How to Dramatically Broadcast Your impact with Facebook Live

In this webinar, John Haydon will show you how to use Facebook Live to engage supporters and raise more money.

Full Transcript:

Steven: All right, John, my watch just struck 1:00. Is it okay if I go ahead and kick us off officially?

John: Absolutely. Let’s go.

Steven: All right, cool. Good afternoon, everyone if you are in the East Coast and good morning if you are on the West Coast or somewhere in between. Thanks for being here for today’s Bloomerang webinar, “How to Dramatically Broadcast Your Impact with Facebook Live.” My name is Steven Shattuck and I’m the Chief Engagement Officer over here at Bloomerang and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.

Just a couple of housekeeping items before we get started here. I just wanted to let you all know that we are recording this session and we’ll get that recording to you later on today as well as the slides. If you didn’t already get the slides, you should have them, but if you don’t have them, we’ll get them to you with the recording, I promise. Just look for an email from me later on this afternoon with all those goodies.

Most importantly, if you’re listening today, we’d love for you to chat in any questions or comments for these sessions to be interactive. We’re going to save some time at the end for Q&A. So, don’t sit on those hands. We got the expert in Facebook here as far as I’m concerned. So, he’s happy to answer your questions. I’ll be keeping an eye on the chat throughout the hour or so. You can also do that on Twitter. I’ll keep an eye on the Twitter feed there. If you’re a Twitter-type person, send in those tweets. You can use the hashtag #Bloomerang or just send us a message right at @BloomerangTech. I’ll be seeing those.

If you have any trouble with the audio through your computer speakers, we have found that switching to the phone audio is usually a pretty good remedy for that. So, if you have a phone nearby and you don’t mind calling in for the audio, try that before you completely give up on us. We find that the audio quality by phone is usually really solid. There is a phone number just for you, an individual phone number for you in the email from ReadyTalk that went out about an hour ago. You’ll find that number there. Try that before you ditch us completely. I know these webinar systems aren’t perfect for everybody. So, try that.

And if this is your first webinar with us, I just want to say an extra special welcome to you. We do these webinars pretty much every Thursday throughout the year. We get to about 45 or 46 sessions not counting the holiday weeks or my vacations, hope you don’t mind. One of our favorite things we do here at Bloomerang but what we are really known for is our donor management software. If that’s new to you or maybe you want to check us out, go to our website. Wait until the webinar is over. Don’t do that now. Wait an hour from now. You can learn more about our products. You can even get a quick video demo and get a look inside if you want. So, check that out.

For the next hour, you guys are really in for a treat. One of my good friends here is really us, John Haydon. Hey, John. How’s it going, buddy?

John: Great. Thank you again for having me and thanks to everybody for making time today.

Steven: Yes. I have wanted you on here for years. I’m glad we finally made it happen. It really just took me to get up the guts to ask you, but of course, you were very gracious and accepting of the invitation. I just want to brag on you real quick.

John is—he’s the man. Whenever I have a question about social media, especially Facebook, he always knows the answer. He is on the cutting edge. Whenever a new Facebook update or news hits the scene, I see that article and then John has already written his own article about it that breaks it down and explains it for fundraisers in the most perfect way possible.

So, you guys have got to follow him, follow him on Twitter. Follow his blog and his newsletter. He’s got a community of over 20,000 people that follow him every day. Great content. Super big Facebook expert, for sure. You’ll probably see him at conferences and on other webinars. So, if you see his name, go to that session. He’s also an author. He’s got a “Facebook Marketing for Dummies Book” and he’s got a “Cause Impact” book coming out here, I think this month too. So, I’m going to be looking for that.

He’s trained hundreds of nonprofits. He’s a CharityHowTo approved trainer dialing in from beautiful Boston. He’s feeling a little under the weather. He still wanted to be here for this. So, I hope you will bear with our audio here with his scratchy voice, but he’s a solid dude and he is going to teach you all about Facebook Live. John, I’m going to finally pipe down and turn it over to you. Go for it.

John: Thank you so much. Yeah. I have a little bit of a hoarse voice. You can all imagine that I have like a sexy voice instead, like a Debra Winger kind of voice. So, thank you very much, everyone, for coming. Today, we’re going to talk about Facebook Live best practices. If you’ve ever attended a webinar that I do or any kind of training I do, you know it’s all about rolling up your sleeves, getting practical advice, and actually putting stuff into action right away. I’m not like theory and all this kind of pie in the sky, cloud-type stuff. No unicorns, just stuff you can do.

We’re going to talk about Facebook Armageddon. We’re going to talk about what is Facebook Live and why it’s important, for those of you who don’t know. Then I’m going to talk about how to get started a few different ways and then tips for your very first broadcast if you haven’t. For those of you who have done a broadcast, I want to hear from you. I want to hear what your ideas are, what’s worked for you. So, please put that in the comments section.

So, let’s get started. Facebook Armageddon—back in January, Mark Zuckerberg basically made this announcement after reflecting deeply on the fake news, the election issues and everything that we’re reading about in the news today. Basically, Mark Zuckerberg tried to change the goal of newsfeed. This was a very profound change. It’s the biggest change ever effective January. So, he basically is saying public content posts from businesses, including nonprofits, brands and media is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect with each other.

So, if you’re a nonprofit and you read this, you say, “Geez, there goes reach. We’re done. We might as well give Facebook up.” Let’s not rush too quickly. Really, what he’s talking about is public content—I’m going to dive into this more—it’s really passive content. We’re going to talk about passive content versus active content. That’s a really critical shift in the strategy for each one of you.

So, let’s drill down into this. Facebook is now showing less posts from pages, meaning your page, that receive little reactions or comments, posts that don’t prompt conversations among friends, posts that aren’t newsworthy or relevant, just kind of random posts, and posts that put the spotlight on your nonprofit. In other words, look at how great we are.

So, really, any kind of content that isn’t seeking to create a dialogue, a connection, some sort of conversation is not going to get a lot of reach at this point. Let me just stop here and talk about passive content. Passive content is when you say hey, through the video, that’s it. You push it out in the newsfeed. You might a comment about it, but you’re not really inviting the conversation. Active conversation or active content is when you post something, a video, a photo or anything but you’re really prompting people to have a discussion.

For example, if it’s a brain aneurism organization or disease type of organization, what’s your number one tip for getting up in the morning and dealing with fatigue and so forth? What do you think? We want to hear from you. So, active content is almost like shifting your brain 180 degrees. The old way, passive content, let’s just put stuff out there and hopefully people react. It’s one way. Social media is two way. We all know that. Active content is a different process, a 180-degree shift. It goes like this, “We want to hear from you. What do you think? What’s your idea? What’s your recommendation? What’s your experience? What’s your creative idea? Let’s hear it. Let’s learn from each other.” That is active content.

So, Facebook will show more posts from your page that get the most reactions or comments that prompt these conversations that I’m talking about, posts that share important and relevant news. So, let me talk about that for a second—important and relevant news. Job one of any marketer, either nonprofit or for profit, is to have your ear to the ground. What do our people care about? What’s important to them?

This is what’s so great—if you talk about news that people are already talking about, if you share news people are already talking about, you totally skip the first phase of marketing, which is awareness, creating awareness. They’re already aware of it. They just want to talk about it more. Sharing important and relevant news—i.e. trending topics that are important and relevant bypass the awareness phase in any marketing, which is a hard phase to push through. Now, we’re entering a phase where we’re creating a dialogue, a conversation.

The last piece is that we’re going to put the spotlight on the community, so talking about your donors, heroes, volunteers, impact stories, really great stuff that actually helps you raise money. Steven knows about this—the more you talk about impact stories and the results donors get, the more money you’re going to raise.

Now, let’s drill down into the newsfeed a little bit ore. Now, this is really interesting. This is why we’re here today. So, Adam, the guy who’s the head of the newsfeed. He says live videos lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook. In fact, he says live videos on average get six times as many interactions as a regular video. Why is that?

The reason why is because if you post a video, a regular old video, it doesn’t really matter when people watch it, but when you go live, Facebook understands that the most important thing about that video or that live broadcast is it’s happening right now. It’s happening right now. Facebook puts a premium on that in the newsfeed and they push it out to more people, simply because after the broadcast the value of it happening right now is no longer there. Facebook really pushes out Facebook Live video.

For those of you who do Facebook Live broadcasts consistently, maybe I would love to hear from you as well, just a comment and we can follow up on this later, but look at these live broadcasts, compare them with the other content that you’re pushing out there on Facebook. How much more engagement are those live broadcasts getting? I bet you if you’re like most nonprofits, you’re getting at least twice as much, maybe three times as much engagement on those videos. So, really, Facebook Live videos in my opinion for all nonprofits really should be a staple, something you do every single week. I’m going to break it down for you.

First of all, Facebook Live, many of you probably already know about it. It basically lets any person, brand or nonprofit broadcast live on Facebook. You can answer burning questions, see what’s on people’s minds. Basically, this is a direct interaction.

What’s really cool about Facebook live from a nonprofit standpoint is that it’s an opportunity for you to bring donors to places that you’d never be able to bring them before. So, for example, Make a Wish, they’re one of my clients. How many times does a donor get to see a wish granted, a little girl screaming because she gets to go to Disney World? Donors don’t really see that. They see the video but they don’t get to be there while it’s happening. That’s a perfect example.

So, basically, this is all about access—giving your donors and supporters unprecedented access. Any nonprofit can do this, by the way, with any Facebook page. It’s fairly simple to do. Really, you can simply check live, video, it’s going to look different depending upon if you’re using a mobile device or desktop or third-party app, but I’ll walk you through exactly how to do this. It’s actually super simple.

But let me show you some examples first, just some really creative examples. Maybe this will get the gears turning in your mind like, “Wow, we can do that. That’s a great idea.” So, a live museum tour, perfect example, right? People go in the museum to see stuff. They’re really curious about a lot of the exhibits, especially an art museum. Imagine a live unpacking of an artist’s artwork with the artist there making comments, maybe a live tour of artwork that is the B artwork. It’s not going to be in the museum, but it’s the other stuff you’re not really going to see. It’s a separate tour.

Asking the artist questions—what’s your motivation? What’s really the purpose? What’s your artist statement behind this exhibit? There’s so much you can do if you’re a museum, especially if people come to your place, like a museum. Science museum Q&A—this is great. NASA interviews, basically breaking down common misunderstandings about science, demystifying any and all mysteries. Create a series, for example, that answers the most common misunderstandings.

By the way, this is not limited to a science museum. This could be for a diabetes organization. What are the common things that people misinterpret or misunderstand about diabetes or something like autism or adopting a pet? Do you have to know anything about a dog to adopt a dog? It helps, but here are the real key pieces you need to understand, especially if you have children or especially if you have cats or other pets. So, these focus on value for the supporter, value for the donor.

Another one, this is a beautiful example from Best Friends Animal Society. This is great. So, an animal arrives at the sanctuary. Let’s broadcast the arrival of this new animal. Here’s a beautiful horse. Let’s call him Joe the horse. Joe the horse is here. Joe is a little nervous. Joe comes from his background, he’s sort of neglected and so forth and here he is for the very first time meeting the other animals. What’s the question on the viewers’ minds—how is it going to go? Is there going to be a problem? Is another animal going to get into a fight with Joe? Who knows what’s going to happen? It’s so exciting because it’s live. It’s happening now totally unscripted.

Another great example—this is actually kind of advice that I give every nonprofit that is starting to do Facebook Live. Don’t create a completely separate and new event just to use Facebook Live. Find something that you’re already doing and just put it on Facebook Live.

Perfect example, New York Public Library, “We’re doing story time,” set up the camera, hit live, we’re done. This creates so much value because how many parents aren’t able to bring their kid to story time? Lots. Don’t worry. We have story time right in your living room. If you can’t make it, for whatever reason, if you’re child has disability or something like that if you’re sick, we’re going to bring story time to you.

So, this is a combination of impact stories and also creating value, really thinking, “How can we be useful?” That’s almost like a mantra that everyone should have, “How can we be useful? How can we serve our donors? How can we serve our supporters?”

So, let’s talk about getting started. The great thing about Facebook Live and Facebook in general is they basically make it so easy. I always say this is example and I hope nobody is offended, but even like a plumber can do Facebook Live. No knocking on plumbers. They’ve got toilets to fix and sinks to fix, all this stuff. They don’t have time to learn Facebook, but all they know is, “Oh great, we just click live and you’re live.”

There are a few extra steps in here to take, but it’s very, very intuitive. You click on live. You won’t go live right away, but you will be prompted to write a description of your broadcast. There are also other features where you can create filters, make it brighter. You can flip the image if you wanted to. For most broadcasts that I do and I do them every Wednesday, for most of them, I use my iPhone. I just set it up on a tripod and literally, I’m logging into the Facebook Pages app.

Now, a side note—if you’re using the Facebook app, the regular Facebook app that we all know and love, stop using it. Don’t use that for your nonprofit stuff. Don’t use that for your marketing stuff. Instead, you want to use an app called Pages Manager. It’s a completely separate app with insights and all this other great stuff. Most importantly, you avoid the confusion about, “I went live but I accidentally went live on my personal profile.” That’s not good. So, Facebook Pages Manager, you can obviously select one of multiple pages and then simply go live. It’s fairly easy.

Now, for those of you who have attended my weekly what I call my Hump Day Coffee Break every Wednesday at 11:00—I’ll tell you more about that later—sometimes I broadcast from my desktop and sometimes I do screen sharing. Sometimes I do a split interview. These types of advanced features are not really available in Facebook Live. You have to use a third-party tool to make it kind of easy. So, I actually, use a tool called BeLive. They don’t pay me anything. I’m just sharing with you what I use.

It’s a third-party broadcasting app that integrates directly with Facebook. You can do a lot of things. You can invite guests. You can have up to four people in a window talking about a topic. You can share photos. You can share videos. You can share your desktop screen. You can schedule broadcasts. For example, when I create a broadcast, I might create the broadcast on Monday. As soon as it’s created, an update on my page goes out that says John is going to go live Wednesday at 1:00. Click here to get a reminder.

So, it also sends out that ability to passively promote your Facebook Live broadcast ahead of time. There’s a lot more you can do with BeLive, but if it’s just you and it’s just you sharing animal sanctuary pet arriving or story time at a library or a single person in a simple Q&A, your iPhone or Android is all you need. Everything else is perfect. You don’t need a lot of extra stuff. But if you’re going to do split screen, talk show style, the desktop sharing, then I recommend a third-party app, for sure.

So, let’s dig down into this. Again, it’s super easy. You just tap on go live. You describe your thing, whatever you’re doing, and it’s automatically posted in the news feed right away. It gives you a counter that will say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 or something like that. So, you’re not going to go live right away. You’ll get a little bit of head’s up. I’m going to give you tips right now to make sure that your first live broadcast is a success.

Now, the first thing to do is don’t freak out. The thing about live video—if you’ve ever searched YouTube for newscaster fails or news announcer fails or live news broadcast fails, you’ll see that live broadcasting, CNN, Fox, whatever it is, mistakes are made. Things happen. Expect this. If you expect and accept it, then at least you’re not going to freak out.

My rule is prepare as much as you possibly can, but if things go wrong, don’t freak out. It’s live broadcasting. Most reasonable people understand that. They’ll be cool with it. They really will. You will actually live. You’re not going to die. You still have shelter, a place to eat, friends. You won’t lose your job or anything like that. You will make mistakes. I’ll share one “mistake” that I made that happened during the broadcast.

I have a dog, Otis. I tell him every time, “Otis, I’m going live right now, please, no noise. Okay? Please.” Of course, he doesn’t understand anything I’m saying. But every time the mailman comes and rings the doorbell—we have one of those ringers where you twist the thing and it makes the bell ring, he freaks out and I can’t do anything about it, no one can. One time this happened, I said, “I’m sorry. Otis was barking at the mailman.” I grabbed the camera, I went with Otis to the front door. I said hi to the mailman. Otis calmed down, I went back, put the camera down. People loved it. They were like, “Wow, Otis, we love Otis.” He stole the show.

People expect and people appreciate when I guess you could say you’re authentic or real. So, don’t freak out with your first broadcast. If you are a little bit on the nervous side, you can certainly do a dry run with a small test group with your profile, just a few personal friends just to figure out how is the video quality and so forth, practice calling out people’s names, ask people to follow, test out other features. Then you’ll feel hopefully a little bit more confident.

Number three, this is a big one—take a topic that people actually want to talk about. Don’t go live with this idea that, “Oh, our supporters need to know this thing. Our job is to educate our supporters. Clearly, if we educate them, then they’re going to suddenly give us money.” The last time anyone wanted to be educated, really, who wants to be educated? People want to learn about stuff if they want to, if they’re seeking it.

Think about trending topics or news—I’m sorry about my voice. Frequently asked questions about a specific topic—I’m giving an insider view behind the scenes. This does require that you do know who your people are, you do know what your people care about. You really should have a basic level of understanding. If you don’t know, you can simply post updates on Facebook. “We’re going to go live this week. We want to pick a topic you guys really care about. Which one is it?”

Give them a choice. Don’t just say, “Hey, we’ll talk about anything.” Just say, “We can talk about one of these three things. Which one is really urgent?” This is one if we don’t know. For most of you, hopefully you do know what is urgent and immediate and top of mind for your supporters from week to week, trending news, struggles that they have, frequently asked questions, the list goes on.

Number four, tell people when you’re going live. This sounds like a no-brainer, right? But it’s amazing how many organizations will simply go live and then wonder why no one showed up. So, the rule here—and this applies across all of your marketing—you have to market your marketing. You just can’t put it out there and say, “We’ve got this really clever idea. Let’s just go live.”

Post an update on your page a couple times, include a date, time, topic, maybe if you want to create a Facebook cover. My favorite thing to do is send an email. Your email list is your most engaged qualified community. These are people that have taken the time to join your email list, right? Tweet about it before you go live.

The point here, again, is market your marketing, put it out there, let them know you’re going to go live and tell them, most importantly, answer the question, “What’s in it for me? Why should I be there?” Don’t say, “We’re doing a series on diabetes for our organization,” or, “Please attend our live video of our nonprofit.” Why? Why should I? Tell me what I’m going to get out of this broadcast. That’s the key, right?

Number five, I do this all the time. It’s live. Who knows what’s going to happen? Make the outline for your first broadcast or for all of your broadcasts. Introduce a topic or event, introduce yourself, put yourself in a list interview request because you’re interviewing someone. If you’re going to cover a specific topic, break it down into bullet points for yourself.

Then let’s not forget always tell people what’s next. At the end of the broadcast, you want to say, “Thank you so much for attending. By the way, this week we have this really cool thing going on, don’t miss out.” The key is while you have people’s attention, you want to make the most of it. Not only that, but your supporters, if you do a good broadcast, they’re going to be nodding their heads and they’re going to say, “Wow, what’s next? What else can I do?” Respond to comments throughout the broadcast. I’ll talk about that later. Then ask for follows. If you want to find out about this broadcast and get notifications about future ones, click on the follow button.

Number six, this is important—make sure you have a healthy bandwidth. Bandwidth is basically the amount of data that can pass back and forth over your Wi-Fi, internet or wireless. Now, this is really a critical and important tip to focus on because sometimes you will be outside doing your life broadcast. Let’s say you’re an animal sanctuary. You’re outside. You have wireless. If you have like Acme Wireless Company and you’ve got one bar, you’re in big trouble.

Make sure you have at least three bars, four bars. Test the broadcast before the event. See what kind of connection you have. Definitely plan for a contingency carrier. So, if you have Acme Wireless and you’re always banging your head against the wall, “I’ve got no signal.” Find someone with Verizon, AT&T, one of the more reputable wireless companies that have actual powers around your area. Don’t just show up and have no bandwidth. That’s not going to work.

Number seven, write a compelling description. Now, the most important thing about your description is keep it short, but make sure there’s a clear benefit to the viewers. For example, diabetes type 1, type 2, what’s the difference? Your dog has fleas. How do you fix it? Things like that. Autism—what’s the quickest way to do this with your child? What if they’re upset? Something like that. Answer specific questions.

Or you can talk about success stories, amazing success with this homeless family, you’re not going to believe it. That actually sounds a little click-baity. I wouldn’t do that. Talk about a result, incredible results too.

Number eight, this is probably the most important tip. I know all of them are very important, but this is the most important one. I mentioned earlier that Facebook will put a premium on the live broadcast and of course, because it’s happening now, they’re going to give it a little bit higher ranking in the news feed for people that follow you on your page. However, what really generates the reach and engagement is when you actively engage with people during the broadcast.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is a nonprofit will set up a camera and they will simply just let it run and do their own thing. Then after the fact, they’ll reply to comments. That is a missed opportunity. So, my recommendations specifically are call out commenters by name. Trish’s got a great question. She’s always got great questions. Here’s what Trisha is asking. Trisha asks this. Then you read the question, answer the question, and then say, “Thank you, Trisha. Thank you so much for the question. That’s awesome. Trisha, you’re great. Who else? Joe, that’s so great. Joe has a question. Joe is asking this. Thank you so much, Joe.”

When people start hearing you say thank you to Joe and that Joe is awesome, guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to say, “I’ve got to have a question somewhere. I want to be part of this.” Read the comments, reply to the comments and say thank you. In the nonprofit world, thank you is viewed as a nice to have. But it’s absolutely central to donor communication and all of the relationships that you have with your supporters.

This is really an attitude of tremendous appreciation or you can say attitude of gratitude. It’s tremendous appreciation for people who make the time to show up and contribute to the dialogue that you’ve set out. So, please say thank you, okay? Thank you.

Number nine, ask for follows. During the broadcast, there is a follow button. When they click on that, they can get notified each time you broadcast. This does definitely increase and boost [inaudible 00:34:35], meaning that more people will be aware of the broadcast right when you go live.

I didn’t mention this but there’s also a fundraising feature within Facebook Live. So, I don’t want to forget about that. You can basically raise money during your broadcast. To use that feature, you search for your nonprofit and add that option in the broadcast. It’s fairly straightforward and simple, but I do want to caution you, don’t put the fundraising first, necessarily.

People feel like every time they attend the broadcast, you’re just going to ask for money. They’re not going to be so likely to attend a broadcast, but if you use it more strategically and thoughtfully about, for example, let’s say that you do a broadcast about a disaster that’s recently happened and you want to report on it, “I bet you want to know what you can do. We need bedding. We need some food. We need volunteers to help with this and that. Of course, you can always donate too.”

So, in the context, asking for donations in the context is something like that is perfect. Simply asking for donations just because you have the ability to really doesn’t make too much sense and it’s almost like crying wolf. If you just keep doing it over and over again, people will get turned off. They’re going to get turned off and they’re going to forget about you.

Number ten, always end with a call to action. So, at the very end, I kind of mentioned this before, tell people what’s next, but be very specific. In my case, I tell people to join my newsletter, “Hey, if you like this broadcast and want more, I do it every week. You can join my newsletter. Here’s the URL.”

Register for events, other calls to action related to the broadcast topic—so, for example, with an animal sanctuary, a new arrival shows up, “If you want to support Joe the horse, here’s how you can do that. Here’s how you can find out more about Joe and his journey at the sanctuary. Subscribe to our newsletter. We have a weekly report on new arrivals or if you want to help out with Joe’s feeding, care, and all this stuff, please feel free to support through our donation feature at the bottom of this broadcast.” It’s all about context. It’s all about having it make sense to the donors. It’s donor-focused and supporter focused. It shouldn’t be awkward, basically.

Number 11, share the recording—definitely share the recording, send a follow-up email with a link to the broadcast. Certainly share the broadcast, re-share it on your page, not right away but maybe a week later. One thing that I do and I recommend to a lot of my clients, one you have enough Facebook Live broadcasts on your page, you can actually go into a feature called publishing tools, I believe, and you click on video. You’re going to see all your videos and you’re going to be able to rank them by the number of views.

So, what are you going to do? You’re going to take your most popular videos and you can simply re-share them or even schedule them right there. You click on the video and there’s a feature in your Facebook page that says re-share. You can schedule it. That means that all the work, all the preparation you’re doing to create such a wonderful broadcast, don’t let that go to waste. Don’t just do a one-off. Make sure you can use this over and over and over again. To take that a step further, you can in fact recycle the recording.

So, on your iPhone or Android, after your broadcast when you finish, you’ll be prompted to save it to your phone or your iPad or whatever it is. Save the video. Then you can take this and using very simple editing tools, chop the video up into shorter videos. This is content that you’ve put a lot of work into. Let’s make it go even further.

So, for example, let’s say that you are talking about diabetes 1, three things you need to know about diabetes 1, or three most common misunderstands about type 2 diabetes. Let’s just say that. And you talk about it. You have a doctor, nurse, whoever. Here are the three biggest misconceptions. Guess what? You have three short videos. If you can make them under a minute, keep it under a minute, guess what? Now you have videos for Instagram.

You can also take some of your videos or parts of the video and have them transcribed. I use a service called TranscribeMe.com and it will literally transcribe the entire audio, whatever it is. You have raw text for which you can either create an eBook, a guide, going back to the three most common misconceptions about diabetes, type 2 diabetes. That’s a really great guide that that organization is going to offer as a download. They can start by doing a really great broadcast video, transcribing it, editing it, of course, adding more examples, really making it high quality.

The point is the recording itself, don’t treat this as a one-off and move on to the next thing. If you put in the effort in the work, you really owe it to yourself to make that go further. Guess what? Your time is super valuable. Your time is the most valuable thing you have. Don’t waste it by saying, “We did the broadcast. Let’s move on to the next thing.” No. Really put some thought into how you can make that go further.

Now, there’s a worksheet I’m going to leave with you guys that’s a very simple worksheet because I like to keep things really simple. But it’s a planning worksheet. It just covers like what’s your topic. How are you going to promote it? What’s the broadcast outline? The broadcast follow-up. How are you going to follow-up on it and promote it? Snippets, are there any snippets you’re going to take from the video for repurposing? Are you going to transcribe it into a blog post?

Now, one thing that I didn’t mention which is really super-important and I want you all to write this down. The most important part of your broadcast in terms of time is the very beginning, the first three seconds. What you want to do is you want to state the benefit right away. So, as soon as it goes five, four, three, two, one and you’re live, say type 2 diabetes, what are the three most common misconceptions or with the animal sanctuary. Joe is a brand new horse. Let’s welcome Joe. You’ve got to grab people and pull them in right away.

A common mistake I see is that an organization will set up the camera, hit go live and they say, “We’ll be right back. We’re not really prepared. Hold on. We’ll be back.” Guess what? Are people going to watch that? No. They’re only going to watch the first three seconds and if they see for themselves—you can even look at your video stats by the way after three to ten seconds, you’ll see a drop-off. If it’s not about them, if it’s not interesting to them, they’re going to bail, believe me. There’s so many other things they can do with their time. So, you’ve got to grab people’s attention right away in the first three seconds. I wanted to mention that because it wasn’t mentioned in the previous slides.

Now, if you’re interested, I do a weekly broadcast every Wednesday. These are like tiny, little marketing tips, fundraising tips, focusing mostly on digital communication. I do them every Wednesday at 11:00 and it’s basically bite-size, 15-minute presentations, a little bit of a Q&A and then we’re out and that’s it. I’ve done a couple hundred of these. So, of you go to my Facebook page, you can actually look at this huge archive. If you want to join the weekly notification, the URL right here. I think that’s all I have. I’m going to turn it back to Steven for questions.

Steven: All right. That was awesome, John. Thanks. Really practical tips. I love that guide at the end. We had a lot of people chatting in that they’re going to be using that.

John:Thank you so much.

Steven:Thank you for doing this. I know you’re not feeling too good. I really appreciate you still doing this for us.

John: I feel great. I feel awesome. It’s just my voice.

Steven: Good.

John: I feel great but my voice is hoarse.

Steven: Isn’t that the worst?

John: Yeah, I know. [inaudible 00:44:41]. It’s okay.

Steven: Which will be over soon.

John: I’ve got my sexy voice.

Steven: Okay. Good. Let’s do about ten minutes of questions. Lots of people asking about equipment. It seems like the easiest thing is just your phone, right? I think that’s actually how Facebook makes it the easiest. You whip out your Facebook app on your phone and you start recording, right? Is that what you recommend most people do?

John: Yeah. If it’s a simple type of broadcast, you could just use your iPhone or Android, but like I said before, don’t use the Facebook app, use the Pages Manager app. That’s the key.

Steven: Okay. Very cool.

John: Use a tripod. The other thing I would say is if you’re going to be indoors, make sure you have a lot of lighting behind the camera facing you. Actually, I will say that you actually need a surprising amount of light to make something seem normal on video, you know what mean? When you look at the light, you’re like, “My god. It’s bright. I feel like I’m looking at the sun.” When you actually look at the video, it’s like that’s normal. Usually, you need more lighting with the camera facing your face, not behind you, but facing you.

Steven: So, a lot of light and an area without a lot of noise. What would you recommend for audio? Do people just wear their iPhone, the white headphones with the little microphone in it? Is that the best way to get sound? What do you recommend for audio?

John: It depends upon how close you are to the phone. So, if you’re within about six feet, the phone is going to pick that up, but if you’re further away, there are mics you can get that extend from the camera and you can wear it around your neck. You can have a Lavalier mic, the kind that clips onto your shirt. Some people use a directional mic that’s very powerful. And they have that set up linked up with the camera. That’s what I would recommend in terms of sound.

Steven: Okay. Get real close to the person talking is probably the best way, right?

John: Yeah. Exactly.

Steven:Okay, great. Lots of people asking about length. Is there an ideal length or does it just kind of depend on what you’re doing? An interview seems like it would be a little longer. Now that I think about it, having heard your presentation, the majority of Facebook Live videos I’ve seen are pretty long, right? It’s a tour or a conversation. What would you say to folks about length?

John: I would say try and go at least 15 minutes because Facebook has to push it out there in the newsfeed. As soon as you start engaging with commenters, welcoming people, reading the comments, that’s going to happen even further. Hopefully you want to keep your presentation part to less than 15 minutes but you want to start engaging with the commenters and people watching as soon as you possibly can.

On the short end, I would recommend about 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes. On the long end, I would say only broadcast as long as you have something to say. If you don’t have anything to say and it’s totally boring, I would just bail. Forget about it. You don’t want to waste people’s time.

Steven: Okay. Don’t belabor it. That makes sense.

John:Yeah.

Steven:So, you gave a lot of really good advice on prepping. Is there a way to do a test run without actually going live or do you just have to start the real thing and hope it goes okay? What would you recommend for people who maybe want to practice? Did you maybe just do a practice one that is live, but tell people, “Hey, we’re just checking this and the real thing is happening next week or whatever?”

John: You can do that. You can just say, “Hey, guys, how’s it going? This is a test. We’re going to start doing Facebook Live broadcasts. Our next one is next week. This is just a run through and so forth. People would be, I’m sure, okay with that. They may not be interested in it. But I’m sure they wouldn’t be offended, like, “Why are you wasting my time?” They would just say, “I’m going to move on to something else.”

Now, what I would do is if you can, try and do a broadcast for your own personal profile. You can create a small little group of like three to four friends or whatever and just broadcast to them. If they see it, they do. If they don’t, that’s fine. The point is to really just practice for yourself to use the features, but they are pretty straightforward.

Steven: That’s smart. So, you do it from your personal profile rather than your nonprofit’s like brand page to practice. That makes sense.

John: I would do that if you feel like you need to practice.

Steven: Okay.

John: The way that I look at broadcasting is some point, you do have to just do it. It’s like my son learning how to swim. At some point, you’ve got to just got jump in the pool.

Steven: Toss him in there.

John:Just toss him in. There you go. Just got to jump in.

Steven:Cool. Repurposing. I think you got people’s juices flowing on the repurposing piece. So, correct me if I’m wrong, John, but you start the live broadcast, you’re live for 20 minutes or whatever and then it ends, but then the recording stays on your page forever. Is that right? You don’t have to download the recording and upload it to YouTube or Facebook again. As soon as a live broadcast ends, it lives there and you can link to it. Right?

John: Yeah. The broadcast ends and it will definitely be on your page permanently unless you delete it. When I’m talking about repurposing the actual video, when you end the broadcast, there will be a little icon that says save. You want to make sure you click on that and it will save the video locally to your phone, to your actual, in your phone [app 00:50:53].

The reason I say that is because the quality, the resolution and the actual dimensions of the video will be bigger if you save it to your phone than actually if you go in to download the Facebook Live broadcast from your Facebook page. The quality is not that great if you try and download it from your Facebook page, but if you save it right after your broadcast, it’s on your phone, it’s going to be a higher resolution, much better quality.

Steven: I see. Okay. That’s a great tip. Have you had experience of taking that file you save onto your phone and would you put that on YouTube or some other video hosting service? What would you recommend folks do with that file in addition to the recording staying on your Facebook page?

John: What I would do is think about where else you have a presence. Are you using YouTube? YouTube is not really a social network. It’s a search engine. If you do take your broadcast and put it on YouTube, make sure the title and description are loaded with keywords related to the topic. That’s the key there.

What I do and a lot of my clients do, they take the video and basically dump it on to their laptop and they use the simple editing tool, like iMovie or whatever to simply slice it up and boost some of the audio, enhance the video a little bit in terms of brightness or saturation, and then my goal is like can you get it less than a minute. If you can, now you have this world of Instagram that opens up where you can post these videos to Instagram, which is huge. Really, anywhere where you going to post video, I would put the video, but just saying strategically about how are we using this video platform, YouTube search engine, Instagram, deeper, different audience engagement, that kind of thing.

Steven: That’s a great idea. It didn’t occur to me until I was listening to you talk just now, you can download the video, bring it into a video editor and you could turn a 20-minute long video into 20 1-minute videos you put on Instagram. That’s a great idea for repurposing content.

John: Yeah. Chances are with a 20-minute video, you’d be lucky if you have three separate minutes of good quality stuff you can put on Instagram. I wouldn’t say you get 20 minutes out of a 20-minute video. You know what I mean?

Steven: That makes sense. All right. You talked a little bit about length. Have you have found anything about days of the week or certain times during the day? Do you think you would have more captive audience in the evening versus when people are at work or maybe you can catch them at work goofing off in between their daily tasks? What do you think about that? Does it depend? It probably depends, right?

John: This is a $64,000 question. It really does depend on the audience. It does. I would say for the most part, I do mine during the day time because I call it a coffee break. My videos happen to be work-related, nonprofit marketers, fundraisers, the network. This is a work-related video. Other than that, the engagement on Facebook tends to go up after like 6:00 at night and also on weekends. If you’re going to experiment with time, I would try night time or weekends, but also keep in mind people are literally on Facebook all the time. If you’re like me, and you probably are, you’re probably “checking” Facebook 10, 15, 20 times a day. Opening it. What sort of garbage do I have now? You close it. There’s nothing there. You hear about all this stuff. You definitely have a habit of looking at it throughout the day.

Steven: Yeah. I’m with you and I am a lot like you. All right. Cool. So, what about privacy and photo release forms and all that? Should you get all that from the people you know are going to be in the video before you start? What if maybe you’re taping something that maybe you’re out in public or maybe people aren’t aware of what you’re doing? How do you get around all those privacy concerns?

John: Now listen, I didn’t pass the bar, man. I tried really hard. [inaudible 00:55:36]

Steven: I bet you could, if you tried. You’re smart.

John: I know, right? If I tried, I bet you I could. I’m not a lawyer or anything like that. My recommendation is if you’re going to interview someone in the video, especially if they’re a donor or maybe somebody that benefits from the work that a nonprofit does, try and get some kind of release like permission, like we’re going to a live video. You will be out on our Facebook page. We may be repurposing this other stuff, just get people’s permission, especially with children and that type of thing. If you’re in a public space, all bets are off. If your story time at the library is outdoors, all bets are off because it’s a public domain. I don’t want to say public domain, but the laws are different there in terms of privacy.

Steven: Be careful, it’s not worth it in a lot of cases. Very cool.

John: It’s better to be conservative with that than not. It’s better to get permission in the case of having someone on video than to deal with the fallout after. Like, “Hey, why did you put that on talk?” You don’t won’t that nightmare.

Steven: Not worth it. This was great. I know we got through a lot of the questions. There’s still a couple of individual kind of technical questions and I know we’re running out of time. John, are you willing to take questions on Twitter, email, or Facebook? How can people get ahold of you?

John: Anything. Email is fine, Twitter is fine if people use Twitter, or if you want to actually compile them and send me a list of questions, I can reply and you can share that with everybody somehow.

Steven: Very cool. We’ll get the list of questions, John, and I would encourage all of you guys listening go to his website, sign up for his newsletter, follow him on social media, obviously a wealth of information. Like I said, he is always on top of this stuff. Anytime there is a change or an update or something we need to be aware of, I check his blog and he’s already done the write-up on it. It’s great. It’s amazing.

I don’t know how you do it, John. You must not sleep.

John:I don’t.

Steven:I know. It’s ridiculous. Check out the Coffee Break too. That is a really cool series, a little more casual and you get some really interesting conversation between John and his guests. John does a great job of choosing the guests, really smart people. So, check that out. Man, this was awesome having you. Thanks, John. I know the voice was gone, but still appreciate you doing this for us, buddy.

John: Thank you. I know, I did my best, man.

Steven: You were great. I knew this one would fit expectations.

John: Thank you.

Steven: We had some great resources on our website as well, check those out. We’ve got some good webinars coming up, for sure. We’ve got some nice ones next week at a special time, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, we usually do 1:00 p.m. Eastern, so those of you on the West Coast, I hope it’s not too early for us, but it would be a good way to start your day. We’ve got Jen Love and John Lepp. Those are the Agents of Good up in Ontario, Canada. They are experts in donor love. They’re going to talk about donor stewardship. They do amazing direct mail, direct response pieces.

They’re going to share a lot of examples, a lot of case studies. They raise a lot of money too. Check that out. If you do direct mail, if you do direct donor communications, that’s all of you. It’s going to be fun, 10:30 a.m., one week from today. We’ve got other webinars scheduled out. In fact, my entire schedule is full through the end of the year. So, you will find a topic that you’re interested in, I promise. Check that one out. Follow John, for sure. Hopefully we’ll see you again next week.

Thanks to all of you for hanging out with us for an hour or so today. Look for an email from me with the recording and the slides. I’ll get that to you today. Hopefully we’ll talk to you again next week. Have a good rest of your Thursday. Stay warm. I can’t believe I’m still saying stay warm in April, but do it. Have a safe weekend and we will talk to you again next week, hopefully. Bye now.