Good morning everyone, so I'm going to start very quickly. I got to tell one General Milley story and there are many General Milley and I My first in-depth interview with General Milley was in the middle of where else but Afghanistan in a place We may never all get back to called FOB shank and if you know it it's in back in the day It was a Sometimes very difficult place for troops to be based. We'd arranged our interview We had our camera was a nice sheltered little location on the FOB General Milley walks up Looks around sees a hill in the distance up against the security perimeter and says well Let's go climb up there and do the interview up there What you learn with General Milley is when he starts climbing a hill Mountain in my view, but it was a hill and it's up against the security perimeter The best thing to do is start climbing and keep up with him and even today in the Pentagon. I would tell you We have a really good opportunity this morning General Milley Clinically impossible for him to spin we know a lot of generals in the building General Milley can't spin He just tells you what he thinks and so that's what I'm really looking forward to this morning We're going to talk very quickly We're gonna he and I are going to run through a few items to sort of set the table And then we want to move very quickly to your questions and get everybody involved And I hope you have a lot of questions because if you don't General Milley is likely to call on you himself and find out What you're thinking around the crowd targeting So General Milley, you know we're talking about the future of war and I think most of us are familiar with your thinking That if you're going to look at the future of war it starts with where you are today and how you view The threats out there in the world that gets us to the question eventually of how much army is enough How much army is too much what kind of army, but let's step back and start with the threats and Kind of have you walk around the world for a minute in what you see? Can we start? Simply with Russia How do you view the threat the United States national security interests and the US Army? Faces from Putin's Russia Well first Barbara, let me first say thanks to you and Peter Berger and Amarima classmate and Just for the record she was in the top half of the class and I was in the half of the class I'm in the top half possible so That's the difference between state and defense like this right so But thanks for having me here You know I where I was in the back room there and then Getting miked up and I was watching the little poll everybody took and I I saw the the threats in the countries that We're out there is kind of an interesting set of results The way I look at you know the world and the guidance I've gotten from Secretary and others is for us to size structure Train our forces Essentially what I would I would say four plus one so four specific threats that are related to countries Russia China North Korea and Iran and Then a fifth threat called counterterrorism today's Specific organization might be ISIS, but it might be something else Down the road so that that's the general category. There's functional threats like cyber and others out there as well With respect to Russia You know I've tried to over the years study Russia had the benefits and great education and Princeton from a lot of great professors and I just carry that through the years and in the military Russia's faced with a series of internal challenges They've got demographic economic Political challenges that they're facing. It's a country that has been subject to land invasions many many times in their history You know the Mongol invasion Napoleon Hitler and so on so forth So they've got a set of internal challenges in all countries operating their own interests and fear is a very real Sort of sense inside the body politic of the Russian people and that's stirred hard by the Russian Political leadership I think as well So I think fear is a player in how they behave in the international environment And then I think pride is a big factor as well So, you know, they were of course a great power under the czars and and then later under the Soviet Union and and the wall came crumbling down So they've got they want to re-establish pride. Where's that all leading them? Well, so so what so you got fear and pride operating and they got there's a lot of money at stake There's a lot of interest so all of that put that cake mix together I think my read not the US government's read or anybody else's read My read is that They've put all those data points together and they said we got to make comeback and so about 2003 ish Forish five ish in that range in that time frame Russia launched on a significant military modernization program. They changed their doctrine and most importantly their behavior in the international realm changed from a Certain benign behavior relative to the United States interests from say 1990 to about 2003 or four or five And then it became aggressive. So Russian behavior today By the definition of international politics is aggressive. They are invading Sovereign countries with military forces or sorry get military forces Which in the realm of international laws now right and Europe hasn't seen that behavior since World War two in 70 years So that's a major strategic shift Behavior of a major or great power in Europe. So that's a big deal so behaviors there You can't necessarily, you know, do Nostradamus and predict intent. You have to get into mind reading for that But you can judge intent based on behavior So their behavior from 2008 and invasion of Georgia and the Crimea and Ukraine and a whole wide variety of other things Where they've used all kinds of tools and national power to intimidate neighbors That is an indicator anyway of intent and then capability their capabilities conventional capabilities are significantly better than what they were In the 90s and of course, they always have their nuclear capabilities. So put all that together to me That's a very significant strategic challenge How much of a threat? I think it's a big threat. I've said publicly in testimony I think Russia is the number one strategic threat to the United States of America And I say that for two reasons one Is they have the capability they are the only country on earth that has the capability As an existential threat to the United States They are the only country on earth with the capability to destroy the United States of America Other countries have lots of capabilities only Russia has that capability So that's significant in and of itself But capability without intent is just capability You have to match it to intent and when you get into the world of intent you're dealing in probabilities and You're dealing in predictive analysis It's very difficult to figure out the intent of a foreign leader or foreign power so you look at behavior as an indicator of intent and Recent behavior since 2008 is aggressive by the Russians. So I have to ask and we'll move on to other subjects But now you've got me fascinated. So based on what you look at when you look at their military leadership your counterpart right the General Dunford's counterpart the chief of staff when you look at the top leadership in the Russian military Are these people actually in charge? Are they decision-makers or are they simply taking orders from Vladimir Putin? Well, I mean in charge of what I mean. They're in charge of the military, but There's no doubt in my mind that there's civilian control of the military in Russia and Putin is the civilian who's in control. So There's anybody the Russian military. I don't believe the Russian military Is a rogue military anything that are operating on their own? I mean they're operating within the construct of Russian internal politics with civilian control. I guess I'm that you should be for I should rephrase the question. Do they ever say to him? Hmm. Maybe that's not such a good idea here All the you know like the Joint Chiefs do you offer options you offer ideas you offer suggestions or is the Russian military at this point now a Yes, man organization to Putin. No, I think I mean, I don't know. I'm not in the meetings. I'm not in the rooms and and I Would assume I mean Russian military is a professional military and I'm assuming that these guys would Tea up the cost and benefits. I I take it as a given that the Russian leadership is a rational actor That's the all the players are more or less rational actors. So I think they would I can't imagine them not Saying you know course of action one course of action, too Here's the advantages as the disadvantage and our recommendation is or something like that. Yeah, I mean I give them credit for being professionals So then let's move to North Korea sure your view You said Russia was the only country that had the capability to destroy the United States What's your sense of North Korea at the moment in terms of their intent on their weapons program and their capability and The threat they pose. Yeah, I think I mean what we've been in a state of armacism since 1953 So we were on the risk in a certain way of groundhog day where tomorrow is going to look like Yesterday in the last 70 years where war doesn't break out on the Korean Peninsula. I don't know if that's such a great Sort of mental attitude to be and we take it for granted That the armistice will continue to hold and that war won't break out if you look at Kim Jong-un and his and his regime I Think there's a lot of things that have popped in the news and that indicate there's a variety of challenges going on inside that regime right now There's a lot of external behavior that causes great concern. Yeah, you know, you had the incident back in August You had if you go back in time to 2010 2011 you had the Chonan sinking you had the Waipido Island incident flash forward the last August you had the border incident January had a detonation of a very large explosion I'm not exactly sure what type but a very large explosion the launching of missiles that were putting things in the space, but They could be dual use missiles who knows So there's you know, of course all the rhetoric that that happens now Some of this is routine in that it happens every year and sort of get lulled into complacency on it But there there is a there are enough differences that North Korea bears very close watching the risks are very high It's not an existential threat to the United States but War in the Korean Peninsula from a human perspective would be catastrophic souls a City of 25 million people there 25 miles from the DMZ. There's a million soldiers on either side You're looking at hundreds of thousands of artillery or rocket Fire that would land in a in a city that has a population density four times New York City The world is not seeing that sort of human tragedy that sort of violence Probably since the the real huge battles of World War two so a war on the Korean Peninsula would be terrible in human terms strategically You can only imagine what it would do to the Northeast Asian economy With Japan and China and of course South Korea So there's all kinds of second and third order effects. So although it's not an existential threat It's a it's a very very significant threat to vital US national interest. Are you how concerned are you? That the US is in fact a little too complacent as you the word you used about the North Korean threat right now I don't think that we in the military and the net and department found I think we're complacent. I think that we have Maintained a very high levels of readiness Forces forward forces that can respond. So I'm 100% confident that Whatever forces are going to be needed by General Skaperati and the Korean Peninsula in the event of an outbreak of hostilities That they would be provided and they'd be provided on time. So I don't think we're complacent necessarily I'm just saying that the expectation that You know, there's gonna be peace tomorrow the next day or two weeks from now or two months from now or two years from now that can be Something that lulls you into tomorrow is gonna look like today that man that that's one place on earth that May not be the case. You never know with that situation and that the forces that the North has arrayed Those forces are always in a state of readiness That could launch some sort of conflict or incident that could escalate to a conflict very very quickly Much quicker than people You know truly realize So the North Koreans could at any point begin have the capability to begin hostilities No doubt could they begin faster? Then we would see it then we would know No, we would know you might not know but we would know Well now I know what reporting I'll be doing we will tell you Think I have a few questions to ask around the Pentagon later today We could talk about Iran we could talk about the threat but watching the clock So I want to kind of jump ahead you've laid out some of the threats We've in Iran we've in the counter-terrorism threat But as you look at all of this you have to deal with all of this as it exists today as It may exist ten years from now and it gets to the fundamental question How much army what kind of army your future how much army's enough how much army is too much Yeah, so I mean and you have Iran you have China Of course the the current fight the fight were actually engaged in Physically on a day-to-day basis counter-terrorism fight against ISIS So the challenge for us challenge for the army in the military writ large is we have got to Sustain and maintain counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist capabilities We can't lose that which we've gained and learned over the last 15 years. We have to keep that going and my estimate is that we will be engaged in Fighting terrorists or insurgents or building partner capacity of countries and friends and partners that are going to be fighting terrorists I think we're going to be doing that for quite some time I think general Dempsey when he was chairman publicly said something like 10 to 20 years my predecessor general Odinero Said 10 to 20 years something like that. There's been other people who have said, you know a long time I think secretary Carter testified to it. I don't know. I don't know that anyone knows I just think it's going to be a long time. So we're going to have to retain those capabilities So that's as I look at how to size and structure a force those capabilities are absolutely essential because that fight's going to continue Even if ISIS is destroyed presidents charges with destroy ISIS I think we will destroy us but even if we destroy them Radical terrorism doesn't magically go away. The conditions are still out there and until and unless those conditions go away Radical terrorism is not going to go away. So that's going to go on for a while And then you've got those four other situations each of which is unique in and of itself and requires certain capabilities For each one of them. So as I look at those the capabilities required to either deter or defeat a Russian aggression in Europe or to fight against the North Koreans Now you're talking higher-end type warfare So you're talking some forces and capabilities that are going to be able to do combined arms maneuver You've got to be able to operate in very very lethal fluid dynamic environments You've got to be able to operate with air and other joint forces So those are necessarily different type forces and you might fight against earth So you said how much how big and so on and so forth As I look at the guidance given to us. It's all relative to risk So there's no absolutes in any of the stuff It's a matter of how much risk The national leadership is willing to take And all I can do is offer my best military advice and say this size force You're buying this much risk and the risk I measure the risk in terms of The size force the troops sort of thing the tasks that we've been asked to do And are those troops adequate to the task the time it takes to do the tasks and then the cost relative to Not only money but cost and casualties and and all of that put that mix in and I come up with a risk assessment And I give that risk assessment to the secretary of defense and the chairman so based on the threats you see and The risk assessment, and I'm not going to tell you my risk assessment What I've said what I've said in testimony what I said in testimony last week Was I think given the the size of the United States Army? The Cape it's really not size I mean the numbers of forces is only one factor readiness is actually the more important of the factors The the the skills of the force the leadership of the force are those units that you have Fully manned are they fully trained and so on so but so size is only one piece Then you want to make sure they've got the right technology and equipment You could have huge armies that have poor equipment and are under man They're gonna get smoked by a smaller trained force So size is only one piece and a lot of people hang their hat on a single Factor size, but what I've said is given the size capability readiness Of our force In my view I've said I said high military risk. So and that was in testimony I'm sorry, so Yeah, are you willing to take our but that's not new news. I mean if you watched the testimony you would have picked that up We just want to get you to explain a little further well, I did so I rate You know what what are the peace? That's what we call the follow-up? What are the peace parts of risk? It's What's the risk today troops? What's the risk today? What's your risk assessment relative to what? We can we can't we have the capabilities relative to Isis. We have the capabilities to adequately fight against Isis Without any problem at all the issues with Isis are not the capabilities in the size of the force That that's not what the issue is with Isis for us The risk to the nation of Isis I think is what you're asking my my view Isis is I think they are probably the most capable and vicious terrorist organization in world history I think they're really Very very very bad and they're very capable So when the president 18 months ago said to destroy Isis I absolutely sign up to that they need to be destroyed And they are a direct threat to us violent interest not only in the region, but they have reach so they can reach Europe as they've demonstrated And they clearly have aspirations and capability to reach the homeland here in the United States So Isis is bad in and of itself But relative to our interests and our own protection They have capability They have intent they have aspiration And they need to be destroyed just like the president told us to do while they have inspired attacks clearly in the united states your assessment on their ability to Plot plan and carry out themselves directly an attack in this country Well, they definitely can plot and plan Whether or not they can execute. I mean I have I have a lot of confidence. Hopefully it's not misplaced. I have a lot of confidence in Other agencies cAA FBI Customs border patrol, etc And we are very fortunate every Americans very fortunate at the great work That those folks are doing In an unnamed way every single day day in and day out to protect American people So I think our defenses are pretty good But no defense Is a hundred percent And These guys Isis Like I said, they have capability and they have intent And they're gonna continue to bang away until They get in here until we destroy them. So we need to destroy them. We need to get on with it and Get them gone When you look ahead and we start thinking of your questions We're going to start in just a few minutes on questions But when you look ahead now to the future Everything you've laid out talk to us for a minute about technology Um One could make a case very briefly that the military There have been some technical changes, but essentially is fighting with the same kit that it had To a large extent wooden desert storm Look ahead. What do you see in army land warfare in terms of new technologies? Cyber robotics, whatever. So I break the the future into a couple chunks of time For My analysis and and the guidance I've given the army staff so But first of all, you got to start with The nature of war and character war, which sometimes Those are synonyms a lot of people use the nature of war is basically immutable. It's probably Not going to change. It's all about war is all about politics always has been So it's about imposing your political will through the use of violence and some opponent It's all about friction chance And all the things that guys like clausowitz and sun see always talked about right so That's those truisms if you will they're going to stay the same. That's the nature of war What changes all the time is the character of war and that's based on organizations and training and Your national political construct and technology technology is usually one of the big drivers of the change of character war So as I look forward I see a chunk of time For ground warfare not air or maritime Or space or cyber in those domains, but for ground warfare I see Between now and about five to ten years from now, which is essentially the budget cycles of the us government to fight it I think that we in ground warfare have a set of legacy systems That realistically are going to be improved at the margins Uh, and you're not going to see fundamental Change in the character of ground warfare fundamental changes and what I mean by that I mean To go from the smoothbore musket to the rifled musket was a fundamental change to go from The horse calvary to the tank or mechanized forces Change the introduction of radio communications fundamental changes. So I don't see fundamental change In nature or the or the character of ground warfare in say the next five years ten years that range But when you get beyond ten years I do see that I see fundamental change. So if you look at technologies that are out there in the area of Mobility is a great one because you know robotics is making great advances in the commercial world There's military application. We're already using robotics. That's what drones and UAVs are robots of of a sort some of remote control But you could I can envision a force a ground force Sometime 10 15 years from now Where a lot of your convoys you resupply your logistics all that stuff where we expose soldiers to IEDs, etc That those are done by robots those those vehicles are autonomous vehicles You load them up with ammunition and chow and so on and you plug in the grids and boom off they go Now the domain of ground combat is fundamentally different than air or maritime It's not as clean you got the you got the earth and surface of the earth So it's a little bit more complex. So the application of robots to ground combat We still got to work through all the problems, but it's clear to me that 10 to 15 years from now Robots are going to be a very significant component. Then you've got Also other things in the area of mobility. You got fuels. You got materials We're right on the cusp of some really significant material breakthroughs In terms of lightening up armor. You've got areas of protection Like active protective systems that are out there several countries actually have and we're developing In information technology, I mean that that thing has been spiraling for a long time So we've got a lot of areas of information technology. In fact, it's a great vulnerability is our reliance on Space systems and GPS and so on so forth for our navigation our precision weapons systems So you've got a lot of areas of You know lethality and shooting there's a lot of things being done in the world of kinetics right now You know, we've been using gunpowder for I guess three or four or five hundred years now So there's things being done in the world of gunpowder Where you can take this much gunpowder required to project an artillery shell and maybe you only need that much gunpowder And you can automatically see That the implications for logistics for cost for the size of your forces, etc Are going to be different if that were true Uh, and we'll see that that's stuff that's all being tested There's stuff in lasers the railguns that the navy and air force are doing that may have the application to the ground So there's a lot of technologies out there today That we see that are emerging That in my view are going to have clear application to ground warfare And I think I'm not a hundred percent sure but I am pretty sure That though the some of those technologies are going to change the fundamental character of ground warfare a decade or so from now And we've got to lay the lay the lay the You know the structure down today for the research and development and the acquisition of those systems I don't know if that answers your question. It does. All right. Let's get to some questions from the audience I'm having a little trouble with the lights. So I think we have microphones out here Which we need to get to people can um And if we don't we'll just have people Stand up and man from harvard Okay, we'll start right here in the front. He went to the number two school We'll I'll have to be careful not to be too loud the microphone And why doesn't everybody say their name and uh, so the general note who's who he's talking to sure cindy freedberg breaking defense And yes, arvard, uh long time ago To follow up on a thread about the research development acquisition Which you have to start now to get things in 10 15 years 20 years Uh even given now so the system is You've submitted a report to congress In response to their statutory requirement saying these are changes I am making in the army acquisition system with the new authorities given to me by law Uh, these aren't things I would like to see And as I read it as people characterize it It kind of looks like the army is saying we'd like to be able to opt out of a lot of oversight You call it delayering bureaucracy, but it's opting out of a lot of oversight By the office of secretary of defense, uh, do tne testing oversight Cape cost assessment over oversight And some analysis and alternatives oversight as well um A am I portraying this fairly B why do you need to get out from under this bureaucracy and c given the army's Kind of terrible track record at major acquisition programs getting cancelled Why do you guys deserve this chance? Um, thank you, Harvard Yeah, yeah, no, I'm really glad I picked on you so I actually You would use the phrase opt out of oversight. I wouldn't use that phrase because secretary of defense And the chains of command always have oversight Just like I always have oversight whether or not the rule says x y or z you have oversight If you're the superior headquarters The way the military works is you always have oversight and you can never give up that oversight by the way So you're always responsible accountable for that What i'm asking for good, you know, first of all, what's the problem trying to solve? We're trying to figure out ways to speed up The acquisition system Some of these systems take multiple multiple years some of them decades to develop So the original requirement by the time the thing is developed The commercial sector or the technologies overcome the original requirement to begin with So you've got some issues in terms of flash to bang how fast you deliver to market or deliver to the customer The the system or the capability that was originally required to begin with so the system is slow And I think anyone out there Would argue that the system is slow Why is it slow part of it is the layers upon layers upon layers The famous one that's recent Is uh the pistol, right? So that's a relatively simple technology. It's been around for I guess five centuries or so and We're not exactly redesigning how to go to the moon, right? This is this is a pistol And arguably it's the least Leafy and important weapon system in the department of defense inventory a pistol, right? This thing's been out there for nine years or 10 years Requirements 367 page requirement document. Why well lawyer says this and lawyer says that you have to go through this process and that process You have to have oversight, you know, this is not the other thing look it I think that large bureaucratic organizations Are or large organizations Whether bureaucratic or not I think the best methods of management are to empower and decentralize I think that I should be able to look at someone And say here's your task. Here's why you're doing it. Here's the purpose Here's the end state that I want you to achieve by such and such a time Go forth and have at it if you succeed You're promoted and I give you a medal if you fail you're fired And and and you hold people accountable What you don't do what large organizations do over and over and over again Is they observe things that are screwed up in the environment and they take the problem and they centralize it And they actually make it worse. So I think you empower and you decentralize By using what the army calls mission command or I'll strike tactic was what the Germans called it way back when and mission type tactics It's been called a lot of different things over the years But you're operating off intent Purpose and and you hold people accountable to it that applies in acquisition just as well as applies on the battlefield And that's what I'd like to do. It's not a lack of oversight. I'm not asking to be You know, hey, you know free reign. Let's go party. I'm not saying that at all I'm saying let me and then hold me accountable Let me figure out What type pistol we need and let me go buy it Without having to go through nine years of incredible You know scrutiny and testing the the test I took a brief the other day The testing for this pistol Is two years two years to test technology That we know exists And we're not figuring out, you know, the next lunar landing This is a pistol two years to test at 17 million dollars 17 million I can call cabela's tonight. You give me 17 million on a credit card I'll call cabela's tonight and and I will outfit Every soldier sailor airman and marine with a pistol for 17 million and I'll get a discount on it for a bulk buy I mean come on So there's a certain degree of common sense to some of this stuff And that's what I'm talking about is to empower the service chiefs not just me Empower the service chiefs with the capabilities to go out and do certain things to speed the process up Bring the products to to the point of need Get there first us with the mostest and get there fast sort of thing Let me go to this side of the room You have a microphone over there the gentleman who in the middle there who has his hand up Who I recognize. Yes, sir, you I was trying to use my outside voice So there's been a lot of conversation about goldwater nickels too in the media in the news and we've seen this before over the years And it goes all over the map from how many co-coms how big they should be What the joint staff should be responsible for more or less Where do you think? What do you think objectives for any change to gold water nickels? To should be and what do you think the conversation ought to lead because right now it's all over the map Yeah, no, I I agree. I think there's an awful lot of ideas and proposals out there Um, you know, I've got a group that are uh of folks that are helping me think through all the various Options that are out there and the Department of Defense has some and The house and senate each have a variety of proposals So trying to work through all of it more complicated than People may fully realize. I think that One of the bigger issues out there that people seem to talk about a lot Um is the role of the joint chiefs of staff And the role of the chairman Uh, you know questions like should the chairman be in the chain of command shouldn't the chairman be in the chain of command What's the role of the joint staff? How should they be organized structured? That's out there. I I haven't formed All my you know sort of conclusions yet got some time Remaining before I have to sort of declare myself And give my recommendations and my thoughts, but that's one of the bigger issues is that one Another one is the role of co-coms combatant commands. So we've had Combatant commands for quite some time. Is it the right way to organize? The u.s. Military or not. There are issues associated with that There's issues associated any type of boundaries between organizations So that's you know, our combatant commands Are they More a paul mill type headquarters or they're fighting headquarters. Now, what's the role of joint task forces in fighting? So that all gets in there the size of Size of headquarters bureaucratic oversight has has led to the expansion and explosion literally of the sizes of headquarters if you go back to World War two admiral nimitz commander of the central pacific He started off with about 300 and I think he ended up with about 900 Folks on his staff and he fought imperial japan across the central pacific actually won and he did it in 36 months So not a bad record for relatively small nimble staff there for admiral nimitz And other staffs were similar not just his Today we have very large staffs Throughout there's reasons for it a lot of it Was already mentioned in a previous question So that's another big area though is the proliferation the tooth to tail ratio number generals, etc So you're correct the the areas are all over the place, but I think those three in particular Probably loom larger than others of course acquisition reform is another big one The role of the service chiefs is a whole series of issues out there As you look at all of this Do you think there's too much or not enough emphasis on the use of special operations forces today? Well, I think there's A series of myths about warfare That are prevalent and they're particularly seductive To americans or to democracies One of those myths is that special forces can do it all They can't they're not designed to do it all they're not trained to do it all And nor in the in the pros and special forces will be the first ones to tell you they can't do it all Special forces is dependent upon other architectures that are out there that come from not only conventional army, but navy air force marines And so on so special forces as a pallet of sort of the silver bullet Is a pot of gold. It's a it's a false It's a myth in the conduct of warfare So I'm always wary of just that The first question you have to ask I think is Are you at war or not? So special forces can do raids high value targets And they can provide extraordinarily capable And useful actions in the conduct of war But if you're at war Then your task is to impose your political will on your opponent through the use of violence. That's what war is And That is not what special forces is designed to do Imposing your political will controlling territory controlling people imposing your will Through the use of violence on an opponent. That's what war is So if we say you're at war it doesn't the army doesn't do it either. It's not special forces It's not the army. It's not the navy the air force and marines In and of themselves none of them. It's the synergistic effect of all of them Together in time and space. So we're at war by national definition of the political leadership We are at war with isis. We want to defeat the u.s. Wants to defeat and destroy isis Is enough? military power Using tools of violence being applied to isis bluntly Is it going to take ground troops to get isis defeated? I mean we're going to find out I'm not trying to be corey, but Why don't know what that means we modified we modified the Campaign That's being carried out. You're seeing some of the results of that Play out in the news And since we modified it back in the fall There's been a series of actions that have taken place that have clearly had positive outcomes in terms of territory that was taken the amount of Attrition applied to the enemy the pressure on the leadership said it so but that's just that's not winning And it's not over. So We have to see how it plays out in the months ahead and we'll have to reassess Your answer is not known yet. Does it require ground troops or not and ground troops? Then you get into who ground troops which ground troops? Putting in American ground troops is one question putting in You know having say Sunni Arab countries ground troops is a different question. So we'll see which way it goes. I don't want to I know he's trying to get me to say but I'm not going to do it. So We'll see it, but I will say that if you go back to the basic question Are you at war? If that if the answer to that question is yes with isis All right, if you're at war with isis if that answer is yes Then there are certain requirements based on the logic of war That more or less have to be done Sooner or later So we'll see We'll see which way this goes or we'll know soon enough Let's go back to this side of the room. Um, sir right there, uh, if And I'll just caution everybody. Although this is all fascinating. We're about five minutes out from having to wrap up Joel Garrow with asu in new america I was struck by your comment that there was no fundamental Change to war that you expected in the next 10 years um No fundamental change Fundamental yes, I mean that word means something to me and fundamental to ground war not to war but to ground war Okay, yeah, I'm interested in uh biotechnology and especially chris per cast nine ability to transform any life form you wish cheaply and uh efficiently If you're a half bright grad student in a reasonably well-equipped Biolab today That seems to offer Astonishing asymmetric power To anybody who cares to harness this from almost any direction. What is your expectation? of Bioengineering especially as regards to transforming humans either offensively or defensively There's research on man machine interfacing on The interaction between man and machine. I think peter singers here. He's written some books on some of this stuff There's a lot of research on it My point about The next 10 years I do not see the research advanced enough To have a practical application To military operations on the ground in the next 10 years I'm not seeing the reality of it The possibilities there there's research out there on all these on that and many many more things Uh, but what i'm talking about in terms of that time frame. I'm not seeing that reality Where we have it in the hands of soldiers and it's in it's real On a battlefield in the next 10 years for ground war. There's certainly peace parts to it But we're already doing thing, you know in the medical world Uh in treatment of casualties is a lot of research has been done We're already applying some of that stuff in in information technology and protection We're taking peace parts of these technologies and applying them right now But fundamental change widespread application Changing the character of ground warfare I I'm not seeing that. I mean it's taken us nine years to figure out how to do a pistol So I don't see why why would I Let me have one last question from this side of the room sir right here in front Yes, sir, uh, we may not I don't know if we need the microphone. We do for everyone to hear I'll give 30 second answers. You can do three questions. All right One doesn't say no general milley. You can time it. Good morning My name is Michael from the us agency for international development office of civilian military cooperation And many today posit that in today's increasingly complex and unpredictable Environmental environment, we need a comprehensive approach in order to solve the challenges to our national security Generally, I'd be interested in your views. What the priority areas are for collaboration with other agencies within our interagency I mean, I couldn't agree more. I think you have to have a whole of government interagency approach And I think it's beyond that I think it involves international partners as well The military is only one tool. USAID is yet another the CIA intel Department of State has a variety of other capabilities. I think you have to bring it all together I don't think what in terms of actual war fighting It's not the army. It's the army the navy the air force the marines It's cyber it's space it's bringing all that together in time in space To win a war takes a nation and it takes the synergy of all of these agencies And and frankly to win a war probably takes an alliance and it takes the synergy of everyone Working together to achieve the political end state. So I absolutely agree with you All right, let's have ma'am right here. I see you stand up. We're running out of time Now you're hard I don't want peter have to give us both to make the acquisition publicly We'll take you find the university of oxford and what role do you see for drones and robots in any hypothetical Conventional high intensity war both within the next five to ten years But also within the next 15 years and what systems and capabilities do you think we should focus on now? this uh, I'm we're already using Drones you say or unmanned aerial vehicles And they come in kind of two varieties one is controlled someone with a control stick another is autonomous So there's already robotics out on the battlefields today. We're using them in explosive ordnance disposal and stuff But the large-scale application Of the use of robots for ground combat One area that I think is very promising is specifically the area of logistics Because we spend any modern army has a relatively robust logistical tail For fuel ammunition food water, etc. And you have to carry that from point a to point b And and when you get it, you know get a closer front line sort of thing or or even if there's no front lines in a particular war like a guerrilla war Uh in afghanistan iraq You're exposing your own forces And then also it takes a lot of protection Uh convoy protection forces, etc. So if we can use robots to deliver that stuff That i'm certainly not exposing ourselves to casualties and it reduces the amount of protection that I need to To to secure those convoys. So logistics is to be one area that i'm taking a hard look at I could envision someday convoys of unmanned vehicles full of ammunition and chow and so on bringing things from some rare area To wherever it is you have soldiers that need to be resupplied All right, I'm going to apologize. We are getting the hook We are out of time Right peter. Well, yes, peter says i'm getting the hook I want to thank general milley. I think I everyone here can agree. This is why This is why when general milley's out speaking in public the pentagon press corps turns up because General milley is always worth listening to and we always learn something sir. Thank you very much for your time


Hi everybody. Welcome to today's session. We're going to go ahead and get started in just a couple of minutes. But before we do that, if you're online and if you have a moment, just drop a quick note in chat to let us know where you're calling in from today. It's so great to see where folks are calling in from. There's quite a span. Massachusetts, Kansas City, Missouri, Chicago, Wisconsin, Oregon, Detroit, Charlotte, another Chicago. Oh, and great Vancouver, Tennessee, Albuquerque, Romania, and another British Columbia. So welcome. Again, we're going to get started in just a minute or two. And hello to California. I think that's about it. All right, so we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you everybody. And welcome to today's session on digital marketing for nonprofits with Hootsuite. We are delighted to have Roya Calvasi join us today from Hootsuite. But before we get started with the specifics of the presentation, we have a couple of quick housekeeping items to take care of. If you have questions during the session, please drop them in the Q&A section of Zoom at the bottom. We've all been doing Zoom, I think, for a while now. But if you can't, it's the Q&A button at the bottom. We will have time for questions at the end of the session and we encourage you to ask those questions, keep coming in. Happy to have a conversation at the end of the formal presentation. Also, don't forget to check your email after the event. We will be sending links and recording and any additional resources that come up today in a follow-up email in a day or so after the session. Also, if you learned something incredibly cool today or something you want to share, please do not hesitate to give us a shout out on social media. If you can, please use the hashtag TS webinar. Lastly, just a quick reminder that closed captioning is available today. Definitely feel free to switch that on if you find that useful. Thank you. Those are the housekeeping tips for today. And also before we get into the details of today's session, we wanted to welcome you to TechSoup's global network, especially for those of you who are new here. We really believe very strongly in the power of technology to do good and to help nonprofits and other social benefit organizations move forward with their important community impact missions. And we're hoping that this conversation today will help demonstrate a part of how that's made possible. So moving on to the details of today's session, our guest speaker today is Roya Calvasi. And thank you so much Roya for being with us today. It's great to have you. Roya is a passionate customer success manager dedicated to driving organizational success through strategic social media planning. She has a wealth of experience as a trusted advisor with a commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction and fostering business growth. Roya helps organizations plan, implement and execute their social media strategies and helps ensure that those strategies align seamlessly with overall goals and objectives. Roya's approach is granted a deep understanding of diverse social media platforms and a keen awareness of emerging trends and additional landscape. And without further ado, let me go ahead and pass the presentation over to Roya. Take it away. Thanks Roya. Thanks Katrin. Hello everyone and welcome to the Texas webinar. Thanks so much for participating today. And I hope we all have great time together and can learn something new that's going to help us with our social media strategy going forward. So as Katrin mentioned, my name is Roya Calvasi and I'm a senior customer success manager. I have been with Hootsuite for almost four years now and my main focus has been helping our customers become successful and achieve their goals when it comes to social media marketing. Today also with me I have my amazing colleague Laura Richley. She will be also helping me throughout the session. So feel free to use the Q&A function in the Zoom and drop your questions throughout the session. And also we'll leave some time at the end to go over your questions if there's anybody who wants to come off mute and ask your questions so that others can also benefit from it. We will leave some time towards the end of today's session. Alright so let's get started with going through our agenda today. So we're going to start with going over how to conduct a high level audit for your social media pages. So we're going to start with that just because this is a key step towards making sure that what you're working today is working towards your goals and helping you become successful. So once we are done with our audit the next step would be to plan ahead. So making sure that based on what we have learned from the audit, our past experience, we are planning for the future. So there are some best practices and tips and tricks that we're going to share around that. Then we'll be going over social media, social media listening strategy. So whether you're doing it right now or whether this is something you're considering, we'll go over some basics and some best practices when it comes to social media listening. And then as a wrap up for the session, we'll go over some best practices and tips and tricks when it comes to all the practices you're doing towards your social media goals. These are very high level, we're going to touch on a few things in terms of best practices. And so again, we'll go over that as the final section before we wrap up and leave some time for the Q&A at the end. So as for the next, for the first step, let's go over conducting and audit. So on the next slide, we're going to first start with understanding why we should be doing a social media audit and how often we should be doing it. Based on the experience working with non-profit organizations, we have learned that one of the biggest challenges for these organizations is understanding if what you're doing is working for them and what's working best so they can figure out how to use their limited resources to be more effective. So feel free to drop in the chat if this is a challenge for your team and for your organization as well. But in order to understand what's working and what's not and what you need to change in terms of your social media strategy, the first step is to do an audit. This could be a quarterly audit. This could be an audit after you have run a big campaign, or it could be just a yearly activity that you do to look at your past year, see what's worked best, and what do you need to change and what are the gaps. So as we know, there are a lot of metrics that you can track towards understanding your activities and their impact on social. So it could be overwhelming. So it's really important that you focus on what's important for your organization. So first of all, we want to focus on our social media channel. So the platforms that are using the platforms that we have presence on our profiles. We want to distinguish and we want to identify what's the best platform that's giving us the best result that we're looking for. So it's really important to track and audit your platforms every often to make sure that you are reaching the right audience and understand where your audience are to better strategically reach out to them. You want to understand what your audience wants to see. So what are the top performing activities in terms of engagement? So what are the things that your audience are typically engaging with more often, which means that those are the things they're looking for. So you want to, and the next is you want to understand who your audiences are so you can tailor your strategy accordingly to make sure that what you are doing is effective and impactful. Doing an audit also help you understand how each platform is contributing to your goals. So one platform can be helping you getting more visibility, creating more grand awareness. Other platform could be helping you generating more leads. So you want to understand all of that so you can again tailor your content strategy and your social media strategy accordingly. And then finally, knowing all this information is going to help you generate new ideas, identify the gaps, see what you're doing that's working according to your goals, make sure that you continue doing that. So these are the main reasons why you want to do an audit on a regular basis. Again, this could be quarterly, this could be yearly. According to the amount of activities you have and the resources that you have, you want to make sure that you just do it on a regular basis and always compare it to the previous audit result that you have done in the past. On the next slide, I have included the steps on how to do an audit. I will go into the detail of each, but first you want to list all your social media accounts on a specific platform. You might have multiple accounts. You want to make sure you consider all of that. You want to evaluate and audit each profile that you have on social. You want to identify your top performing content and posts according to your goals. What is what is more important for your team? And then evaluate each social media to make sure that, again, you are considering which platform is more helpful, which is helping you achieve your goals and then understanding your audience on each of those platforms. So first and foremost, for the first one on the next slide, you want to have a template. It is could be as simple as what you see on the screen. This could be a more, like there could be more columns and more information you want to capture. This one is a simple one that I have here. You can also use one of our blogs on our website that has a beautiful template as well as some guidance on how to best audit your social media platforms. But you want to start with, as I mentioned, listing your social accounts. So having a URL for each of those accounts helps you directly go to that page and get additional information you want to put on your audit table. And then you want to count, you want to have a count of the followers on each of those profiles. You want to know which profile has more visibility, has more followers on it, and how you're doing compared to the past. Are you getting more followers? Which platform, again, is getting more visibility compared to the last time that you did the audit? Then you want to have your average monthly activity. This is typically the number of posts you have shared on each of those profiles, average for each month. So then you can take a look right away and compare your monthly activity against your number of followers. Are you more active on the profiles that has more followers? Or is more activity leading to gaining more followers? So already with this information, you can get some ideas around how you are performing on each of those social profiles. The next thing that we typically recommend is focusing on your top performing posts. So for each of those profiles, identify the top three posts based on the metrics that is more important for you. This could be engagement. It could be the number of comments each post has received or number of likes each of those posts have received. So based on, again, whatever is important for you on each of those profiles, identify the top three posts. Again, this can go further into more detail, but even with this basic information, you can take a look at your performance on each of those profiles. Number of followers, average number of like posts you have shared for each month and then which posts are high performing for your accounts. And then as the next step on the next slide, the other thing that is very key and maybe even should have been done as the first step is evaluating your profile. So you definitely have profiles on different platforms, even on some you might have multiple profiles. It's really important to audit your profiles on a regular basis. You want to make sure that your profile is up to date, whether it's the cover image, it's the links you include on your profile. You want to make sure that everything is on brand and up to date. And maybe from time to time, you want to change your cover photo, your profile picture to make sure that it is aligned with your focus. Maybe based on the next upcoming campaign, you want to have a new cover photo that on its own it can engage people or get more visibility among your followers. Whatever you're including in your bio, you want to make sure that again, it resonates with your brand tone of voice. You want to make sure that it is up to date, consistent across all the profiles that you have. You want to make sure that your profile name is also consistent. If you have multiple locations, you want a profile for each of those locations, you want to make sure that it is included in the name of your social page. Just so that it's easier for your audience to find the page. And any link on your profile, whether it's linking to your website, to upcoming campaigns, fundraising events, you want to make sure that those links are also up to date. So these are the important things you want to review on your profile, as well as your pinned post. So on each profile, you know that you can pin some of the important posts you want to give more visibility to. You want to make sure that from time to time you change those posts to make sure that these are aligned with what you are currently focusing on. And also make it more appealing for followers if they are coming back to your pages. So again, a key step is to evaluate your profiles on a regular basis as well. And then as the next step during your audit process on the next slide, you want to look for patterns. So now that you have done your profile audit, you have taken a look at your performance on each of those social profiles. You want to take a look at the performance data and see if there's any particular topic, post type, whether it's image post or video post, that are better in terms of engagement performance. What are the best posts in terms of engagement? What are resonating more with your audience? You want to identify those patterns and include them as you are planning for the upcoming months for your social media strategy. Taking a look at the performance across your social networks, again, making sure that you are reaching your audience on the right platform. And finally, if you are doing any sort of like engaging posts like questions, polls, you want to make sure that you're getting the right engagement and result according to your needs. If not, let's take a look at what's not working. If it is a question, make sure that it is targeting the right people on the social network. So for example, if you're posting a question on LinkedIn, because typically it's a professional audience on LinkedIn, you want to make sure that your question and your poll is resonating with the audience on that social platform. So again, key steps in auditing. You want to audit your profiles, make sure they are up to date and easily find being able to find it on social channels. You want to audit your performance on each of those social channels and look for any trends that can help you for the next step, which is planning your social media goals for the next year. So once audit is completed, you want to start, you want to start planning. So based on the audit results, you might want to revise something, something that is not working for you. You want to change it. Anything that's working, you want to continue doing or improve on. So for the planning ahead, if you go to the next slide, you want to list again your social media platforms and ultimately you want to think about each channel that your organization has presence on and is active on. So then plan accordingly. So maybe your focus for Facebook could be to promote an event because people typically, your audience typically comes to Facebook to know what's coming next. Whereas for LinkedIn, it could be to recruit more volunteers. Instagram could be used for brand awareness and Twitter could be used for customer relationship and support matters. So again, listing your social networks and identifying goals for each of those social channel is the key step and the first step in order to identify your goals. And then on the next line, when you are working on defining your goals for the future, you want to make sure that you are considering your goals to be smart. So you want them to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. And we'll see on the next slide how you can achieve this or how you can leverage this framework to make sure that your goals, even though they could be very general but at the same time you can analyze them and make sure that you achieve them in a time of frame that you identify. So let's start with an example. So which like this goal is typically a common one. So that's why we're going to start with that growing your followers on social media. So this is very, this is very general and high level how we can make it being smart based on the smart framework. You want to make it more specific. So you want to make sure that you are targeting the right platform and you are working on growing your followers on the right platform. So we're going to say we don't want to increase our followers on Facebook. And then you want it to be measurable. So for how much.  How long are we going to work on this goal and achieve it? So growing our Facebook followers by 2% and by the end of the year. So now right now this is very easy to define, easy to measure, and also it's time bound. The metric that you want to track for this goal is your number of followers. So you know where you stand today, and by the end of the year, you're going to track the same metric and then compare it. The other good example could be driving fundraising. So again, this is very high level. We want to make it more specific. So let's say I want to increase our effort for fundraising on Facebook by 2%. So for this one, I can measure the amount of posts that I create for this specific fundraising, the number of clicks that came from those posts. And finally at the end, the amount of fundraising that we were successful to achieve by the activity on Facebook. The last one is the overall brand awareness. So we want to increase it. So let's say again, targeting Facebook, 1% increase in our engagement on Facebook could be the goal that we want to set. And the metrics that we can track for that is the engagement rate. So the amount of interactions that our posts received, likes, comments, and research, or you could even take it to the next level by considering the number of clicks on the post or video views to determine the amount of awareness that our activity on Facebook created. So again, these are high levels, but you can always use the same format to identify your overall goals and then make them more specific and list the metrics you want to track for each of those goals. Alright, so now that we have done the audit, we have planned and set our goals, let's target another strategy that we can consider, which is social listening strategy. If you are not familiar with what social listening is on the next slide I have a very simple and high level definition of social listening. So this is all about reviewing the mentions of your brand, going out there looking at competitor brands and see what they're doing, any related keywords, you want to search for that on social media and stay on top of anything that's happening out there on social. So this is outside, this could be outside your own brand channel, this could be anywhere on social media on your competitor pages and other platforms, you want to see what's being said about your brand, and also other related keywords in the same industry. So with having that definition in mind on the next slide I have listed some of the use cases for social listening. So here are the five that I have identified, obviously the use case could be more than this, it's not limited to this five, but these are the top use cases, especially for the nonprofit organizations. So first one is understanding your audience, so who your audiences are that you typically interact with. Marketing intelligence, so again, who are the top influencers, what are the stuff saying related and being said on social related to the keywords that are relevant to your organization. Crisis management, so anything that's happening in the industry related to your brand that you want to stay on top of. And customer engagement, so what are your audience again saying about you, what are the posts that they are engaging with more often.  So we're going to go into the detail of each of these five use cases on the next slide. So the first one being understanding your audience. So you want to know what your audience are saying about your brand, whether they're loving it, whether they are identifying some gaps that you can jump in and help with. You want to be aware of everything that's happening and not everything is said and is basically not all their activities are happening on your own pages so you want to make sure that any mentions of your brand. You're considering those as well and you are going through those so you're not missing out on anything. One of the practices for this one is again understanding your audience finding your popular posts and mentions of your brand so you review them again understanding what your audience is saying about you is going to help you a lot with your future strategies. Checking out your drama graphic so who are the audience that are typically talking about your brand, are you targeting them when you are creating posts on your own brand pages. So these are the stuff that you can learn by having a social listening strategy in place. The next use case was market research. So I'm monitoring the conversations that are happening in the industry, what's working what's not working, what is popular in the market so you might want to consider that as you are planning for your content or even your future events. This information is really helpful to your marketing team to your customer service team. This is really important for them to stay ahead of everything that's being set out in the market. And you might want to tweak your services based on the information that you get from the market research you can do by having a social listening strategy in place. So reviewing the common questions on social that's going to help your team to address those questions on your social profiles on the posts you are creating, and make sure that there are no unanswered questions from your brand perspective, and then identifying popular platforms. Because if you know where your audience is, it's going to be easier for you to reach out to that audience, you know where, if your audience is typically let's say on Facebook, you want to make sure that you align your strategy to have a stronger presence on Facebook. So these are all the intel that you can get from market research. The next use case is crisis management and brand protection. So social listening allows you to track sentiments in real time. So you can know what's being said about your brand and if there's any significant change in how people are talking about your brand, the services they're receiving. You want to make sure that you stay ahead of the game, you are on top of it, you can address anything that's going to have an impact on your brand. And you want to make sure that you are ready to act on it as quickly as possible.  And if there's any huge shift in there, you can act quickly. So for this one, you can track the mentions as I mentioned and have, you know, then you can set a normal rate for your mentions and then if that norm is changing, you know that there's something going on and you need to act on it. So you can set alerts for that to be notified if the number of mentions, there's a spike there, and then you can act accordingly. Having a crisis management plan in place is obviously helpful. You want to make sure that your team is prepared for any changes that's happening around your brand on social. And then the last one, the one next after that is customer engagement. So on the next slide. And that's another use case for social listening. People are engaging with your posts or mentioning your brand. You want to make sure that you engage with them in the right place. Not just for jumping on it and selling them but also for interacting with them for creating that relationship with your audience. It is really important to make sure that you are engaging with the right audience. And also you are giving them, you are making that relationship with them for not just selling them your services but also again talking about your brand and also answering any questions they might have that you can help with. So creating that relationship is really important. You want to make sure that your team is set to help answer any comments or questions that your audience have. You might want to set a list of preset answers that your team can share with the audience on social just to create that efficiency when it comes to customer engagement. And then finally the last use case, which is around competitor and industry trends. So social listening is more than just understanding what's being said about your brand but also what are what your competitors are doing can help you shift your strategy if needed. So if there's any gap that you can identify by listening to your competitor's audience, you might want to address that and use that to your advantage. So social listening can show you what your competitors are doing in real time. Again, for you not to miss out anything when it comes to setting a strategy. So definitely the practice there would be to checking on your competitors on social media on a regular basis and see what's happening around their brands on social right. So that was the five top use cases for social listening as the next topic. As I mentioned earlier during the agenda, we have identified two practices that we wanted to share with you based on listening to organizations like yours. We identified creating a content calendar and setting up tracking could be beneficial for your team. During today's webinar, I have referred to having a planning place and also tracking your performance on social to understand what's working for your team. So these two practices can help you achieve those. The first one being the content planning. So when we think about building our content on social, we always find it helpful to have a master plan in place. So this could be the list of the relevant events, dates, any upcoming holidays that you want to be prepared for and have a content in place for. So having that master plan help you achieve that efficiency you're looking for when it comes to when it comes to managing your social platforms. So thanks to consider our local events. So you want to be, you want to mention those or have them on your content calendar, any topical activity you want to do on your platforms, whether it's around campaigns, your launching, any resources you want to share with your audience. And then finally, relevant trends and holidays that you want to post about. So having these basics in mind on the next slide, I have a sample calendar. This is very simple and we just like some high level events and holidays. You can definitely take it to next level and adding some more details that you typically post about. Having a calendar like this in place is helpful because you can plan ahead of time. You know what's coming next month and the month following that so you can plan for them. And you can have also, again, campaigns you're running throughout the year so you can adjust the timeline if it is like having conflict with some other events going on. Having a calendar and help you have that bird eye view around like what's happening in the next few months and plan accordingly. And also if there are any trends or if there are anything happening in the industry that you want to act quickly accordingly, having this calendar view can help you with that because you have already got some of the stuff out of your way by planning ahead of time. So you have more resources and time available to focus on those trends and again act accordingly to what's happening in the industry. So again, this is a simplified calendar. Some of you might be using like tools like Hootsuite for that. If you are using Hootsuite, you know that there is a calendar view within the platform that you can have everything in place and schedule posts ahead of time for any upcoming campaign. Events or holiday that's happening in the future. And then the next thing we wanted to review in terms of practices was implementing tracking for your social media posts. Again, in the previous slides I talked about measuring the impact of your posts, whether it is driving traffic to your website to the fundraising events. So all of this is achievable by having a tracking system in place. So when you are creating a post to publish on social and you are trying to drive traffic either to your website to register for an event to participate in the fundraising webinars, all sorts of like registration pages that you have on your website and how to track that and how to make sure that the traffic is coming from social or even narrow it down to which social profile specifically. You need to have a tracking system in place. I have a suggestion on the next slide. If you are using Google Analytics as your as your website system, you can set up UTM parameters. So you can see on the bottom left corner that you have your website.com. This is the URL for your web page. If you start using UTM parameters to track the traffic that has been driven to your website, you can narrow it down to see from which social platform it is coming from what event or even narrow it down to what sort of content drove that traffic. This is really helpful. This is the sample that I got from Google Campaign Builder. This is available to everybody if you use. So basically you have your URL. What else do you want to track? Is it the social platform? Is it the post specifically campaign? So you can add all those identifiers known as UTMs so that when your website receives a click or somebody comes to your website, you would know from which post, from which platform and which campaign activity drove that traffic. These are all the information that can help you identify your top performing posts so that you can leverage as you are planning for upcoming campaign or again as you are putting your content strategy in place. You know what's working better based on your previous activity and you can leverage that knowledge to continue being successful with your social media activity. So if you want to learn more from this, I have included the link to Google Campaign Builder. Feel free to leverage that information on a Hootsie blog. We also have a blog on how to leverage UTMs when you are creating content for social. These two were the two practices I wanted to share for today and then I'm going to wrap it up with just going over some key takeaways from this session. So if you go to the next slide and the slide after that actually. There are three key takeaways. First of all, make sure that you audit your social profiles on a regular basis. The information helps you understand what's working and what's not working and you need to change. Second one, set smart goals. So make sure that your goals are attainable, relevant, time bound, specific and measurable. So start with practicing of jotting down your goals and then using the smart framework to make them more specific. And then make sure you track them on a regular basis. And then finally use data to your advantage. Use all the resources that you have and you can get data from to make sure that you are doing the right thing. And then learn from what's working for your social activities according to your goals. So you continue doing that and anything that's not working. Let's identify why it is not working and then make the necessary changes of there. I hope this was helpful. So I'm going to now hand it over to Catherine. I think the next would be the Q&A section. Thank you so much, Roya. I really appreciated that overview. I was also taking notes as you were talking that to apply to our own program. But now we are going to go ahead and switch over to Q&A. And we do have a few questions popping up online. Let me go ahead and read them out. First from Steve. As a small nonprofit, mostly using Facebook, there is no obvious way to get the information that you described in the audit. Does that mean that Facebook is not good for us? Sorry, I was just on mute. So the information. Yeah, I think I'm not sure what you mean, but get the information I described. Most of the metrics that I had as an example are available on Facebook. And again, there are tools also helping you audit your performance on different social channels, like even at Hootsuite. We do have that information captured for each of those social networks so you can compare and again take a look at your performance. Not sure, Laura, if you want to add anything. Yeah, I think that was great. I totally agree, right? Using tools like Hootsuite or even just looking natively on Facebook, you can get a lot of that great information and data for your audit for sure. Great. Thank you both. And Steve, if you have follow-up questions on any of that, definitely feel free to pop another question in the Q&A. Moving on to the next question from Stephanie. What are your thoughts on threads, particularly in terms of establishing goals, smart framework and the metrics that you would use to track? Yeah, I think everybody is kind of new to threads. Even for us, as we were talking to our customers, we're asking them to have presence on threads, but it's a new platform. So we are also learning from it as well. Unfortunately, there are not much available currently for analytics when it comes to threads. I'm pretty sure that's going to be coming. But for now, what we would recommend to our customers is have a presence there because also that's a new way of reaching out to your audience. But again, in terms of metrics, I think we have to wait a little bit to see where it's going with analytics. Makes sense. Thank you. Next question from Valerie. For setting goals, what number should a small nonprofit expect to achieve? I'll let Laura explain this, but I don't think you can recommend a specific number. I'm pretty sure there are industry benchmarking information available that we can use. Yeah, I would definitely agree. So it's going to look different for everyone, right? Just because everyone's got a different social presence and different audience. And I will say as well, everyone starts from zero, right?  So I would say for, you know, maybe a smaller nonprofit, you're working on some of that growth on social, just take a look at what your normal looks like today. And that can be a really good benchmark for driving success in the future. So, like Roy mentioned, there are some good benchmarks for engagement rate or whatnot that we can send over. I think there's a sweet blog. I'll find it and pop it in the chat for you. But really, I would say looking at yourself and comparing yourself to your own performance over time is a really great way to just sort of continue driving success there. But really good question. Fantastic. Thank you. Welcome to another question this time from Mark. How do you get over the hump when getting traction on social media? And when do you need to spend money on promoting posts to get that traction? It's hard to analyze metrics when there is not a lot of activity. I'm going to take a stab at it and then hand it over to Laura. I think that audit practice that I explained earlier could be a good way to start understanding what's not working, why the traction is not as much as you were looking for. You're targeting another platform could be the right thing to do or maybe changing the tone of voice. So all sorts of like things that you can analyze from the data in terms of like who saw your post but didn't interact with it. What's the reach compared to the engagement you got from it. So maybe people are seeing your post but not interacting with it. Like if it is not creating the reach you're looking for in the first place, then that's when you want to promote it because you want to get it out there. You want to go beyond your followers and make it more available to others outside your posts. So that's when promoting and putting some spend behind your post would make sense, as well as like those high performance posts that you always want to promote as well. So great question and I'll ask Laura to also add her input for this question. Yeah, I think I would agree 100% right even if you have some of those. Like if you're looking at your metrics and there's not a lot of activity there. You're still going to get some information right there might be a poster to even if it's not the metrics you want to see. They're performing better than some of the other ones right so use that knowledge to your advantage to say. Everything even though there's maybe not a whole lot of engagement here. These kind of topics are getting a lot of engagement for me. Maybe this post template is. And so what can you sort of take from that and use for your content strategy going forward like Roya mentioned so. Yeah, even if there's not a lot of activity it can give you some good information in like a direction to go. But yeah continually AB test right maybe like Roy mentioned you try out a different platform maybe you try out doing video instead of images. So always be testing as well because you never know what new format or new idea could really help bring some traction for you. It's fun with social right. I know there can be a lot of, you know, formulas and trying to play into the algorithms and all that but really it's a way to connect with your community and connect with, you know folks that also align with your mission so definitely, you know try new things have fun and see what works for you for sure. Excellent thank you. I wanted to circle back to our initial question about Facebook's, we do have a follow up question about that one. As a follow up to my Facebook question, we publish a video each day, as well as text posts for videos, all we get is the body count, no record of who watched, and a view only says that they were there for five seconds, which seems pretty useless. So how do you move forward from there. I would say, first of all, it's not useless data, the fact that people are dropping when watching your video that's a good information, the piece of information to have some you want to make sure that your videos are short. Getting the message and the message out there in the five seconds maybe, and also create more engaging videos or maybe ask your team members to start the engagement on the post and see if it can help with the engagement so people might add more comments as a follow up to your video post. So these are the things that came to my mind right after I heard about like five second dropping gets to useless information, I don't want I want to say that's not useless that's actually helpful so maybe there is something that you are dropping after five seconds. And also you can leverage that information to make sure your videos are created according to how your audience are interacting with your posts. Thank you. A question from Tracy. How does Hootsuite compare with something like Meltwater when it comes to social listening. That's a very detailed question and I can speak to Hootsuite but I have not used Meltwater so it's going to be hard for me to compare the two platforms. I'm not sure what specifically you were looking for in terms of the comparison but obviously within Hootsuite, you can create search queries, basic search queries based on just like certain keywords or you can take it to the next level by adding location other parameters you want to consider and narrow down your search to make sure that you are just seeing what is relevant and what you're looking for. Thank you. A question from Anand. What is the recommended budget, the percentage to be set aside for any nonprofit sector towards their marketing and advertising. That's a good and very specific question. Not sure, Laura, if you have any recommendation for this one. Yeah, yeah, really good question. So I would say it's maybe not as direct of an answer as you might want, but really, you know, everyone's budget is going to look different for paid social. So I think it's more so using the budget that you do have really smartly, right, so like instead of going in and maybe boosting every post with a little bit of paid ad spend.   So when you're running a paid campaign specifically that's not boosted. It's a great opportunity to also a B test and optimize your budget. Right. So maybe you have three different ads within your ad set, and you test one thing so one thing is different about all three of those. Maybe you have the same image for all three posts but you change up the post copy a little bit for each. Maybe you have, you know, different images but the same post copy. Let those run for a little bit usually 24 hours or maybe till it hits a thousand impressions. And then you'll start to see one of those or maybe even to sort of lead the pack. And you might have some underperformers. So then you can turn those ads off and put the rest of your budget towards the ones that are getting some good results for you. So it's kind of a bit of a maybe less direct answer but it's not really like a percentage of your budget socially, let's say but more so how you can optimize and use your budget to make the biggest impact with your social so you know, it always helps to show that impact maybe that budget can always increase down the road for some paid social but start with what you have and really sort of show the impact that it's making by, you know, boosting those top performing posts for you or a B testing within those separate ad campaigns. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Moving on, we are getting near the end of the session so I'm just going to do the next two questions. But if you do have more please don't hesitate to toss them in Q&A or even chat and we can include them in the follow up materials after this session. So a question from Catherine. What is the average number of hours a week do you foresee in our profit would need to dedicate to follow through with your recommended process? I think it all depends on like what you are trying to achieve during the week like if you're running a campaign obviously you need more time being spent on planning and creating content for that whereas some other time could be more quiet but I would say you would at least need like between three hours like a little bit more three to five to for each week to make sure that you are posting your right content engaging with your audience because that's one of the recommendation in terms of keeping your audience engaged by answering their comments answering their questions make sure that you're not missing anything. So I would say three to five but this is not specific to nonprofits so let Laura add in if she has any benchmarking for for this specific industry. Yeah, I would totally agree right a couple couple hours a week to maybe do a little social listening go through some of those campaigns. The audit though once a year right you don't need to do that as regularly. And it's just a good gut check I would say we're coming up on that time right especially with 2024 planning coming in place. So maybe you start sort of working through some of that audit now so that you've got your 2024 plans ready to go. But besides that I would agree, you know, a couple hours a week but the audit might take a little more time. And so for that, you know you want to give yourself a little more bandwidth, but it's only once a year. Thank you both. And just our final question for today session at least live and again definitely don't hesitate to toss questions into the Q&A or chat and we can follow up after. I've heard that platforms downplay posts that link to external sites. So is it better to interact on each platform for the brand like follow share and others rather than posting links, for instance to external news articles. I thought somebody is talking. So for that one I would say I mean you always want to have links in your post on a regular basis because you want to again drive people to some sort of outside the social media activity you're doing whether it's your website it's an event. And so our sorts of things so I don't think they're the way for us to avoid having links in our posts. But obviously you want to focus on your post being engaging as well even on the social media you want it to be some sort of like interactive so they might want to add some comments in there. So you can leverage some of the best practices to keep your post engaging while having the link included in the post so that that would I would say that's the best possible way to avoid getting into the trap of like your post being downplayed because it does include a link. So that was a great question. I'm actually now curious to know more about that so I will do my do that just but I'm pretty sure there are ways to get over that algorithm if the post does include a link it is downplayed but Laura any other strategies you might have. Yeah, I would just agree right put that value right up in the post itself. You know, even if you're linking out to some resources put them in key takeaways in the post right. If someone wants to learn more they're going to click through and learn more regardless. So it's always nice to give them some of those main value takeaways right in the post copy. I kind of heard that as well right I know our even our own who tweet social team has been playing around with linkless posts, and they've seen higher engagement anyways on ones that don't have links in it. So I think it also depends on your goal right if you're wanting to maybe drive more engagements on your posts on social, maybe experiment ab test with a little, you know, a couple posts there with no links to see what that does for you. And that's also important that we drive folks to our website and talk about our mission there so I would say, maybe don't go full fledged into only linkless posts by ab test and see how they do and maybe add them in your strategy from time to time to drive engagement. Thank you that's great. I really appreciate that a response on that one particular very interesting question. So, thank you everybody for joining today. We do need to move to the wrap up. And we do have a couple questions that we didn't quite get to but we will be following up in the follow on after the event today. And thank you also to Roya and Laura for being here today fantastic presentation and again thank you to everybody who entered chat and questions we really appreciate it and some really fantastic questions came up today. And if you can, folks online if you can maybe add something in the chat about something that you learned today. We'd love to hear some of the points that maybe really resonated with you or that you'll be taking with you after today's session. Also, if you enjoy today's session and you want to support similar events like this going forward and maybe reach nonprofits. Feel free to reach out to our team at TechSoup around being engaged or perhaps even sponsoring an event. But I know I just to go back for a quick second on the chat. I just wanted to share a couple things that came up. One, some learned Hailey learned a process for approaching social media as a newbie. Excellent. Love sharing the UTM tip is another thing that came up. And just a lot of thank you for the general knowledge, particularly around reinforcement on marketing in general, and how to solve problems instead of hard selling during a session. Thank you for the feedback. We really appreciate your input via chat. Again, also, if you're interested in perhaps collaborating with TechSoup around an event like this reach out directly to Susan Tambi on our team who can talk to you about possibilities of being a sponsor being more involved with these events. So, again, thank you so much to everybody for attending today. And don't forget to fill out our post event survey. The link is in the chat. And another quick reminder, we will be sending out the slides and any follow up information that is associated with today's presentation. So thank you everybody. And I hope you have a great afternoon. Take care.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with a pack of mosaic football hobby edition pack number 69 nice, and we're giving away eight nt spots at the end of this break It's also nice But let's do the break first big. Thanks to this group here for making this happen And there's all the teams right there. I'm pretty sure we just have to do one more and then we're in And then I think we're in breaksville Let me just double check the website really quick. I think it's actually sold out now So that NT might be coming up fairly soon. All right. Thanks. So let's do this. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it Two times One and two snake eyes. So this is just for the break itself first the giveaways at the end Then what's so nice about? Oh, because you can win nt spots in this. That's all I was talking about You must have misheard One and two snake eyes one and two Steve verge of pitchers can't use sticky stuff. Why can batters? I mean Yeah Why even wear gloves? Why even wear batting gloves? I think we should I you know what steve? I think you're right. Let's just take we should take the rules just back to Like the 1800s No more specialized gloves We just want mitts that are about just to just bigger than the size of their hands Let's get back to where it needs to be Here's the first half of the list right here And here's the second half of the list right there All right And now no trade windows in these little things. We just want to get to the get the giveaway spot All right, the ball would be like an unright peach exactly Stadium club chrome is not out today regular stadium club is out today I'm not sure when chrome comes out trevor. Maybe maybe in a few more months Yeah I'm not I'm not pleased with the uh Well, especially the mid-season change super. I kind of say I feel like it sets a weird precedent Where like there could be mlb could just make like a knee jerk reaction And then just start tinkering with things in the middle of the season Just on a whim. So I mean, I know it's an existing rule and now they're just enforcing it, but I don't know. It's a bit of a cluster All right, we have two packs left right here We're gonna go one two three for the top pack four five six for the bottom pack With that die right there Two top pack right there and this will be for the last Filler that we have to do which will be break 70 which will be coming up a little bit later And there's the final print out That reminds me of the maybe that's what you're referencing man, but that reminds me of uh an old, uh Conan O'Brien's sketch bit where uh Where he was an old-timey baseball player It's a pretty good one to revisit if you've not seen it There's nfl debut cd lan Red parallel for the cowboys josh There's a jerry judy rookie card For denver that's going to be for josh There's a joe burrow nice Joe burrow rookie card for burq and the bangles All right now So that was nice Let's even nicer are those uh Those nt spots were given away nt football spots were given away So let's gather everyone's names again New dice. Let's roll it randomize it six and a three nine times So it's going to be the top eight After nine good luck One two three four five six seven eight And ninth and final time. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck So after nine now from eight on down, especially spot eight Or I'm strike check that from nine on down jared Sorry just on the outside looking in unless you're in the top eight My apologies my apologies to everybody here, but I appreciate you giving it a shot And congrats at the top eight you're in the break Matthew hedges joshua joshua joshua burq josh michael and josh There's the top eight right there. Thanks for getting in congrats And I'll see you a little bit later tonight for the break itself. Jasper's case breaks.com


Got a Nick chubb 299 who won there and how about this a holo hero CJ Stroud Let's go Matthew. Let's go nasty Stroud holo heroes there we go That is sick That's what we're looking for right there on the SP Let's go Very nice will mag that Matthew