How to Create Online Community with Susan Tenby Episode 2

Susan Tenby Global Director of Community at TechSoup where I oversee TechSoup’s Social Media, Community Forums and Events, Net Squared program, and will develop the overall Community Management strategy for TechSoup Online Community, Social Media and Partnership Director of Caravan Studios, where I run all the social media channels, recruit volunteers, identify and engage influencers, curate relevant content, plan and participate in both online and on-the-ground monthly events, speak publicly on behalf of the organization and spearhead development opportunities via network mapping and creation. TechSoup Online Community and Social Media Director, where I was responsible for the strategy behind the community team's promotion, management and direction of the TS community forums and social media channels. Designing a social networking and live, interactive event plan across the social graph for the community that TechSoup serves Runs the social media accounts for the legendary all-female rock band, The Go-Go's. Launched a community of over 400 nonprofit staff members and volunteers in Second Life. Asked to Testify before the US Congress about this work in virtual worlds Runs an active monthly online community meet-up in San Francisco for fellow online community managers in he SF Bay Area to exchange ideas and best practices with a membership of over 1500 Frequently speaks at conferences on online community & social media best practices Subject Matter Expert who writes and consults on the topic of online community building in its various forms. Has deep understanding of what it takes to launch and sustain a community from the ground-up and has done this successfully many times with many of my philosophies being kept in practice for over 10 years. Specialties: Second Life, Social Networking Apps, Conference Speaking Appearances, Clips, Blogs, Groups, listserv's, Community Management For Press coverage, see: http://del.icio.us/suzboop/susantenby http://npsl.wikispaces.com/Press+Coverage Resume at: http://susantenby.com/about-me/cv/

Episode Transcript

(00:18):
This is Edwin k Morris,
and you are about to embark on thenext Pioneer Knowledge Services
because you need to know a digitalresource for you to listen to folks
share their experience and knowledgearound the field of knowledge management
and nonprofit work.

(00:42):
If your company or organization wouldlike to help us continue this mission and
sponsor one of our shows, email,
b byn tk pioneer-ks.org.
Joining us for the second segmentfeaturing Susan Tenby of TechSoup

(01:05):
Organization, which is a globalnonprofit organization. Welcome Susan,
and welcome back to the show. Thank.
You. It's nice to be back.
Let's talk here. The first volley ofour conversation was all about you,
where you got your start.
Why are you such a super trooperwhen it comes to building community?
This time we're gonnatalk about resources and,

(01:26):
and a little bit more about some ofthe under the hood elements of getting
people in involved andfor the right reasons.
Let's talk about some of the things youhad quoted in an earlier discussion with
me. Success is not bythe number of followers.
Can you talk a littlemore about that? I mean.
What I've noticed, um,
both with my day job and with theside hustle is the first thing

(01:50):
people say to me who aren't experiencedin online community is, Hey,
we only have 4,000 followers. Weneed to get to 400,000 by next week.
How can you do that ?And you know, the truth is,
that's the absolute wrong wayto think about online community.
It's not about how many followers youhave. You can buy followers, they're bots,

(02:10):
they're called, and youcould buy them on eBay.
It's not about how manyfollowers you have,
it's about how manyengaged users you have.
And I'm not talking evenabout a hundred David Spins,
who's a online committee expert, whom Irecommend that everybody subscribe to.
His blog recently said, youdon't need a hundred true fans.

(02:31):
You just need 10 really engagedusers to help your community move.
Considering that the posterto lurker ratio mm-hmm.
one to 10 in a healthy.
Before you go farther, can youdefine what that means? The.
Poster to lurker ratio is theratio of people who post versus
read in an online community. Okay.Read a question or post a question. So.

(02:54):
There's, they're not participating,they're just reading.
Yeah.
They might be googling a question andthey land at a forum or something like
that.
The poster to lurker ratioin an online community for a
successful community is one to10. One poster per 10 lurkers.
Knowing that having 10engaged posters that you could

(03:17):
name off the top of your head shows thatyou have a really good community. Okay.
And a community with a thousand people,if you can call 10 people in and say,
Hey,
I wanna have a group call with you guysand listen to you and take feedback from
you and your ideas, that's what Irecommend. I think that's the best wage.
Cuz you're so close to your communitythat you might not be thinking about it

(03:40):
from the very ground. You're thinkingabout it from a top-down perspective.
Mm-hmm. , I mean,
we at the TechSoup communityhave had the same hosts,
the same group of about 10 to 12hosts for decades. That's gold.
These people are so invested,
it's more their community than it'syours and you are just providing the
infrastructure.

(04:00):
Well, walk me through what that structureyou just spoke about looks like.
So an organization that's looking todo this could maybe copy that. Yeah.
So the way that an organizationcould build this kind of
cadre of experts andvolunteer moderators and hosts
would be, you could do,if it's an email list,

(04:21):
you could do what I did in the old days.
It still works where you filterit into Outlook or whichever mail
client you use, and do a sort on who,
you can also do it manually insocial media. Like in Facebook,
you can look for names that are familiar.If you have the tools in your forum,
you can go search on the backend andsee who's logging in most frequently and

(04:42):
who's posting most frequently.Mm-hmm. ,
the forum tools will tell you,and you can use the badge mm-hmm.
mechanisms to reward thosepeople by awarding them a badge like a
star. I recommend, I mean, just bymanually assessing your own forum,
you can see who's asking thequestions most frequently,
who's answering people'squestions, who's liking posts,

(05:04):
and being an engaged member and mm-hmm. making you notice them.
And once you do, let them knowthat you notice them, thank them.
Write them backstage as I say, you know,kind of write them a DM and say, Hey,
I noticed you. Thank you so much. Youmight start with sending them some swag.
We have tech soup socks, we have,you know, key chains and notebooks.

(05:25):
Like just a thank yougoes a long way. Yeah.
It might be that you give them somethingfree access to something like feedback
on.
Let, let, let me just break in. Isthere like a school bus outside?
I don't make that. It's like, holy cow,go. Come on, you holler out the window.
Hey, keep that debt. You move your baby.
If it wasn't my downstairsneighbor, they know me well enough.

(05:46):
I'm gonna tell them I'mrecording. Hold on one second.
Hold on. Okay. Thank you.
Hey, Claire.
Hey Claire.
I'm sorry.
He's screwing a tantrum and laying.
On the sidewalk.
So I can't really, oh, of course.
I can't really stop it. I'm sorry. I mean,I, I don't wanna be like that person,

(06:09):
but I feel that way. Okay. So wherewere, what were we talking about?
We were talking about buildingthose engaging followers
and.
With every successful community,
no matter how small you shouldfollow this methodology of
DMing and saying to your starusers, Hey, I recognize you.

(06:30):
I'd love to get you in a group call.
What it will do is not only giveyou feedback from the ground up,
but it will also build, um,kind of create ownership,
a sense of ownership from thosestar members, which will help you.
You want them to feel invested andto feel the sense of ownership.
It will help you manageyour community well.
How does an organization go fromrecognizing and endorsing someone to

(06:54):
represent their organization? That'sgotta be a bit of a liability, isn't it?
So we have an ambassador program thatwe just launched at TechSoup. Okay.
It's a ladder of engagement. You know,
we don't tell them that they canidentify as a TechSoup staff member. We,
but we do send them to conferencesas like a thank you after, you know,
there's like the first step, whichis like the sending them socks,
kind of thank you. And then it'slike getting them on a call.

(07:17):
And then after they've represented theirknowledge and their expertise in our
forums by answering questions and maybeWR writing blogs and participating in
webinars, and we, we can trust them,
we might send them to a conferenceto speak as a TechSoup ambassador.
It doesn't mean that they're representingthe organization as a staff member,

(07:38):
but it's one step abovebeing a regular user.
And it's like a ladder ofengagement. And the more you do this,
it will help you grow your community.
Because the concept is,
is based on the fact thateverybody wants to be famous,
whether they know it or not. Givingthem that kind of amplification,
giving the members that kindof amplification as, Hey,

(08:00):
we think this person's reallysmart. Mm-hmm. ,
they're doing this great stuff. They,they are experts giving them that mm-hmm.
platform,uh, will make them,
encourage them to promote it to theirown networks, thereby amplifying,
boosting your signal andamplifying your own message,
extending the edges of your own network.
But how do you build in quality checks? I,

(08:20):
I just have to assume insuch a large footprint,
digitally and physicallythat TechSoup occupies,
how do you just check tomake sure everything's good?
I mean, you have to at some pointhave a disclaimer saying, you know,
we're not responsible if someperson brings down your network.
But unless it's the membership basedcommunity I was talking about earlier,

(08:43):
quad, which is actuallystaffed by TechSoup staff,
it's staffed by our IT guys. Okay.Basically, so our IT department,
I should say, although they are the guysthat are doing it, are actually guys.
So there has to be some sort, sortof disclaimer language like, Hey,
we hope this is helpful for you, but wearen't taking responsibility if it's.
Not.
Do you require like anNDA kind of signature for somebody that's a power user,

(09:05):
like an ambassador?
No, we don't becausethey're not disclosing any,
there's no secret that theywould be privy to that We would.
Oh.
Got it. There's no like companyIP that they would have.
That's kind of the realm that folks thatare looking to, to build a community.
The common phraseology is communityof practice. Community of purpose.

(09:26):
These are different typesof functional communities.
But you are talkingabout kind of a hybrid,
is that you want a communityof engagement around a topic
or an around a theme.
Can, can you repeat yourquestion or rephrase it?
Community of practice isone and a community of, uh,

(09:47):
purpose are two different types of.
I can explain what those are. If you want.
Go right ahead.
Okay. So there, there aredifferent types of communities.
There's communities of practice,which are, let's say Excel users,
which might talk about how to makea pivot table or web designers.
So they form a communityaround a specific practice.

(10:08):
And then there's communitiesof purpose, bird watchers,
people who are interested in,
in viro tech or people who areinterested in food insecurity,
that there's a common purpose thatbrings their communities together.
And then there are athird type of communities,
which are the communities that are mm-hmm.

(10:28):
Everybody who's in marathontraining group or Burning Man.
And once the project is over ora community around a web project,
once it's completed,then they don't Right.
Participate in the community anymore.Even with, for example, a hack,
let's say that there was a hack, asecurity breach mm-hmm. ,

(10:49):
we all jump into a community todiscuss it. Once it's resolved,
the community can close.
Dissipates. Yeah.
That is a big consideration that youwould suggest that an organization look at
is the lifetime arc ofprojected usefulness in a design
feature of the why. When you'reanswering the why are we doing this?
You just answered a couple of lifelinekind of segments that are different and

(11:13):
for different reasons. And I thinkthat's a big consideration to,
to look at because this isa resource, not intense,
but an organization has to, tohave a successful, my guess,
successful engagement with yourcommunity. You gotta have some resources.
Yeah. You shouldn't ever,ever farm it out to an intern.

(11:34):
You should always remember thatsocial media is not the same as online
community. You can decide whereyou want your online community,
it could live in Facebook orLinkedIn as a group. Yeah.
But it's not the same as a page. If youdon't want to have a separate forum,
like maybe it, there's no reasonto have it live standalone. Mm-hmm.
, it doesn't need tobe be closed or private. Mm-hmm.

(11:54):
, it doesn'tneed to be paywall.
Then you might wanna have it where yourcommunity already is. So for example,
Facebook. Mm-hmm. .
But you need to be able to resourcethe forum itself or the group itself
with somebody that can answerquestions and tag others.
Like if they can't answer a, aquestion, they can tag someone who can.

(12:15):
Uh, somebody that helpscurate that flow and.
Moderate the discussion.
Yeah. Moderate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. If there's, if there it starts toget contentious, somebody who can say,
Hey, you know, this is out of bounds.
Yep. You're outta the pool. Yeah.
In that constructionphase of building this,
is there a perception ora reality that says if our

(12:37):
market, our age demographic of thefolks we wanna communicate with,
that is our engagementcommunity is between 19 and 31.
Is there a method out there somewherethat says, don't use Facebook,
that's for old people, don't use LinkedIn.That's for business people. I mean,
is there a map out there tohelp organizations figure out what channel do I even

(12:58):
go in?
I don't know. I'm not familiar with amap. I mean, I guess you could ask cmx,
but I would recommend for you to thinkabout where is your constituency,
where are they? And ifthey're on Instagram,
that's not a good tool forcommunity. Mm-hmm. Instagram is,
is a visual platform. It'snot a community based tool.
You don't even have clickable links inInstagram unless you do a link tree or

(13:19):
link in bio situation. Okay. Irecommend, like, is are they in Twitter?
Are they like,
you have to figure out where your peopleare and consultants can help if you
can't, but you probably know where yourcommunity is and that would be the.
First, do you not see an age bracketanywhere of who's using what?
I don't think that young peopleare using Facebook. They're not,

(13:40):
I think a lot of young people areusing LinkedIn groups. Think that, um,
I'm seeing more and morepeople using Alignable.
Alignable is like a LinkedIn alternative.
It's a business basedkind of like nextdoor.com.
It's like location basedbusiness community.
So I'm seeing more and morepeople use that. But again,
it does depend on whereyour constituency is. Yeah.

(14:01):
There are also app based communities.
People use band for thingsthat other than bands.
The band app is being used forcommunities. WhatsApp, like in Europe,
everybody uses WhatsApp. So youreally do have to start Yeah.
With where your community is. Yep.
And then you figure outbased on that, what to do.

(14:22):
And if you need to put your ownplatform up, like we put up Quad, the,
the new community inTechSoup using Circle.
You're using all kinds of words.
I don't even know what the hellyou're talking about. What's Circle?
Circle Dot. So is the platformthat we built Quad in,
which is a wonderful new communityplatform that very easy to
use.
Is there an example of thatanywhere that people can look at?

(14:44):
Or do they have to join the club?
I, I think there might be a, anopen community of Circle users.
Let me just try to grab that real quick.
Um, that is, uh, that's, that's the,okay. So it is just called Circle Circle.
So yeah.
Circle. So, so you can look, Ithink there is a circle community.
So you can see how it, what it looks like.

(15:05):
Yeah. Now wait a minute. Allright. So this is the deal.
We're talking about stuff that Ihave somewhat of a finger in the pie
of, you're showing me stuff I never evenheard of before. My question is this,
how does an organization pin the tailon the donkey today and not switch gears
a month from now whensomething else pops up?

(15:26):
How do we know that a platform's notgonna go under or become less popular
once we invest in it? So I thinkthat's a super valid question.
It's an argument fornot using a new startup.
And I feel bad for the onesthat are new. Fabulous.
Cuz I've spoken to some reallyhelpful community platforms that are

(15:46):
visionary, but I'm afraid.
So. Yeah. It's hard to park your wagonin something that you just, it's like,
wow, you're betting all the horseson this one gig. And it's like.
Mm. It makes it difficult forcommunity startups. But you know,
maybe they start with givingfree instances to people. I mean,
I've seen many come and go.It's also good to have, um,

(16:08):
that's an argument for having redundancyand having your community across
platforms, not just in one place.
Good point. Good point.It's just like investing.
You're gonna have a little bit over here,
a little bit over there cuz you're notsure which is gonna win the race and
who's gonna lose. But you're, you'rejust kind of playing the field. Uh, the,

(16:28):
the question is, is that onceyou have this investment,
what's your measurementof success? I mean,
you are the leader of thiselement, correct? Correct.
You know, with the tech soup community,we've switched kind of midstream,
we've switched platforms multiple times.
And I would say the measure of successfor the TechSoup community is that the

(16:52):
attrition wasn't huge.It was pretty minimal.
And the engagement is actually up overwhere it was three years ago when we were
on a different platform.
So I would say a measure of successis does your community survive? Mm.
When you switch platforms Mm.
Are you able to successfullymigrate the membership?
I would say another measure of success is,

(17:13):
does a question get answeredwithin 24 hours? Yeah.
I insist on that in terms of the workI'm doing. Mm-hmm. ,
I will prioritize it over other things.
Another measure of a success is arepeople asking and answering each other's
questions without you having to intervene?
Are they bringing it to your attention,saying, Hey, this is cool. Mm-hmm.
, like, is your super fanbase, your treasured user, your top 10,

(17:37):
you know, friendly people thatyou can tap. Is that growing?
Those are some measures of success. Okay.
And are you seeing people refer toyour community across platforms?
So are you seeing people tweet about yourcommunity if it's on Facebook or post
about it on Facebook? If it's in Twitter,
that's another measure ofa big measure of success.

(17:57):
If you're getting recognition, uh,from an outside source or a similar,
uh, so source in your industry for, uh,
those types of incidents. I mean,that's, that's good news, right?
You're being noticed, you're being,you're getting your visibility up.
It's much more valuable than youtalking about your own community.
Having someone else recommendyour community is much more

(18:21):
valuable than you tweeting about it.
Right. Well, before we roll out, Iwanna hear all about how you turn, uh.
A tweet into a meeting.
Yes, please.
Okay. So I have it pinned on myTwitter page, but let me, um,
so basically I'm not gonna read each step.
It's a methodology that I kind of madeup that actually seems to work almost
every time. And it's about whenyou find someone on Twitter,

(18:45):
the difference between like Twitterversus LinkedIn or Facebook is with those
platforms, someone has to opt in and say,yes, I'll be connected to you. Mm-hmm.
. Whereas Twitter,
what makes Twitter kind of magicaland great is that you have access,
open access to anyone on Twitter. Mm-hmm.. Mm-hmm. .
So it could be someonewho is famous, you know,
an influencer or royalty orwhatever, however you wanna call it.

(19:08):
The way that you would turn the tweetinto the meeting, as it were so to speak,
is that you would firstof all follow them.
Then you would like andretweet certain tweets of
theirs, not just at the beginning.Cuz then it, it's too obvious. Mm-hmm.
that, but kind of searchdown the tweet stream and kind of ping,

(19:29):
maybe respond to comment like,
and retweet some stuff furtherdown in their tweet stream.
Add them to a Twitter list that'spublic with a flattering name like
social media influenceror innovative thinkers in
philanthropy or something like that.
Some flattering name of a Twitterlist. Mm-hmm. .

(19:50):
So you're kind of bringingthem into a group,
a vertical group thatwould make them feel good,
retweeting their stuff with comment,not just what I call a drive-by retweet,
but retweeting with thequote, retweet function.
So you can explain to your followers whatmakes their tweet interesting to you.
Mm-hmm. doing that more than once,
responding to someoneelse's post and saying, Hey,

(20:12):
I think that this person and taggingthem would be a great person to
respond to this, or would havea lot of knowledge about this.
So pointing to them, putting them kindof in the front of your tweet stream,
and then eventually they'llprobably notice you and follow you back and then you
DM them and then you createa meeting with them. So.
When you first said this,

(20:33):
I thought you were using a methodologyto run your meetings with No,
but this is actually to make aopportunity happen more than,
yeah. All right. So it'show to knock on the door.
It's a cold calling techniqueof connecting to somebody.
Right. For example, there's some,
there's a guy and if he's listeninghe'll know his name ,

(20:54):
this guy named RickFink, who I've never met,
but he's somehow networkedwith me online and I now,
he's a member of all of my social networksacross, he's my number one super fan.
I don't know him, he's constantlyresponding to my tweets.
So he was effective at it. And peoplehave even been effective at it,
at getting me to notice them and hirethem through this methodology. Think that,

(21:17):
you know, there's a skillthere and there there is, it's,
there's something there.
It's people that recognize and takeadvantage of opportunities that
now exist in a different waythan they did 20 years ago. Yep.
Exactly.
So that's the continual challenge,
I think to the human frameworkis to continue to adapt.
And having an open discussionplatform like Twitter or Micro Blog,

(21:39):
as they used to call it,
allows you to actually have a conversationwith somebody that you would never
have had an opportunity to talk to inthe past. Mm-hmm. . I mean,
sometimes I'm responding to newsand I'll be tweeting directly at a
journalist and then all of a suddenthey hear me and they respond and like,
that's pretty def definite new.

(22:02):
That's an innovation in comms,in communications technology.
Yeah.
It's given us all newmethods and intersections of communicating and connecting
that never existed before and it'sjust gonna continue to evolve. Right.
Before we go,
we wanted to talk about transitiondecommission and recommission.
How does an organization createvalue in its own capacities?

(22:24):
If they don't look at platforms, methods,
systems in a way that says,you know what, we need to,
this horse needs to go to pasture. We'redone with this, we need to move on.
And, or instead of cobbling upsomething forever just because.
So kind of, um, the, theidea is when to know how to,

(22:45):
how to sunset a community.
How to transition it into newownership or, um, you know, or,
or sunset it entirely. How togive it to its members. Okay.
When you no longer wanna support it.
That's an important part ofcommunity management too. You know,
you can't keep everythinggoing forever. Forever.
And ever and ever. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. And so you have to kind ofevaluate like, is it worth the roi?

(23:09):
And so many times in my career,
we've figured out thatalthough the community, it,
it still has members and it maybe it'snot worth completely shutting down.
There's no reason to shut it down. Wecan't personally support it anymore.
Either it's no longer grant funded orwe have other grant funded projects as
a nonprofit that take priority or wedon't have a resource cuz the resource has

(23:33):
moved on in the organization or moved toa different department that gives us an
opportunity. Like it just happened withTechSoup Connect, our regional meetups,
you know, during the pandemic,obviously regional mm-hmm.
stopped and so they becamevirtual, which led to, instead of,
you know, instead of 250, we had30 and they were only online.

(23:53):
So it gave us this kind of resetwhere, let's look at this program.
Is this program still apriority for us? And we,
what we re what we resolvedand decided was, although the,
we don't need to shut down the program,
and this is not the firsttime I've done this.
This is the second or third time thatwe've done this as an organization.
Mm-hmm. We've turned itover to the members. When a community is really healthy,

(24:16):
the members can just take it and gowith it. They still wanna be there.
We don't have to necessarily supportthe management and we can just hand it
over. That's another, uh, argument infavor of having the super fans. Yeah.
We hand it over to themand then they take it over.
Sometimes we might provide theinfrastructure, meaning the platform,
paying the platform feesand sometimes we might not,
it might be a transition in thatthe volunteers end up fundraising.

(24:40):
Like for the second life communitythat I launched a long time ago,
in the early two thousands,
we ended up handing that over to themembers and they still have it going.
It's a community ofnonprofits in Second Life.
They fundraise and they keep itgoing. But for TechSoup Connect,
we decided, at least for the time beingthat we would pay for the platform fees,

(25:02):
but we would turn the management overto the members and let it be volunteer
run.
So how does an organizationplant that strategic end state at
the beginning?
Because you need to somehow buildsome markers in to say when to start.
Eh, I mean, we havenever built it in at the.
Beginning. No.

(25:22):
Okay. We, we never, no, we newe never had, at this point,
if it isn't going well,
we turn it off or we pivot because it'sso organic with online community that
you just, you just want it togrow. Yeah. And you see as it goes.
But if after like three months to sixmonths you're seeing nothing's growing,
you know, then you might reconsider like,what can we do? We've invested a lot,

(25:44):
like both of those communities. Imentioned, you know, 10 years of,
of investment, you know, with theTechSoup forums mm-hmm. ,
we're still managing it and wehave the volunteer forum hosts and
we've moved it to different platforms,
but we're doing it in a different fashionmay because with the TechSoup forums,
it was launched beforeall these other Yep.
Community tools even existedlike social media. So now it's,

(26:08):
it's serves a different purpose,
but you do have to kind ofjust have check-ins and I,
I recommend having a monthly meetingwith the members, the super fans,
having a monthly call with them andgetting face-to-face. So you don't,
they aren't just a name on a screen,
but you get on a Zoom call and you haveand you have open discussions and how do
you guys think it's going, how couldwe improve it? Never forget that,

(26:31):
don't keep your community hidden behinda, a wall. Even if there is a paywall,
don't keep it gated.Export snippets of it,
whether it's small videos orinfographics or blog posts or
tweets to promote it and then getpeople interested to expand it.
Cuz otherwise there's no way you canexpand it beyond who's already in.

(26:52):
It. You're talking about your favoriteterm, highly shareable content. That's.
Right. All social media content,all content you produce,
if you're a person who'scommunity-minded should be highly
shareable. So for example, whenyou have an event in Eventbrite,
they allow you to customize theurl. So instead of having it a long,

(27:13):
having the URL be really long,I use the customizable feature.
If you have a URL that'seasy to pronounce Yep.
Then it's highly shareableso you can say it.
And having content thatis shareable, like mm-hmm.
Extracting content from yourcommunity that is highly shareable,
that people want to share.
You wanna make it easy for people toshare it because if people are publishing

(27:37):
on their social media channels,
sometimes it's hard to curatecontent and to know what to post.
So giving them highlyshareable content mm-hmm.
gives them areason to share about you.
An example of that is Heather Mansfieldwho has at nonprofits on Twitter,
that Twitter handle at nonprofits,
and she's nonprofit tech forgood on Facebook and LinkedIn.

(27:58):
She creates highly shareablecontent all the time.
She's one of my mainstays Mm. Assomeone whose content I share, um,
through the TechSoup channelson the regular, and she makes a living doing this,
but she creates highly shareablecontent. There are other brands mm-hmm.
that do that too.Donor Perfect is an example.
There are other channels that createthis highly shareable content that we use

(28:22):
on social media.
So is the newsletter dead?
No. Uhuh No. The newsletter.
Is, tell me.
Tell me the newsletter is the best waybecause people see so much noise in their
feed that the newslettergets right in front of them.
And more and more internal conversationsat organizations are being moved into
Slack. Mm-hmm. ,your email has become less noisy.

(28:44):
So hitting people, you also need tohit people from multiple to approach,
I should say, instead of hit .
To.
Approach people from multiplechannels so that the,
it isn't until the fourth message thatthey're gonna go, oh yeah. Oh yeah,
there's an event. I saw an eventfrom TechSoup. That's right. Yeah.
Approaching them from multiplechannels is the way to go. And for us,

(29:05):
we see that newsletter, our, our directnewsletter is the top way that people,
I'm talking about like 75%. Wow. You know,
are are getting it fromthe newsletter. Wow.
And it's 25% that they're gettingit through other means. So yeah.
Newsletter is not dead.
No. Well that's interesting. Butthe model has changed, right.
Because now it's become more of amultimedia extravaganza type thing versus

(29:29):
a static newsletter.
That's right. Yeah, it's,
it's much more engaged and it's much moreinteractive and there's embedded stuff
and HTML newsletters and you just haveto make sure you don't get blacklisted.
And there's ways to be on safe senderlists. Yeah. That's a whole other animal.
That's so easy. I mean thisis like a full-time job.
Yep. Exactly.

(29:50):
Oh my. Well thank you very much forsharing all your experience and expertise,
Susan.
My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
You have just finished our latest becauseyou need to know a public service of

(30:13):
Pioneer Knowledge Services.
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