Edition #10

[OCTOBER RECAP] The Power of In Person!

Ashwath Narayanan
November 09, 2023

Happy Election Week! Can’t believe it’s almost halfway through November. I know I’m a little late with the October recap newsletter, but it’s been a week — to say the least. To all the new readers — welcome! Every month, I put together a round up of news, highlights, tests and things we’re exploring around the creator economy as it relates to the progressive/impact space at Social Currant.

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I also share more about what we're up to at Social Currant, my interactions with creators and how you should be thinking about working with creators.

Alright, so — let’s dive in to everything else:

We hosted our very first creator briefing on November 2nd — bringing a group of creators to talk about the differences between c3’s and c4’s, how to navigate a firewall and work with organizations in politics and advocacy more effectively. We’re hosting our second soon on best practices around mental health, RSVP if you want a preview!
We also hosted our very first DC creator meet up + San Francisco creator meet up. We’d love to partner on an event in your city! Let us know and we can coordinate details.
We’re testing our product with organizations — we now have content flow on the platform and are hard at work to see what features we can add to make your job easier. If you’re interested in matching with creators, let us know!

Our very first creator briefing!

Alright, so — for today’s newsletter I’m going to focus on the power of in-person collaborations, share ideas on how more organizations can think about this and what you need to do to start building community with creators offline.

High level pros and cons:

Helps you build stronger, long lasting relationships with creators. On the flip side — these are hard to measure and leverage without consistent investment in working with creators.
Gets you bonus content — creators are more bought in and likely to support you and your cause through in person events.
It allows creators to see you as someone that is giving them space to meet other creators + focused on investing in deeper relationships with creators.
It can be more expensive and more work — a lot of coordination, managing people that can take up more time than sponsored content.

Quick tips: A few quick tips to keep in the back of your mind as you’re thinking about creator work.

List build early and consistently. One of the big challenges around bringing creators together offline is to have a ready list of creators you can invite. Start building your list early by looking through location tags and other spaces creators are meeting.
Partner with a creator! Identify a creator in your location / community and see if you can work with them to bring creators together around the shared goals + issue.
You don’t have to create new convening spaces, you can also invite creators to existing events you’re hosting as an organization — fundraisers, happy hours, press briefings — the opportunities are limitless.
Build your processes early and try to work as much in advance as you can when it comes to in person events. Think through internal organization processes you’ll need to have before you even get started.

Where To Start:

Build that list of creators that make sense to your organization + are in the same location.
Start cataloguing all the events you have coming up and think through where you may need amplification help and support.
Start talking to creators on the list to understand their appetite around in person events, what types of events they’re looking to join and what their goals are.
Find an event that is the right and invite them!
Repeat and continue building relationships with folks.

What This Can Look Like: A few ideas around what in person collaborations can look like:

The next time you’re on the hill, bring some creators along.
If you’re hosting an event in your community — invite creators to come interview stakeholders.
Invite creators to a press briefing, if you’re hosting one.
If you have a fundraiser, give creators a VIP ticket — their reach and awareness may help you raise more.
Host creator only events — roundtables, discussions.

If you want to start small, you can also take everything I’ve said and do it on zoom to get a feel for what this can look like. The best organizations are doing all of the above and more but you don’t have to start with everything. Start with one creator, one event — go from there!

Creator Economy News I’m Reading:

Instagram is diving deeper into paid subscriptions. They now have over 1M subscriptions to creators (compared to 30M on Patreon). While it’s a small business compared to their ad business, they’re focused on building tools for creators to trial this new feature and generate more subscribers. Read more here.
TikTok is shutting down it’s creator fund — in favor of their new creator monetization program. It’s unclear whether they paid out the entire billion dollars, but the fund was known for it’s notoriously low payouts. This goes to emphasize that the only real platform to monetize on is still Youtube. Read more here.
In an earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads had just under 100 million monthly active users. Read more about the actions they’re taking to keep users coming.
President Biden announced a new executive order focused on starting the regulation conversation around AI. Here’s what it may mean for creators.
TikTok launches a set of moderation features and practices surrounding content on the platform. Read more to also find a mini analysis from them around content surrounding Israel & Palestine.
Slow Capital did a quick breakdown in some of the evolution of the creator economy and the types of creators they work with. Check the newsletter edition here and make sure to subscribe for more info.
Reels announces that it will allow creators to A/B test thumbnails and captions. This also raises questions whether these matter on short-form content. Read more here.
Instagram is testing collaborative carousel posts that allow you to source photos from friends or followers. Check the feature out here.

Anecdotes, observations & what we’re hearing from creators:

For creators seeing suppression of content, adding other creators as collaborators helps reach a larger audience. Some creators are adding up to 4 collaborators to their posts to help reach a larger audience.
Number of redrafts matter! We’re hearing from creators that reducing the number of redrafts can actually help reduce rates / serve as a negotiation tactic to help creators understand the time needed from them for a specific deliverable.

Some ideas we're testing/looking to test. I'd love to chat with you if you're interested. Grab some time / reply!

We’re looking to build more regular programing & resources for creators. Some of the things we’re testing:

Events for creators — in person and virtual to give folks more space to learn about the political, advocacy and social impact space.
Toolkits, resources and materials that could equip creators with more information to talk about causes they care about. We’re partnering with a number of awesome organizations on this.

If you have ideas you want us to test, let us know!

FAQs from the month:

How do you find the right creators for your organization? Use our platform — we’re building to help organizations find creators with ease. Here’s a few other quick tips:

It’s much easier to search through tags (based on issue, content and any other identifiers you may have about your community!) on TikTok & Youtube to find creators than Instagram.
Always use your phone to find creators. The desktop app for TikTok isn’t just there yet when it comes to search features.
Once you find one ideal creator, try to go through who they follow - engage with, who is commenting on their content.
Then ask all these creators what they care about — why — ask them for referrals and you’re looking at a list of 10-15 creators.

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If you made it all this way - thank you! For reading, trusting creators and me. I'm building Social Currant to make an impact and you all are a part of this journey. Until next month!

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