one open source community, but rather helping others do that. And so I think that a good open source citizen in a company is really good at attracting, inspiring, training, and rewarding employees to turn up as good open source citizenship. And this is what I call or I'll refer to in this talk is building teams for the upstream or building community for the upstream. And obviously the difference between building community and an individual open source citizen and building community for the upstream, made of multiple good open sources, citizens that were successful, is scale. But that's not all. So I think the fundamental difference between building open source communities and building for community for the upstream is the incentivization design. They're both building groups of people, but fundamentally how you do it is a lot different. Fundamentally where you find people is a lot different. Let me say a bit more about that. So in my experience of building open source communities, you know, what you're really trying to do is get that inspiration right, that that North Star shines so brightly that people are drawn to it. People self-select. They join because they intuitively understand the value of their participation, how they might belong, and maybe even looking for such an opportunity for quite some time. So I love the view of these magnets that people are drawn towards. For people working in their day jobs, so, you know, engineering, design accessibility, the draw is maybe magnetic, but the incentivization is different. The incentivization looks more like fridge magnets. So in that the value of being a good open source citizen means that those magnets need to be carefully placed in front of or alongside things that are already drawing their attention. These are the same people that might also join open source communities for all the reasons that we've mentioned, but in the context of their role and their job, it's just a different experience for them. And so we need to think about that as an OSPO. The design, the incentivization for employees to be good open source citizens and to understand the value for them requires a lot more intention. Community, community can't just come from anywhere, it needs to come from our employees. You are given a set of people to work with and it can't just come from anywhere. You can't, for example, decide you're going to try and, you know, work with universities one day or, you know, think about a specific region, your pool is finite in a way. I'm pretty lucky that my pool, Microsoft, is really quite large and talented, but still this is about scale, not about, you know, opportunity. And with that said, and maybe you're already thinking this, the other hard thing is that you're dealing with a fire hose all the time inside of a company. You know, people, especially as they're coming into a company or thinking about the culture, you know, they're working with their manager, they have deadlines, they're trying to ship things, they're trying to get promotions, they're trying to, you know, get through some life activities on top of that. And this is a really important consideration. So I tried to boil this down into what I think the three areas of investment to consider are and that we're working on at Microsoft to get in front of people and to combat that fire hose. So the three categories that are, that the work that I'll share with you is, I would fall under is connection of purpose, a clear value exchange and meeting people where they are, kind of at this fridge door. And so I'll walk you through some of these. So first of all, meeting people where they are. I am literally in front of them. Meeting people where they are. I literally mean this. In training programs, they're already taking. In development workflows, they're already using. In existing communications and places, people are already looking. This is your best chance. So one of the ways we do this is as far as training people are already taking. We try to embed like a very brief Microsoft 101. We have self-training and live versions of a workshop that introduce people. To what it means to work on and with open source at Microsoft. Super high level. Letting people kind of know some of the very small details. But we also supplement that with a GitHub project onboarding tool, which breaks down the steps that people can get involved with open source at Microsoft, but in a way that matches their pace. But which also matches what we see as the logical steps to becoming like that excellent open source citizen. So the first steps are usually around things like joining the internal community, joining channels and distribution lists where our newsletter goes out and that kind of thing. The second steps are about making sure people have the training that is important for their success in open source. So that's things like training, understanding the compliance needs of GitHub and so on. And then as they start to get settled, each category further breaks down ways to get involved and to, you know, join networks of people. That's something they can also track with their managers. Open source is also very much in engineering workflows. The first example is component governance, which detects open source at build time, giving inventory to a central company-wide database, connecting vulnerability data sources and helping alert manager risk. So this is all squarely around open source security risk and compliance, but to be successful in getting folks to take the actions we need, it's embedded in the engineering workflow. It's more opportunity to think about that as well for other things. We also recently invested in a communication strategy. Once we realized that we were communicating in a lot of different places and maybe not with a set of unified language. So with our communication strategy now, we're clear about how, when, and where we communicate topics of open source. And specifically the locations of things like documentation, blog posts and a unified deck for presenting. This is a big part of fire hose management. If people can't recognize that open source and the Ospo is a specific entity at Microsoft, then it's very easy to get lost in the noise. And part of that was also having a design mark. We use this design, this little pull request design, which is really cute, I think, on all of our assets. So ideally folks start to connect open source, compliance, community and other efforts back to the Ospo's resources. And then it just becomes easier for people to find those resources and each other. The second category, the second fridge magnet, is providing a clear value exchange. So this is things like promotional language, building on the work of others tied to like rewards and promotions, using the language of engineering excellence, making open source feel and ensuring that people personalize it as central to engineering excellence. As well as opportunities for mentorship and networking. So those are, you know, very tactical, practical and emotional value exchanges. We often use storytelling for inspiration. So especially with regard to others at Microsoft and have all they've accomplished through open source. One of those stories is Babylon JS. We started it as an idea of one engineer inside of Microsoft and which they pitched their manager and which had a pilot launched as an open source project, which has since grown to a really thriving open source project, which originally for 3D rendering found its place with 2D rendering and other innovative potential, which would have not happened if it was left as an internal project. There's also great inspiration here in how to be a great open source citizen. So Microsoft and this team very much work as part of the community and not as a leader of the community, which is really important. I'm going to change the slide, but my mouse isn't moving. Great. We also again around storytelling, tell stories of people they work with who might not have met yet. And one of those is now Shamrell Harrington, who actually was a colleague of mine at Mozilla came over at a similar time as I did and who now represents Microsoft on Russ Board of Directors and is a principal engineer in the office of the CTO. Super inspiring person and you know someone that they can look up to. We tied all this inspiration together into a really short but concise course that helps people work through their personal goals, their professional goals with their manager and using HR specific language and templates. Ideally a manager and their direct walkthrough and mapping exercise and leave that discussion completely aligned on how open source is important in that person's goals, which in reward time will be very rewarding. Hopefully we also invest a lot and help people connect with other enthusiasts, experts and leaders in open source and extend to their specific ways they want to help others. So we have a program at Microsoft called the open source chance program. It brings together people who want to help others basically but who each individually have very different ways they want to help. So for example, some people want to help mentor those who are new to open source. Some want to, some really want nothing to do with mentoring new people to open source but would rather want to help teams with strategy. There's things that they have learned and they really want to save people from similar challenges. And then there's just folks that want to help in the context of a community. Bringing up NEL again in the Rust community now would be a great person to talk to. You get questions about being successful in the Rust community and of course that extends to many, many others. So the idea is that everyone is unique and offers unique perspective and expertise to the company and that folks can find them around those things. So that network is really important and inspiring. And finally the category of connection and purpose. We've already touched a little bit on purpose. People's careers and their goals are really important when they're spending their paytime at work. They want to make sure those things are connected. But when I speak about specifically here is kind of connecting to what's already on people's radar. So for example, people care deeply about open source sustainability. They know how important security is. Diversity and inclusion is a core priority at Microsoft. Being a good maintainer is important and a great skill for building someone's career and just being regarded as that expert. So first of all we have from the top this inspiration that open source matters. And this is really, really important. We can't build inspiration if our leaders don't provide that. And so I often use this quote to get people thinking about building on the ideas of others. And so one of the ways that we do that, this is really getting to the teams part of the upstream is through something called open working groups. It's a fairly kind of new structure, but we have groups working on open source metrics in collaboration with the chaos project, diversity and inclusion in open source, open source maintainer, skill sets and excellence and security. So these are just the first set of working groups, but the idea is that all of the work of these groups is pushed up to the upstream and contributed, which is really, really exciting. We've also recently made it easier to find some of those open source champs I mentioned. We have a search functionality where people can search for champs by those expertise, by communities and other attributes including language and region to find people that they can talk to. And meet one other really great team for the upstream is the Microsoft Fund. We've been running this for a couple of years now as I'm writing and we're speaking. We have another, we're almost at our 25th award of $10,000 each month to an open source project. In order to participate and vote on a project, employees are asked to have contributed to open source in the last 30 days, or last 60 days, last 60 days. And all nominations also come from employees. So this is a great program that gets people thinking about who needs support as well as how they contribute to themselves, thinking about what they can do to qualify. So that's another kind of team. And so as I said, this is kind of wrap it up again. The fundamental and interesting difference, and I'd love to have conversations with people about this who've worked in building open source communities and inside of OSPOS, is this incentivization design. It's not the same thing in that how we incentivize is different. The goal is the same, that we end up with more great open source citizens. And that's something that we'll need to work on and hopefully collaborate with you if you're interested. So thanks so much for coming to my talk. And I hope that you've learned something today. Thank you.


Andy, welcome and I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you very much, absolute pleasure. And yeah, thank you so much for everyone for giving a bit of time today. So this session will last probably about 45 minutes and we'll have a bit of Q&A at the end. So as Aretha already mentioned, if you just go ahead and put anything in the Q&A box, any question that comes to your mind, I'll be reading through all questions at the end. So this session is going to be quite a packed one and yeah, I have a tendency of talking quite quickly. So do pull me up if that happens because there's a lot to cover and I'm going to try and make this session as practical as possible. So there's really three parts to the next 45 minutes, which is going to be talking about where content fits into our broader marketing mix. So how can we use social media or content marketing more generally to really like to maximum effect to drive results for our fundraising efforts? And then what does that good strategy look like, right? Because everyone knows social media is important but how do we create a structure around it that's feasible for us when we're resource constrained, resource limited, how can we make a strategy work for us without having to have dedicated people to do social media for us without a massive budget because none of us have that particularly in a nonprofit world. Now, how can it be done? So this is the most, I think fun bit of the session because we'll take all of the learning, all the structure and then walk you through one by one how we bring this to life across all of these different steps of this strategy. And at that point, everyone's favorite bit is where I'll show you all of my favorite tools to do that as well. So all of which either are free completely or have free versions of. And I will mention Content Cal in that but Content Cal is listed on the TechSoup Marketplace as well with a 70% discount and such. So all of the tools that I will talk about are very accessible. But it's more about the tactics than the tools this one but I wanna make sure you have everything you need to really come off the back of this session. And if you think what I've shared is useful you'll have everything you need to bring this to life immediately. So we're gonna start by setting the scene a little bit because sorry for a big data slide to start with but the way that people are consuming content on social channels is changing dramatically and the last 18 months has shifted that massively. So this is some global data we're looking at as you can probably tell I'm from the UK but this is all the information I'll show you is related to global statistics. So these are the primary channels that people go to research topics and it's brand research but ultimately any organization that they're searching for predominantly as you see here people will go to search engines so Google predominantly or social networks to find that information. But the important message to take from this is that the top two places that individuals go to discover information and research certain organizations causes or whatever are two channels that we do not own as businesses they are content marketing channels search engines and social networks. But now I'm gonna show you here is some data from HubSpot. So that's another marketing technology software but they interviewed 1500 marketers worldwide and these were the primary channels that all of these organizations use when it came to marketing. So great to see that social media is the largest percentage of what people are using as the primary source or the primary channel for their marketing. Website second to that quite encouraging to see that together because fundamentally search and social are the two main channels but what you see in the top five and the bit that I really wanna draw your attention to is the fact there's a big mix here between long-term activities so things that take a bit of time to really bear any fruit and really come to life like content marketing and SEO, search engine optimization. So essentially helping your website rank higher in Google search results. So that's more of a long-term strategy then we've also got like page social so that is a page strategy as you would expect and we've also got more direct conversion things like email. So it's a big mix of tactics in the top five channels people use for marketing. I'm fairly sure most people on this session will use a bit of a mix but the really interesting thing to notice is this slide and this is the final kind of data slide I'll show before we get into the real kind of like how to type of stuff. But I think this is a really important slide to really understand, to think about how content marketing works. So let's kind of orientate you around this slide. On the left-hand side, we've got potential traffic. So what that means is basically how many people can we potentially reach with a particular activity? So going from smaller to larger on this axis and then the bottom axis, what we see is short-term to long-term, how long does it take for something to yield results? And this is a really important thing to understand thinking that the things that we do to promote our organization to drive our fundraising efforts we've got a range of different opportunities and channels we could use like we've shown you in here but they all play a different part in this. So if I kind of draw your attention to the right-hand side here looking at content and SEO so what we're thinking about here is like your website content, your blogs the things that will help your website appear higher up in search ranking. So when people are searching for a certain cause, mission whatever it is that you represent that your website will appear. Of course, that's a hugely important factor to keep in mind and something really important to build towards because you'll see content and SEO has the highest potential yield for growth. That makes sense because when we looked at this chart search engines is still the primary way that people discover things. So it makes sense that has the biggest opportunity but it does take the longest to bear fruit and really few to yield that growth. Now, if I draw your attention all the way onto the left-hand side of this chart you got paid advertisement. So I'm thinking about your Facebook ads or your Google ads for example where you don't have to spend a lot of money but essentially little bits of money go a long way in terms of reaching more people. So that's why this chart here shows this gives you the best opportunity to drive short-term results. So then what we've got is quite a big gap in between. So we've got kind of a ravine that's forming in between your short-term stuff which works where paid works its best. And then you've got your long-term stuff which is where your longer content your blogs, your website content, your SEO work there's a big gap. That gap in the middle is bridged really nicely with social whereas social helps still drive some short-term results but it also has longer-term growth too. Short-term results because we can get big distribution because we now have 4.2 billion people across the world on social. So there's never been any better channel to connect people. So social media gives us a great opportunity for reach and gives us great opportunity to reach new people. Hence the reason you see that bridging the gap quite nicely but hopefully that makes sense this slide and thinking about our short-term to long-term tactics and it's important we think of both and we don't just skew too far to the left-hand side to drive results now taking our eye off the long-term gain which is about our longer form content. So that's how we can understand our content marketing mix but let's kind of bring that to life a little bit more. So we're still in the theory bit of it before we get into the practical but I think this builds on the previous slide quite well where really there are two types of people we're trying to appeal to with our fundraising efforts. Ignore the fact that this says buyers here this is just typically is representing behaviors. So two types of people we're trying to appeal to on the left-hand side there are people that are already aware of the cause and the mission that you represent and are already bought into it but potentially not bought into your particular organization. And for that reason we call these people in market. These are the people that represent the kind of short-term activity here. And honestly, these people are best reached through paid channels because these are people that are already aware of the mission or cause that you represent. So they are targeted really well through things like Facebook for example because you can be so precise with who you're targeting. So that's where I would represent their significant opportunity to drive short-term results through those audiences, through a rational message like this is what we do this is what we represent, et cetera and targeted to a narrower audience because you know who that audience is. But really where content marketing is most important really where I wanna focus our minds for the course of this presentation is on the right-hand side. We call it out of market. So what these people are people that have no clue about your cause and mission haven't considered it before aren't even aware of this. And this is a completely different approach. And this is where social media is incredibly powerful for reaching, educating and driving awareness with a whole new audience. And that's where I personally find social media incredibly exciting because nothing really affords that level of reach. But we need to think about how we appeal to those people in a totally different way. It's actually the opposite of what we've just been speaking about over here. Instead of a rational message for those that are already kind of bought into the mission that you represent. We're looking at the other perspective. These are people that have no idea about this mission. So it's about an emotional message why we do what we do, our purpose, our mission, our values, our beliefs. And for organizations that are represented on this call that's much easier to do, right? Typically I'm giving this presentation to commercial or corporate organizations. And it's harder for them to connect with a purpose beyond trying to maximize profits. Whereas with the organizations and the meaningful causes that everyone on this session represents it's much easier to connect to that emotional side of things. And broader targeting. Because essentially social media is about going broad and wide and building our awareness. And we're going to talk lots about this in a more practical sense. But before we segue now on to let the more practical bit I want to be really clear in this, in like if we really wanted to describe what we need to achieve through social media marketing in a sentence, it's this, it's building trust at scale. Trust is the most important and fundamental foundational emotion that's generated in individuals that drives our behavior. Who we're friends with, who we do business with, what causes we represent is all driven by trust. So we need to think about how we build trust at scale. And trust is all about connecting at a human level. And that kind of emotional connection we spoke about is fundamental to that. Now, as I said, let's make this a bit more practical. So now what we're going to do is show you the marketing funnel, if you will. So typically this represents and slightly oversimplified way of how people discover things, make decisions and essentially take an action. So in a very logical way, people become aware of a certain cause or mission or a challenge or a problem, whatever it is, they become aware of something. They then weigh up and research whatever it is they've become aware of. So do they need to take action on it? They fill themselves with information, research, learning before they're ready to make a choice of either supporting a cause, essentially supporting a cause in this scenario. And then once they've made that kind of conversion, if you will, and supported a cause are now kind of a member, if you will, then it's all about loyalty. So people sticking with your cause and mission and then telling others about it. So that's typically the journey we want to take people on. But really, just so that we can focus our minds here, the way we use social media is purely at the top two pieces of this funnel, how we get more people to become aware of us and how we get more people to weigh us up against and research us and understand more about the cause and the mission that we represent. This is all about education in this stage. So top two parts of this funnel is really what we care about. This is the bit that's gonna help grow that trust and create that emotional connection. So now let's kind of expand on this a little bit more by going into the top two tiers of this funnel and talking about what content works well in each of those stages. So this quadrant represents the top two tiers of this funnel. So the top two quadrants that I'm scrolling my mouse over here is all about awareness. And the bottom two relates to consideration. So awareness at the top, so people becoming aware of you for the first time is all driven as we said about that emotional connection. The way that we can create that emotional connection is in two-fold basically. On one side, we can entertain people. And on the other side, we can inspire. So both of those are ways of connecting at an emotional level. Now, talking about entertainment content, three things are my personal favorites from these, quizzes, giveaways and games. Always brilliant to start with. And probably the easiest thing to start with is like a giveaway. And honestly, the lower the value of the giveaway, the better it does from what I've seen over my years of doing this. So book giveaways, that kind of thing. Essentially, giveaways that orientate or encourage people to comment on content. So let's just say, this is just one example. I'm not suggesting everyone does it, but it's just one example. So let's just say you're running a giveaway on Facebook. You've got a book to give away, for example. You'd encourage people to comment to their answer to a certain question, comment that into the chat of which every time that someone comments, that is a key signal to Facebook. I'm only using Facebook as an example, but they all work in the same way. That's a signal for Facebook that this post is valuable. And what will happen to that post, the more that people comment on it, it will be shown to more and more people's feeds. So that's one powerful thing, because that's increasing our reach and increasing our awareness. So that top of the funnel gets more people into it. So that's the first reason that that's powerful. And the second reason that's powerful is that we all like to win things. We all like to feel part of something. So the moment that we've kind of commented to be part of a certain giveaway, for example, we're emotionally connected, we're emotionally involved. So that's really, really powerful as a way to kind of drive engagement early on in the strategy. That's just one example. Then we got Inspire. So influences, endorsements, reviews, none of that will come with a huge surprise, but the influencer piece is something I want to pick up on is that the word influences has kind of been blown out of proportion a little bit. When I say influences, I'm not suggesting that anyone goes out and works with Kylie Jenner. I'm suggesting that actually we work, we find collaborations we can create with people that have some degree of influence within the community or the cause that we're trying to represent. For us, whilst we're not a non-profit organization, to be completely clear for us, that has been one of the most powerful elements of our content strategy. We haven't paid anyone to talk about us. In fact, the only times that we have, it hasn't worked out as well as those people that have genuinely endorsed us because they believe in what we're trying to do. So it's actually finding those individuals is super, super powerful. I'm going to show you ways that we can do that and how we work with others. But yeah, at the top of the funnel, personally, that entertainment value quizzes, giveaways and games, great to do early on in the strategy to get more people commenting on content to make your content go further and get it seen by more people and then influencers collaborating with others to create content together. And when you create content together, it means that it gets shared to a new audience. And a good example is exactly what we're doing right now, for example, so I've created some social media training guides for TechSoup for free to share. But of course, that means that the TechSoup audience also get first awareness of the organization that we represent. So it's all about everyone wins in that scenario. So finding suitable collaborations is such a powerful part of social and underutilized in my view. Then we're going to go to the bottom part of this quadrant, right? So let's ignore the bottom right because that's the most obvious really and the most kind of conversion orientated bit of content. Well, on the left-hand side, for me is really the power play. This is the bit that I think I care most about and it's all about education, right? So this is the key thing and that's a key element of the funnel that we were just talking about here. This consideration bit is all about education. So if we're thinking about that funnel again, people become aware of you for the first time because they've maybe seen one of your quizzes they've enrolled in that or they've seen a person that they follow talk about you through influencers. They've become aware of you. Now they're going to start weighing things up and researching more about your organization or about the cause that you represent. So that's when people will need to consume educational material, whether that's trend reports, research, guides, news, trends, that kind of thing. Those things that you can create that help people answer the questions that they really wanna learn. And when you add value to people, you build trust. When you build trust, you build a reputation and reputation typically follows in building a brand and something that then attracts more and more people towards it. So that is a super powerful part and it's all wrapped in that thing that we've been talking about throughout the whole course of this webinar so far is all about how we nurture trust. So that is our kind of like practical way that we can start to take what we've learned so far, how important it is to build trust, create those emotional connections, how we then use that marketing funnel we've just been talking about and how we use that awareness and consideration stage and the content that works well at each of those stages. Now, we're about to go into the kind of building the strategy bit now, but before we do, there's a very important, two very important things we need to consider. Firstly, the persona of who it is that we're trying to serve. Content marketing, social media marketing if you wanna be more specific is really, you could just call it customer first marketing. Fundamentally, we're creating content to serve the needs of others, not ourselves. Now, that's usually a message I have a home for like the commercial organizations that I talk to but for yourselves, that'll be much easier to do but it still means that we absolutely, we're trying to serve someone. We really want to be crystal clear about who we're trying to serve as we possibly can. Now, I often get a question at this point where what if I have multiple personas? What if there's lots of different audience that I want to serve? My answer to that typically is that unless you have a really advanced social media strategy, there'll always be one group typically within a business or an organization that represents the biggest opportunity, value or whatever basically is the one that's most important to you. There'll always be one group. I would always start with a more targeted strategy focused at a certain group being as specific as you possibly can because that will help you create better content that resonates more, that will drive better reactions and more engagement. When you serve people the content that really means something to them, then we can build and add more personas as we go. But I would try and be really restrained on this and be really focused on that one single persona. Now, the other thing I would say with regards to personas because what I'm showing you here is actually our one and all of these slides we made available to you so you can get an idea from this. Of course, as our organization has different purposes but it'll give you a good guide. But one thing I see lots of people fixating on which I see as a bit of a misstep is lots of people fixate on this bit, which is demographics. For me, just knowing that someone is 36, lives in Brooklyn and has two dogs doesn't really determine whether they're the right or person for us. The thing that's more important because demographic stuff is quite useful. It helps us think about what platform we should be on but it's no way near as powerful as what we call psychographic stuff. What are the people that we're trying to serve truly care about? What are the things that keep them up at night? What are the things that they're aspiring towards? It's those kind of fundamental foundational factors, those emotional drivers that we all have as human beings when we understand that from our target audience and the only way really of getting that is through interviews really or speaking to your audience. And that in itself just as a side note just thinking about this as I'm talking that in itself is really good content to put out to ask those questions to your audience. That's always great because it shows honesty, integrity it shows openness of just going to your audience and saying, what are the things that mean the most to you in a certain cause? For example, what do you want to learn more of? Understanding that is a fantastic way to one, create some content that encourages interaction and two helps you inform this persona document. So with that also now we've kind of got a bit of an idea of what we're gonna be doing with our content strategy and where it sits and its purpose we thought about who we're trying to serve. But before we create the strategy we wanna be really clear on something and it's something that's really easy for me to say but it's harder to do. And just before I show this to you some of the research that we're gonna go into into the practical bit in a moment will help you answer this question if you don't know this already. But this is the thing, what do we want to be known for? That is such an important question to answer in a single sentence for anyone engaging in social this should be at the top of any strategy document you're ever gonna create, right? You need to be really clear about who we are. So if your organization is a person think of it as a person, what kind of person is that? And that is a really important thing is that when we represent our purposes, our mission, our values, people connect around that. Now, as I said, I've said this quite a few times already but for the organizations that are on this session this is gonna be much easier to do than other organizations. And actually thinking like this gives smaller organizations an unfair advantage over their bigger ones because this is where a lot of larger organizations struggle on social, too many people involved they don't get as crystal clear on their message as they could be. And this is why as a small organization we wanna be crystal clear to say, this is us this is what we know what we believe in this is our mission, this is what we're trying to do. And once you've got really clear with that then all of your messaging becomes much easier because you know who you're trying to serve and you know what you represent. And once you understand those two things and you're clear about them honestly the rest of the strategy stuff gets so much easier as a result. But talking of strategy, let's go ahead and do it. I feel like I've been talking for ages so I'm halfway through. So we're on time, which is a shocker for me. Right, six step strategy we call it the content cal six C's I'm gonna talk through them one by one you don't need to remember them but essentially what this is a framework of building the perfect strategy. We've been doing this for many years so this is kind of what we've developed as a result. I'm also gonna show with you in turn six of these free tools. Don't worry about like noting them down right now we're gonna talk through them one by one and how they're used but essentially we're gonna take these six C's as a strategy, take these six tools and then we're gonna bring it to life using a bit of a fictitious scenario. So like I've been talking about it all starts with the customer the target audience who you're trying to serve the person that you are ideally trying to deliver this message to. We should already know this a bit from our persona work but even if we don't have that persona stuff going on right now, starting on this process and all the research we're gonna do right now will really help inform some of your persona stuff. So it always starts with our customers always will do in social and this is where we use the first tool which is called keyword strategy tool. So simply you can find that on keyword strategy tool.com entirely free there is no paid version. And this tool is one of my favorites of all bunch I've started off with my favorite so yeah, it's only downhill from here. So what we'll do here is this is our opportunity of understanding what our audience are asking for and what are they searching for across Google and YouTube. Casting your mind back right to the start of this presentation I shared the two primary places that people go to research things which is search and social. So Google and YouTube being the two primary sources that people go to. So this is gonna be a fantastic tool to get in the heads of who we're trying to serve. So we're gonna search our cause. So I've put in my Loma. So I'm just using this as an example scenario which is a type of blood cancer unfortunately quite close to my heart. So what we're gonna do is search this. We're gonna look in the jurisdiction that's of interest to us. So we're just gonna search whole United States, press search. And then what we're gonna do here that is then gonna bring back all of the search terms. So what positive keywords means is essentially all of the phrases that are searched on Google and YouTube if we selected that as well. So great, well it's 800 keywords what on earth are we gonna do with all of that information? Because this is literally what everyone's searching for. So this is the way that we're gonna make it easier. It's sticking with that tool. You've got this little filter option here. And what I recommend here is typing in every question preposition you can think of like how, where, when, which, why, every one of those. Because every time you search that it's then gonna pull out all of the questions that people are asking. And as you remember when a few slides back were showing you that kind of education part of the grid. And I was like, this is our opportunity to add value to our audience, to educate our audience, to tell them what they're wanting to learn. And this is how we find out what they're wanting to learn. And all of the questions that are coming out of this we can just keep on just searching those. And as you can see, they just pull over onto the right hand side of this. So now we've got a list of all of the keywords, the phrases, the questions that our audience are asking. We need to take a couple further steps on it. Staying with the same tool. Sorry about how this screen looks. A little bit overwhelming, but this is where like the gold is. So we've taken all of the questions and all we've done is press in the top left of this tool looking at search volume. So this tells us how often this phrase is searched. So people searching for multiple myeloma, 301,000 monthly searches in the US on Google related to this. So clearly it's, yeah, it is a very unfortunately popular thing to search. But of course, all of the questions that are being asked are like, how to diagnose or how do I know I've got it, et cetera. All of those questions are ranked too. So all of the questions that you filtered out we now have a priority list of them because we now know the ones that are the highest value to our audience. So essentially we've gone inside the heads of our audience and looked at what they're asking for, what's in their minds and now we've no a priority list behind it. So what we're gonna simply do is press the export button which takes all of those questions that we filtered out and all of the search volume. And what we're gonna do is put this in tool number two which we're gonna use content cal for this. So content cal is a content planning tool. So this allows you then to start building all of your research into the plan you're going to use to actually start doing this work. So this is an important part because what we don't wanna do is spend hours doing research and then for that research to live in a separate document somewhere. We wanna make it really easy to do that research, find those findings and then make it easier to create our content as a result. So what we've got here just as a recap we found all of the questions that our audience are asking across Google and YouTube. We've got a priority list based off how often they're being searched for. We've just taken that list and then we've popped it here in content cal stored it as content ideas and we basically got a year's worth of content ideas straight off the bat. Honestly, if you spend about half an hour doing that yourselves, you'll have enough ideas to fuel your content plan for the whole of 2022. Honestly, for a free tool you can't argue with that. Now, I'm gonna go on to tool number three which is a free me-um tool. So there is a paid version but the free version will probably get or the free trial will get you what you need. Now, there's two parts to this and this tool is called mentionlytics. So mentionlytics.com, this is tool number three. Now, the reason I like this is for two reasons and permitted me to explain a bit around this because it sometimes can be a bit of complex to explain. What mentionlytics gives you the ability to do is to see what your overall reaches across all of social YouTube and also the wider internet, your blogs, your website basically aggregates that all up and tells you how many people you're reaching. Just so you know, the word reach refers to the amount of unique people that have the opportunity of seeing your content or have seen your content. So reach really is the data or the statistic behind that top of the funnel bit, that awareness bit, that very top of the funnel. So, and that's why it's such an important metric reach because essentially it helps us measure our influence because that's what we're trying to do with social reach new audiences. Like we've been saying all throughout the start. So this is a really important thing to track. And then what we can do actually because we all like looking at what others are doing. Well, I certainly do. We can go ahead and put in our competition into this. You might not see them as competition. You might see them as others in your space. But then you can see what the share of voice is. Basically how much reach are you generating versus others? And then you can look at what others are doing and that will help give you some further inspiration. But the second thing, because whereas this pie chart that represents share of voice is really useful for you to just track and for a bit of curiosity to see the influence and impact you're having.  So you can see all of the people that are mentioning you right now. And when I first looked at this tool, I was massively surprised as to how many people were talking about us that I had no idea. And it's when these people start talking about you, this is your golden opportunity to build relationships with these folks. So I'll give you a real life example. So Leeluk Bullock here is someone that I have respected for a long time in the marketing space and used this tool, saw that she was talking about us quite a lot and recommending us, had no idea. So I use that as an opportunity. I mean, she has 101,000 followers, which is about 20 times what we have. And so now Leeluk and I regularly create content together. I will ask her to contribute her thoughts to blogs sometimes. Sometimes we'll do like a podcast together. Sometimes it'll be a guest webinar like we're doing right now. So those kinds of things not only help us create better content because it gives more diverse viewpoints because you've got someone else involved. It also opens up your channels of promotion because when Leeluk has created some content with us, she'll share it with her audience too. And that then increases our reach because that's 101,000 new people that wouldn't have seen us before that haven't now seen us. So as you can see here when we look over the course of this time period we've received 178 mentions but look what that's done for reach. Honestly, I think this is the most underestimated part of social. I could talk about this for days honestly but I'll try and keep myself within the next 30 seconds but that is the network effects at play.  So honestly working with more people like this building content in collaboration if you don't take away much from today that should be one of those key things to take away. So we've done a lot around customer, right? We've done a lot of research around everything that they're looking for we've kind of built a bit of a plan around this and we've got a load of ideas now and we've also looked at what's happening and our total influence in the space and also those other individuals that we could use to help amplify our content and work together. So we've got a good picture of our customer and what's happening in our industry. Now, let's look at context which is how do we create relevant content that should land with the people that we want it to? So this is tool number four no prizes for guessing what this tool does entirely free of charges one best-hashtags.com Very simply, we've put in the cause that we're talking about here, which is my Loma it pulls out all of the most liked and the most relevant and the most popular hashtags on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And that gives you a ranking of, as you can see here how many posts represent this and also, you know, your top 10 hashtags related to it but the best thing of all we can just simply press the copy button and then what we're gonna do we're gonna paste them into content cow so we're gonna, like I said, all throughout all of this when we're doing our research we wanna use this research to improve the speed at which we can create content. So these snippets in content cow allow you to save the little bits of content like this group of hashtags and then essentially whenever you come to create a post press one button and all of those hashtags come in great way of speeding up your process whilst using all of the research that we've done. Also what I recommend as well is thinking about your content plan as we build it in what we would call themes or categories or topics, you know some of you might call them different things but ultimately having a thematic approach to your content plan will really help you. And the way we can think about themes will have been already facilitated through the work we did on the keyword strategy tool when we were looking at all of the questions that people are asking. When you read through that list you'll start to see themes emerging those themes might be like how to or diagnosis or questions or news or research, whatever it might be. I would recommend if you've not thought about like themes before, start with five and run one theme every single day because that's gonna help make life so much easier for you if one you know your five themes you wanna work to run a different one every day it's gonna make your analysis so much easier as well because then you can start to see actually did my research content perform better than my diagnosis content in this example or did my news content do better than my best practice or whatever it might be. So that's why I typically recommend five and not over-engineering it try and find those five really important themes through your research and then create them as category tags and content count. So we're gonna come back to that however when we build the plan. So tool number five fairly obvious one it's another really good use of hashtags but this is making sure we're jumping on national days. So go to daysoftheyear.com entirely free go to browse calendar you'll see all of the national days that are upcoming for the next quarter the next year, et cetera and all of the associated hashtag. So this will make sure that you'll never miss an opportunity again. So if it's mental health awareness week as it was a couple of months back we wanna make sure if we're an organization that has a part to play in that conversation we wanna make sure we don't miss that opportunity. So we wanna take those hashtags and we wanna build it into our content plan like this so that if we wanna have a voice on creativity and innovation day because you will always see a spike in reach because lots of people start searching that hashtag it starts trending more and more content gets discovered. So that's where that's really important. So it gives us an opportunity to get additional reach. So using national days, plugging that into our calendar we're starting to see our plan take shape now we save some of these category tags we've saved the snippets using those hashtags we saved our national days so that we've got a good kind of plan shaping up and also we've got a whole bunch of content ideas all kind of nested within our main tool that we're using for planning here. Now creativity, let's do a quick time check to see where I'm at. So I'm gonna speed up a little bit. So creativity is gonna be fostered by a lot of the work that we've done already but one thing that I definitely recommend it's free tool that we do that we have rather if you use Google Chrome just search content Cal Google Chrome and you'll find this little Chrome extension. So this is really useful that if you're browsing the web both on your phone and on your desktop you find actually that's a really interesting article. You know, you don't wanna necessarily create posts in the moment you wanna create a plan behind your posts but when you find something that's inspirational and you think actually, you know that's given me an idea of something we could do just press that button it's then gonna clip a snippet of that article and save it to your content hub on content Cal and see that as your like digital pinboard really. So this helps you find and save ideas which makes life so much easier when you're creating a content plan where you've got a load of inspiration to build from. Step four collaboration and there's two sides of collaboration. So first side of collaboration this is a really powerful tool actually we only built it recently and it just allows anyone within your organization they don't need to have access to content Cal cause they might not need it, right? It allows anyone to just go ahead and pop in an idea that they might have. So it's a great way of opening up the opportunity making it a lot easier and more accessible for other members of your organization if you're working in a team to share ideas. So anyone can share in an idea whether it's just a picture they've taken when they were out, you know, they might have been out of the office and they've come up with some really interesting content they can just share it straight into here. So there, this is just literally a link and that people can that you can share with others and everyone can share stuff into it works on mobile too. So really nice way of collecting those ideas and inspiration and it all goes into this library on the content hub as you saw with the previous thing as well. So what we're doing here is collecting ideas and inspiration from different sources to really speed up creation. And the final tool takes us into the kind of second area of collaboration and I've spoken about it a lot already. This is called Hype Auditor. This is a free Mium tool. So there's a free version but then there's obviously paid versions too but the free is quite good. So Hype Auditor allows you to find those kind of collaborators or influences in your space that you could work with to build content together. So search your keyword. I've just searched coffee here just as a generic term. It then brings up the amount of people that have influence in this space looking at their category and audience quality score. I wouldn't go after people with 24 million followers because they'll probably want paying for that. I would look at people between kind of two to 10,000 followers that they'll have great kind of micro influence and be more open to collaborating with you if you share a similar purpose. I've spoken lots about this. It does take some effort. There's no lying to that. But honestly, it does make your strategy so much more powerful when it's built alongside others as well or complimented with content you're creating together with others. Now we're getting into the final throws of it now. So step five is all about channels. So here we are back into Content Cal. It's worth when we're saying, I haven't mentioned it already, whilst there is a 70% discount on TechSoup, there is a free version of this. So I want to make sure that I'm going through all of this, telling you to use Content Cal. And you could also use a Google spreadsheet for your plan as well. So I just want to be clear about that. But anyway, so we've got our ideas. We've taken from daysoftheyear.com. We've got all of our national days taken from... Let me do that again. We've got all of our content ideas. We've taken from keyword strategy tool. And then we've got all of our national days that we've taken from daysoftheyear.com. We're going to go to Content Hub here, where we'll find the inspiration that's been shared with us by other members of our team or our colleagues, partners, whatever, and also content that we've saved as well. So let's just say we've saved this piece and we actually want to do something with it. Maybe we want to reshare this article. So we saved it earlier. We're going to press Use Content. We're going to put it out onto whatever platforms we need. So we want to automatically publish this. We want to schedule this content. So we're here, we're taking our inspiration. We're going to schedule it. We're pressing this square button here, brings up those snippets that we saved earlier. So these are the hashtags that we know we want to use that we researched on best hashtags.com. And here's those category tags that we saved earlier. You know, those kind of themes that we are speaking about. So here we're going to add those themes. So as you can see, like I've been saying all along, all of the kind of research that we've done is there to speed up the creation of our content. We've got some inspiration. We're going to use the snippets to make sure we're using the right hashtags. We've got our guides or our category tags to make sure we're using the right theme and topic so we can make analysis of this content easier, which we're going to the next step. And then we simply add this content and add the rest of the content that we want to create based off that research. All organized across these themes and topics with a different one every single day. So with that, we've got a real clear picture of our audience. We know the hashtags that we want to use. We've got awareness of the national days. We save some ideas and encourage creativity. We've encouraged collaboration. We've built this all together in one plan now. And now the final throw of this is the calculation. So here we can understand at the end of the week or the month, how did our audience grow? You know, did we get more fans and followers as a result over the last week? Post-engagement, did it go up and down? So these are likes, shares and comments all counter together. And then here in this filter section is really important. Here's where we can bring in those category tags that we saved earlier. So like, you know, whether it's best practice or news or research, we can just click on that and then see how our different topics that we're speaking about impacts growth. So if we talk more about research, do we get more engagement? If we talk more about news, do we get more? What's the best time to post as well? And also all of the top performing content related to that theme. So this is when the process gets so much easier because now what we've got, we've already done a whole load of research that's kind of set our strategy. But also now, because we've started to do this for a week, we've got some findings coming back and we're starting to see some, maybe some content or some themes emerge that are working really well. So then all we wanna do is press this button here if you can see this in the blue circle, this allows you to take that post that performed well the previous week and just add it as a draft to the following week. I don't advocate putting out the same thing again and again, but when you're adding things as a draft, you can see it's a draft, it's got a blue light on the top of it so it won't be published. So here, what we can do is kind of create a template content plan for the next week or next month using the stuff that worked really well last time. So yes, we'll wanna tweak and tailor it, but now what we've got is a whole load of research supplemented now with stuff that we know is working using our own analysis. And that makes the whole process so much quicker each time because that's why those six Cs are a cycle because once you do the research and get into a consistent process, a process creates momentum and momentum creates results because the more you do, the more analysis you get, the more top performing content you get, the more you'll start to reuse and repurpose. So whilst it might seem that the first week will take an extra couple of hours to do with all of your research, the following weeks gets so much quicker. Hence the reason I started this session with that the idea of this strategy, it's doable for people that don't spend their lives doing social media, don't have budget, big budgets and resources to do, but you can still deliver great results using quality free tools that's all engineered about delivering the right result for those people that we're trying to serve. And with that, I'm gonna go to Q and A over around by six minutes. So sorry, Aretha. It was some great, powerful stuff. We needed it all. So yes, you can go on a Q and A and I have some questions that I could not put in Q and A but I'll ask you then if you wanna go ahead and finish with Q and A. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, I will do. So, cool. So James, thank you for your comments on the presentation. I appreciate that. So James says, I keep running into the word influencer being redefined, usurped by the word of social media as number of followers. I see the new use of influencer as meaning semi-filtered reach rather than targeted or credible influence. I think you used it both ways. I thought about identifying and engaging real influences. Can you recommend measures of meaningful, productive, effective reach beyond click-fruits or actual donation sales results? Excellent question, James. There's a lot to unpack in that. I probably answered a little bit around in that tool which was called Hype Auditor because the audience quality score answers a degree of that for sure because yeah, there's still, the word influences is quite, is a very broad thing. The way that I was thinking about in the context of this presentation, I consider it as kind of micro-influences. Typically those with smaller reach, an audience of maybe two to 10,000 and people that are just genuinely passionate about the thing that they stand for. And that's where Hype Auditor is really good to find those folk. As is mentioned, Lytics, which is the tool I mentioned earlier where you might find people that are already talking about your brand already and have a degree of credibility. It's a very hard, it's such a broad subject. So it's really hard to answer it completely, to say this is factual because there's a lot of gray area around it. I would also say as well, TikTok personally have done a huge amount for making this a lot more transparent in the world of influences. So if TikTok is a platform that anyone's interested in, they've just relaunched their creator marketplace. So if you search a TikTok creator marketplace, there's a lot within that as well. So few answers for you. Cool, another question from, sorry, I'm trying to multitask here, which I fail with, another question from James. You asked some brilliant questions, James. Is persona simply your preferred word for target audience or do you think it is something different? Perhaps it's just to move thinking closer to qualitative psychographics or quant slash demographics. Yeah, the way I think of persona really is target audience, the audience that you're trying to serve. So fundamentally, if you had to put a picture on your wall of that person, that type of person is individual that I would like to serve more than anyone else, that is the way I consider it. There's a lot of nuance to that too. And of course, like I said earlier, there'll likely be multiple different target audiences that people will have. But yeah, I think my challenge to everyone on this session is try and think as, you know, what are classes of the minimum viable audience, they get as targeted as you possibly can. So let's move on from that one. Steve has asked, what are your thoughts on Google ads? For us, I can only speak of my personal experience, incredibly powerful. So nothing, there are probably two channels that from our experience that have delivered fantastic results on the kind of like the short-term type of stuff. You remember at the start, I was talking about like short-term paid ad performance. Google ads and Facebook ads would be the first two places that would get any of my paid budget if I had any budget at all. So yes, I think it's good basically Steve would be my answer. Umi, or Umi, sorry if I've pronounced your name incorrectly. Is Content Hub a tab on Content Cal? They've asked, so the answer is yes. We were talking about Content Hub as a way to collect ideas and inspiration from others or found online. So yes, it's all connected there. Anne-Marie, great question. This comes up quite a lot, which is how much content should a company be posting daily, weekly or on each social media account? It's a perennial question. The answer is undefined. There is no fact to this. So if I told you a number and you sort that as facts, I don't think that's the right thing for me to do. But what I would recommend to start with, and I say this to everyone, if you're just starting out, I would post one post per day across the core social platforms that you're on, which might be different for different organizations.  One, that's easier for you to manage and create a strategy. And two, probably more importantly, is that it gets you known for delivering a certain thing on a certain day. For example, here at Content Cal, every single Tuesday, I give a view on the changing landscape of social media and post a video on all of the changes that happened across all networks, every single Tuesday. I've been doing it for the last year. I'm now known for it. Just one post. Actually, the less posts you do, posts you do, the more impactful it can be. Because I'll give you an example on LinkedIn. So this is a quick side note for answer the other question. I've attempted to post more times per day on LinkedIn and I've seen worse results because the algorithm, which is the mechanism that decides how much your content is seen, then has to compete. You're basically competing with yourself because you've got multiple posts happening. So it's hard for the algorithm to know what to serve. Michelle, that's definitely a very important point to call out. Well, thank you for your comments on the presentation. But Google Grants provides $10,000 a month for nonprofits. I have no idea about that. It's definitely a good one to flag. And that, I think, is at the end of the questions.


What is happening guys, Staff Sergeant Masiba here, also known as Art Chuzo on social media and welcome to another episode of US Army Basic Combat Training mini series, Your Future Starts Here. For today's episode, we are going to be talking about the Forge. What is the Forge? What is the importance of the Forge in basic combat training? For those of you guys who do not know, the Forge is a brand new event that's being implemented right now all across the army in all basic training sites. The Forge basically is a culminating event for week 7 trainees about all the stuff that they learned the whole time they're in basic training. This will involve combatives, ruck marching from one point to another, firing weapons, bugle sticks, obstacle courses, land navigation, and many more. To summarize it, the Forge is basically that final requirement to see if a trainee will pass Army Basic Combat Training and finally become a soldier. 25 Providence, an IT specialist. I actually have been a mechanic my whole life and everyone thought I was going to go that route. But recently I got into computers and stuff and just wanted to find my own way in life. Everyone in my family has been a mechanic so I just kind of wanted to take my own path. Behind me we are actually getting ready for the Forge which is the biggest event here. We started off with the Hammer which is about 5 or 6 mile rug and then we went on to the Hammer which is about 8 and this one is anywhere from 10 to 12 miles and it's the biggest rug and all the other rugs we've been doing throughout the day this one is doing all our events at night so we're actually preparing for this to leave at midnight tonight at that market. Long story short, me and my wife both actually joined. She leaves a week after I get back from basic and we found out last year that we couldn't have kids and we knew we weren't going to make our family any bigger so we figured there was a bigger purpose of life than just working at 9 to 5 and now I'm coming here. I've realized so many huge families and guys have met here. To tell myself the mental part is the hardest part of it and it gets better, it honestly gets better and you're going to meet people from all over the world so get ready for it. I want to give a shout out to my wife mainly because she is my number one fan and she's leaving a week after me so get ready because it's a roller coaster and my mom and dad for being super supportive and also my brother and sister because they're rooting for me so thank all of y'all. Private first class, Ashley Matts. I was born in Greenwood, Mississippi but I now reside in Jackson, Mississippi. I have a four year old and I know that I needed to do whatever I needed to do to make sure that four year old had the best life that he could have and I knew the army would provide a great avenue to do so. My MOS is a 91 Bravo, all will be able to get it. The hardest part for me has been the gas chamber. I don't like not having control and to not be able to breathe, breathing is pretty important and kind of scared me a little bit. But once I got out I realized I was just freaking out in my head. It wasn't that bad. Victory Tower has been my favorite moment coming off that wall. That was the best part. Well you're 40 feet in the air. Either you're going to get it or you ain't. But I got it thankfully. Graduation. When we got here, the fastest way out of here, graduation. And one of the drill sergeants told us that the process isn't fast but quitting won't speed it up. And to know that graduation is right around the corner, just keep going, just keep pushing. You'll make it. Basic training has been hard. It has been challenging. It has been interesting. I've learned a lot about myself in basic training. Basic training will teach you things about yourself that you never thought you ever learned.  You meet new people. You do new challenging things. It has been exhilarating. The longest journey start with the first step. You've already taken the first step. So every day that you keep going you're one step closer to being finished. Just keep going and get it out of your head. Join. Do it. It is the worst best thing that you could ever do for yourself. You're going to be hard and some days you're not going to want to do it. But when you go to bed at night in the bay and you lay there and you think about all the things that you've accomplished that day, it's the most, this is the greatest feeling ever.  The final event of the Forge is a rite of passage ceremony where trainees put on their berets for the first time in basic training. This symbolizes that they are now soldiers.


My name is Jeff Hemingway. I'm a state soil quality specialist with NRCS. We're going to go through and talk About a number of different characteristics today that we have to do with soil quality We're going to use our rainfall simulator to do just that first of all the rainfall simulator is built to do just this put on about an inch and a half to two inches of water on simulated soil conditions so that we can look at different parameters infiltration runoff Raindrop detachment aggregate stability We'll be talking about each one of those independently, but we'll be trying to define those more and Explaining that further but first of all let's explain just this is that the rainfall simulator has several different vegetation conditions land use conditions if you want to go at that The first one over here is is a pasture. It's was cut out of my pasture this morning It's basically a loam soil that is in the blue grass and a brown grass sod The next one is is a no-till soil actually and the adjacent field so still my same field Two months ago. I seeded that down to a cover crop and you can actually see that here The no-till field that we're talking about With residue. This is wheat residue No-till field with out residue and then my neighbor's conventionally till field What we're actually going to be looking at is the runoff that's associated coming off The rainfall simulator and that's depicted it'll actually show up in the front set of jars here And then if you can actually see that behind here We actually had another another set of jars and that second set of jars it will actually capture the infiltrated water That is the water that's moving through the soil As we go through the demonstration so with that what I'm going to do is I'm going to start the rainfall simulator And we're going to start to talk a little bit more about some of those characteristics Okay, one of the first things I like to talk about is some of the first things that that we're going to see and Raindrop impact on the soil surface is extremely important. We've got During a rain event we've got that raindrop hitting the soil surface Detaching that soil it has a lot of kinetic energy. We don't really understand that very well I don't think and we don't see that very much because we don't typically stand out in the rain And watch it but as the example here is if you see that we have a soil that's that's covered versus a soil That's not covered and when I say covered it actually can't even have surface residues or it can have a crop canopy on it That's protecting that soil if it's not protected that raindrop actually hits the soil surface That is goes through a process of detachment and then that soil particle goes into transport what we call transport and it's moved And the positive either locally or and or off-site We've got a a depiction of that raindrop hitting the soil surface right here. It's blown up many times It looks like a very small explosion that raindrop hits the soil surface again. Those those raindrops bounce up Into the air and you can actually see that on the rainfall simulator right over here On the back you can actually see those soil particles actually have been detached and they're bouncing up And at some point almost immediately one of the first things that I like to point out was just this So we've got a conventionally tilled soil on the far right Which one actually started runoff event first the conventionally tilt one Okay, why was that? Well, you know, we've been taught I think through our educational process that that if we go until a soil that's beneficial Well, let's talk some more about that Infiltration is actually that process of water moving through the soil It has to be maintained if we're going to continue to move water in the soil And if it's if we end up with that raindrop hitting a soil surface We not only end up with that erosion process starting, but we also end up with what we end up with those soil particles Actually being detached reoriented on the soil surface and actually plugging the soil matrix the pores the macro pores and what happens We end up with Roth Very simple thing to understand and we can actually see it being depicted here very quickly Now what happens in those other conditions if we have something that's interfering something that's in the way That's absorbing that kinetic energy of that raindrop then that Energy is not expressed on the soil surface We don't end up with that detachment of the soil particle and we end up with infiltration actually being maintained over time Any individual that that talks about residue is being extremely important really understands this process and you can't over and emphasize that just The impacts of residue itself Residue on the soil surface or a crop canopy absorbs that energy and maintains that Infiltration water continues to move down through that soil profile. All right Now one of the things that that I like to really talk a little bit about is soils are made up of poor space In some cases it might be half of the profile that we're actually talking about actually might be poor space That is either air or and or water the other that we typically think about is either mineral material and or organic material What we don't think about very much is that additional? Organic material that's in there that's actually living soils are Full of life to have bacterial fungal Root systems from the plants we typically think about but that life interacts and actually produces That interaction produces a variety of products associated one of those that we do understand a little bit about Is a another depiction I have here of a stained Microisophungi that is the residual of microisophungi called glumalin is a glycoprotein That glycoprotein actually shows up brown and soils actually staying green here That was actually discovered by Sarah Wright with ARS in 1996 So when we start really looking at those characteristics we need to understand That they have major impacts on the soil surface Now the other thing that I guess I really like to to point out Is just this what what what are you actually seeing here right? We end up with quite a bit of runoff actually occurring from Our conventionally till and or no till the no till with a residue versus without the residue You see the impact of residue same soil No joke today a difference there is having residue on the soil surface You see the jar on the back is actually where infiltrated water Our cover crop and our piece of side Now the color of the the water going through the side today is basically I think just because I cut it out today But continue to notice what that runoff event actually looks like After you've gone through this this Class and you've talked a little bit more about Runoff and water quality associated we know that As we run off and that soil particle actually is moved off site What impact does that have on surface waters? Well sediment is a pollutant itself, but it also has what nutrients and our pesticides that we've applied As crop protected products on that soil moved into our surface waters, right? So from an erosion standpoint, we're not only just concerned about the impacts on the soil itself the erosion the loss But what about the water quality also other aspects? I'd like to show you a little short demonstration on aggregate stability I've got a Conventionally tilled and a no till cloud And we'll just drop them in here My no till cloud conventionally till cloud And what I wanted to show is immediately Is I don't know if you can see that But here's my no till cloud Here's my conventionally till cloud, but you can see that because it has Really poor aggregate stability. It's starting to degrade once it's immersed almost immediately. See that? Or the no till cloud which has high aggregate stability higher gating matter Is holding together better than that one. See that? How clear that water is comparatively This is a really simple little test You know when I go out and try to collect soil for a rainfall simulator This is what I do. It's a really simple thing to do Well, I want to find something that has low aggregate stability I just pour some water in a jar and Throw in the cloud Go for it This is my no till tray, right? I'm gonna wind out of your day. It's not being helpful This is the runoff So is that tray actually wet? Dry We put on how much water About about an inch and a quarter on Well, let's flip it over Wet to the bottom, right? Eventually tilled That one went to the bottom too Still dry on the bottom I think this is a really good standard demonstration from my standpoint because it it really With most producers anyway They've been taught to believe That if we increase the amount of tillage we increase the infiltration rates And that's just not the truth. What happens In conventionally tilled is we dry out that surface But what about subsequent rain events? What about the reactivity of the soils? No till We typically talk about macro pore development That was those major pores Good soil structure aggregate stability conventionally tilled We're actually oxidizing that organic material In other words, we're reducing the amount of organic matter within those soils And subsequently we affect aggregate stability And infiltration rates


Hey beauties! I'm Bianca Renee and you're watching Bianca Renee Today and today is Foundation Friday. This morning I ran the Sephora and I got the new Cover FX Foundation. This is their brand new foundation and we're going to try it on today and do a full review and wear test. Now the one I got right here, cute little plastic container. There is 1.18 fluid ounces. Okay! 1.18 extra than most foundations, I respect that. This is their power play foundation and it's supposed to pretty much be perfect. According to the box it says it's supposed to be long wearing liquid foundation, medium to full coverage which is great, supposed to give you a breathable weightless finish with ultrafine powders that control shine and help visibly blur imperfections all day which I will definitely be testing without dulling or drying complexion. Sounds good to me! Now I am someone with very oily skin and I usually get things that are mattifying or have matte in the name, this one doesn't but as you can see I am getting a very nice matte finish. But when I picked it up I decided to keep it in the Cover FX family and I also got the matching primer. So let's get down to the nitty gritty shall we? I am the color G70 and there's 40 shades to choose from so there's a pretty good shade range going on. They do break the colors down from a pink undertone, neutral undertone or golden undertone. So if it says G70 like me, the G stands for golden. These bad boys are pretty expensive though. Pull out the good ol' receipt shall we? And the foundation was $44 and the mattifying primer was $38. I spent a pretty penny this morning. The Cover FX foundation is also paraben fragrance gluten mineral oil and talic free and it's vegan. So without further ado let me show you exactly how I applied both the primer and the foundation to my face. So let's get started we are going to be using the items straight out the bag. I got these from Sephora literally this morning. My face is already moisturized but I did pick up the Cover FX primer. So let's go ahead and try this for the first time. I'm really excited to try the Cover FX primer because it's supposed to be a mattifying primer with anti-acne treatment which is obviously what I need and it has salsic acid in it has one percent. So that's kind of cool to be killing two birds with one stone if you can keep me matte and clear my acne at the same time I'm for it.  So let's go ahead and try the brush first it does have a little squeeze nozzle and I'm going to squeeze just a little bit on my brush and let's go ahead and start oh not as thick as I thought it was going to be pretty good coverage it's kind of more watery than I expected you definitely can get a sheer coverage if you want that but it says it's supposed to be buildable and I will be building today best believe let me go ahead to the beauty blender side see how this does going to be putting some right on there the squeeze is kind of nice it's interesting hmm I think you get more full coverage when you use the beauty blender because you can kind of pack it on there I think it must take with a beauty blender so I'm going to apply a little bit more on the beauty blender to get some more coverage doesn't really have a smell so that's good all right then I'm going to stop here I am getting some good coverage so it's supposed to be for a medium to full coverage I think I'm getting like medium when I think full I think of like extreme I can't even see your pores full but this is doing a good job so now to go ahead and put on the rest of my face so right now I'm very happy with the final application it doesn't feel heavy or cakey so it does have that weightless finish that I talked about it's not claiming to be Matt but I was able to get a matte finish with the powder and you know maybe this primer is working I think the shade range is working very well and another cool thing about cover FX that they do have a shade match guarantee so if you get the wrong color or you're just not happy with the shade range you actually can return or exchange it now according to the cover FX website this is supposed to be sweat proof waterproof transfer proof and provide an all-day wear well cover FX that's what we're going to be testing today so it is currently 2 p.m. I will come back at the end of the day and I'm going to show you exactly how well or maybe not so well this foundation does throughout the day so I'll be back and we're back it is currently 11 30 on the dot that means I've had on this foundation for a total of nine and a half hours so this foundation did claim to last all day nine hours is definitely a full day that's your whole eight-hour work shift plus your drive home so what you're seeing now is like worst-case scenario I was outside in the cold for a while I was in a hot area for a while literally put this makeup through a very full day and this is where I am so I am a very oily girl anyways but this is where we are I think under these lights like you're literally seeing every shine on my face I don't think it looked as bad in like person a normal mirror but without further ado what I like to do is grab my oil absorbing sheets and we'll just see how oily I really am so take a good look okay oil after nine and a half hours now I'm going to blot my face if you don't have these blotting sheets in your life what are you doing go get them today and this is just supposed to pick up the oil and leave the actual foundation it says it's transfer proof so there really shouldn't be too much makeup coming off so here is all the oil that came off of my skin some of the foundation is on here but it's not too bad I probably lifted with the oil but now if I take a good look at myself I look pretty mad again so looking at it now I am actually very satisfied with how I look on a normal day I would not wait over nine hours to blot my skin so as long as I could blot and get back to a matte finish I'm gonna be happy with it I do think I still have my coverage I got a little bit off of my nose which kind of just happens but I think it looks really good so this is my very first impressions the first time I've ever worn this what I do want to start doing is wearing this like every day after my foundation Fridays so I can keep up with you guys so maybe trying with a different primer maybe try the primer on its own with another foundation just really see how it works over time so if you guys want to see that make sure to follow me on Twitter Instagram and snapchat at miss beyond grenade I might do an Instagram live I might put in my story but remind me on Saturday to wear this foundation again and give you guys another update before right now I'm happy with this purchase I know these just came out but if any of you have tried them already please leave me a comment let me know your thoughts and your skin type you can get both of these at either Sephora or Ulta if you enjoy my foundation Friday so forget to give me a thumbs up and subscribe I post two new videos every week foundation reviews on Friday and curly hair videos on Sunday so hit that subscribe button and the bell so you notified as soon as I post a new video I'll see you guys on Sunday thanks for watching beyond grenade today