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Christine Pelosi comments on Tuesday's results with Chris Kelly (left) and Fred Davis (right)

Highlights from Rally’s Technology-Themed Super Tuesday Watch Party & Panel

Hashtags were more prevalent than insults Tuesday night as tech leaders and leading strategists from the two main political parties gathered at Rally HQ to talk politics and technology.

The all-star panel, moderated by former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, mostly agreed on tech’s growing impact on the race for the White House, while agreeing to disagree about the broader issues that will define the election.

“The big takeaway from the night is that the fundamental truths of politics have not changed but the technological tools have,” said Rally.org founder and CEO Tom Serres. “In fundraising, people still give to people and people still give to stories.”

“Conventional wisdom is that Republicans are troglodytes when it comes to technology,” said GOP strategist Tucker Eskew, “Are we there yet, no. But we are sharpening our weapons.”

“Campaigns must adapt to survive or they cannot win,” said Democratic communications expert Peter Rangone.

Panelists also talked about the role of technology in building image and driving conversation.

Fred Davis, a leading Republican ad maker, said “I don’t think the internet and web yet are the image creators that decide all . . . the decision on who to vote for is made by talk – something that old.”

Leading Democratic digital strategist Christine Pelosi responded, “The internet is not the image maker but it is definitely the image breaker.”

“I think the water cooler has changed – the water cooler is on Facebook, the water cooler is on Twitter, the water cooler on Rally” said Serres.

Responding to the results from ten GOP primaries, Democrats welcomed the prospect for an even longer and harsher Republican primary season during the discussion at the Rally headquarters.“The winner tonight is Barack Obama,” said Pelosi.

Republican strategist Eskew said he saw a path for a Romney victory, but that the governor needed to “avoid the temptation to tell the biography of Mitt Romney and instead put forward solutions on the terribly unpopular stimulus and terribly unpopular healthcare plan.”

Representatives from both the Obama and Romney campaigns attended the event and mingled with the more than 200 participants.

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Whether your Rally Cause Page needs to match your already established website, or your Cause Page IS your website, designing an attractive header is an easy and important way to represent your cause. Follow some of these suggestions to design and create a compelling Rally header that inspires people to donate to your cause.

Design Tips:

1. If you have a logo, be sure and feature it.

2. If you have a tagline, include it! It helps new visitors better understand your cause.

3. Use good quality photos of some of the people your cause helps.

4. Or show your cause in action with detailed images.

5. Remember your header image needs to be 940 x 150 pixels and saved as a JPG or PNG.

Resources:

1. Tools for designing your header:

• Powerpoint
• Keynote (for mac users)

2. Free photo editors and how-to guides for cropping and saving your header:

• Picasa: How-to crop images
• Aviary: How-to crop images
• Gimp: How-to crop images
• iPhoto (for mac users): How-to crop images

We hope this list was helpful. If you want to learn about Rally’s tools for fundraising sign up for our weekly webinar or download our Getting Started Guide.

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Cara Jones speaking

How often do you immediately share with a room full of strangers the story of the most wild drag-down fight you ever had with your brother? That is was what happened to me Tuesday night at “Storytelling for Good”—a workshop hosted by RallyPad with Emmy award-winning Cara Jones (founder of Storytellers for Good).

For almost two hours, 25 other non-profit or communications professionals and I practiced storytelling, learned concrete tips for storytelling, and watched examples of mighty fine video storytelling. Here are my notes.

After asking us to tell a personal story in 90 seconds, Cara shared with us her story as a young ABC affiliate broadcaster in southwest Florida. She reported about stranded manatees and other marine wildlife until she moved to New England and covered Boston area crime. And reported about a lot of sad, sad stories. She eventually left. “I wanted to tell stories but I didn’t want to tell stories for the news.” After leaving Boston, Cara traveled for a year to South America, Spain, and India. She eventually moved to San Francisco and founded Storytellers for Good.

The workshop focused on three basic principles for storytelling in video, photo, and writing.

1. Aim for the heart.

Reason, statistics, and infrastructure all have their place. But not when you need to  supercharge your audience to remember your cause. Stories that resonate emotionally are also more likely to be shared. As viral video pundit Dane Greenberg put it, people “are not just sharing your content — they are sharing the feeling your video has created.”

Example shown:  Mama Hope
What moved me: A mother’s love and loss unexpectedly transforms her daughter and a small Kenyan village

Mama Hope

HOW do you interview someone to best capture their story?

Listen.

• Make eye contact during your interview.
• Be aware of “what you want to find vs. what you find.”
• Ask tough questions. Then ask them again. Sometimes you hear more the second time around. (Sometimes you need to ask them again because the camera wasn’t rolling!)
• Be comfortable with silence. Wait a beat or two and you might be surprised what people share.

“Exaggerate what’s there so people who are not there feel they are there.”

Aim Tight.

• Use close ups of people for video and photography
• Allow natural background sounds to be present in the audio.
• Show concrete details to evoke the reality of the situation

“We are all looking for ourselves in stories.”

2. Let characters lead.

Focus on 1 or 2 characters. Don’t try to include everyone or everything; otherwise, people will remember nothing.

Example shown: Smile
What moved me: A one-woman intervention to help her neighborhood connect.

SMILE

Choose a main character who embodies G.O.A.L. :

Genuine. Someone is emotionally in touch with themeselves.
Outgoing. Shy people will not amplify well on video.
Articulate.
Lively. Enthusiasm is infectious.

HOW to help characters shine?

• Interview them in a comfortable environment (never against a white wall!).
• Invest in a lavalier mic that is unobtrusive and captures sound well.
• Interview without referring to notes so the person is more at ease.

3. Remember narrative structure. Build to a surprise.

Don’t get keep telling your beginning over and over. A lot of organization spend so much time talking about their programs or introducing themselves, they forget to move it forward.

Example shown:  The 93 Dollar Club
What moved me: One random act of kindness between strangers at the grocery store grows into a solution to hunger.

The 93 Dollar Club

When crafting a story:

• Identify a problem. Introduce the hero. (beginning)
• Send the hero out into the world. (middle)
• Resolve the tension and draw or suggest a conclusion (end)

Think big picture. Ask yourself or your organization:

• Who is your audience?
• What is the message of the story? (This is not your mission statement)
• What is the best medium to tell this story? A 2 minute video? One large photo? A “longread” in your newsletter or blog?
• What is your “ask”? What do you want people to feel or do by the end of the story?

In addition to the people you help,  also consider telling the stories of :

• Founders
• Volunteers
• Donors
• Your surrounding community

Parting thoughts.

Everyone has a story.

Keep it short. For video, 2-3 minutes is a good length without trying to describe everything you do.

A good story helps people remember your cause; it doesn’t attempt to represent everything your organization does.

Build a storytelling culture in your organization. Consider developing a “story bank” so when you need to communicate through story, you have good examples on hand.

And that fight I had with my brother? It ended well. He and I learned we care a lot about toys. I learned not to bite. In some ways, we both won, and my parents learned something in the process too.

“If you want to learn about a culture, listen to stories. If you want to change a culture, change the stories.” — Michael Margolis, Get Storied

And lastly, a parting example of  a story that balances more than one character, showcases fruites and vegetables, and incorporates moving type. There is a whole world of storytelling out there. Find your hook!

Mandela Marketplace from Storytellers For Good

—————-

We at Rally hope this article was useful.  If you or your organization are looking for a unique way to combine storytelling and fundraising, check out Rally’s online fundraising tools. Post your videos and photos and raise money for causes you care about. 

If you live in the Bay Area and are interested in attending future workshops and events at RallyPad, our incubator and event space for non-profits and causes, join our email list.

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Jesse Taggert joins us as Product Marketing Manager for Rally and Program Manager for RallyPad. She has over 15 years experience in communication and design. Jesse has helped organizations — startups, professional associations, art museums, universities, and even the U.S. Navy — strengthen their market position, tell their story, and inspire their audience.

Born and bred in New England, Jesse worked in Boston for over 10 years and earned a master’s degree in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design. A few years later—craving warmer winters and the “can do anything” culture of the Bay Area—she moved to San Francisco. She’s taught design and design history, run a coworking space, and currently volunteers as “Dean” of the Awesome Foundation, San Francisco.

Causes Jesse cares about include: funding art projects, ending child sex trafficking and increasing women’s educational and economic opportunities worldwide.

Teresa joins Rally as our indispensible Operations Manager. She worked with us for several months on a contract basis, and we’re now thrilled to have her aboard full time to support the Rally team and the RallyPadders as we all work towards building a stronger community.

She is finishing up her MA thesis and is in her third year of a “service learning teaching pipeline,” Pin@y Educational Partnerships, where they voluntarily teach Critical Filipina/o American Studies at SFUSD and City College of San Francisco to address issues of recruitment, retention, and research, amongst others. In her chill time, she likes to eat good food, be with friends, and go to sunny places.

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Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle

A few weeks ago, Carolyn Said sat down with Rally’s CEO to learn more about the company’s evolution. We love the way her cover-article in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the Rally story:

Serres, now 30, was volunteering for a local candidate running for judge in 2004 while studying Chinese and accounting at the University of Texas at Austin.

Surprised that the campaign lacked an online presence, he helped build a website and raise money via e-mails and online newsletters.

During the next year and a half, that consulting business evolved into a online fundraising platform. After a key turning point involving Rep. Joe Wilson’s famous “you lie” outburst during President Obama’s health care speech to congress, the platform took off.

To the founding team’s surprise, it wasn’t just  politicians who needed an easy online fundraising tool. Everyone from schools to churches to nonprofits started signing up:

[Rally] is now home to more than 10,000 cause-based groups worldwide, “from Bangladesh to Iceland,” Serres said.

“We quickly evolved beyond political organizations to advocacy groups, churches, things like nature conservancies, missionary groups, you name it,” he said.

The article goes on to describe Rally’s current client-base, as well as our social venture incubator, RallyPad.

You can read the full story here.

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Adam Tait joins the Rally Engineering team from his consulting business, where he led front-end development & product marketing efforts for a range of technology businesses. Previously, Adam has worked at Freelancer.com, Indochino.com and Amazon.com, and with Canadian venture incubator, Wesley Clover. He loves all things winter and has been a long-time supporter of the Alpine Canada and Canadian Ski Coaches Federation. At weeks end, Adam can been seen training for the next marathon, learning japanese, or hacking on his guitar.

John Brandy joins us from Hewlett-Packard, where he worked as a Systems and Software Engineer. Journeying west, John’s trip to Rally started in Florida with a stop in Fort Collins, Colorado before finally reaching the bay area of California. In addition to being a stellar engineer, John is a home-brewing enthusiast, with plans to teach the Rally team how to make a mean IPA.

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Congratulations are in order for Kaitlyn Trigger on her recent launch of Lovestagram.  Kaitlyn is our marketing director here at Rally. She also happens to be Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend, and decided to learn to program to give him a fabulous Valentines Day present.  With some coaching from her friends, Rally employees, and of course Mike, she spent a couple of months of spare time building the app.

The reception has been nothing short of spectacular.  Kaitlyn and her app have been profiled in Tech Crunch, Mashable, Gizmodo and elsewhere.  She has rapidly found herself on the speaking circuit telling her story about how she learned to program and is finding a rapt audience among interested women in San Francisco.

Bravo Kaitlyn, Bravo!

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Two slim, silver, 10-inch-tall ladies will be joining the Rally team! Our online fundraising engine, which is now used by thousands of causes, won “Best Online Fundraising Tool” and “Most Innovative Product” at Campaigns & Elections’ 2012 Reed Awards on Friday night.

The Reed Awards recognize the best in political campaigning and communication in the United States. According to Campaigns & Elections Publisher Shane Greer, “When you win a Reed you’re joining an exclusive club whose members literally shape the political future.” Why, thank you!

While Rally’s easy online fundraising tool is open to causes of all types, it’s been especially popular with political campaigns as the 2012 election cycle heats up. From multi-million dollar Senate bids down to town assembly races, campaigns across the political spectrum are using Rally to share their message, connect with new supporters, and raise more money.

After accepting both awards, Rally CEO, Tom Serres, thanked the judges, saying, “We’re honored to receive such prestigious recognition from the political community, and we look forward to working with more political entrepreneurs on both sides of the aisle.”

If you’re curious how Rally’s easy online fundraising tool can help your campaign win in 2012, please join us during one of our free 30-minute webinars. Sign up here.

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This week, a colleague and I got to attend the Social Media for Nonprofits conference in New York City. Speakers like Beth Kanter and Paull Young from charity : water enchanted us with stories and advice for how social media can energize nonprofits. To share this great event with the Rally community, we sponsored two nonprofit leaders to attend, and they’ve graciously shared a few of their top takeaways with us.

Eric Cohen is the Founder and Executive Director of ‘nPlay Foundation, a 501c3 organization that is helping schools meet the criteria of the HealthierUS Schools Challenge. He writes:

This past Monday I attended the Social Media for Nonprofits conference in NYC thanks to a scholarship from Rally! It was a very enlightening day as I learned some very new things about the right way to utilize social media for the non-profit world. While the issue of childhood obesity is something that is very visible today, it clearly hasn’t translated to fundraising and visibility online the way it should. I know the takeaways from this conference will help ‘nPlay reverse that.

Stand for something positive

People want to be inspired and see positive change. Social Media provides a great platform to do that. You need to utilize your real donors and recipients to do that. No one wants to be depressed. Who passes along a video to a friend or family member that makes them sad?

Add your own spin to great content

It’s not enough to just re-tweet content no matter how good it is. It’s important to put your own slant on it that makes it fresh.

I especially love his last point. “Content curation” is getting a lot of attention as a quick way to build up an authoritative social media presence. What’s easy to forget, though, is that great content curation requires adding value to the web, not just aggregating value from the web.

John Link, the second nonprofit leader Rally sponsored, also wrote about the importance of content curation. John leads communicati