Sep 24

Sep 24 Off-Leash: “Here’s to the Original”

It’s Thursday, and we’re nearing the end of another busy week.

As always, we welcome your feedback and greatly appreciate your shares.

Let’s dive in.

1. “You need a social media strategy” or, “what’s our social media strategy?” Those two questions haunted the days and nights of anyone dubbed, ‘social media manager’ or ‘intern’ about ten years ago. And while we don’t hear as much about the subject anymore (because, c’mon, your social media strategy should be part of your broader communications strategy), maybe we hear a bit too little?

Take Instagram, for example. Instagram is a visual-first platform that sits on the home screens of more smartphones than we can count. Yet, for every organization that takes the plunge, how many of them are starting with a strategy? Or a defined visual identity? Or position on the types of content they would like to post there vs. on other social media?

Well, it’s time to step it up. Here are 13 of the most common Instagram mistakes marketers need to avoid (via Hootsuite).

2. Email is more important than ever, but we don’t use it very well. I’ve gone on the record in the past as a huge proponent of email. It’s still one of my favorite productivity tools and a great way to communicate. Email requires no special software or hardware (other than any number of free email services or inexpensive computing devices), it’s as creative or utilitarian as you choose to make it, and just about everyone in your life—from your mother to your work-wife—uses it, too.

The problem with email lies mostly in how we use it. In a later post, I’ll expand on some strategies we use to make the most out of email, but for now, here are four great tips from Inc on how to improve your email productivity.

(And a bonus link to a free eBook on starting your own newsletter!)

3. What many people love about social media is that it’s easy to find many people who agree with you. That’s what makes platforms like Facebook and Twitter echo chambers, places where we all can go to find some affirmation about how we feel about things. We also use them to share details about our lives and our work—hoping to find a safe harbor among friends and colleagues (which doesn’t always pan out, but that’s another problem). Add a dash of social media algorithms that only serve a single side to every story and, voila, echo chamber.

“Social media companies, therefore, rely on adaptive algorithms to assess our interests and flood us with information that will keep us scrolling. The algorithms ignore the recency and frequency of what our friends are posting and instead focus on what we “like,” “retweet,” and “share” to keep feeding content that is similar to what we’ve indicated makes us comfortable,” writes Christopher Seneca for WIRED.

This presents a problem for having constructive conversations or learning about multiple sides to any issue. It’s also been a critical catalyst for spreading misinformation and fake news. But what if we could retake our feeds from the algorithms and use Twitter and Facebook again for real connections?

Seneca shares five steps we can all take today to fight the algorithms.

4. “Nonprofit life is all about doing more with less,” says Olivia James in her post on Causevox’s blog. Anyone who has ever worked at a nonprofit knows that that statement welcomes you to your first-round interview. And as your career evolves, you wear it as a badge of honor, showing off all of your many hats and Swiss Army Knife-like skill sets that make you ED, head of HR, IT Director, and night janitor all-in-one.

Your superhuman well-roundedness aside, James shares some helpful tips on spending less to raise more—for starters, using peer-to-peer fundraising as a mechanism for ushering in new donors, or defining a process to upgrade your current donors to a larger gift. “It costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one,” says James. “Taking the time to create a solid donor retention plan pays off big.”

5. How do you onboard a new employee when we’re all working from home? That’s a question a lot more of us will be asking in the coming weeks and months. Thanks to a litany of digital tools like Zoom, Slack, and others, we can all stay connected and work together in real-time. And we can also use those tools (among others) to foster both healthy workplace culture and easy-to-reference norms, processes, and procedures. So this post is for all you HR nuts out there.

While we are technology-agnostic, we’ll throw a bone to Trello for publishing this helpful guide to building a flexible, universal employee manual with their tool.

“Employee manuals change over time. Sometimes it’s a small change, like how travel reimbursement receipts are processed. Sometimes the changes are huge, like allowing employees to work remotely full time and explaining how to to set up their virtual environments.

The place where all of this information lives needs to be easy to update.”

Using tools like Trello, Asana, ToDoist, or other shareable platforms where you spend a lot of time anyway, you can easily create an employee handbook that’s useful to both you and your team. Here’s how to get started.

6. A tribute to the original. In honor of the late, great Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (aka Notorious RBG), State Street Advisors paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring their iconic ‘Fearless Girl’ statue donning a lace collar and headlining, “Here’s to the original.”

State Street Global Advisors’ iconic statue from McCann pays homage to the late Supreme Court Justice (image via AdAge)

That’s it for this week’s edition of Off-Leash. We’ll be back next week with another collection of interesting clicks in technology, communications, and social impact. Have a great weekend!