Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Lauren Zoltick. I am the director of Performance Marketing at Storyblocks. Storyblocks is a stock media subscription service aimed at helping creators and businesses create better video content faster than ever. We do this by offering unlimited access an award winning highly curated library of stock footage, audio images, templates, and much more, plugins that integrate directly into your editing software and the highest legal coverage in the industry. And I'm here today with Brady Josephson, who is the VP of Marketing and Growth at Charity Water. In his role, Brady oversees, a team of marketers, makers, and story tell tellers that craft powerful stories, innovative campaigns, and incredible experiences help the world, better understand the global water crisis and help charity water in their mission to end it. Today, we're gonna be talking about a number of topics including how to leverage insights from your paid and organic social media to benefit both, how to evolve with the growing landscape, of paid in organic social and how to help your team set up, a social strategy or evolve your social strategy as the landscape changes. So, before we jump in, a couple of, quick, announcements One is you should see, on your screen a QA, tab. You can submit questions at any point throughout our conversation to the QA tab. And we're we're gonna answer them at the end. So, you know, we're not gonna, touch them during the conversation, but please submit them at any time, and we'll get to them when we can. Try to get to as many of them as we possibly can. Also, we'll be sending out a recording of today's webinar, afterwards, so you can watch it on demand. If you, wanna share it with your colleagues or peers or if you had to miss, like, a few minutes of it, you should be able to access the full recording there. If you wanna rewatch it, amazing. We'd love that. So yeah. Thank you again so much for joining. And without further ado, let's jump into our first topic, which is the state of social media today. So let's start, Broad Brady. Do you mind just telling us a little bit more about water and your role there? Of course. Happy to. Thanks for having me. So Charity Water has a mission to end the global water crisis in our lifetime. And there's about seven hundred million people on the planet today that do not have access to life's most basic need, clean and safe water. And if we talk about more regular and consistent access, that number is more like two billion. And so in our lifetime, we've provided clean water. Thanks to our community and supporters to about eighteen million people and have come a long way, but there's still so much more to go. And so that's kind of the work that we do. And, you know, more relevant for this conversation, I think, too, is the vision of the organization and the founding is rooted in really reinventing charity. Which is pretty audacious, but this idea of there's gotta be a better way to do marketing and fundraising in the nonprofit space. And so a lot of what we have tried to do on our history and what we tried to do today is learn from all different, you know, industries and verticals, but really try to innovate, and I know it's an overused word, but really try to pioneer these new and different ways to go about fundraising and marketing and have a brand that stands, apart from a lot of other nonprofit brands. And so I'm lucky I get to be a part of that along with, the amazing team that oversees the both the paid and organic side of social. It's an incredible mission, and I'm so happy that you're here today to talk about how you do that with social. So from your perspective working at an NPO, can you set this in a little bit for the current landscape of paid in organic social? Yeah. I mean, it's obviously a broad landscape, but the word that comes to mind is chaos. But kind of in a good way, I think, you know, the way that the platforms are changing, the way that, consumers and customers and supporters are changing, the way that the world changes and spins, it almost feels like trying to keep up and trying to keep on top of literally everything is kind of a fool's errand. And so part of it is maybe just embracing a bit of the chaos and trying to force yourself to simplify and force yourself to go, you know, what is this about? It's connecting people to our causes or our brands and using content to do so and just really focus on that. And I think not get too bogged down. And you know, our calms calendar, what goes out, when to who and how, and because a lot of that stuff, we can't even control like we we used to anyway. So It is chaos, but in in a weird way, it's almost like, a blessing because we can focus a little bit more on just the actual core basics of what it is that these channels allow us to do and really focus on that. Not that those other things aren't important. They are. Yeah. But sometimes you can kinda lose the real meaning and get, you know, bogged down in, like, the hacks and the tricks. And so it's been a kind of a return to the the basics, I think, that is kind of a a blessing in disguise. But it is a lot going on out there. Again, from your perspective, what are some of the the trends or things that you're currently seeing on social, that you feel like are really powerful or that you're you're paying close attention to. Yeah. A big one for us is kind of the the TikTokification of all social and even just video itself of a lot of the lower five direct to camera kind of person to personality speaking about things with maybe content or video or b roll or something in the background. Obviously, that's pretty native to the TikTok platform, but it's really expanded to reels and shorts and YouTube and all over the place. And so, that's something that we traditionally haven't done a lot of. We've we've done a lot of kind of more classic direct storytelling and not having a person in front of the camera. And so that's something we're paying a lot of attention to. We've started to test and departo's in those waters a little bit and have seen a lot of success actually with it. So that's one Okay. One thing. And then I think the other is just longer form content. That's something that we know, probably better than anyone. Our our main asset on paid and organic has been a nineteen and a half minute many documentary that we've put close to five million dollars of paid spend behind with a lot of success over a number of years, which is Crazy. Like, that I'm not necessarily recommending that, but this idea that short is always better and people have short attention. Like, those things are true, but longer form content, especially in our world where we need to evoke an emotional connection to the work. It's not just, oh, hey, you know, download your free ebook or something that's a little bit more scratchable. We have to dig a little bit deeper so the longer form content. And I think a lot of brands are finding that. You know, you see TikTok expanding their platform and every platform has kind of expanded to how long you can do things generally speaking. And I think that's because good content can be longer, and I think we're seeing that too on the social platforms. Yeah. I think, to your point around kinda like hyper focusing or getting too caught up in some of, like, the rules or trends or things that are happening on social and just focusing on, like, great storytelling. You see things happening recently, like, I don't know if folks have seen, like, the Reese TISA, TikTok story, where this woman is telling, you know, a story, and she does it over the course of fifty, ten minute parts on TikTok. And we always think about TikTok as this channel for, like, very quick one minute clips that are you're just kinda constantly scrolling through, but then she has this audience of millions of people that are watching I think, like, ten hours of her just talking in her car or her house. And so it's really I think it's all about the storytelling and the quality of the content that you're putting out there versus the tips and tricks and, you know, attention spans and all of that stuff that we kinda get lost in. Well, even the same thing, I mean, my wife and I, we when we sit down at the end of the day to watch something, it's like, oh, we don't have time for a movie. Like, we don't wanna get in a movie. And then we'll watch three hours of some TV show. You know? So it's kinda like it's not necessarily about the length of time. It's about the commitment. And once you commit, and it's good, you'll keep going. I think there's an element of that too where, yeah, I think that plays plays a role. Absolutely. Alright. Well, let's jump into our second topic, which is building your marketing strategy. And I'd love to start with, why or or why not? Would you advocate for building a paid and organic social strategy together. Yeah. I mean, we do, and I would advocate for it. I mean, every organization's different and has different goals and priorities and resources and things like that. But, you know, for me and us, there's a few things. One, you know, one of my favorite quotes from a old Madman era Adman named Howard Lacasse, is kind of the Socrates of San Francisco. He was kind of a revolutionary in the ad space and really helped birth the kind of environmental movement in the sixties and seventies. He has a quote that people read what interests them. Sometimes those are ads. And I think for us today, it's, you know, people watch what interests them. And sometimes those are ads And so those lines between, you know, paid content and organic content, you know, sponsored posts and unsponsored posts, those lines have been continually getting blurred for us. And especially today, it is. You know, the other day I watched four and a half minute ad from Target. I mean, it was a very different type of ad. So, you know, what constitutes an ad versus organic has has changed a lot. And so that's one thing just from a strategic perspective of those lines are blurred. But then from a resourcing perspective for us, you know, we have a brand and content team, a marketing communications team, a growth team, and a supporter experience team all under marketing and growth. And they all play a role in both paid and organic. So the branded content team is the one who produces basically all the content, whether it's organic or paid, And then our Mark Home team manages organic, our growth team manages paid, and then our support experience team is the one who does the listening and inbox management. And so it just makes sense for us the way that we're structured from a resource perspective too to say, hey, let's look ahead at the next quarter. What are the assets and stories and content that we wanna create for all the channels at once. And then how they get distributed is obviously different and different cuts for different channels and things like that. But from a content strategy perspective, it's just one. And that's somewhat strategic and somewhat just resource efficient for us because we don't have the ability to, you know, do bespoke custom content all the time for all the channels, unfortunately. Yeah. To your point about the target ad, I I I think I've mentioned this before, but, I was about about a couple weeks ago, I was watching. I was on Instagram and I was watching, what I thought was just a post. And I think I watched four or five minutes, and I thought it was like a clip from a broad city, episode. But it was actually a mirror that, and I had no idea. It was just, you know, and they they did a great job integrating the product in. And it took me about three minutes to realize that that's what it was. There's just so great that it's so funny that it didn't really, you know, I just it didn't trigger it for me. So that's amazing. Yeah. Definitely. Okay. So let's say, you're starting from either ground zero or kind of doing a social media strategy refresh. What are some of the, like, first questions that you would ask yourself or your team when getting started? I mean, it's pretty it's pretty common, pretty basic, but goals and audience you know, I I think especially with how much time and energy it can take to have a really good content strategy or social strategy You have to be really ruthless going into it with, like, what is the main thing that we're trying to do, from a goal perspective and then say, and who's the audience that we're trying to get that from or with, and then, you know, bring that in. And I know that's that's basic, but it's it's so paramount to really, really get that right. And one thing that we we do that we've, found helpful is we kinda bifurcate, strategies into two buckets. It's either creating future demand. So that's their kind of brand awareness, top of funnel, that type of thing, or it's capturing current demand, getting people to give or donate. And our model on the consumer side is is basically a subscription model. We focus a lot on people doing monthly giving or subscription giving. And so that's been helpful because you'll get into conversations around social, for example. And it's like, well, of course, we want people to give monthly or do subscription giving. But Is that really the best application of social or content and for us? No. Like, social is a brand building, audience building, reach focused thing. So let's goal it like that and almost not even care how many donors it does or doesn't bring in because it's almost immaterial and it's not what we're trying to do versus a lot of our paid social to date, which very much bottom funnel, ROI, Cacked LTV, all those ratios, and, like, care a lot about it. And if we don't have a lot of impressions who cares. And so You know, I think so much of what we do today in the world of digital is just about alignment and focus and that helps a ton. And so I think whether you're, you know, huge or starting out really being able to get that alignment on, like, what are the goals and then going into audience to play into the channels and content is is huge. Without it, you're just kinda throwing stuff out in the wind and chasing your tail. It's it's really tough without those things. Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense. And, so so I think next question for you is, as as someone who's done this before, what advice would you give to folks that are listening on advocating for either more team resources or budget resources to dedicate towards paid and organic social. Yeah. Again, part of that's the the goal in climate process. Right? Like, if you if you say, hey, our our goal or is to to kinda grow the reach and brand or move people from, you know, awareness to consideration, and we think social's of doing that, and we all agree that this is really important. Right? Yeah. Okay. Well, now we're gonna put resources behind it. I think that helps. The other thing that I I think is really helpful is positioning things as pilots. So whether it's a new content strategy, you're entering into a new market, you're trying a new channel, a new tactic, just not making it like a a big strategy, but more like, hey, we're just gonna try something where we're gonna pilot something. And it just kinda takes the the risk levels down a bit and even just the attitude with decision makers, I think, are like, oh, it's just it's just a pilot. You know? There's something magical, I think, about the word, pilot. And then even the internal team, it's like, hey, we're not saying we're gonna do this forever. This is really let's see if there's some, some potential here. And let's let's get into it. And, you know, you time box it, you resource constrain it, and and go about that way as opposed to trying to, you know, here's the three year plan for how we're gonna enter or use this. That just gets really overwhelming and truthfully, like, you do not know what you're doing three years from You may think you do, you don't. Like, so I I I think that's the other really important thing around kind of pilots and maybe a little bit more short term, focus on things. Yeah. I love that. I feel like it gives the team air cover to be creative and make adaptations too in a way that if you have a more long term plan feels more con constrained. Even if you set up specific plan for a pilot, it still feels like you're just making changes to a test versus, you know, making changes to a strategy that's bait. Yeah. Yeah. We used to have a big piece of, in our culture called safe to try. And it was just kind of when someone had an idea whether it was for programmatic and solving the water crisis in countries where we work or internally marketing and fundraising. It was just kind of this is it safe to try and people would kinda poke some holes in it and then eventually kinda give you thumbs up or thumbs down and say, yeah, it's safe to try. And a lot of the the work around, like, innovation or new stuff is really just about risk mitigation. If you can just lower the risk, then your ability to try and to innovate goes way up So that's what I think a lot of that is is quick alignment around pilots, you know. Absolutely. I love that. Alright. Let's jump into our third topic, which is best practices for effective paid and organic social. And I wanna start by asking you what are some of the biggest mistakes or errors that you're seeing brands make on organic or paid social at the moment. Yeah. I I don't know if it's if it's a outright error because, again, it's like, you know, your brand, your goals, your audience, etcetera. But I do think one thing that is potentially a mistake is having, like, really, really polished buttoned up content where you're hoping for more shares and engagement, perhaps. Mhmm. So, again, there's a time and a place for that. Like, when we'll often launch a new campaign, we'll have a like, beautiful rich story. And it's not really a a share ask. It's kinda like we really wanna connect with you emotionally because of what's coming next or maybe inspire you to donate. But when you want people to really kind of click and share, it needs to be a lot more participatory. And the more kinda like buttoned up in corporate something feels, especially today. It's just it's not as kinda compelling or engaging, or you you'd we don't get quite the same number of of shares. So Again, it kinda goes back to your strategy, but I think this idea of, you know, it has to be super polished and buttoned up before we can, push the button to publish is is probably a mistake. Or at least it's worth again piloting or experimenting to say, like, I bet you can get away with a lot less polished content and get just as if not more engagement, and it's easier to produce. So I think that's that's one And then I think more from a brand strategy perspective, and we're kind of revising and refreshing our our brand is something more like a personality You know, Lauren, we talked a little bit about Super Bowl commercials, previously. And I think one of the things that were pretty common across those was a lot of personality coming out in brands, whether they're, you know, using humor or, I mean, a lot of humor in those commercials, but you can kind of get a vibe or personality, and I think that's what really plays on on a lot of social channels is really understanding a brand's personality as opposed to, oh, that's great content, but doesn't really stand for something. Doesn't really mean anything other than being great content. That's kind of ignorable. So I think a lot of brand personalities are a really big focus too, and that kinda goes back to the polished content piece. This might be very related to what you just said, but what are some of the best practices you've learned from working on social with charity water specifically? Yeah. Again, I think the power of of story. I mean, it's it's again, storytelling and stories kind of a an overused word perhaps at times. But in the work that we do where, for the most part, when we're posting things on on social, whether it's organic or paid, Very few people are actually waking up in the morning saying, I'd really love to learn about the water crisis today, or even more so. I'd love to give money away. To the water crisis today. And so we have to find a way to kind of interrupt people's patterns, whether they're just, you know, on a break or looking for something else or scrolling through their phone, to interrupt that pattern. And then we have to move people from maybe not knowing anything about us or the water crisis to the point of feeling not just an emotional connection and wanting to do something, but actually feeling good about giving money away, which is not an easy thing in a relatively short period of time. And we have been able to do that, and we do that through really, really rich storytelling normally with a high emotional, quotient to it. And then ask people to give. And we've tried other kind of funnels and acquisition methods of generating traffic or capturing leads or emails and then, you know, emails to subscribers or one time donors to subscribers. And we haven't been able to find anything nearly as close as kind of a longer form, powerfully emotive video that asks someone to take action here and now. And so we've just spent a lot of time kind of perfecting some of that. And, again, the long form side that that nineteen and a half minute video just blows people's minds, to see how powerful that is, for anyone who kinda starts and washes it Yeah. I know. I love that you found so much success with something long form. It's really powerful. With Charity Water. So I think that a big theme of twenty twenty three, and it feels like twenty twenty four now as well is kind of doing more with less We've a lot of folks have felt re resource and budget cuts, but still the same expectation for a lot of social teams is the same. And so I'm curious if if you have, for yourself at Charity Water, but also for for folks who are listening in, how would you advise sort of choosing where to position resources since it's obviously getting harder and harder to be on every channel as as possible. So how do you focus in on which channels to be on what types of content to put out? Yeah. Again, goals goals performance and data, especially on the paid side. Like, it's such a data heavy focused thing where the data basically shows you the way and you have to be pretty diligent about it. You know, on the brand side, you can be, a little bit less data centric and trust your instinct a little bit more in some of the piloting of things. But I think two things that I think are really important all the time, but especially in, like, leaner environments. One is like syndication of content So, you know, we often shoot, trips. Our our brand team just got back from Bangladesh today. And we can't go back to Bangladesh. Over and over and over again or Malawi or Uganda or Ethiopia or wherever it is. Like, we kinda have a week and a half to two weeks to get the story and as many assets as we can. And then that needs to feed us for a while. And so we have to get really creative with how we use b roll and how we use cuts and repurposing content from long ago in you know, if you have a a production house kinda like what we do, you have a lot of content in reusing content, even if it's two, three years old, is still valuable content and even recutting, clips or videos or content from two or three years. So many people have never seen it. Or if they do, it's like, oh, yeah. That was awesome. Like, we get in our minds as marketers, like, oh, no. We sent that out two years ago. Nobody cares for the most part. You know? So, like, reusing and syndicating content is is a really big thing. And then also just going across the kinda like having a learning engine. So whether there's the data piece, of course, but one of the important things of our support experience team is they listen and reply to all the different comments and feed that back into our paid and organic team. And so we'll cut a video, put it out on paid. They'll see a bunch comments and be like, hey, a bunch of people are saying they're not really sure what we do. And I'm like, that's important. So we'll kinda feed it back the team will look at it and maybe cut a new intro, and then we'll publish it in that way. And so that's like soft data that there's no way for us to get other than the listening team. And so kinda being able to translate lessons learned from organic or paid back into each other, is also a way to be more efficient because you're getting, like, real time information and feedback instead of constantly doing net new stuff that's unproven. And so it they're both versions of the same thing. I'm just like, what do you already have? And how can you learn or reuse what you have? So it's less of, like, where to do it, but it's a way to kind of maximize the content you already produce in a lean environment. Yeah. I love that. And I'm sure you know this, but you can always dip into the storyblocks library, for additional b roll. Also a real life moment. If you hear for everyone in the audience. If you hear any screaming or laughter in the background, my son has woken up from a nap and seems very energized today. Alright. So last question for this topic, can you give some examples of, successful posts or initiatives that you at story sorry. At Charity Water have done on on social? Yeah. A few that jump out. One, our most, engaged piece of organic content for the whole year was a video that we call AI can't fix this. And it was our lead videographer just playing around with some new Adobe tools, honestly. On the weekend and just kinda cut this video and sent it to me and someone else and we're like, this is this is awesome. Like, let's let's put it out there. And so we we put it out there, and it doesn't even like, if you really get into it, it doesn't make a ton of sense. But just the the vibe is perfect. You know, obviously AI is such a topic in just the normal conversation, which ties into that. It's beautiful, stunning. And it was a good example of, like, we didn't sit in a room and come up with the calm at in a three hour brainstorm, you know, it's just a creative, curious person playing around and saying, what what if we posted this? And we did. We tried running it on paid. It didn't quite work as well, but on the organic side, it was it was great. So that was one big win in lesson learned. And then another one, kind of, in that direct to camera mode, you can see in the the slide there, Scott Miller, who runs our monitoring and evaluation program. We just said, there's a new announcement from UniceF in the World Health Organization saying how the number of people without, clean water went down to seven hundred three million What have we just shot one of the most smarty, smartest nerdy guys in our whole organization explaining that with a little b roll? And so we were at an off-site. We shot it. It's pretty kinda dry straightforward, and people absolutely loved it because it was just educational and informational in a compelling way. And it was, again, a super easy shoot. Scott, like, wrote most of the script himself, kinda like one, two takes, simple cut, and is powerful, not just in that it worked in terms of engagement, but it was highly educational content. So those are a couple interesting wins for us. And I think the common thread is, like, You don't have to put a ton of resource and thought necessarily around every single piece of content. It's more of that constant, you know, thinking and curiosity and putting stuff out there. And again limiting some of that risk and fear. Yeah. I love that. Alright. We're gonna jump into our fourth topic, which is a look at what's next in social. So let's start with some of your predictions for what's gonna happen on social in twenty twenty four. I I don't like making predictions, Lauren. I think the big not elephant in the room, but the big thing for all of us is just the election. And what that means, particularly on the paid side. I mean, we were talking about this just this morning with, kind of our TV vendor and just what does this mean to try to, you know, be on TV in an election year, and it's kind of chaos, but not just the the on the paid side. I just think the narrative around it people leaning into it, avoiding it, playing off it, the organic conversations that happen. It's just it's gonna dominate the feeds and what does that mean? And so for us, we're we're gonna try to lean into it and play off it a bit. You know, we're an apolitical organization, but we're kinda having an annual theme, like, something we can all agree on and just saying, look, there's gonna be a lot of divisive rhetoric, but one thing that we should be able to all agree on is everyone deserves says to clean water. And so we're hoping to kinda play into it a little bit so that we can have some voice in the conversation. Otherwise, it's just really hard to stand out in in election years. So that's less of a prediction, more of, like, a concern or something that we see coming, but There's no way that's not gonna impact the things that that we do across organic and paid. Yeah. And I I think we've seen in the past that that has such an impact particularly on social platforms. So I would say it's a a very firm prediction. It's a it's a clear it's gonna happen. So one, trend, I think, to your your conversation around, like, direct to camera, one, trend that we're starting to see more is companies recruiting in house creators to be sort of like the face of their social. Do you think that this tactic will stick? Do you like this tactic? Is this something that you're looking into, for charity water? Yeah. We we tried. We tried to hire someone. So when when we were kind of rethinking about social and hiring a social media manager, we kinda had someone who did a great job managing social for a bunch of years, but he was just getting spread pretty thin. And so we said, well, what if we actually hired kind of a content creator as social media manager? And so we did. We went through a whole process and and hired someone. Unfortunately, kind of two weeks in, she landed a bunch of acting gigs. And so I was like, hey, I'm sorry. I signed a deal with Netflix or HBO or something like that. I'm gonna go to Hollywood and be an actor and be like, didn't see that one coming. So we kinda tried to go down that path and kinda got burned. So we pivoted back to a a more traditional social media manager who could do a little bit more direct to camera, but it's It's more of a nice to have as opposed to the main thing. And so what we'll try to do is introduce a variety of we're calling them charity water personalities, but not just our founder and not just the social media manager, but just more humans across the organization. Yeah. That can that can speak to things and do a little bit more of that direct to camera. So Again, I don't know how long that kind of trend will last. It's always a pendulum swing. It stands out and it works, and then everyone does it, and it becomes normal and doesn't work anymore. At least for now, in the next bit, I I think it's gonna work for a while. And so we'll keep pursuing it just not not with an in house creator. Yeah. I liked, Jared's comment, which is just means you picked a really good one because they got Yeah. I guess so. That's one that's one way to take it. Yeah, we we did a webinar, I guess, gosh, back in September with, Kyle Denhoff from HubSpot around leveraging your internal team as creators. And I think that that feels like a much more, a strategy that has a lot of longevity because you're not basing all around one person who, you know, who leaves the company. Yeah. And so the the approach that they've taken is they find, like, experts in house that are you know, subject matter experts who don't mind being in front of a camera and you just practice and, like, know that the first couple pieces aren't gonna be perfect, but you know, they kinda get used to it. And they they have a, you know, they have a pretty nice, production team to be able to help, but, I think it's a great strategy regardless. No. For sure. And again, I think when you kind of get in this bucket of low fi, lower stakes, more human actually works, it makes that way, way easier. Know, in that long nineteen and a half minute, spring film that we did, one of the the reasons why we think a lot of people stop their thumb and start engaging with it is it starts quick with a person looking at the camera, and then it breaks. He actually cracks early on and kinda laughs and looks off camera and says something to someone. And it's just really human and kind of unexpected moment. And that was somewhat intentional, somewhat not intentional, but when you look at the first six seconds of any video, it's critical to do something that kind of gets someone to pause and stop. And so we've since tried to replicate elements of that even with, you know, longer form stories we'll shoot ten, fifteen second quick intros from people. And I think there's an example of one that we might send out and really rough. Like, she stumbles over words. She's in her garden. Like, it's it's not super polished, but it's something that can really stand out. And she's just she runs our marketing in the UK. You know, like, there's way more of those opportunities that you can pursue if you're if you're open to that. Absolutely. Alright. So last question for me is if you can leave everyone with one key learning from today, what would it be? I think I'll go back to that Howardlock Osage quote of just people watch what interests them, and sometimes it's ads, you know, just if we're creating really compelling interesting content, that always has to be the main goal. And then you can figure out the best way to cut it and slice it and dice it and put it on channels. But if you start getting too focused on the hack, the tip, the trick, the channel, the specificity of the platform. The content often is what suffers. And even if it works for a little bit, it's just it won't work over the long term and the the shelf life of the content or the content strategy just isn't the same. So, again, not that those things aren't important, but if you can't create compelling stuff, it doesn't matter how much of those other things you know in the long run. So And again, those lines are just so blurred today that thinking about really great content across both organic and paid is is really, really key. Yep. A hundred percent. Alright. So let's jump into our q and a real quick before we do. Our next webinar will be on March twentieth at one PM. It'll be on producing b to b video marketing that actually converts. It will be featuring, Kristen and Kyle from Superside. And I will be, stepping aside for one month as host, and our our creative director, Caitlyn Rosie, will be, joining the group. So if you've been on, it's gonna be a really great panel. I hope everyone can join. Also, if you're interested in at previous webinars we've hosted or just more content from, from storyblocks. You can head over to storyblocks dot com, but storebox dot com slash resources. We have a ton of great blog content, webinars, white papers, tons of, courses to learn from. Around video editing, marketing, social media. It's a great resource. So I highly recommend you take a look. This webinar will be available there on demand. Tomorrow. But we'll also send that out to everyone via email. Also, when we do send out this webinar on demand, we're gonna include some of the links that, to the social posts that Brady referenced, around Charity Waters, most successful content. So look for that. And, yeah, get excited about washing some of the water content if you haven't seen it already. Alright. So let's jump into the q and a. I'm gonna start with a question. You're okay. As a nonprofit helping those experiencing homelessness, this this person hasn't started a TikTok account yet. What type of content would you recommend posting on TikTok, and in general how should we make content for TikTok that diff that's differentiated from content on other platforms? Oh, good question. Again, I'll just give you my thoughts. That's not a industry that we work in, and we're not even that big on TikTok either. So I I think two things. One, especially when you're dealing with sensitive groups and populations. One of the easiest things is to use your own content yourself. So, again, that kind of who's a program's person or yourself who can maybe be on location and talk about things, without necessarily needing to go into people's privacy and their sales and their stories that they may or may not want you to share. I think that's always a consideration. You know, we work really hard on consent when and if we do share people's stories, That's something that we have to do, whether you're in the non profit industry or not. So I think that's an extra consideration when you're working, with people experiencing homelessness. And, again, that kind of direct to camera content. Outside of that, I I do think, and we've seen this successful for some other nonprofits. Instead of kinda spending a lot of hours making micro content, there's a really good argument to spend more hours creating that one longer piece that tells one person's story or the organization's story that has more of an arc that's really compelling because that has a lot of longevity. And then you can always cut it, tweak it, slice it, and dice it by from the big thing. But if you're always just, like, small, small, small, small, small, you can't stitch it the small pieces back together to have a longer form more valuable asset. So, again, my default would be more like invest in the long form asset first that you can send to donors. You can run it at an event. It's a lot more functional instead of creating very bespoke content just for a platform that is here today and then it's gone. So that's a resource maximization thing. So not so much on TikTok. Well, you could run it on TikTok now if it's longer So I think that's something to really consider. One test one, tactic that we've tested at storyblocks that has worked well, is creating thinking about both at the same time. So we've done, like, this is obviously specific to story blocks, but, like, we've done, like, five transitions, like, tutorials, like, the best transitions between, you know, video clips. And, we broke each one down as an individual, like, short form video, but then we had the whole one on YouTube. So that also helped us kinda get more longevity out of our You know, the other thing that we've we've done is more like behind the scenes. So when we travel, we'll have a team of three to five. And so often one will kind of take pictures or do videos and recordings of the other folks working. So whether traveling or being in a jeep on a bumpy road in Uganda, whatever it might be. And that's another way to get kind of more human authentic short form content that can work on shorts and TikTok without, kind of duplicating the effort. Like, if you are going out to shoot a story, you know, having a second person there to capture you capturing the story is another way to to kind of duplicate your content. Yeah. It's a a great piece of advice. Alright. Where did the assets come from for your team, when making creative for social? Do you use stock? Do you only use graphics, original footage, and photos, all of the above? All of the above, we do use some some stock, like we wanna test some more interesting concepts that aren't from, like, Uganda or or the places where we work. Like, we tried to do one that was trying to be humorous and lean into everyone and during COVID, which absolutely bombed, but we used a lot of stock, for that because we didn't have the ability to shoot, and due use of a lot of copywriting and and editing. But for the most part, we we capture all of our, photo and video assets ourselves, in the field. And then, we have so many assets. And then we work to to create those for different channels. What was the second part of that question again? I think that was it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we produced them mostly, mostly in house. Awesome. Alright. How do you manage, or what are some of the best practices when your organization has multiple programs or multiple social media pages and accounts. Sorry. Can you repeat it? So are there any best practices for when an organization has multiple, social media accounts or pages? So we we have multiple accounts. We created a second account specific to a hundred percent model. So one of the kind of disruptive or innovative things that we did was essentially we were started way back in two thousand six, our founder created two bank accounts, one that would have all of our operations revenue. And that's how we'd pay salaries and office and marketing and me and whatever. And then another one that would only have, money that would go to water project. And so that was kind of this separate strategy. And these two pots of money are separately audited. They'd never meet so that we could more transparently unauthentic tell people when you give to charity water every single penny, we even pay back credit card fees, we'll go to support water projects. And so That's a key kind of differentiator of the brand. And so we created a hundred percent model handle on Instagram. That's not active. It's if you go to it, it's just one page that has all the tiles to spell out more about a hundred percent model, and we don't update it or anything. But we'll often tag it or link to it from stories and posts particular on Instagram when when it's like, hey, check out more about a hundred percent model. Instead of people leaving platform or cross linking, it was a pretty billing way. Nothing to do with it. To get people to learn more by staying on platform and being able to link to an account, which is way easier than, you know, a short link or something like that. So that's the only kind of multiple account that we have. We are exploring more, like, regional accounts. We have a a charity in the UK and has always been struggled with, you know, global brand versus hyper local and what does that relationship look like? And we're kind of exploring that. I just think generally speaking, same thing with multiple accounts or channels, you're you're often better doing fewer and less more and better than spreading yourself out too thin for multiple accounts or multiple channels. It's really hard to sustain those if they're dynamic. So I would pursue those strategies pretty cautiously. You need a really, really good use case to have multiple accounts. The role I was in before, I was storyblocks was overseeing social and digital marketing for Marriott Hotels. And, you know, I I inherited, a brand that had hundreds of social media accounts for each location. And there's also regional accounts and then there was our global account. And our global account had by far the most followers, obviously, but, you know, some of the local hotels did really in, you know, try and invest in their social channels. And so one of the things that we did while I was there was we implemented essentially, like, a guide book. It wasn't, like, you know, a hundred pages. It wasn't, like, down to, like, which emojis you weren't allowed to you, you know, it was it was not incredibly specific, but it just had, you know, guidelines around fonts, around types of images. We had a collection of, approved photos that included each location. And then we had, like, a Canva account, that essentially was templatized so that you could access it from different like, they could all access the same templates and and create content on their accounts for it. So that things were a little bit more brand safe and standardized. So there was no way of, like, you know, I agree with you. I think, like, doing less is sometimes better, not spreading yourself too thin, but when you are in a situation where you have to have that, those are some of the best practices that that we ran into. Well, on the the customer service side, I think, is a bit of an exception too. Like, if if you do have so many, like, if you're staying at that hotel and you're at Marriott, you're never gonna Probably get the answer you want where if you at, you know, Nashville Marriott, you might have a chance. So I do think that that's one of the biggest arguments for us in the UK is not even so much from a content perspective, but If you're a UK supporter and you have a question around a UK tax receipt or something like that, you should deal with people in the UK instead of kind of going to the central. So there are use cases. I just think general. Yeah. You gotta be careful with it. Yep. Alright. Great. Let's do one more question. Should this one's a little bit on the, in house creators we were talking about. Do you think that creators should offer or, try and find positions in house for brands, or do you feel like that's too niche of a job right now? It's probably a little niche. I think it's coming more and more common. So I I mean, I don't know of too many nonprofits that do that. For example, like, we're I think we're gonna be one of the first to to do that. And there's difference between obviously being a creator in house and someone who manages social who can also be a bit of a creator. So I think that's a necessary distinction, but I do think it will be more and more common. So, you know, if you were able to carve that out and pursue it, it might be a little niche, but it may not be quite as competitive where you might stand out whereas in a year or two, there might be way more people that are kind of, you know, in house creators. You know, one thing that I forgot to mention too is we've developed a local storytelling program where we have creators who are on contract in the countries where we work. So in Bangladesh and, Sierra Leone in Nepal. We have three right now. And the the goal is so that we can produce more real time content without kind of sending our our brand team to the field. So there could be some equivalent like that. So instead of someone being full in house, you know, someone who can kind of cover a territory or a region or in your Marriott example, they can kind of be shared across a state and work with a variety of you know, Marriott. So those kind of hybrid in house, maybe serving a a few different needs could be also a different, a different approach. But I think his content needs go up and they do go up and you wanna have more of that, real timey authentic content. I think we have to hire those folks or at least contract them in. Otherwise, there's there's no way to keep up with that strategy. Yeah. A hundred percent. I so I lied. There's, like, six more questions that just came in. I wanna answer a couple more of them because they're really good. Alright. Do you find there is a line emotionally with your with your content that you shouldn't cross? Like, can you go too far with trying to tug on heartstrings? Yeah. For sure. I think one of the the brand principles we have is that it starts and ends with hope, and it used to be hope is greater than guilt. I mean, I'm I'm old now, so people may not know this, but a lot of the kinda like one eight hundred commercials that you'd watch late at night are pretty pretty guilt ridden. One, it positions the people that we serve in a very negative light. You know, these kind of helpless, people that are deeply in need and just we don't think that's the right way nor an accurate way to portray the people and communities to be served. So we we stay away from that. But also just guilt isn't a great driver. So it is a fine line of tipping over into guilt versus making someone feel compelled. And we talk about that all the time, and it's not something that you can really clearly define. We know that if we don't evoke some emotional component, people will not get they may like. They may share. They will not give. And so we know we have to do that, but I think we do a pretty good job of of putting up some guardrails to never cross that line where we're positioning things in a inaccurate or manipulative way and not doing something solely for this the point of guilt and always ending with a solution. Like sixteen, sixteen thousand children on the age of five will die because they don't have water this week. I'm not saying that to make anyone feel guilty. That is a straight up fact, but we don't end there. Then we say, but you know what? It just costs forty dollars, and you can provide clean water to one person for ten years. Like, join us and do that. Like, you have to provide hope at the end of it. And too often fundraising is just leaves you with the guilt. And then you're like, oh, I might give. And even if you do give, you're not telling your friend about it. You're not sharing on social about it. So that's the other thing of trying to build a brand and a movement is we want people to feel good about connecting to the cause with others not just given quiet. So it is a really tough tough line, and I don't know if we've perfected it, but I think we do a pretty good job compelling without going over the line into guilt. Love that. It's a very, I feel like powerful answer and and and really cool that you're team thinks about that, in that way. Alright. This question is could you talk about AI? Are you integrating it do you have an AI policy? This person thinks that we need to be transparent when using it. Do you think it can compromise brand integrity, especially in a chair in the charitable sector. Yeah. I I do think it it can. I think especially when kind of the previous question and comment where we feel a responsibility to to share stories that are accurate and truthful. We've gone out of our way to talk specifically about how things weren't created by AI, and we try to tag the creators who do it to know that humans have actually created it. And so I think as more general of AI and more a content goes out, we're thinking of it more as to say we're not that. To to kind of make sure that we're doing that. Now that being said, we do use AI just not so much on kind of the creation side of things yet. We'll use a lot of AI tools and we're exploring more on the copywriting side where it's really just you spend a lot of time writing versions of the same copy and, like, there's automated tools and AI tools that can help with a lot of that. So we are exploring it. I just think when it comes to images and video in particular, we're really kinda hesitant because of where we are as brand and what we believe around and around storytelling, but, you know, it's still pretty early days for us. But I I think we're all gonna have to wrestle and grasp with with what's truth and what's reality and what do we say overtly and what do we not. So we're just at the early stages on that for us. Yep. Alright. I'm gonna do one more question, officially this time. It seems like building upon our audiences has been more difficult in the past year more than ever. Do you have any advice on breaking the stagnation that many are experiencing right now? Oh, man. I wish I had that answered because we we've seen that too, you know, organic because is mostly flats. We had to produce way more content just to keep the same level of of reach, which isn't, a winning strategy. You can't just create more and more content to stay the same. And on the paid side, we've been able to have a lot of success to lower our our cost and efficiency. I I think a lot of it, again, is there's a forcing function right now for us where I think we've been able to be a little lazy going back a few years and let platforms do a lot of the workforce, especially on the paid side. And so I think there's a real opportunity to really understand audience, really understand content that compels, like, dig a little deeper into what's going on instead of where, again, this is not a terrible strategy, but just throw a bunch of pieces of content out there and let the platforms kind of figure it out. That doesn't work quite the same way that it that it used to. And so it does put a lot more pressure on on some of that research behind the the concepts. But I also think, like, keep going. Things turn really, really quick. So, like, if if, if we stop producing content, if we stop our paid strategy for whatever reason, things things really can turn around in in a short period of time, just like turned around in a negative way a few years ago, and if you're not already still working through the gear, still trying to find a solution, it's gonna be hard to catch up. On the other side. And so, you know, be smart, limit resources, be lean, but, like, shutting things down or really walking away is super super risky, because it's hard just to get it fired back up again. Yeah. One one thought I'll add to is In my role, I I oversee our, partnerships so that our engagement with creators, as well as paid an organic social And so, one thing that I often think about is, like, taking the lessons that I learned from working with influencers and creators and applying it to our own organic and paid social. And as someone who, like, is negotiating contracts with influencers with my team, one of the things we look at is or I would say the main thing we look at, if we're working with someone new is the kind of consistency of video views or engagement on their previous posts. Honestly, I I rarely even, like, check subscribers, followers, etcetera. I'm more looking at what their reach is for the post that we potentially be sponsoring. And so I think pulling that thinking into your own and at least this is what we've done into our own social, you know, KPIs and goals. We're looking more at, like, you know, what are our, you know, month over month video views, our traffic to site, all of those things, particularly when it comes to organic social, over, you know, follower growth and subscriber growth. Just because of the way that social is right now, you can get a ton of, engagement and video views with a small audience or a big audience. And so to me, that's a more valuable metric at this moment. Yeah. No. That's a great point. You know, one other thing is is collaborations. Right? Like, if there's if there's similar ish brands that are both kind of struggling, some of our best performing posts for all collaboration posts Right? And so that'd be another, it's kind of different platform to platform, but that, like, we're both kinda struggling. What if we teamed up and you know, both helped each other out is a is a good strategy too. Yeah. We've been experimenting with that as well. Awesome. Alright. Well, thank you so much, Brady, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Just a reminder, our next webinar is March twentieth at one PM. And it's on b to b video marketing that actually converts. Again, you can check storyblocks dot com slash resources for webinars like this, this webinar, and a lot of incredible content produced by the Starbucks team. And then, stay tuned. We will send out an on demand version of this webinar. It's very soon. Alright. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.
