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>> Great. Welcome everyone to the Community Based Social Media Learning Network Webinar.
Today we have Angelia and Elyse from the Michigan Community Service Commission
and Gayle Brock hearing some of what they've been doing and learning
as they've been experimenting with social media in their organizations.
So without sort of further ado, I'm going to turn it over to the Michigan folks
who will take the next half hour to share some
of what they have done and what they're learning.
>> Hi everyone.
This is Angelia.
Can you hear us okay?
>> Yup.
>> Yes.
>> We're on a speakerphone.
I am the Learn and Serve Coordinator here at the Michigan Community Service Commission
and we work with both K-12 and CBO Programs and I am joined by our Communication Specialist,
Elyse Walter, who is the brains behind this whole thing.
So she's going to be showing a lot of the things that we've been doing and just kind
of adding information about where we go from here too because a lot of this will land
on her good skills and good commitment to the social media work.
>> Yay.
>> Yay. So we wanted to share just kind of an overview of where we started,
where we kind of thought we would go and then where we ended up and we were pretty pleased
with some of the things that have happened and we'll give you this framework began and it is
that when we started a year ago we had zero support for using any sort
of social media network organization.
The agency then was reluctant even to do things like webinars and some other things like that
and so there was a core group of a few who really did believe
that there was a good role especially as it relates to the young people we work
with through Learn and Serve, AmeriCorps and in Mentoring World
which is another major initiative of ours.
So there were enough of us who were committed to doing it
that we kind stuck it out and tried to make it happen.
That being said, it hasn't been easy though it's getting easier and easier and we kind of feel
like it's taking off now so that's a good thing.
The other thing is that I think as you mentioned earlier, Kristin, we've learned so much.
It was many painful learning opportunities for us and it's so great
that we're doing this together now because it was good to hear
that other people have had some of the same challenges.
I think that we want to be able to share, ask some questions of you all too that are
on the phones about how you've addressed certain issues and we'll do that towards the end.
So kind of the kick off for us then was we were going, we had a Summer Youth Leadership Camp.
We partnered with another youth serving organization for the first time, this,
we expect, will be an annual event.
We started it in 2008 with young people who put together the agenda,
facilitated all of the sessions, you know set up service opportunities for us.
It was a three day event and the idea would be that from that camp we would keep
that group connected both through an online community but then also invite them to apply
for mini grants to do service in their communities that they could then document
and show and share, you know, we could all be a part of that conversation and experience.
The other piece that we wanted to do was give mini grants to local sites to challenge them
to look at how they use social media so that we would learn as a group
and we would learn what it looks like at the state level but also what it looks like locally.
And then the fourth kind of component of that was getting a social media intern,
someone who could kind of pull all of these pieces together.
So that's, and support us in our growth because we didn't feel that we were the experts.
I don't think we feel that yet, but we needed to be able to support our locals too
so that intern was going to be really integral in doing some of that work for us.
Hello Brett, do you have a question?
>> Yes, I'm trying to type it at the same time here to follow instructions
but can you say a little bit about what the purpose
of the mini grants were to be or is that yet to come?
>> Yet to come.
>> I'll be quiet and listen then, thank you.
>> Please put your hand down now.
So those were kind of the big things, thank you, those were the big things we wanted
to focus on and spend our time on.
And so I'm going to go back for a second and talk to you about really happened.
So we had the camp, we kicked off in 2008.
We had about 100 students who were there from across the state.
They did come in teams roughly of about five.
Immediately what we wanted to do is connect them to technology and how to use social media
and how to use some online communities to stay connected beyond the camp.
And they so incredibly bonded and really had a good experience.
We're going to show you, we think.
[inaudible].
So immediately what we did was we had someone come out and, [inaudible] come out
and do a session on learn and serve challenge, what it meant and why they should get involved
and then we introduced them to using online tools like you know Face Book
and all those other things and showed them how they could be really powerful
in spreading the word about service.
We had a, we were at this fairly rustic camp but we had a technology lab set up
and allowed the students to get on immediately, log on and begin to populate their Ning site.
Have, you all probably have used Ning.
We were introduced through a corporation and a clearinghouse
but it has been a really cool tool to kind of keep them connected.
So as you can imagine it was nonstop.
The students wanted to be on the computer the whole time
because they were e-mailing each other and uploading pictures
and really staying very connected.
There were some really cool photos from we had an awesome dance
and some great service project pictures too.
We really did get good support.
What happened though over time is that folks stopped using it as much.
School started, all these, you know, things happen so as much as the adults
in the group tried to kind of encourage the conversations, it began to die out which led us,
you know, to 2009 so we'll be, we've started a new camp development, it's next weekend,
and we have our committee who now has a 2009 camp at West Side and they're going
to begin getting people populated and working on that one as well.
The other thing we did was with the mini grants was put mini grants out to locals
who really encouraged them to use social media and other forms of technology in ways
that they hadn't before, in ways that did two things.
One is create a community among service learning practitioners but then also do some forms
of outreach and get them spreading the word around service.
One of the, so we have three grantees but we only budgeted $10,000 for this
so when I say mini grants I meant mini, tiny, mini grants.
And we had five applicants and each of them said this is so cool.
We'll take less if it allows us to bring other people into this.
So it's a fun three.
I thought that was really, really very cool and they were,
again in the very beginning, very reluctant.
You know, we had lots of reasons why they couldn't do it like school blogs,
some worried about security, I mean all the things
that we all share but the grants went out.
Folks got excited about it and we had three kind of differently unique approaches.
One was a group that, you know, started a virtual bowling league.
They'd been doing this cyber-citizens technology mentoring program with a local senior center
for a couple of years and they were looking for a way to kind of amp it up.
So they pretty inexpensively did, you know, started a bowling league but a couple
of years ago they got a big technology grant so they were able to put computers
into the senior center so they could stay in touch between classes.
So they started the league and [inaudible] Face Book as a way
to spread the word around service learning.
The woman who was going to invite me to be a part of that is on her honeymoon
so I wasn't able to show you that link but I'll make sure to get it out to you.
It's a great service learning project but on top of that, they're really being creative about how
to use Face Book to promote what they're doing and share.
They have a, their home web page for cyber-citizens
on their school website has lots of links for senior citizens.
It's just kind of a neat thing.
The third, the second group is exploring how to create community in their school
and they're using, they've invested in Youth Moodle.
So they're going to use that in supporting teachers in particular and then bringing them
on into service learning using a more technological approach than the face
to face stuff that they were doing.
And then the third group really created a website designed to bring students, educators,
community members together around service.
And all of these, you know, kind of were really getting started pretty strong
in the spring and they're moving on here now.
The one that we put up here is Engage Ionia and they have a variety
of things that they're going to do.
There'll be lesson plans and you know kind of the school stuff here,
they'll have community contacts but they're calling these
that I'm showing you here PSA's and they're student led.
Oh darn. Let's see if I can get back to where I was.
The PSA's are around service learning and they're many of them youth driven.
I know you can't hear these but I just wanted to be able
to show you some of the videos that are up.
And they've been calling them PSA's.
They weren't intended to be PSA's but they really think they're effective tools
in getting others to see and explore and experience service learning.
One of the challenges that we sent out to this group and to our young people was to look
at the service learning standards and maybe to do some videoing around the standards to see
if they could document some of those and I'm hopeful that we'll get some
of those this year still and if not, we're going to push that again next year because I think
that in terms of working with other teachers if you can have a visual depiction
of what a service learning standard would be, it could be really useful.
So this is the Engage Ionia.
They're probably the furthest along at this point.
And then the rest I wanted to say to you is that that was where we kind of went
with service learning stuff but it really grew from there and we found
that we started using the social media more and encouraging this in all
of the groups that we worked with.
So I worked with a school based grantee.
They got into Ning pretty good and they've been taking a little bit of a break lately.
We had a sustainability symposium recently
and that generated a little additional interest but they're sharing resources.
I love to get in and kind of listen in on conversations
that they're having between each other.
So that's been, they've really adopted this and it felt very safe to them because it was,
it's a close community so I think they are pretty comfortable using this.
What we've also noticed is our coordinators and teachers now taking on Face Book
and so I wish there was a way we could label them and say they're service learning people
and the kids are service learning students but we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
>> Logo. Sorry.
>> Think [inaudible] to put a logo on there?
You'll have to help me with that.
>> Sure.
>> Okay. So and we've used it now with not just Learn and Serve we're using Face Book
and some other things, partnering with a number of sites
for a cross-training conference every year.
Well, we do it every two years but we last year did a session on social media
and we had people there in the fall who said never going to happen,
we're never going to use it and they're online.
I won't name any names and I won't tell what programs they're from but they've been really,
really catching on and it's been really exciting to see if take off.
So that's what we thought would, you know, where we were, what has happened.
In terms of this second slide, I think, what did we learn?
[inaudible] Here we are.
So in terms of lessons, there were some big ones.
One was to be flexible.
So one of the components of the mini grants that we were offering to campers was
that they would do their projects, document them.
We didn't have people who applied for them.
I think they were restrictive, though we thought we made them really simple.
We allowed them time to work on them.
We offered them twice and students just weren't interested and so we kind of went back
and thought we don't want to lose the opportunity to do social media stuff.
What can we do instead?
And instead we loaned four videos to our service learning youth counsel members who are
across the state and said go and record.
Work with your, you know, coordinators locally.
Find out what the, you know, legal parameters are and make sure that you're,
make sure that you're doing things according to your local policies and they did.
So that has been really effective.
We need to work with them in the next couple of weeks to get all their materials
because we're having a hard time getting from [inaudible] to [inaudible]
so that we can do some editing and cleaning them up too and Elyse has been really helpful.
So we expect to have some of those in the next, probably next couple of weeks
and get some final copy that we can put up in a variety of places
that Elyse will talk about later.
And I'm going to turn it over to Elyse because I think she was really instrumental in terms
of some of the other things that are listed here.
>> As Angelia was saying earlier, one of the toughest things that we've here
at the Commission learned from Michigan had to deal with getting people on board
within our office and in our grantees and our constituents to engage
in social media opportunities but because Angelia is such a strong leader,
she kind of engaged myself as the Communication Specialist
and then we also have an outstanding AmeriCorps Vista member
who is a technology wizard in our office.
So between the three of us, we've been able to implement some really fun and fresh and keeping
up with the times ideas of ways that we can engage more people through social media
and one of our first forays into these opportunities was Face Book.
So we would love to share with you one of our Face Book pages
which is for Michigan's AmeriCorps.
This kind of, I mean we don't have a ton of fans but I am shocked
at how fast this has kind of exploded.
We have 116 fans and we just started the page, oh gosh, early June I think
so we're pretty pleased about that.
I kind of am often times, I will set a goal and ask people to become a fan or else
and it's amazing what you can coerce people into doing.
Yay! [inaudible].
And then another page that we've engaged is the Mentor Michigan page.
Mentor Michigan is one of our initiatives here at the Commission
and so again we just have another similar Face Book fan page that we can share our news
and our events and we can facilitate discussions and we can put photos and videos and all kinds
of things and I just think one of the main reasons that we've started looking
into social media actions is because the more channels I think that you can provide
to people the better because not everybody responds to an e-mail or just a general website
or anything like that or a letter in the mail.
I mean, everybody is different based on generation, based on education level,
based on demographics, based on all those things so we I mean when I put a link
up on our Face Book fan page that is not the only place that it's going.
That's on our website, that's going out in an e-mail,
that's going out in our bi-monthly e-news letter, that's going to Twitter,
etc. All those different places so that's been really good to just get things even more broader
than what we've originally been able to do.
I will say that that we have run into some roadblocks because anything that we do
with youth, because the Michigan Community Service Commission does engage a lot of youth,
it needs to be controlled just to ensure that they're being kept safe,
that we're not we're addressing all our liability issues and that is an issue sometimes
because I think kids are so used to being able to do whatever they want on the internet
and there's no repercussions and there's no concern.
But obviously because we are a professional organization we need to maintain a,
we need to maintain our brand and we need to maintain consistency so we have had issues
of having other people post on our pages and having people post on our blogs
and making sure that those maintain consistency.
But I think one of the reasons that the AmeriCorps fan page has taken off is
because the AmeriCorps members understand that because they have a lot of stipulations
as an AmeriCorps member and someone doing national service.
But they really understand what those rules are and why they need to oblige by them.
What was I going to show during that part?
>> That was it.
>> Okay and then lastly another thing that we've been doing that we've been working
on a lot very heavily I should say is blogs and I'm actually very proud of these
because we've been able to really engage a lot of different, and our mouse isn't working
so that's awesome, is the fact that we've been able to engage so many people in this blog.
So what we did for the Michigan's AmeriCorps Member Counsel blog was we assigned a member per
each week during this past year of service and they're asked to write a post on their service
or perhaps a service event that happened within their program and share that with us.
We also have a blog for mentoring which is called the [inaudible] Mentoring Blog
which is more about sharing resources and conversations about the importance of mentoring
in our community and then lastly we have a youth service blog which is about service learning
and just general youth service, it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to our SLYC team,
the Service Learning Youth Counsel.
It's about service in general and what youth are driving.
So that's been exciting too to be able to have those consistently updated
which I would say another key is consistency, making sure we're always updated, they're fresh,
they're new, when people go to it it's not the same old, same old information,
they can always see something exciting to look at.
>> What's been interesting is that, you know, again this small grant really allowed us to,
it gave us the leverage to use the social media and other programs and what,
it's great that it's taking off on the AmeriCorps side
and on the Mentoring Michigan side.
Our group has been slower to adapt with our young people.
We have smaller groups and we have more than 2,000 AmeriCorps members
so it gives you some other options in terms of, you know, audience and getting blogs posted.
It's been harder with our young people and I think that kind of takes us to kind
of the third slide which was what are the implications for youth service?
What does this mean for us?
And I think part of it is that we need to be really mindful
about how we engage young people [inaudible] and that we need to ask them what works
and really help them take a stronger leadership in pushing this social media stuff
and we've capacitated their thankfully, you know, three of us really kind of focused on this
but not any of us has really dedicated time to do a lot
and the kind of support that it's needed.
We were just talking before the call that we have some youth counsel members
who are not married with children and we're thinking that it's time to re-engage them
and really find out what it takes to get our young people committed not just
to the service locally but to this organization and a role we play in promoting service.
And we need to help our local sites do the same because I think they're still reluctant users,
they're into it, they do it at home because they're firewalled often times but we need
to get them developing that into their service learning strategy, how to get youth,
how do you work with young people that promotes sort of [inaudible] youth in social media.
So we're going to go kind of to the end which is what's next or what next and talk a little bit
about where we think this is going though we recognize that we're probably still right
at the beginning and we're learning a bunch.
>> Yeah, we're still rookies at this game so one of the big things that we recognize that we need
to do is increase usage as Angelia was saying for our youth members.
I think we just need to make it even more structured but almost casually structured
so they don't know they're being structured that just engages them more frequently and keeps them
on a track that people realize that what they're what they're creating and what they're providing
and through the blog and through a Face Book page
and all those good things are being maintained and fresh and exciting for people to look at.
So I think we're on the right track with our AmeriCorps people and mentoring is slowly
but surely getting there and Learn and Serve and hopefully if we do this
in another year we can tell you that we're champions.
We'll get to that point.
We also have a couple of new strategies that we're looking into.
One of the big ones that I'm, I'm not even really familiar with but I'm excited
to approach is mobile technology such as mass texting and creating just more things for people
that are using PDA's and their cell phones as opposed to being able to sit down at a desktop
or laptop computer and look things up readily, making things more accessible to people that are
on the road and on the go and traveling and busy,
busy and providing them more opportunities to engage those people as well.
So we're getting, we're slowly but surely dabbling into the mobile technology for outreach
and education and very anxious about that opportunity.
We're also looking more into videos as Angelia was saying.
We were lucky enough to get a bunch of flip video cameras
which I will say are pretty fun and simple and easy to use.
They come with their own software that downloads directly onto your computer and it's very easy
to edit them, upload them, share them with a variety of people.
So as a result we actually created You Tube page that we've been able to put a few videos up on
and I really hope that in the future we continue we can continue to put even more
up because we put everything together as far as AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve
and mentoring videos and I think it would just be fun to be able to share even more.
We've actually put up some of the national videos with their permission so anything
that we can share at our You Tube page we're very excited to do that as well.
And some of the other things that we're looking to do is a broader communication plan.
We realize that we need to serve all of Michigan not just a select few
and as I was saying earlier, everybody kind of reacts to tools and materials differently
so the more we can do, although it does create more work for us and more work for our grantees
and everybody in between, we do realize
that because we're service oriented we want everyone engaged in service
and we will do everything we can to ensure that we do that.
So we're very excited about that possibility.
>> What's been really neat I think the real cool outcome, the long term sustainable outcome,
is that the social media stuff has been integrated into the way
that we do communications here for service and, you know, beyond Learn and Serve,
beyond just AmeriCorps, beyond just Mentor Michigan.
It is becoming a strategy that we're going to rely on for some time.
One of the last things we want to show you is our United We Serve Michigan page
that is really I think we do more communications here than maybe we do you know by press release,
by, you know, by letter and things so to us this is really the next generation
of kind of where we go.
>> Yeah, if you're on Face Book you should become a fan.
>> Brad Lewis is a fan.
>> Sure enough.
>> There he is.
>> So don't look at the fact that we only have seven
so this page was just created earlier this week so become a fan.
We would appreciate it.
>> Do you want to ask those questions?
>> Yeah. So, you know, just in conclusion I think what our big lessons were
or big questions really for you were how in the world do you all manage this?
Who does the social media in your shop?
What kind of time are they spending?
We got really lucky that we pulled together people
who were just really kind of curious and interested.
And we had not used Face Book coming out of college.
>> I know and I'm, yeah and I'm only been out of school for a few years
so Ang thought I was really lame for a while there.
>> So, you know, we were really lucky that we had a group of people who were just, you know,
professionally curious maybe we've taken it on.
But we, so we wonder from you, you know, who's doing this stuff for you and then what kind
of time are they spending to make it really good because there are areas where we want
to do a better job but we just kind of keep scratching our heads going how though and when?
When will we get this done?
So that's it.
Thank you for listening.
>> Yay. Do people have prob, I mean, have comments in terms of staffing up
and building the capacity to be able to do this?
>> This is Judy from Heartland Foundation and we've been very fortunate
because we have a student intern from [inaudible] Western that is here 20 hours a week
and basically her role is to be our social media guru and Erica's with us here today
but just does a phenomenal job and you know has the stuff on Face Book and Twitter
and is helping us with the other social media tools that we've put in place
through our partnership with Learn and Serve.
>> You know I forgot to mention that we did apply, include funding in the grant
for an intern and you may have heard, we have a little bit of a budget deficit here
and there's a massive hiring freeze and so that person who we thought was going to be the person
who could do some of this work and kind of convene the students and kind of keep
that piece going has yet to appear so that was my tick tock, tick tock, we're still waiting.
They're hopeful that it might get approved but here we are at the end of the grant
so we recognize that as a good option as well.
We're hoping to get there with you.
>> Is there another grantee that wants to share how they staff up?
>> Well I'm thinking, this is Kristin, and I'm thinking that it might be you know part
of what I'm listening for across these calls and I again and probably will come back to you
with some proposals but what might be the three or four big questions
and you know safety has always been one.
Some of those pieces again on what we've learned about how to introduce this and get this
in your system is something that I think people have learned a lot about
and you guys it's clear today that just talking about where people were a year ago
and where they are but I think maybe there is one that we're really talk about, you know,
what does it take to do this well in terms of staffing and what are the models
like I'm intrigued that with the internship piece, you know,
is that to get somebody who's young and more fluent but partnered
with a communications person who really knows the more how the systems work and has some
of those other skill sets you know.
I think we could come up with what are two or three different models as well
as you know what roughly has been the time invested and seems to be the time
to maintain this and keep it fresh and new like you've said.
So you're asking the right question and maybe that's yet to become by to [inaudible] by sort
of September we can start pulling the wisdom from each of the sites.
Is there anything else for Michigan or should we all do our virtual, I don't know,
how do you do applause you know like I guess you type in applause but applause via technology.
Thank you so much Elyse and Angelia.
It was really, I feel like we got a full meal.
>> It felt that way and thank you.
>> Yeah, thanks.