TECH SUPPORT
Using Storify to Capture Insights at Events By Paula Jones, N.C. Center for Nonprofits and NCTech4Good The way you interact with your audience has changed forever. The days of the monologue have passed. People expect to be engaged in real world collaboration and conversation through the social web. It is in these conversations that you discover trends, and gain an honest understanding about your audience’s experience with you or your organization, such as what people like about an event, how a speaker made them feel, or what they think about your services. All of these honest interactions and reactions are important, not only because you’re better able to serve them, but because you’re also building relationships and creating exposure for your organization. This “user-generated content” can tell a broader story that’s needed to help you better serve and meet your mission. The question is: What do you do with this user-generated content? How can you interpret it? Whether or not you capture or listen to this content, people will create it. Tons of it! That’s where tools such as Storify come in.
What is Storify? Storify is a free online tool that allows you to tell stories by
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curating content from your social networks and from the web. You can use searches and hashtags to find the most important tweets, posts, videos, links, and other relevant online media to create a visual story with context to why it’s important for your story. It captures the voice of the community by compiling people’s reactions to a speaker at an event, news story, disaster, trend, or other shared experience. Additionally, Storify offers flexibility in how you share your curated story. In addition to sharing it across social media channels, you can also embed it on your website or blog, which is a great feature if your audiences are not on social media.
Case Study – NCTech4Good Conference After this year’s NCTech4Good Conference, our organizers were determined to find an easy way to
curate the greatest moments from the annual conference. The goal was to collect the conversations that happened around the conference so they could be shared with participants and those who were unable to attend. We hoped to preserve the authenticity of the attendees, the spirit of the conference, and the passion of those involved in our nonprofit technology community. Participants were encouraged to use the Twitter hashtag, #nct4g, when they posted content relevant to the conference. This helped us to streamline all content in one channel by having one location, which we could tap into further with Storify. We chose to use this tool because of its ease of use and ability to curate content across multiple platforms. It was the first time we used this tool for an event, so we sought help from Ryan Boyles, Global Social Media Strategist and Digital Marketing Lead at IBM (@therab). After his demonstration of Storify to our 501TechClub, I created these five tips to help as you consider Storify for your organization.
1)
Encourage online engagement: You must provide a way for participants to share pictures, tweets, posts, or status updates in an easily identifiable way. Prior to the event, establish the hashtag and include it on all materials such as slide
“This ‘user-generated content’ can tell a broader story that’s needed to help you better serve and meet your mission.”