Happy Thursday, and welcome to the second edition of Off-Leash, our weekly roundup of things we clicked on this week. We want this space to provide a diverse collection of helpful tips or insights, interesting perspectives, and fun clicks that add value to your day. 

Have something you’ve found particularly useful lately? Leave a link and your thoughts in the comments. 

As always, we also welcome your feedback.

So, let’s dive in.

1. Certified young person Paul Rudd wants you to wear a mask. As part of New York’s “get out the… mask (?) campaign, Governor Cuomo recruited Paul Rudd to encourage people to wear their masks when they’re out among other people. It’s a simple, creative example of a fun PSA. 

2. Where to get creative. If you’re writing a blog post or a new section of your website, you need to include some photos or videos to go along with it. Whether you’re a nonprofit, small business, or a freelancer, stock photos from places like Getty or iStock can be expensive (nevermind hiring a photographer yourself!). Good thing there are plenty of generous professionals out there who are glad to provide you with high-quality images, videos, and graphics for your content—with or without credit, and often without a fee.

In this post, we share a few tips on Where to Find Beautiful, Diverse, Cheap, or Free Stock Photos.

3. Treat people the way you want to be treated. That’s the golden rule. And it’s also the very minimum you’d expect from customer service standards, right? Well, over the past few weeks, a couple of companies have made a couple of mistakes and went about fixing those mistakes in very different ways, writes Ephraim Gopin of 1832 Communications.

“Crisis management 101: Make a mistake? Fess up. Right away. Don’t wait for followers, supporters, the press, and social media to pile on. I know it’s hard to admit you screwed up, but we’re all human, and these things happen. In fact, by apologizing, admitting your mistake, and promising to do better in the future, you INCREASE your authenticity rating with your followers...

Let’s look at two recent examples of customer service emails, including apologies- how to apologize and how not to do it.”

Whether you work for a for-profit company or the neighborhood food pantry, customer service is essential to building relationships and trust with your community. Read Ephraim’s analysis of two hiccups from Zoom and Blackbaud and how each addressed those issues with their customers—and what we can learn from each.

4. Facebook might be moving into email marketing. Not satisfied with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus (should we count Portal? That’s still a thing, right?), Facebook might be making moves into email marketing:

“This summer, a small number of Facebook Business users were given access to a new email marketing tool, which Facebook later confirmed it was experimenting with.

While you might not expect a major social media platform like Facebook to invest in email marketing tools, this move actually makes a lot of sense.” ~ Pamela Bump, HubSpot.

It’s true, email was not something that I expected Facebook to decide that they wanted in on (but also, who saw VR coming?). For nonprofits or small businesses, capturing email addresses from Facebook—which you can do already through Facebook’s lead-generation ads solution—and engaging with them without having to use a different product or tool does have its advantages. For starters, this could save many people the headache and cost of deploying an email service provider and hiring someone else to run it. It could also reduce the friction for both the “Business” and the supporter in signing up and then receiving that first communication.

Anyway, Hubspot put together this great read on what we know so far.

5. Tweet out the vote! This election cycle, Twitter wants to help everyone discover “reputable” sources of election information on their platform by launching a dedicated hub in both English and Spanish.

According to the Verge, “[t]he hub will appear at the top of the Explore tab for US users, and it will have Twitter Moments from “reputable news outlets” and its curation team in English and Spanish; live streams of debates and other major events; a tool that shows candidates in a user’s state; and local news…

The hub also will include voter education public service announcements ‘using information from non-partisan government and voting advocacy organizations,’ which will run on Twitter up to Election Day, with information on topics like how to request an absentee ballot and guidance for voting during the pandemic.”

This could be an excellent resource for people who spend their time sourcing news articles from Twitter—and a big spotlight for the non-partisan sources and fact-checkers who are shifting into overdrive this election season. Read the full post from the Verge to learn more. 

6. Libraries are an invaluable community resource, even during a pandemic. For those who spend most of their waking hours online, it’s too easy to forget that countless people live out there who cannot. The digital divide was an issue before the outbreak of COVID-19, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the problem. For many, libraries offered a free connection where they could do school work, read the news, apply for jobs or social services, connect with loved ones, and much more. But with many libraries shut down, people are still packing up their devices and connecting from the library stoop. In fact, since March, the New York Public Library system hosted between 500 to 1,000 WiFi sessions per day across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, reports the City.

“The Queens [Library System] has recorded an average of 160,000 WiFi sessions per month... Twenty of its branches have outdoor extenders that boost the WiFi signal 150 yards from the buildings, about a football field and a half away...

In Brooklyn, library officials estimate people connected to WiFi approximately 185,000 times from April through August ‘with many patrons sitting outside of our branches.’ The figure is about 27% of the usage rate before COVID-19 shut branches.”

Read the full story here.

7. Something Instagood. As both a marketer and a person with interests, I spend a lot of time on social media and the Internet at-large. Lately, between pandemic news and the election coverage, you rarely see social media content that makes you smile. With brightening your day in mind, Amendo put together this piece that spotlights six Instagram accounts only sharing happy, feel-good content, like the National Geographic Travel, to help calm your scrolling.

That’s it for this week’s edition of Off-Leash. We’ll be back next week with another collection of links to interesting reads, helpful tips, and sector news. Have a great weekend!