Welcome back to the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. Well, kickstarting our conversation this morning with the June 12th protest and how the security operatives and the government are taking it in the country. We know that it was a democracy day, June 12th on Saturday, just two days ago. And all across the country, Nigerians gathered in their numbers in capital cities across Nigeria to protest, saying they want a realization of the ideas of democracy. And we know that some policemen, some security operatives, made arrests. Senior advocates of Nigeria like Fermi Falano are speaking up against that, saying the police need to apologize to protesters and release them. We also heard Tunde Kala Wali, a lawyer that we had on off the press, saying lawyers are coming together to make sure that he prosecutes the case, so prosecute all involved and make sure that all protesters who are arrested are released. Now, to join us speak on this matter, we've invited Mr. Oshina Webrahim, who is a risk and policy management expert. Good morning, thanks for joining us. Good morning. Good morning, we asked. Good morning, everybody. All right, so when we heard about the June 12th and the news of protests in Sarah Park in Nigeria, we know how the police came out to say they didn't hear anything like that and what the police had been saying about this. So we need to find out regarding protests in Nigeria. Is there a limit or a restriction on the rights to protest in this part of the world? Well, anywhere in the world, not exception, it's not excluding Nigeria. There is a UN convention that guarantee the freedom of association, freedom of lawful gathering and freedom to express your view in any capacity. So what the protestors has done is lawful, not only lawful, it's their fundamental human rights that is guaranteed by the 1999 constitution as amended. So I think they are on the right path. If the police have been issued as arrested anybody, I will advise the Honorable Commissioner of Police, Mr. Kim Udmosu, to immediately, not matter of choice, not matter of patronage, we should immediately release those that have been detained unlawfully. Because for me and for us who has been in the trench of civil society, participants in student movement believe that they have conducted themselves in the last time, lawful protest peacefully. So there's no reason for detaining anybody. Most of the protestors that I personally view on national TV and other questions around legals were peaceful. Everybody can express themselves about what the government is doing that is not right. So I will call on the Nigerian Police, the Inspector General Police, and the Commissioner of Police in Lagos to immediately, to immediately, please kindly release them so that they can go about their lawful living. That's right. We over the weekend also saw videos from the protests and the reaction of the Nigerian policemen to these protestors. We saw some of them being arrested. We saw tear gas canisters being fired, and some of all of that. So I want you to help try and explain, if possible, the mentality or the mindset of the Nigerian policemen with regards protesting. Are they working with others from above, or do they just believe that once there is word of a protest, they should immediately get on the streets and arrest everybody who tries or dares to protest and fire tear gas to disperse every protest. What exactly is the mindset like of the Nigerian policeman? You know, in policing all over the world, including Jewish, Canada, Britain, and the rest of the world, I think they have what the public code of conducts that they need to address some civil issues, especially protests that is guaranteed by not only the constitution of each nation or each state, but it's guaranteed by the UN Convention. I believe ordinary cops in Nigeria needs to be trained. And if you look at their police college, particularly the one in the Kedah, you can't believe that it's a training school. So if you look at the structural view of the building, if you look at the quality of police that have gone through that institution, you'll find out that they are lacking what we call a civil training. They still need to be trained. After you join the service, you still need to go back to enhance your capacity on human rights, on how to treat protesters, on how to address civil issues. Some police in Nigeria, you'll find out that they address just ordinary men who are civil issues with life ammunition, firing tear gas because you feel that some people are coming to infiltrate protesters. Some people are coming to hijack protesters. That is not lawful. That is not right.  Your intelligence, Gadrin would give you edge ahead of anything that you might foresee that is coming on board. But firing canisters, you know, that is harmful too. If you fire the canisters and it hits anybody's eyes or it hits anybody's in a very wrong place, that's another civil matter entirely that anybody that turns to be with, happens to be the victim, can approach the court. So our police in Nigeria needs to enhance their training capacity. They need to do more in terms of addressing civil matters. It's not all civil matters that you come to take care for the civil, you come with guns. Look at Britain, for instance. You see police in the city of London, Manchester or Liverpool, they move, you hardly see their pistol. They don't use AK-47. AK-47s are used by the military in the combat arena. So we believe that the ordinary Nigerian police is still lacking the rightful and civil training to address civil issues. So we call on Nigerian government and the president to please kindly look into the police service commission who is enshrined by the United Nations Constitution to train and retain and promote the Nigerian police. They need to go back to school, most of them, to enhance their civil and mental capacity to handle civil matters. I look at the one in Nogota. It was on cover, firing, manhandling protesters. These are not meeting the 21st century policing system. And this has been going for so long. Why we are in school? It happens. So you are protesting and the government thinks that what you are doing or you are going to load your image in public space. They tend to use the police as a tool to harass and intimidate the ordinary citizens. You know? So I believe that Nigerian police needs more training. More training. In fact, in times of training, they need more training. Mr. Ryan. Very, very quickly. Okay, right. We have our correspondent, Destiny Momo, on the field, one of the grounds that was said to be for protests this morning, June the 14th, Democracy Day, public holiday as well. So we now have Destiny Momo joining us from the Lucky Toget to give us live updates on what's happening there. Good morning, Destiny. Good morning, Aneta. All right. So the Lucky Toget, is that right? Yes, I'm at the Lucky Toget right now. What can you see around you? What's happening? Is there a protest going on there? Okay, I got to the venue at 7.15 this morning and I've been there till now. And because of the public holiday, you can see that scanty cars applying the road. And so now the policemen here earlier told me that they will not allow any protest to happen here at the Toget. And so far we've been here and we're not seeing any signs of intending protest. All right. Did you ask the policemen why? Is there a why they're not allowing any protest? Now they've not given me any reason why, but the LCC members are officials. They just told us that they are under surveillance. And they're saying that they do not want anything that happened the last time to happen again. But although they allowed people to protest or even report us to report yesterday because it was June 12th, democracy day. All right, Destiny. You've confirmed to us that there's no protest currently going on at the Lucky Toget and that movement there is sparse. So we'll definitely join you back much later to see if the situation of things at the Lucky Toget has changed. Thank you. All right, thank you so much. All right, Mr. Ibrahim, are you still on the line? Mr. Ibrahim? Okay, we'll try to connect with Mr. Ibrahim but we've seen updates there from the Lucky Toget. We know how it was last year, October 20th, 2020. All the allegations and reports of deaths or no deaths still in contention at the Lucky Toget. So we can understand, have a sense of just why the police might want to be there, heavily armed, guarding the Lucky Toget. But we still have more questions regarding why people are not allowed to protest if the protest is supposed to be peaceful. We still need to know why and also we'll be getting more feedback on the streets of Lagos from our correspondents in other parts of the state as well. But the question is about the legality of protest. If we're saying or quoting the UN Charter, the Nigerian constitution to say we do have a right to protest, then the question remains, why will police operatives or security men say people should not protest at certain places? You know that question is paramount. You know, if I agree with Mr. Ibrahim and that's what I'm gonna bring up, you know, glad that he's back. Mr. Ibrahim, welcome back. Thank you. Yeah, so I wanna go back to something that you had mentioned. You know, we just spoke with our correspondent who says she has spoken with some other policemen at the Lucky Toget and they are saying that they will not allow any form of protest in Hapun there. You know, you can draw in the sentiments of, you know, the fact that the Toget was destroyed sometime last year, you know, and some of all of that. But I'm going back to some of the things that you said that, you know, the- Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. I can hear you. You can hear us. We thought, you know what, can you hear us? All right, well, we try to reconnect with him. The challenge that I have is, you know, he's saying that it is a lack of training and that's what, you know, the challenge is, you know, policemen need to be trained better to understand, you know, the rights of citizens and trained better to understand, you know, their role when there is a protest and you don't need to go in, you know, carrying assault weapons. So you think they know all of that? Then why are they not doing what they're supposed to do? The initial question that I asked was, you know, what is the mindset of the Andean policemen? Is it because they have orders from above to ensure that there is no form of protesting? And when I say above, I'm expecting that whoever it is that is above is properly trained and is well-learned, you know, you don't get to the rounds of commissioner of police or inspector general of police or ASP or DSP or whatever it is without having some form of education that makes you understand what the UN charter is and what the Nigerian constitution says. I think another question we need to ask is, you know, if we can all agree that police go through training because obviously they have training schools, is what type of training, you know, do they get? Because you ask an average Nigerian on the streets how they feel about police presence and you don't necessarily get a feel-good response. So the question is what type of training is, you know, we spoke to police PR in Imoset-Bala, El-Kana and it talked about the accusatory method where they accuse you, they don't presume you're innocent, you're accused of the crime and then proven innocent later on. So we need to find out what type of training that they get. Is it one that asks them to put up a defensive front and accuse the territorial front or one that, you know, is friendly to the people? If they say police is a friend, do Nigerians feel that a police is friendly to what's them? So it's the what, what type of the training? How are they trained? The content, the quality of the training that we need to be asked about. So it's the same way they say bail is free and you know it isn't. Police is your friend, you know, police not your friend. It is also from the foundation of the Nigerian police force, you know, which is where I believe that one of the challenges is, it seems like they're, you know, institutional of government that are set up to protect government. They're not set up to defend and to protect the people, you know, which they serve. They're set up to defend government and government's interests and people in government or whoever it is that is the highest bidder.  Okay. Mr. Ibrahim, welcome back and you hear us. Thank you. Sorry for the network. Yeah, that's fine. So I was asking, you know, with regards, you know, where this training that you, because you mentioned that maybe it's a problem of training of the Nigerian police, but the Nigerian police, of course, you would know doesn't act out of his own, you know, mindset. From orders, from wherever they're coming from, orders from whoever is in charge of that police department or whoever's in charge of the police in that state. So would you say that the Nigerian police itself, right from the top, is set up to always go against protesting? I will say that, and I will not be fair for me to say, but I will refer you back to a case between Mr. Femi Falano, representing our president in 20, in 20, I don't know, but I think it's 29, 22, 2009 or something. They arrived from the Abuja Federal High Court to the Court of Appeal. And the Court of Appeal affirmed that, one, no protestant, if you are a lawful protestant, you don't need any permission from the Nigerian police to protest. What they need to do is to give you protection to no police in Nigeria have the right to intimidate, harass, any lawful protestant. Lawful, I mean. So what I'm trying to say is that the hierarchy of police, you will not be fair for us to say that they give their subordinates command to intimidate to this. Seems we may have lost them again. But what some points he's mentioning there, makes me ask, is this? Yes, yes, Mr. Ibrahim, glad to have you back. Please go on. Apologies, we'll try to sub that out in a bit. So like I was saying, some points he raised there that are key for us to begin to ask questions about. He says the police, you shouldn't get permission or you shouldn't need permission to protest. Also, he mentioned that the police should be giving you protection, but the question is, is that really what we see on ground? Because we've heard cases, we've heard times when the police say, you need to get permission. And some other people say, oh, they actually got permission to protest. So who should it be writing to get permission for? The constitution say you need to get permission to protest or the constitution say it's a freedom. It's a right that you have. It's a right, you know. And if it's quoting the family file on our case and judgment, the court have said that you don't need to get permission from anybody to protest. Also, about when the protests eventually take place, he mentioned that the police should protect you, should be able to provide protection for the protesters. But is that what we see or do we see a protestors versus police? Yeah, you know, and it goes, takes me back to what I was saying initially, that it seems like the Nigerian police as an institution and the mentality that they have is that they are meant to protect government interests at all times, not protect citizens, not to serve and defend, of course, you know, the citizens at all times, you know, their role is to protect government interests. And so that's why you should not be seeking their permission to protest because if the government feels like the protest is going to give them, you know, bad reputation, then of course, they're not gonna grant you that permission. So the courts have clearly said that you don't need to get any permission to protest. You can't go out and protest. But if you're protesting in a situation where the police themselves feel like they always need to do whatever is possible to protect government interests, then they're always going to be against your protesting. There are videos from the Ansar's protest last year where police vehicles were used to carry, allegedly, used to carry thugs and carry people who were of course going to disrupt the other protest.  So it's the same thing, you know, the Nigerian police, look at the way that they come out. If you remember the protest for the toll gate, you know, after the court ruling was given at the judicial panel, yes, look at the way that the Nigerian police were, you know, all out in the street, fully armed because they heard that there was gonna be a protest the next day. Why? Why are you carrying tear gas canisters?  There are people who decided that they want to protest. Pretty much the same thing we've seen over the weekend. Why is the Nigerian police driving, you know, so recklessly and running and looking for people to arrest and dragging people like animals because they want to protest? And these are not people who have been violent. You've not seen any evidence of anybody being violent and anyone breaking the law. They are simply exercising their right to protest. So on the other hand, we're sorry, we also need to understand where the government is coming from, right? I understand that we have a right to protest, but when you look at it from the government perspective, you see that the history of protests in Nigeria seem to have been characterized by violence, whether by opposition protesters, whatever it is, whatever excuse it is, but we've seen cases that protests are not entirely exactly peaceful all the time. Somebody gets shot. Somebody, you know, they all... I'm coming, I'm coming. Remember what happened with Shoray? They all, he was shot by a tear gas canister. Oh, he wasn't shot this and that. So the police could be, or rather, the government stands against protests. Could just be to protect lives and property. That's another way to look at it. But that's not the way you do it. So you stand there to protect protesters. We're going to be linking up with our correspondent, Jota, in a bit. You're present there to protect protesters from whatever reprisals. We see these things in other countries. Why are we acting like we don't? We see how the UK police comes out when there is a protest. There might be two different sides and two different protesters on opposite sides of the street, but you would see that the police is there to ensure that they maintain law and order. They are not there to immediately start beating everybody up and saying, go home, no protest, regardless of who it says you're on. Another question I need to ask Osaoie, we're talking about celebrating democracy day and all the ideals of democracy. The day that was celebrated in Nigeria as the day 1993, June 12th, that Nigeria experienced her first and first elections. Do we think that it's on such a holiday that Nigerians should be protesting against the government? Just the question we need to ask. So it's pretty much the same question that we asked during the answers protest. Not now. Do it later. When Jusun also was about going to strike the NBA, said, oh, maybe it's not the right time. Is there a specific time that is right? Would you say, oh, let's not do it this week, let's do it next week, or let's do it in May? There's no specific time. If the people, the people feel aggrieved, feel angered, feel unfair, unfairly treated, feel like they need to express themselves at any point in time, they have the right. And that's what the constitution says. That's what the UN chapter says. They have the right to express themselves at that moment. Let's connect with our correspondents, Jota this morning, Jacinta Obiku. Good morning, can you hear us? Okay, we'll try to get with Jacinta in just a bit. But the videos you're seeing on your screen is, or Jota, this morning. And basically shows relatively peaceful environment. You can see Lager State workers there sweeping the roads. It doesn't look violent. People just going about their daily business. Of course, traffic is not as much as it's used to because it's a public holiday, lots of people are resting at home. We can see police van packed there on the roads, police officers sitting down, nobody's pacing, nobody's carrying any guns. So it seems, just as it is in the... As peaceful as it can be. Yes, just as we saw in the Lekitoget area, it is a peaceful environment here at the Ghanifarimi Park in Ojota. A total, total departure from what we saw over the weekend on Saturday, where we saw people on the roads protesting, tear gas canisters here and there. We even had gunshots. All right, so yes, we'll try to reconnect with Jacinta there. But as we can see so far, in the place that seemed like a hotspot over the weekend, Ojota for one seems relatively peaceful today this morning. There's something that we've repeatedly said here on this platform with people that we've interviewed, security experts, and that is the importance of intelligence with regard to security. We cannot carry out security work and we cannot continue to act like we can only use force. Force cannot be the only approach with regard to security. There has to be intelligence. And so the Nigerian police needs to be able to develop itself to a place where they know when there will be a protest and when there will not be a protest. Protests don't just spring up. Nobody... People plan these things. Exactly. You would see and they would plan these things. Yes, there are those ones that may just happen out of nowhere, but let's not throw away the importance of intelligence. If the police is feeling that there's going to be a counter protest and might go and turn violent, they should be intelligent enough to know where these counter protests are coming from or who might be sponsoring the violence. Good morning. Welcome back, Mr. Ibrahim. Can you hear us? All right, so we've tried to of course do our own quick analysis on some of all these issues. Go ahead, I was asking earlier about where this mindset seems to be coming from. And I suggested earlier that it might be because the Nigerian police seems to be or seems to believe that it is set up to protect government interest and anything that seems to be against government interest needs to be crushed. Is that also likely where these challenges are coming from?  If you look at the Arab Spring, you know, it started like just a protest for some on welcoming policy of government. But it turned out that most of the protesters in the Arab Spring were hijacked.  So what's happened in Nigeria, in Lekitougi as well, turned out to be one of the worst and very heaviest protests in the history of this country. The whole must, you know, submerge the lawful authority in the land. Investment that was cut, that was destroyed on this stream was almost about nine billion for Lagos State alone. Not to talk about other states of the federation. So the police naturally will be on a red alert. If such a protest is coming, not necessarily mean that the government will tell them what to do. But they will naturally have the right, lawful right to protect, you know, the civil authority and protect the public property as well. So I believe these are, you know, combination of two, you know, approach that the police are using. However, the police still have the right to protect public property. If you are protesting and another person is not protesting, that person has the right for free movement.  And at the end of the day, the police will take the blame. So I see the reason why police is being, you know, unnecessarily agitated. But our advice, most of the protesters, you can display and protest in a little bit. In a full manner, you don't have to destroy against the civil authority. For instance, I watch as just unhacked up. I can say that anytime, any day, it's just unhacked up. You know, if police are saying that please and please not fully approaching you to leave a space, that place has been, you know, cornered. You don't have to go there and rest on the fence where police is instructing or telling you that this place is not safe. Okay. All right, Mr. Ibrahim, if you can hold on, we have our correspondence on the line. She's joining us from Ojata. Good morning, Jacinta Obiku. Jacinta, can you hear me? Jacinta Obiku, can you? Sadly, we lost her. We would get her back on the line. We apologize for that. But really, this is a conversation that must be had because June 12th is a very symbolic day. These are issues we need to address now because, you know, look at the future. Next year, what would June 12th day be like? What would democracy be like? Is this what we're going to see every year now? Is this going to be an annual thing? So we need to really address these issues. I feel the government needs to actually address these issues so that it can be laid to rest and put to bed once and for all so that we don't have a day set aside in the country that becomes a day of protest, you know? So Jacinta, do we have you now? Yes. Yes, good morning. Thank you for joining us. So let us know what the situation is like where you are in Ojata. Okay, so we've been here for seven and we tell no protest is going on. Yes. But we can see the presence of the Nigeria police. We are here confirming how peaceful here is for now. You can see the usual atmosphere of public holiday. That's what we are sitting here for now. All right, have you been able to speak with any of the policemen on ground there? Yes, we spoke to them to know whether there will be a protest for, for, it is fairly specific. They just said it's peaceful here, nothing is going on. Just let me be known that nothing is going on. No, just normal, normal atmosphere normal atmosphere for every holiday. Okay. All right, good to, you know, see how peaceful Ojata is this morning. And thanks for, of course, sharing with us. Would connect with you, of course, sometime again during the day and see if things change. Thanks very much, Jacinta. Thank you. Okay. All right. So I think it's great to know that Lago seems pretty calm today. We hope it's the same way in other parts of the country in other states, because we saw what happened in Abuja. The tear gas kind of says that we're fired. It's just terrible. This protest is calling out the government for bad governance and all of that. But lots of injuries, lots of arrests. Activists just demonstrating against the current administration. Well, good to see that today is relatively peaceful and calm. And we hope it stays the same way. We won't want any more casualties on the side of Nigerians. That means that both sides need to understand the roles that they should play, both the protesters and the police and law enforcement agencies. Yes, I need to ask you, Mr. Ibrahim, thanks for still being here with us. If we're talking about protests, the right to protest, to say this is constitutionally guaranteed, we're quoting the UN Charter. But when we come to Nigeria and the practicability of this protest in Nigeria, it seems very different. So, looking at the Nigerian setting, is there any acceptable form of protest in this country? You know, the mood of the country, the policy of the government determines, you know, the form and shape of the protest. You know, you can see different groups protesting, requesting for different, you know, public policy that needs to be changed. Some can be, the foreign currency dollar is very high. Some can say the fuel is very expensive. Some can say, okay, we need more infrastructure. Some can say, okay, police brutality, you know, you can actually determine the mood and shape of the protest. It depends on the, you know, citizen policy of the government shape out different form of government, different form of protest. If you look at in those states on Saturday, some people are demanding for, you know, agricultural support, food, ageless in food and the rest of them. In Abuja, some are saying Guwali must go. I don't know why they are saying the reason why they want Guwali to go. If you want somebody to go, you must have a reason why you want the person to go. In Lagos, some are saying, you know, different agenda, different, you know. So that's why I said it depends on the mood of the protestor.  But of course there has to be a central correlation, you know, few weeks ago, my good example, Mr. Femi Falano was at the Lagos House of Assembly, you know, presenting official letter demanding for some certain level of, you know, requests from the government. And like what the commissioner of police, Mr. Akim Udumosuditse said, he said Mr. Femi did take approval, he notify him, he notify him. And he has done the writing, he provide them, you know, security for him to move from Ekeja to Lagos State House of Assembly, which I believe that's the right thing to do. Like I did say, like I did mention, it's not necessarily mean that you have to go to police and seek approval and write application. You can notify them, just on the phone call and what they need to do, guaranteed by the constitution, is for them to ask him for time and location so they can provide the necessary security measure or require security and details to protect the protesters. So I think this is necessary for also, you can't tell me what the mood of the protest would be. In your state, that might be another thing they are demanding for. In KB state, it might be another thing. In Kano, it might be another thing. So who determines how the protest will look like. But I believe the well-ordinated protest so far, in this new millennium, in the last two weeks, I think it's well protected and it's well arranged. Okay, so just like you said, the protest is not coordinated because different states, different groups demanding different things. So what then can the June 12th protest achieve since there's really no focus among the different groups in different states? Or is it just all in vain? You know, if you look at, let's say 15 years ago, 20 years ago, you will notice that there is the deformed June 12th correlation led by the late chief, Antonia Enaro, Dr. Bekorra Sokuti. I commented on you, who happens to be a friend and a brother, also was a secretary. Ayua Diwali. If you look at Prunaku, other civil society group who believes in June 12th. Now, let me tell you something. So far. Okay, we apologize for that network glitch there again. Hopefully we can get Mr. Ibrahim to finish up his thoughts on that one before we delve into our next conversation. I'm still talking about governance, you know, this time around about federalism, but really, you know, like we're saying, it's a constitutional right to protest. It's just how it's done and the response of the government and security operatives that makes the difference, isn't it?  Like I said before, you know, the Nigerian police seems to believe that it is there strictly to protect government interest. And so, regardless of how you send a message, if you send it with hot smileys or you send it with, you know, with the angry smiley, if they feel, you know, like that your protest is not going to be in government's interest or might be in government bad luck, then you may not be granted that permission to protest. I don't know what the clarity needs to be on. Well, you know, do I notify the police or do I, you know, ask for permission to protest? And what that notification simply means, I believe, is sending a message across to say that there would be protests at this time, regardless of whether the police is giving you permission or not. I believe that's what it means. But there's so much, you know, that also needs to be understood. He has made mention of civil society groups that had, of course, a champion during 12 protests many, many years ago, 15, 20 years ago, in the 90s and even further down. I don't think that in today's Nigeria, there is these protests, you know, that we are seeing have been led by civil society organizations or civil society groups. The NSAS wasn't led by any civil society groups. The civil society groups in Oshun State actually led protests. Even though we know that most of this is by individuals. Right? Well, I'm talking generally on June 12th protests today. Yes, June 12 protests. It's not been led by, the ones that happened here in Lagos weren't led by any CSOs. The ones that happened during the NSAS protests weren't led by any CSOs, you know, led by Nigerians and, you know, young people who felt like they needed, they had a point to make. Oshun Owari, Brian, I think we would have to wrap up here. Thank you very much. We apologize for the poor network that we had this morning, but thanks for joining us and for sharing your views with us. Thank you. You're welcome. All right.  Whether you get that message or that notification about a protest or not, it's still to, you know, the responsibility of police to know, at least to a large extent, where protest is coming from, if there's going to be a counter-protest and know what roles that they should play, you know, on both sides. Yes, other people have the right to freedom and have the right to say, okay, we don't agree with this protest and we will stand on this other side. They have that right also, but the police should be able to know what both sides are saying, know where both sides are coming from, know who is behind both sides and be able to maintain law and order. That's their responsibility. Yes. They're not meant to simply say no protesting whatsoever because there's going to be violence, no protest whatsoever because remember what happened, you know, last year, you know, October and the way of saying no protest whatsoever is to fire tear gas at anybody that they see and pick up anybody and slap left and right and put people into Black Marais and all of that. It's a terrible thing that we're seeing and it should not be that way. We'll go on a short break when we come back. The conversation on true federalism and what federalism truly means and the federalism that we on endurance are asking for is what we're getting into next. Stay with us here on The Brightest.


Hi everybody, on behalf of TechSoup, we'd like to thank you for joining our webinar today. TechSoup is a nonprofit 501cview organization and our mission includes supporting nonprofits with technology to build a more equitable planning. And we do this by hosting catalog of technology products, especially price for nonprofit organization. And one of those brands is Constant Contact. We have a special guest here with us today to provide you some insights on how to improve donor relations and drive actions with email marketing and social media tools. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm honored to be the webinar producer here at TechSoup. Before I introduce Amy, I would like to show you how you can engage. If this is your first time here, you know you're already on mute, right? So we would like you to put your questions in the Q&A. I have the wrong slide. I'm glad on the webinar producer because I can edit this out. Put your questions in the Q&A. Feel free to ask your question in the chat. But Amy has some team members here that is going to provide you some answers in the Q&A. We would love for you to follow up with Constant Contact after this. I'm going to introduce Amy. I love your bio, Amy. She's a product success manager at Constant Contact has over 11 years with Constant Contact. She's been on board member for multiple organizations, Habitat for Humanity, the Food Bank, and worked with various animal rescue organizations. So she understands how to drive donor relations and engagement through the top of mind marketing and appeals. So Amy, thank you so much for being here and welcome. Thank you, Aretha, and thank you very much for that warm welcome. Thank you, everybody. Really glad you're here on today's webinar. I'm going to go ahead and take a moment and just turn off. I'm going to present today. And while I'm presenting, I'm going to turn off my camera so I don't have to look at myself. So bear with me one moment while I go ahead and stop my video and get a screen share going. While we're waiting, please continue to, yes, love Constant Contact. Let us know where you're zooming in from and what you have for breakfast. And if you already have Constant Contact, let us know in the chat room. Yes, in the chat room or no in the chat room. OK, thank you, Aretha. Again, welcome to today's webinar on signed, build, and grow. I first want to start by thanking TechSoup for allowing me to be here today with you and a special thanks to Aretha Simons, who's coordinated this gathering today. And just a little bit about TechSoup. They have been a partner with Constant Contact since November of 2020. TechSoup currently has about approximately 500 nonprofit users who use Constant Contact. And I believe somebody did raise their hand in the chat to say that they were a Constant Contact user. So if you're one of those users, I just want to take a moment to say thank you for your business. We greatly appreciate that. And also, you might learn today some things that you have available to you to you in your account that you don't know about. And if you're not a Constant Contact user, hopefully you'll hear something today that will let you see how using an email marketing platform can really help you drive donations and support to your nonprofit organization. This is a really exciting time of year for nonprofits. And by exciting, that can also mean really stressful. We've got some major fundraising holiday coming up holidays coming up, which you well are well aware of. We've got Giving Tuesday. I'm here in Colorado.  We have Colorado Gives Day. And I'll be honest with you, some of my nonprofit organizations, they don't even want me to give on Giving Tuesday. They want me to wait until Colorado Gives Day because there's a program here where they will double the donations. And I apologize. I don't know if your state has that. I hope it does. And then there's the year in contributions. You're trying to get those donations in for the end of the year for your organization. So I just want to say, I know you're busy and I'm so glad that you're here sharing this space with us today. And thank you again, Aretha, for introducing me. So a little bit more. I have been with constant contact for 11 years and I've worked that entire time with the partner team. And I love working with the partners and I love working with organizations like TechSoup. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite childhood stories was StoneSoup. And when I was in a meeting one time with Gal and Allison, Gal actually shared with me that TechSoup was modeled after that StoneSoup, that child's book. So I loved the concept of everybody gathering and bringing something to the table that we can share with one another. I mean, it doesn't really get more nonprofit than that. So that's that's constant contact, Amy. But the other thing that Aretha mentioned is there's nonprofit, Amy. So I'm very involved with several nonprofits, Habitat for Humanity, Homeward Alliance, K9 Companions for Independence, World Hunger Foundation, Larimer County Humane Society. One that I'm going to talk about a little bit today is the Wild Animal Sanctuary here in Colorado. Happily ever K9 Rescue. If you are an animal rescue, there is a good opportunity you're going to get me to volunteer for your organization. So let's talk about what our agenda looks like today to see more specifically what we're going to cover. I'm going to take you through three different platforms of marketing. I'm going to take you through email marketing, social media marketing and SMS. And all of these tools are going to help you with finding donors and volunteers and sponsors. This can be done through our list building and list growth tools. You can share these tools in an email marketing platform and you can share them on your social media sites. And you can actually share these tools that go beyond your inbox.   So your purpose is a story. You've already got those contacts, but you need to build those relationships to deepen your loyalty. You can use these same tools to keep the story going. Tell people about changes in your organizations, updates, success stories. People want to hear the successes and the needs. If you've got people that are dedicated to your nonprofit, they're in, they're they're trudging with you. They want to know what you need as well.    We're going to go over a little bit more of this in detail later. And the growth part of this presentation today is it's all about the growth donations, which come from donor growth, building up your volunteer base and helping the communities that you serve, getting people from your community involved, getting their buy-in. The first thing we need to do is show you why you should use an email marketing strategy. As one of the most effective ways marketing channels, email marketing should be at the center of your nonprofit's fundraising efforts, especially since 99 percent of email users check their email every day. And of those people, many of them are checking their emails several times a day. I'm guilty of that. But finding the right messaging to get donors to take action can be really challenging.  You have a lot on your plate. You wear a lot of different hats. I get that. Our mission today is to show you tools through a cross-platform marketing strategy that can help you achieve your nonprofit organization's goals.  You want to use email marketing just out of sheer usage and available people with whom you can connect. Your storytellers. Email marketing gives you the platform to tell your story. Also, with email marketing, you can send targeted, relevant, segmented and personalized messages that will help with the engagement of your email campaigns that you send out. And we're going to talk a little bit more of each one of those in detail as we continue on. Segmentation is actually taking a front row seat in this webinar today. Why email marketing counts? Every contact matters.    So email marketing is that way that you can connect with them. Are you connecting with them regularly to stay on top of their mind? These contacts, they're the front line of your email marketing strategy. You already are connected with them. You already in some way got have you have their interest in your nonprofit organization. I'm going to give you an example here. So one of those nonprofit organizations that I mentioned in nonprofit Amy Land was the Wild Animals Sanctuary and it's here locally in Colorado.  But when I moved here from California, she was quite young. And someone said, oh, the Wild Animals Sanctuary, it's amazing. So what they do is they breast you animals from flicks, I hate to say it, lions, tigers and bears, wolves, elephants, other animals from pretty horrific situations. And they put them in a natural environment where they can live and thrive and grow and flourish. And it's this really cool walkway that's above their natural habitat that you walk around with. And I went there and I thought, wow, this is this is the kind of organization I need to get next to. So I went in and I provided my email, my email address to them so I could get on their email list. And when they sent started sending me their email campaigns, I connected with them on social media. So I received their emails, I have their social media posts in front of me. And then there's different communications that they send. For example, you can sponsor an animal as a gift for someone. And if you're like me, you may have some family members that have everything. But if you're giving them a meaningful gift like sponsoring an animal, so it's a great way. This is a great way through that one visit that I have connected with this organization. So, you know, marketing, your time and your money is important. Email marketing is a great way to get a return of a very effective return. Of investment on your money spent. Statistics show that you're going to get $30 for every dollar spent. Your money is important and it's needed elsewhere. So you can get a really effective marketing tool that's going to give you a really powerful investment. So this this statistic, I want to start by saying that email marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. In and of itself, yes. But we're going to talk about using this in email marketing in conjunction with social media marketing. But why is email so effective? Well, with email, again, you've got these contacts there. You have their information. You have their email address. You may know something about them. You can add personalization to the email. You can send targeted emails through segmentation. There's that word again that we're going to talk about more in detail. So when email marketing is done right, such as segmentation, you can track your success in real time. So it's important to have those analytics. So when you're spending money on something, you want to see how well it's reporting for you. We give you easy to understand reporting and you can see who's engaging and who isn't. So this gets to be where you can, again, see who's getting engaged with your email campaigns. Those are people who are connected. You're going to want to tailor that mark, that email marketing message different than someone who's not engaging. What are they clicking on? We'll let you know what links they're clicking on. So not only are you going to see who's opening your email campaigns, you're going to see who's clicking on your email. Campaigns and what links they're clicking on.  So people will support nonprofit organizations with people they know, like and trust. Email gives you the ability to build that credibility with your audience by sharing helpful and informative content and for a nonprofit organization, your story. Now that you understand why email marketing is so effective and important, let's look at the tool itself. You can create beautiful email templates in very little time.  Constant contact provides hundreds of templates and simple tools. Time is really important too. We get that. We understand that. So we've provided a really intuitive user friendly interface. So let's take a look at that. What I'm showing you here is an actual template that's in our template paper and the builder, the tool that you use to craft your email campaign. So these tools, these campaigns are all mobile responsive. So in other words, what it looks like here to the right. This is what it's going to look like on somebody's desktop. But we give you the ability to see what it's going to look like on a mobile device. So this will automatically stack fit to screen for a mobile device. So it gives very professional mobile rendering and people can just scroll through to see your message. A couple of things I wanted to make mention of here. You're going to see at the bottom, there's these social blocks. So these types of blocks, you can bring over a text block and image block, a button block. This sign up to volunteer is a button block. So you just really want to know that this is your palette.  All you have to do is put in your content. So here at the bottom, there's two sets of social buttons. This first set here. This is called your social share button. So when you're contacting, your email campaign, this gives them the ability to share your newsletter campaign, your marketing campaign, your donation campaign, your volunteer requests on their social media site. Now, why is this important? Well, you know, if I'm getting an email from a nonprofit organization, I probably have a lot of people that I'm connected with on social media. That are also volunteers of a nonprofit organization. They're all supporters and they, I might intrigue someone on my social media sites to share your message. The second set of buttons is what we call social follow. And this allows people to connect with you on your social media site. So a couple of things to keep in mind here is we definitely want me to use these buttons, but don't use the social media button just because you happen to have a social media site. So for example, if you're not on Twitter and you're not actively tweeting or responding to tweets, then you probably don't want to put your Twitter button in here because there's nothing worse than feeling unheard. So you just want to make sure that you're putting all of the the social media sites that you're active with. We're going to talk a little bit later when we, when I go into social media marketing, how you can be more engaged on your site. It just, that's kind of a tip to think about. The other thing that I want to show you here is this button, this sign up to volunteer. So this can take people to a landing page where they can find out. So again, if I'm sharing this email campaign, it's going to give people who are not on your email list, the ability to sign up to volunteer. So those are really great tools. The last thing I want to mention here is I've talked to you a lot about segmentation. So one of the things that's really important to do in the body of an email campaign is add links. So you can add links to text. You can add links to images. Anything. Links are going to get your contact to engage with your email marketing campaign. So anything that you make a clickable link, you can also automatically map to a list. So for example, if I have sign up to volunteer and somebody clicks on this link, not only are you going to get the reporting that shows who clicked on this link, but the system will actually do that. It will actually move those contacts to a volunteer list or any other list that you establish. Same thing with any text or any image. So click segmentation is a tool within the constant contact platform that allows you to easily, not you, excuse me, that allows your contact to easily segment themselves into the email. So on the content, communication should be driven around these questions. And these are some pretty, these are some pretty fluid questions, but in order to be able to answer these questions, you need to have some sort of platform that will provide you this information. So we provide an affordable, robust email marketing platform that provides you those and all of those questions. So we provide an affordable, robust email marketing platform that provides you those analytics and segmenting tools and list growth tools that allows you to capture this very important information about your donors. So let's look a look at this a little bit more in detail. Okay. Segmenting your mailings is critical in today's environment. So you may recall when email marketing first came out, it was just like blasted everybody about everything. But those days are long gone. Your contacts are busy too. Think about your own inbox. How many emails do you walk into in the morning? 30, 50, 100? It's pretty daunting. So you want to be respectful of your donors and your volunteers time. You want to know your nonprofit audience. What do you know about the people on your contact list? This might seem like a daunting question, but you likely have more information than you think. And for every piece of information you have about your audience, the more effectively you can communicate with them. Have they donated, volunteered or attended an event in the past? If the answer is yes, you should have segments in place for each of those things. Reaching out to existing supporters with the same message you use for prospective donors can be ineffective, maybe even offensive. Like why am I getting, I give you money regularly. Why are you treating me like you don't even know who I am? Similarly, emailing your volunteers with donor language can make it seem like their time and energy is less important than monetary donations. And you know, that's just not true. I'm going to give you like a little story about that. So my sister-in-law, who is my best friend, my brother stole her away from me, but not really. I think she still likes me better, but that's a whole other topic. So she lives in New York in the Hudson Valley, and she's very involved with canine companions for independence. And she does a lot of local fundraising events. She's basically the face of the Hudson Valley canine companion for independence. I can't be there to help or volunteer as much as I would love to, but I can donate to their cause. I can give my monetary contributions. I can connect with them on social media. I'm not a volunteer. I'm a donor. I'm not a companion for independence, but canine companion for independence also does retail marketing. So if I were to keep getting emails from them to volunteer, I'm going to feel like they don't know me, because I'm not a volunteer. I'm a donor. Also think about whether or not your contacts have engaged with any of your other emails. A yes is a great indicator of interest. What you're doing is working with those recipients, but if you're not a volunteer, and your contact list isn't opening or clicking on your emails, then it may be time to pull those recipients aside and test out a new messaging tactic for them. So take a look at what they've clicked on in your email for people who have engaged. The more you know about what they engage with, the better. So for example, we give you those tools. We give you those segmenting tools that I've mentioned. We give you the analytics. We give you the click through rates so that you can see how you're doing it. We give you the specific links. That information is available to you. What do we know about them personally? When you ask supporters to opt into communication, what do you ask? Of course you're going to ask for their name and their email address. That goes a long way. But taking the opportunity to ask for other meaningful questions like what type of support you're interested in providing? What sorts of topics would you like to be updated on? What type of information would you like to be updated on? What type of information would you like to be updated on? What type of automated birthday email? That really connects with them and shows that you care. All of this can give you information that helps you personalize their communication and make them more relevant, kindly and effective. The one thing I'll mention about this though is sometimes less is more. I don't know if you've ever signed up for an email list and they're asking for basically everything and including your email address. If you don't have a specific target amount, if you don't let people know the goal that you're trying to achieve, then they're just basically shooting arrows at a target that they can't see. You want to be specific with your time frame. You want to let them know time is of the essence. This is how long we have. Hey, giving Tuesday is coming up. Hey, if you don't have a specific target amount, if you don't let people know the goal that you're trying to achieve, then they're just basically shooting arrows at a target that they can't see. Giving Tuesday is coming up. Hey, Colorado gifts day, wait for your donation then because we're going to be able to double our contributions. Hey, you're in donations. Time is of the essence. Your emailing will become more frequent the closer you get to the target date. So you really want to balance this out. You don't want to be bombarding people with emails because probably what's going to happen is they're going to get close to that target date. That makes sense. They're going to expect that. That clear expectations for the money and resources you're asking for. What will these funds be used for? The more specific you can be about how the money will be spent. The more your audience can clearly understand your needs. But don't just say, hey, we need, you know, $500,000. We need $500,000. We have a lot of money. It's going to be like, hey, we need $500,000. We have, you know, 200 homeless families in our community. This money is going to provide 80 meals for 200 families. You just want to be really specific on the purpose. Again, segmentation. Hold the people out who have already donated. Make theirs different. You don't want to keep sending, hey, give, hey, give, given it's gonna make them feel like you don't that you don't understand that they they're already in the game.  And this friend of mine uses social media to do fundraising. And I may give like, it's a little tight, you know, I'm going to give you a little money, and maybe I can go deeper in my pockets but then you know, a week later she's saying hey we're still far off the goal for this dog to get the surgery he needs so that he can be adoptable.  I can see how close she is to her goal of meeting that dog needs. Another way to do this is a goal thermometer or some sort of visual as to where you are it's a really good motivator for people who have and have not donated. Provide ongoing stories of success and impact. So it's really important that you don't just get something out there that talks about like what you what your needs are and what you're going to use the money for. Hey, this is where we're at this is what we can do here we are loading up the trucks with with food images tell a story, words tell a story. There's lots of different ways you can still tell a story.  I just mentioned the, these are some actual comments from donors, and I have a little experience with this. In the comments, I feel like my gift, or again that meter and progress part, like when I gave that extra 20 bucks I could see how much closer we were to his crosses goal of getting that surgery he needs. No one told me how to use the money. Well, yep, goal based campaigns tell them upfront and that's really important but again, keeping communication, share the success journey along the way, give them real time stories of how their money, their donation has made an impact, or the organization didn't share their impact. Once it was done. It's like, well, did we hit the goal did work did we feed families, did the dog get their surgery. So it's really important that you actually thank people tell them what their impact made this is so important sometimes we can be focused on the need to raise the money the need to get the volunteers that we forget to stop and thank the people afterwards. I had a nonprofit organization that I was very heavily involved with I did volunteer work and I submit. I gave them a significant amount of my limited donation money. I also reached out to my friends that were able bodied and had them come do, you know, volunteer work and then other friends who weren't able bodied. It's some donations but everybody was like well did they get the donation or what did they do what's going on. Even the people that volunteered felt like, you know, we're here but you know are we making a difference. And sadly, you know, the donation stopped and the volunteers started leaving so definitely this is a really critical piece here. I talked about knowing your audience, making sure you have targeted relevant emails landing in your contacts inbox. If next year you talks about subject one. Why subject line again getting back to your inbox because you have you open your inbox in the morning and it's a little daunting. I want to put effort into that subject line 47% of people will determine whether they open your email based on the subject line, no matter how good the content is.  No more than the four to seven words another reason you want to do this is not to be just to be respectful of people fine. But a lot of the email clients will truncate a subject line and you're thinking you're getting a really great messaging out there and they're only seeing the first 47 words. Make it descriptive make sure that they understand what they're going to see what they're going to learn what their what their outcomes expected when they actually read your email campaign. And these next two things are just trying to steer you away from getting your emails in someone's junk or spam folder. So writing in all cats or excessive use of punctuation, not only do those look unprofessional but that's also a great way to get your email campaign in someone's junk mail. A couple other things with the subject lines again, keeping in mind that 47% of people are going to be determining whether they're even going to open your email campaign emojis emojis are a great eye catcher. And using a subject and a pre header getting back to that subject line being four to seven words, but you're maybe not able to get your full message in it's hard. So the pre header is like a secondary subject line. So for example, your subject line might be time is running out. And then the pre header could be the community pantry needs. So it's a secondary subject line that drives home the message that you're trying to send. A couple other things that help with subject lines question, will you help play hunger. Alliteration is something that's really effective to support senior services, chunking it getting your message into different chunks connect prefer enjoying lists, five ways you can make a difference. I probably have time to find out five ways that I can make a difference. I don't have time to find out 40 ways I can make a difference. Five ways to make a difference that I can handle. Again, sense of urgency, webinars tomorrow and personalization, adding personalization to a subject line means that your email campaign is 22% more likely to be opened. We have a tool that allows you to add that personalization Allison, we need your help Allison's thinking wow at some point, not only have they spelled my name correctly, but I must have given it to them. The other thing is to keep it simple so the so you've got your subject line, you've got your targeted audience, and you want people to engage in your email campaign. So if they open your email campaign and they see a lengthy email, they are going to be like, Nope, I don't have time for that. Keep it simple. Three images or less including your logo. The other thing is, do you have that friend that went to a VUBA, and they have 85, 85 of their vacation photos posted on Facebook and you're like, Oh, this is beautiful. And you click through for the about the first 20 of them and you're like, I'm not going to keep through these images. Well your email campaign is the same. You want to share the good news about your event. Images are a great way to do that. Don't overwhelm people. Again, getting back to that clicking. Always link your images. Never use 100% image. That's another way to your email campaigns, it can, it can get caught in a sample. I'm just going to take a quick water break. Hang on for me one second. Okay, so again, why do we want to make these images a clickable link? Well, again, it's a really great way to get people to engage in your email campaign. Statistics find that there is a 64, 650% higher click rate for emails that include images. The gifs are also like this click rate here is a gift. It's pretty engaging. So if you have animated images, those are great to involve, those are great to include in your email campaign as well. Another tool is the constant contact mobile apps. So our editor, and some of you who may have used it may not even be aware of this because it didn't. Oh, it wasn't always this way. Our editor is a cross platform editor, which means you're the website and the app talk to each other. So if you're working at your desk, which for me is my living room with my, my rescue dog and my rescue cat by my side.  You can actually log off, you can grab your phone and while you're sitting there waiting for your child or waiting for your grandchild or doctor, you can actually continue on with your email marketing. The app also has the same social tools that we're going to talk about, and it also has the same reporting analytics so the app is a great way to go. So in the body of the email we talked about personalization, but excuse me within the subject line we talked about personalization and the impact that it can have, but in the body of an email. Personalizing your contact content is already is also very effective. So for example, any piece of information I have a contact record can be inserted into the body of an email campaign. So for example, if I've had a recent and tech soup has been there and constant. I can send the same email but when it arrives in Aretha's inbox it's going to say dear Aretha, we want to say thank you to you and tech soup for sponsoring our event. And when it comes to my email my inbox it's going to say dear Amy, we want to thank you and constant contact for sponsoring our event. Personalizing content is a really great way to get people to engage with you. Quick segmentation, we've talked a lot about that that gives you the ability to have segments, contact segments themselves into categories that interest them.  We have a tool built into the system that will say that you can click and it'll give you some recommendations video video is another great way to share your story. We've talked about words. We've talked about images. We've talked about even animated images videos are very engaging. They do have to be web hosted. We do have a video block that you can drag over on the constant contact editor. So please, if you have web hosted videos that is going to completely improve and enhance your engagement. We also have a B testing. So you can send out 20% of your email at subject line a 20% at subject line B, and then you can send the rest of the 60% out based on which one got the better results. We've already talked about adding social media pages and the sharing capability you definitely want to do that to engage. And then the last thing I'm going to talk about is events. So, in the body of an email events constant contact has an event tool where you can actually create an online registration page that allows people to sign up to volunteer or even sponsor an upcoming event. The registration form online. It has its own unique URL. So you can send that out in the body of an email campaign, you can post it on your social media sites. So we have the constant contact event tool, and we also have an integration with events right. So some nonprofit organizations already have this platform available to them. So if you do you definitely want to make sure that you connect your constant contact account with your event right. So automatically bring over your contacts from your events, and it will bring them into your constant contact accounts with these integrations can actually do the tools can do some of the lifting for you as well. So this gets back to not only knowing how your marketing budget is working for you but more importantly, what are the types of campaigns that are effective and have generated the most engagement and the most results you want to track your test. What are some of the things that we give you well, we tell you who's opening your emails, we tell you who's clicking on your links we also give you a heat map of the most popular links in your email campaign bounces those are emails that don't make it to somebody. Why did these emails bounce unsubscribes and spam complaints so we are automatically compliant with can spam. We also help you with castle of GDPR. Some of the other regulatory agencies that make you comply with email marketing. So if you have somebody that marks you with spam or unsubscribes that contact will no longer be able to be added into your even if you bring them in via an integration or a list. The system will say no, this person is opted out. You also give you the did not opens and why might that be so important. Well, you can save these people to their own list and try and engage with them in a different way. So how do you use the reporting click segmentation we covered that on the slide with the editor. So not only do you have the reporting that tells you who clicked on what link with click segmentation you can also automatically have contact segment themselves. You also have the ability to build custom segments based on a contact activity so for example, you can build a segment of someone of a group of people who have not opened any of your last emails or a group of people who have opened your last five emails those people are very engaged. The next few weeks are going to help you make the most of your marketing effort. You want to give people the opportunity to join your list. You want them, you already have some contacts but you want to grow that contact list. You want to give them the ability to hear from you. So these list growth tools are going to give you the ability to grow your contact list. So we have a lot of different tools available to you. So we have an inline form. We have a pop up form. We have a fly out banner. We have a banner that is hard coded at the top of your, of your campaign or excuse me of your website. So all of these list growth tools are available to you in your constant contact account. And then once you activate these list for tools, we give you the code necessary for you to host on your website, or provide your webmaster. The other type of tool that we have our landing pages and landing pages are a great tool, because you can create a simple landing page and capture the information you want. Maybe just, again, not email and name but here's where you can ask for their phone number, their birthday. The more information you have the better you're going to be able to segment the mailings. One thing to note though here is again, you can ask for more information later. What's really great about landing pages is you're actually generating instead of code HTML code that you're putting on a website, you're generating a URL, and you can do a lot of things with the URL, you can put them in the body of an email. You can post them on your social media sites, or you can even take it to our code builder where you can generate where you can generate a QR code. And then you can host that on your social media sites you can host it if you have an event you can host it on a table at the event. I know some people that create the QR and they put it on their phone. And then if they meet somebody, they can just go ahead and say here scan this and you can join my list. So there's lots of ways that you can add contact so the sign up form we have apps we have what's called the list builder app again this is found on the app store and you can download it to your phone. So if you're out and about you can also just ask somebody for their contact information. Also, if you're the type of event that people have business cards you can also scan a business card. Constant contact also has an open API, so you can think constant contact with your CRM very simply you can just type and paste in contact. Most people upload contacts from a file or spreadsheet. And we also have other integrations like for example, Gmail, you can connect your Gmail account. Some of you nonprofit organizations may have the donor platform. As your CRM, you can integrate donor perfect as well. And then if you want to get on social media sites to try and generate more leads, you have the ability to bring in leads from social media as well directly into constant contact. Now we're going to go on to social media marketing social media marketing allows you to extend your reach beyond your contact list. People are more engaged in social media than they are via email communication so this is just one more channel where you can connect with people. What's showing you here is what's called a social post. Now you may remember when we were talking about email those social follow buttons and I said well, you know, put the ones that you use but don't just because you have them. I want you to be engaged to the social media. Some people just don't have the time or they don't have to know how, but you can actually connect your social media accounts with constant contact, and you can do your posting, all from one place right in your constant contact account. Once you connect your social media, you can create your posts. You can not only create your posts you can bring in images and it shows you over here on the right. So you put your messaging you put your image, and then, boom, you schedule your post it goes out to all of the media platforms. In addition, you're going to see something really cool here called create variations social media platforms have different benefits. Twitter, you need to be very concise in your messaging. You can link in you can link to other businesses. So you might want variations and how your message is going to look at across the different social media channels. We give you the ability to do that.  So constant contact in addition to the social inbox tools, we also have what's called, well it's also attached to the inbox, but basically, Facebook and Instagram also will automatically feed messages back to your constant contact account. So again, you can respond to those messages directly in constant contact you don't have to link log into your social media platforms to respond to these messages. So it gives you one place where you can post your messages to all your social media accounts, you can be active in all of them, and you can even respond to social messages on Facebook and Instagram. What are some other things that you might want to share on social posts. The most important goal for your social media is to drive action. This is your ultimate goal because this is how you grow your nonprofit and your donations by driving traffic to your website, getting registering registrations for events, growing your email list and more. So here are some of the things that you can post through your social inbox. You can share a link to a sign up form again that landing page. So that's a great way to get people to sign up for a new list on your social media sites. You can promote an event. You can link your donations page to your website. You can ask for volunteers and sponsors social media extends your reach beyond your contacts. I highly encourage you if you're not using social media marketing to do it because even though it can seem a little daunting. It's just a great way to get your reach beyond the inbox and if you're doing something like posting your landing page or sign up form. That's giving you a tool that you can ask people to join and become a contact. So constant contacts basically these social media tools they're all going to save you time while accomplishing these goals these social media marketing goals that you have. You're going to be able to get the word out about your nonprofit and you can also share your constant contact campaigns to let's take a look at that. So this should look a little familiar this is when you send an email campaign this is your reporting. You're going to notice this blue button. So if you click that blue button once a campaign is scheduled to go or it's sent won't see this this if it's in draft status, it opens up this very familiar looking post area and here it's going to automatically connect that newsletter and you can select the social media sites create those variations and boom post your newsletter. Now one of the things that's really interesting here is that because you may ask why am I adding a landing page in the body of an email when somebody's already on my mailing list. Because if they share it on their social media sites or your share. You're extending your reach, you're giving other people the opportunity to last marketing tool we're going to talk about is SMS we are very excited to be introducing SMS to our marketing menu.  This method of communication allows you to have an immediate impact and communication with your contact. If you have any statistics about SMS think you know this yourself think of businesses that you have signed up for like what comes to mind for me is a coffee, a coffee company here. And I signed up for SMS because there's days where I get double points. There's days where if I drag in my rescue let she'll get a pappuccino. So, if you're signing up for messages, these are people that want to engage with you. Also, your contacts cost money. So you want to retain them. Also if you recall and we're going to visit this once more each channel, whether it's email marketing social media marketing or SMS has its benefits. You're going to have these in conjunction with one another. You're going to have a lot of positive impact impacts you're going to have people that want to do business with your nonprofit organization. You're going to have people that stay connected, and you're going to have people that want to share your message. So SMS again you want to know how your tools are working for you so you get the same analytics that you do with email marketing you'll find out who's opening who's clicking on any links. So, I'm going to use some subscriber growth. So, there are analytics to come along with it. There's a lot of other things with SMS and again this is new and SMS has its own rules around compliance. And one of the things that you decide to opt in for SMS is there is a wait period so you have to actually enroll. And it takes about 24 hours for our texting company to verify the validity of your organization, and then you're ready to go with text messaging. You get a dedicated phone number for support so if you need any help you can give us a call. It's a very simple message editor so the messaging is going to look very much like the messaging in your email campaign. Again, the detailed reporting the list growth in the opt-in tools.  Now lastly we're going to talk about almost lastly. We're going to talk about harnessing the strengths of each channel we've gone over email marketing social media marketing and SMS and SMS is just another channel to add to your marketing mix, but it's not about using SMS or email marketing or social media in and of themselves, it's about using them together. So when you combine these marketing platforms. You're actually connecting with people in the channels that they prefer. There are times when using one channel over the other is going to be more appropriate in times when they can be used together. So let's look at these in detail, social media. You're going to use that when you want to get beyond your inbox, beyond your email contacts and be on your SMS contacts. You're looking to increase your engagement so that you can reach a new audience. You're doing this publicly your messaging is going to the public. Email, you want to use email when you need to reach your audience directly, you have a more robust message. You're going to be using targeted segmenting mailings. SMS, you're going to use SMS when you have something that is time sensitive, or something that offers something exclusive and it can be handled in a short message. Usually with nonprofit organizations and SMS is going to be something like maybe some message into some volunteers or last minute message to donation effort. It's something where you really need an immediate sense of urgency to some other tools to cover with you. We do have integrations outside of the ones that we've discussed constant contact also does offer some services that I'll mention. We have support, yep, that is right support live people, and we have best in class with deliverability because honestly, if your email has the best subject line and the best content, and it's relevant and targeted and segmented, and your email campaign is full of rich content. It still needs to land in their inbox. We have 97% deliverability. We have a team of mail operations people that are dedicated to making sure that your emails get in someone's inbox. So integrations we already talked a little bit about Facebook we talked about the event integration but again, we have other integrations that use the nonprofit like donor perfect, but I also want to mention canva. I don't know if any of you are canva users but canva is a great tool and there is a free platform that produces beautiful images, and we also directly integrate with canva. So, again, your story can be told using words, images, video, canva gives you the ability to create unbelievable professional looking images that tell your nonprofit story and you can automatically post those over to your constant contact account. If you're feeling like wow, this makes sense, and I want to do this, but there's no way. We do have a nonprofit marketing services. So one option available is something from as simple as a $79 can branded professionally designed campaign design, the full menu personal marketer. You know your budget. You know what your, you know what you can and can't do. It's a service that we provide. Award winning customer service and this is pretty huge because again it's not just customer service it's award winning. We've won lots of Stevie awards for our customer service. There is like a lot that you have to go through to get to a person, but consistently when I'm talking to customers, partners, nonprofit organizations, they're like, wow, I cannot believe how helpful this person was. So it's one of the things that constant contact really prides itself in is hiring really great people training them to do a good job for you. We also have live chat. So I don't know if you've ever had chat with your telephone company, but it's really frustrating because they're like what do you need and then they think they know what you need but they don't. So you can also chat and you can get a live person as well. We also have KB articles that stands for knowledge base. So, again, people learn differently. If you're somebody that wants to take the phone and call us. We provide that if you don't want to talk to people just want to have a quick chat with somebody. You can do chat if you're like nope I need the CD instructions in front of me I'm definitely a visual person. You can go to KB article. We have lots of different ways to make you successful. Sorry about that. So we're to the questions part of the presentation today. Before I get to the questions I just want to go ahead and let you know that with TechSoup when you sign up with constant contact, you do get 50% off monthly that QR code is a QR code to the landing page. So that'll get you started. So I just wanted to make sure that you had that tool and without and without further ado, I'll go ahead and turn it back over to Aretha. Excellent. I think Heather has answered all the questions and you have another team, Thomas here. Heather you want to jump on. We brought in the heavy hitters. Thank you Thomas and Heather Thomas is actually a co worker of mine. Heather is like is I bow to Heather and Thomas and they're, they're, I'm very blessed to be a part of such an amazing team so thank you both for being here today. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think we got to all the questions. There is one that just popped up. What if you're already a constant contact member, can you get the discount. I think with this particular setup. Let us get back to you Charlotte. Let us get back to you because there was another question and the if you can send us your email address. That will be helpful. Yeah, so to further answer that question to the way that it works with tech soup is they have like a hub, as a reason mentioned there. They're like this melting pot of technology for nonprofit organizations, and you go to that landing page and you like pay into this. This fee to pay into the text to have available to the tech soup pot of technology, and then screw that once they have verified that you've paid into that.  It's an administrative fee and that you're not affiliated with any other partnership on the back end, but we definitely want to give you every benefit available. Awesome, I do see a question. Yes, you're going to receive the email and the video slides. And will the attendees receive the info about the tech soup. You can go right to TechSoups website right now. And in the search box type in constant contact, and that page will come up as well. Any other questions, comments, feedback from Heather, Thomas, Amy. I think there was just one quick thing on Canva, which it sounds like Canva Pro version is available for nonprofits, if you apply to Canva. I didn't know that I learned that. So we have a great integration. So thanks Terry for highlighting that Terry. And then the you so Michael did ask about text messaging and Thomas got back to Michael but the for text messaging and SMS marketing it is in the US at the moment. We are looking at expanding possibly in 2023 but that's on the roadmap and don't want to make any promises, but that should be definitely coming soon. So thank you for all the apologies I should have definitely mentioned that for right now it is US only in all of the tools that we talked about today and there is. You do have the ability to see what that 50% off pricing looks like and there's also, there's also two different plans with constant contact there's a core plan and then there's a plus plan. So a lot of the tools, many of the tools including the social media integrations come with a core plan. The, the plus plan has some additional features like for example it has automation that I didn't even go with you today. So, I definitely encourage you to at least look at the plans. The only thing that's additional is SMS SMS is a standalone product. So, all of the things outside of the SMS would be included. Either if you have the core plan, what items are included in the core plan, or the plus plan. So just wanted to make that differentiation as well. And I did see that there was a 404 on that bit.ly link so I just shared the long link. So that one should not give you a 404 I'm not sure what happened but there you go with that link. Awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you all so much Amy. What a great present. I can't wait to do another webinar with constant contact.  Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day everybody and make sure you take care of yourself as you're taking care of everybody else.


Wow, what's up everybody once again is Brandon and shy and I'm back with now a regular guest y'all have seen her multiple times on this I'm not going to do a long intro, but we got up here, and she wants to speak and drop game on team building. Y'all know we've talked a lot about team building before in the past, but always want to do an update video and bring additional perspective so we got to cut to to use. I meant to drop some of the gems based on what she's learned over the years because she's definitely in the trenches so appreciate you happen on again and let's talk like what what do you have and see when it comes to artists and building a team. Okay, so what I see first. Thank you for having me again. And yeah, I want to talk about this because a lot of people reach out to me since my past appearance and just had questions or want to know about how to build a team. So, I think the most difficulty that I see people dealing with is a lot of times with music they may not have the budgets. That's typically, you know, a manager is supposed to get a percentage about 10 to 20% and then you may have like a lawyer and then your producer may want this and of course we say the first thing is to actually go out try to perform and try to see who gravitate towards you of course see who's a fan and who actually is passionate about your art or what you have going on because of course these people will naturally want to offer. There's a lot of people, especially in Atlanta that are upcoming photographers videographers they may do it for like their college credits, things like that so there's a lot of people that are looking for new talent or looking for people to build and grow with and I feel like that's the best kind of relationship, of course. I like that I like that, especially college credits at that free work, but it's easily, you know, it's a mutual benefit to stuff like that so I love that. And then a lot of times with college credits they have to, like particular benchmarks to hit and things like that so it'll have like that professional look and stuff with certain things. And like I said I know it's a lot of internships or things like that where people are looking for work, but if we're actually talking about the actual positions of a team, I would say to look for. I would say of course, a lot of people have two managers or two different types of managers so some people may have a personal manager that like helps you day to day that helps you you know before you get the rest of your team members they may even just keep you on schedule with posting content, represent you reach out for you go go with you places because a lot of times the artist may make the relationship initially, but then the management may take over from there so that the artist can focus just on the art while the manager handles the business and then so that would be like a personal manager more so. And a lot of times people may have both in one or may have them separate but also a business manager is good somebody to handle like the bigger fish, like that may know more about distribution or talking to different labels if you're looking for that different partnerships and stuff. Again, a lot of times they can be both in one, especially starting out. It's good to have an attorney of course or somebody that is familiar with entertainment law that can help you with certain things. It's good to have an agency. So agency that can be your creative team creative director it can be like your marketing team or a person that helps you would like all your social media platforms. The supporters will tell you what they like and don't like they'll tell you what you want to see. And of course supporters that's your that's your human capital so that's who buys into you and supports everything that you have going on so you do it for. It's good to have a producer and a DJ of course, people may start with the producers somebody that they actually like working besides and again it's a lot of new and upcoming producers up here that are looking to grow with artists that may want to do like splits or do like the later paperwork on the back end instead of saying hey you pay XYZ amount for beats, but either one is good to just have somebody that you can work hand in hand besides. What do you think is better in terms of a producer who is like this is my writer we're on the team and we're creating together or, you know, yeah I'm paying up front for beats, even if it's the same go to God where I found this guy online like how do you see is the best producer long relationship long term. I think the best is the one that works with you because they can learn about your style they can understand like your process of performing you know if you like the studio setup this way if you like these type of beats like this type of cadence certain things that they can more so be personable to you. That makes sense yeah. And a lot of producers they can make the beats around like if you write out the lyrics first they can make the beat around your lyrics so that'll be just you to kind of getting to know each other I think that's better. Yeah, I see that because you can go further which are artistry to like they can pull things out of you, whereas you just got a random person sending you stuff online. I mean it just is what it is you got to be and all you can work with is that. And then it's good to have like a group of people that some can be friends. Some can be people that may be strangers but it's good to always test your music out to a different group of people before it is officially released. Okay, usually call them focus groups. Now you can go to certain places and you can hire a focus group to come and listen you can also hire my team I'm sure you you and your team are for that as well as far as like where you review music and things like that. So, oh you don't know. Go to tea, go to tea. So yeah so you want honest feedback on like production. If you want like how to release it things like that. So focus groups, a lot of people do offer those and I think that is good. It's good, definitely to get it organically amongst friends or amongst people around you. That will be honest with what they like and don't like. So you want to go back into the agency part though.  Now there are agencies that can be for hire that helps you with the strategy and the direction of everything, but getting a photographer, getting a photographer because we're in a time now where content is king so content is how people directly relate to your story, doing, you know, even if you can't afford all that right now of course, as you talk all the time about doing tiktok and doing things that are relevant to your brand and putting your song behind different music like that so by different you know tiktok. That's pretty much all I have for building a team so always it's best to be organic as far as working with people that naturally gravitate towards you or actually like your musical course because they can help you educate your as a future vision way better. I like that because yeah artistry is like it's different than I don't know I work at Coca Cola or something like that, like if they're not buying into the product. It just doesn't work the same doesn't work the same so yeah not with you on that. Okay, I mean, with those are these quick tips when it comes to building the team and like I could definitely second all of those. And if y'all want more information from team or tips from tea. You can hit up to cup at where you will find me on instagram te double AC double P underscore or you can text me at 7707655 422.