Kapor Center For Social Impact's digital engagement director Cliff Worley creates social media strategies that aim to diversify the technology ecosystem.
Cliff Worley
Digital Engagement Director, Kapor Center For Social Impact
Oakland, CA
Twitter: @FiscalCliffw
4:59am: I wake up thinking I still have hours to sleep, but there’s really only one minute left before the alarm goes off. I grab my phone to see what I missed on social media from the night before and take a quick glance at my email before checking my calendar to see how busy my day is going to be.
5:30am: Finally out of bed, I’m dreading getting dressed for the gym, though a quick glance at my belly motivates me to go. My gym is in my apartment building, so I really have no excuse. I focus mostly on core exercises – planks, squats, pushups, and woodchops – due to a back injury from my CrossFit days. I jump in the shower, get dressed, and have a bagel with cream cheese. After I eat, I ask my Amazon Alexa for the morning news brief.
8:15am: I grab a green juice on my way out the door. Everyone talks about how bad the Bay Area commute is, but it all depends on where you live and work. I’m lucky to have a sub-one-hour train commute from my apartment to my office in Oakland. During the ride, I listen to the new DJ Khaled album “Grateful” and peruse @SocialTimes and @SocialMedia411 on Twitter to stay up on the latest social media news.
9:00am: I arrive at the Kapor Center, which houses the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Capital (our venture capital investment arm), and the Level Playing Field Institute (our nonprofit that engages underrepresented youth in STEM), all of which aim to diversify the technology ecosystem so that it is more inclusive of communities who may not have access to opportunities and education. Collectively, we’re thinking about, through education programs, social impact investing, and advocacy. It’s exciting to start each day walking into a building filled with people and organizations doing work we all care deeply about. As our digital engagement director, I coordinate and manage all social media campaigns for the Kapor family of organizations. There’s a lot going on at any given time, which often means I have to be good at juggling and prioritizing. I start my day at my desk updating my to-do list on Trello, the project management software that helps me keep track of all of my projects and incoming requests. The joke at the office is that my Trello board could be mistaken for a massive game of solitaire because I have so many tasks on my screen at all times.
9:30am: I run through our social media accounts on Hootsuite (my go-to platform for scheduling social posts, engaging with our fans and followers, and reviewing social performance media metrics). We hosted an event at our office last night about venture capital and startups, so our social media channels saw a good amount of activity from that. One of Kapor Capital’s principal’s, Ulili Onovakpuri, led the event, and I spend about 30 minutes analyzing the social conversation online and run a report on how well the hashtag for the event performed.
10:00am: I meet with my colleague Jonathan and one of Kapor’s summer interns, Karen, to discuss the layout for a quarterly newsletter highlighting our team’s work in Oakland’s tech ecosystem and our research on inequity in opportunity and underrepresented students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We discuss how the newsletter layout can be optimized and finish our meeting 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Everyone loves 15 minutes of their day back!
11:30am: There are close to 60 people who work at the Kapor Center, four of whom are on my team. Our office has an open floorplan and lots of great art around the building, courtesy of Mitch and Freada Kapor's personal art collection. Tonight, we are hosting our first annual Kapor Social Impact Awards, celebrating outstanding efforts to boost inclusion in the tech ecosystem. We’ll be livestreaming the event on Facebook, so I head to the auditorium in the basement of our building, where the event will be held, to test the audio and video configuration with our IT team. We’re all set to kick off the livestream at 6:30pm sharp. Back at my desk, I gather Twitter handles for all the participants and awardees so I can shout them out on social throughout the event. I also log into Union Metrics, the software we use to track Twitter metrics, to make sure it’s configured to track everything online.
12:30pm: Time to grab lunch. My boss is in town from D.C. this week, so we walk across the street to get salads and bring them back to our office. We take advantage of our building’s amazing rooftop deck and the sunny day, enjoying our lunch up there and talking about the gameplan for the Impact Awards show before discussing our team offsite scheduled for the end of the week.
1:30pm: Back at my desk, I quickly scan Hootsuite to catch up on any activity I’ve missed on our social media channels. I receive an email announcing that Kapor Capital just invested in a new company that will need to be added to our website – exciting! I open up Photoshop and edit the new company’s logo to be formatted for our site before adding it to www.kaporcapital.com, where we proudly display the startups in our investment portfolio (there are a lot, so we organize the logos by sector, from finance, health and justice, to education, food, and people operations tech, among others).
2:30pm: I get to work on my presentation for our team offsite on Friday. The meeting is a mid-year check-in to see how our department is operating and assess any needs for additional resources. For the next two hours, I work on crafting my case for bringing on an additional intern and possibly another full-time employee for next year as well. We are preparing to launch a blog, and I would like to get Kapor Capital and Kapor Center For Social Impact on Instagram, so I could really use the help.
4:30pm: I’m starting to get a little hungry, so I go upstairs and raid our snack pantry. If you are trying to lose weight, stay out of this room. My snack of choice is a bag of Goldfish. Back at my computer, I start knocking out emails. I love having my inbox at zero before I leave for the day, though 99 percent of the time this is not possible. But I try.
5:30pm: It’s time to start getting ready for the Impact Awards ceremony. The IT team and I do one more run-through, testing the Facebook Live stream and double-checking the audio quality. I send out a quick tweet alerting our community that the awards will be starting in an hour, and I schedule another tweet to go out that includes the link to Facebook Live stream. Pre-scheduling posts really helps streamline my job.
6:15pm: I head downstairs to the event. When I arrive in the auditorium, I almost don't recognize the place – the mood lighting is on point, and there is a small jazz ensemble playing in the entryway. I grab a couple photos for Twitter and let our followers know that the event is about to start. I take a seat in the auditorium and get my laptop ready for the livestream and the show.
6:30pm: It’s showtime! I quickly check the audio and video feeds to make sure everything is running smoothly for our online participants. Now it’s time to start live tweeting. Gotta love social media, right? We encourage everyone at our events to Tweet and promote the event hashtag, and we also continuously look for tweets that help elevate the conversation. I start monitoring #KaporAwards2017 through Hootsuite and see a few quality tweets that I retweet from the @KaporCenter Twitter handle. We’re always excited to be growing our digital footprint. We hit 10,000 followers earlier this month!
8:00pm: Seems like the event is a success. Over 100 people came out, from the team at the design studio Oakland Digital, to Ana Roca Castro, CEO at Genius Plaza, and many other innovators and social entrepreneurs. Time to head home. The good news about catching the train after 7pm is that you get a seat. On the ride, I continue to monitor our feeds to engage with the post-event tweets, while also hopping into a game of Candy Crush. I’m on level 370, and, while I’m theoretically trying to beat the game, I have a feeling they are going to keep adding levels. That’s fine with me too, though. I can play this game until I’m old.
9:00pm: I make it home. Since I worked out this morning, I grab a popsicle from the freezer (yes, a popsicle – a blue Otter Pop, to be exact). Probably not the healthiest, but you need to treat yo’ self every now and then. Then I eat dinner and browse the internet until it's time for bed. I will only watch TV if the Golden State Warriors are playing, but since we won the championship already, the TV pretty much stays off until October minus some occasional news surfing.
9:45pm: I get in the bed and check my personal and professional social channels one more time. Per usual, I try to count to 100 to fall asleep. Also per usual, I get to three and pass out. three.