NPCommunicator

blogger is killing me

2007-09-20T17:20:00.001-05:00

well, we are trying to move this over to wordpress....

A old alinskyist on code pink

2007-09-17T09:39:00.001-05:00

X-politics: ESPN-speak for direct action organizing. Read this piece from The Nation, by Nick Von Hoffman, I think you'll love it! Gotta love those Code Pink ladies.

Community Media Summit

2007-07-31T17:10:00.000-05:00

Business and PR types are buzzing about "social media." Nonprofits have community media--same stuff, but it's not about selling someone something they may not really need. More definitions here and here.

In June in addition to our usual Making Media Connections conference, we held a Community Media Summit to discuss this stuff. Here are a few videos.

We had 172 folks come out; look for a copy of the formal evaluation of the event in this space soon.

Professionals

2007-02-23T17:20:00.000-06:00

If you want to know more about Chicago Public School music teachers or what Barack Obama really did (or did not do) as a young community organizer on Chicago's Southeast Side--and more on nearly two dozen other topics, these are the folks who can tell you.

Five weeks after we started, Community Media Workshop's winter 2007 Professional Media Relations class wrapped up, with 24 folks having mastered media relations basics.

They are volunteers as well as communications, advocacy & organizing, and development staff from nonprofits
as far south as Altgeld Gardens on the South Side and Highwood in Lake County on the north.

We decided to take a picture of this year's group because we've found in the past that people who take this class go on to do pretty high level communications work, as this recent article from Columbia College Chicago's alumni magazine demonstrates.

Also on hand and in the picture from our final class were journalists Melanie Coffee from Associated Press-Chicago, Catrin Einhorn from Chicago Public Radio, Anita Selvaggio from CLTV, and Bob Secter from Chicago Tribune. They let the nonprofit communicators practice pitches on them and were very gentle--although as Bob pointed out, he might not have 15 minutes to give to a pitch on an average work day!

Advanced Communications from new friends at Opportunity Agenda

2006-07-27T06:20:00.000-05:00

Driving while black—instead of racial profiling. Working moms with no options--instead of home alone.

These are examples of reframing social issues that Alan Jenkins of Opportunity Agenda and Diana Ip of the SPIN Project presented to about 40 policy and communications staff at the Workshop yesterday—an advanced communications class that focused on a specific kind of frame Jenkins and his organization have researched, tested, and hope to apply to a range of social issues: opportunity.

“Opportunity is connected to deeply held beliefs about America,” Jenkins told the group. “Opportunity is a way to talk positively, it’s for all, [it] balances threat and promise.” His group’s research found Americans are both proud of the country’s core values and at the same time often disappointed in the lack of fulfillment of these high ideals.

Many in communications and policy have noticed the downside of our diverse nonprofits is the seeming inability of many of these groups to talk to each other, even or especially when it seems they should be on the same side of many issues. Opportunity Agenda proposes that using a common frame can help nonprofits get their messages across more clearly. But the group’s leaders also believe nonprofits everywhere can strengthen each other by speaking from a similar playbook, using this research-tested and writer-developed frame of opportunity.

Reframing racial profiling as driving while black gave the issue new traction, Jenkins told the group. It was done through a mixture of research demonstrating that African Americans were pulled over disproportionately on I-95 along the East Coast, for example and taking advantage of key moments, such as traffic stops of high-profile individuals who are black. the media and word of mouth carried the message across the country. Jenkins said the pre-9/11 campaign has not only helped reduce racial profiling—some—it also helped inform a general feeling that the country needs to show restrain on profiling Muslims and Arab-Americans since 9/11.

It was experiences such as this that prompted Jenkins, Phoebe Eng, and Brian Smedley to start The Opportunity Agenda. Jenkins was previously director of human rights at Ford Foundation, Eng directed The Social Change Communications Project, a foundation-sponsored research initiative exploring the role of strategic communications in social justice advocacy, and Smedley has been a Congressional Research Fellow and senior staffer at Institute of Medicine. The New York based group is a project of the Tides Center currently; they anticipate gaining their own 501c3. The presentation in Chicago was the fourth in a series of rollout events for the brand-new organization.

The Opportunity Agenda:

Mobility, Where you start should not influence where you can end up in life.
Equality, not everyone gets the same treatment but necessary accommodations are made to ensure everyone ‘starts at the same line.’
Voice, people have a say in the decisions that affect them—not just freedom from censorship or a vote but opportunities to be engaged in debate.
Redemption, people should have a chance to start over, even if they have made mistakes, that this is a ‘nation of second chances.’
Community, we’re all in this together--not enlightened self interest but that we are better together.
Security, people must require the ability to provide for their basic needs to take care of themselves.

What can Lewis Lapham say to a bunch of farmers (or vice versa)?

2006-07-15T16:45:00.000-05:00

In theory, people who talk about George Orwell and quote from history books about the value of dissent in democracy ought to be close allies with people who put crooked payday lenders behind bars and protest against hog factory farms. In practice, we seldom see these folks in the same room together.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement broke that rule at their annual convention in Des Moines, which CMW staff visited over the July 14 weekend to do spokesperson and letter-to-the-editor workshops. Iowa CCI hired Lewis Lapham, Harper’s editor emeritus, as keynote speaker for the annual meeting, which drew more than 300 members from across the state.

“Democracy allies itself with change. It assumes a ceaseless making and remaking of laws and customs [not just] matinee idols,” Lapham told the audience. “Without dissent, you don’t have an argument. Without argument, you don’t have democracy.”

The appearance was by and large a success. Lapham’s audience, a mix of family farmers, working folks from around the state, and other members of the statewide organization, gave him a standing ovation. After the speech, a few kept him talking in the hotel smokers’ lounge until the dapper Lapham finally started to nod off after a long day of travel.

“Democracy is dissent,” the title for Lapham’s talk, reinforced the Iowa CCI message that protest is an all-American tradition.

Why is this showing up on our blog? For two reasons. First, advocacy communications, the kind we often work on, is almost always about the intersection between talking and acting. Second, Iowa CCI is putting into practice in a polished and effective way the kinds of methods people like George Lakoff have been talking about.

This group is very savvy about messaging and communications. Visit the Iowa CCI web site and the first thing you’ll see is that this organization has framing and branding down. It’s rooted in direct-action—it was started in 1975 by a former priest trained in Alinsky-style organizing by Chicagoan Shel Trapp of Chicago’s National Training and Information Center.

Iowa CCI promotes family over factory farms, leads the nation in the areas of urban and rural grassroots community development and bank reinvestment, supports immigrant rights by working on education, profiling, and jobs issues with the state's growing Latino population, and works on public election reform.

Their work is not unusual across the country, but the way Iowa CCI talks about it is. Their frame, laid out on the Web site, is “We Talk. We Act. We Get Things Done.”

It promotes action without sounding raucous. It’s so commonsensical -- so Iowa -- it’s hard to imagine who could be against it. On the branding side, Iowa CCI has splashed the tag line across their Web site, slick four-fold brochure featuring a posed photo of about a dozen members, new banner, and other materials including an annual report more polished than many another million-dollar-budget nonprofit. They even have their own “Get It Done” Fair Trade Coffee as a fundraiser.

The tag line and many of these materials resulted from an extended process of research and meetings involved staff and leaders that the group’s volunteer leadership and paid staff carried out with the help of a Des Moines area public relations consultant who donated her services.

“A lot of organizers think, ‘I don’t have time for that,’ CCI Executive Director Hugh Espey said. “They’re too focused on the here and now. That’s important but they need to be thinking strategically to stay around for the long haul in addition to the here and now.”

As observers of the whole show, CMW staff had to wonder who learned more from whom. As he heard stories about the organization’s recent victories such as getting local banks to invest in revitalizing urban areas and stopping police from racially profiling immigrants, Lapham seemed genuinely surprised by and interested in the work of Iowa CCI. Maybe we can try this kind of get-together again soon!

P.S. maybe it's the factory farm issue itself that is inspiring creativity. Check out the flash movie "The Meatrix" for a funny intro to the issue.

More free stuff

2006-05-02T08:52:00.000-05:00

If you visit the Design America Foundation on-line, you won't just find a good looking web site--they also have a program to donate free design services to charitable organizations (i.e., nonprofits). Chicago is one of 30 cities where they are working.

You have to write a proposal--but they will provide up to $40,000 worth of design help. For grins and giggles, and general edification, here is some guidance from their web site on good and bad proposal language:

Applications that have the most compelling outcome-tracking measures are most favored.

Examples of strong requests:
We need our project's message to reach 30,000 people over a 12-month period with a 3% response to our call center. We have $10,000 to apply to production.

We serve an invisible, transient population that is difficult to track. We need a project that will help us connect with 250 youth over a 6-month period. We have $2,500 to apply to production.

Examples of weak requests:
Our PR Committee developed a communications plan we need implemented. We need all new print material.

Our website and agency brochure do not coordinate and look unprofessional. We need a new website and collateral material that present a more polished image of us.

We need a new logo.

Go get 'em!

Every crime in your neighborhood--on the web

2006-04-21T12:44:00.000-05:00

Have you seen www.chicagocrime.org? Its a map that uses up-to-the-minute
Citizen ICAM data from the Chicago Police Department to track the location
and nature of every reported crime in the city. When we viewed it at our
office, everyone was astounded at how much crime is happening in our home
neighborhoods.

Beyond the fear factor, its useful to nonprofits looking
to track the nature and number of crimes occurring in their service areas.
In areas served by the Chicago Journal newspaper, you can also get stories
about the crimes that come from the papers Police Blotter feature.

Its a project of Adrian Holovaty, 25, who is in charge of special online
projects for The Washington Post. He is based in Chicago (at least until
his wife finishes law school next year).

Holovaty says he is a journalist but I use code instead of words. As he
points out, he is still carrying out the basic functions of journalism:
gathering information, distilling it, and presenting it. But the
information he presents relies on massive databases; he writes computer
programs that go find this information on the Web, aggregate and make sense
of it, and then make it searchable and sortable by various fields.

For example, a recent Post project was to create a searchable database of
every Congressional vote since 1991. The votes are viewable by bill, member
of Congress, year, and so forth. Chicagocrime.org, which won a prize for
journalistic innovation from University of Maryland last year, is a side
project for Holovaty.

Currently the Post has him working on a database of soldiers who have been
killed in Iraq; His next side project will rock Chicago (but Im sworn to
secrecy on its nature).

Is this young man old-fashioned print journalisms best hope? He may be
(no pressure, though, Adrian)as he figures out how to use new media tools
to get new kinds of scoops.

Congratulations!

2006-04-18T10:18:00.000-05:00

Ana Maria Soto of Columbia College's brother Onell Soto is on the news staff that just won a Pulitzer for National Reporting at the San Diego Union Tribune. The paper's investigation, done in collaboration with Copley News Service of former U.S. Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham, one of the more blatantly corrupt members of Congress--and to think he's not in Illinois!--shared the prize with The New York Times, which won for reporting on secret domestic eavesdropping.

Ana Maria is the best connected person in the whole world, I think! She is a leader in the Latino communications community--National Hispanic Media Coalition--which is a small but we hope growing component of the Latino nonprofit community's infrastructure, we hope.

Congratulations Ana !

Shorebank hiring communications supervisor

2006-03-29T15:38:00.000-06:00

Shore Bank is the country's oldest and largest community & environmental bank and serves 12 Chicago communities as well as Detroit & Cleveland.

We are now seeking a Communications Supervisor for our office at 7054 S. Jeffery in Chicago. This position will be responsible for drafting and authoring corporate communications and marketing vehicles in a wide variety of mediums (written, oral, electronic) and conveying ShoreBank’s brand and message. The Communications Supervisor will maintain and update the content of information on the holding company and bank’s websites. In addition, the Communications Supervisor will write, edit and assist with the development and maintenance of the ShoreBank Intranet site. Will assist with the design and implementation of an internal communications program and strategy, and assist the entire marketing department in shared projects or special assignments. The Communications Supervisor will manage internal and external third party relationships and provide communications counsel and coaching as needed to employees.

Qualifications include a B.S. in Journalism or equivalent work experience, although a graduate degree is preferred. Four to six years experience with an agency, nonprofit or corporation. Demonstrated proficiency in website technology, graphics packages (i.e. Photoshop), Desktop publishing packages and Microsoft Office Suite.

ShoreBank offers career advancement opportunities, work & family balance, competitive salaries, a diverse workplace, business casual dress, and an attractive flexible benefits package that includes medical & dental, vision, tuition reimbursement and a 401(k) plan.

Interested candidates should submit resume to: elsa_luna@sbk.com

Listservs to join; Woods Fund News

2006-03-28T17:20:00.000-06:00

Just a perfunctory moan about the need to keep this up to date. Sorry readers--if you're out there!

I just joined the listserv of TechSoup, whose motto is "Technology served the way nonprofits need it." It's pretty geeky, but -- free stuff!

Most people seem to know about TechSoup and its parent, CompuMentor--because they get their free software this way. I can't believe I ever worked at a nonprofit that paid for Microsoft Office or Adobe PageMaker--since they are available as donations at TechSoup. But the San Francisco nonprofit also has a lot of useful information on how to use and think about technology.

I wouldn't write about any email list that only makes the dinner spectrum of spinach; this one is more like a steak. That is to say, it's good and solid. If you like to eat (or read blogs in this case to stretch a metaphor) you'll love it. It's not dessert, though. For that, I read I Want Media, a simple list of news-related headlines that mostly describes how the Internet is, allegedly, rolling over the gray old newspaper-TV-industrial complex. I like to tell myself that this has some relevance to my job, but the truth is it's just as much fun as going to the aquarium to watch feeding time at the shark tank. A slightly more sober daily treatment of media business news and media policy is compiled--right here in Chicago-- by Kevin Taglang of the Benton Foundation.

I suppose that nonprofit tech (the subject of a lot of nonprofit oriented blogs out there) is slightly higher on the list of organizations' priorities than communications but perhaps not too much. We're looking forward to having Marnie Webb from TechSoup at our conference June 7-8, 2006 on the Columbia College Chicago campus, by the way.

On an unrelated note: big changes at Woods Fund of Chicago. Effective March 8, Ricardo Millette has left the position of president and Deborah Harrington, formerly vice president, has been appointed interim president, effective immediately. Many people appreciated Ricardo as a foundation executive who showed up at community meetings; among Deborah's other work she recently has been leading the foundation's South Side Capacity Building initiative. Phillip Thomas of Woods, meanwhile, has gone to Chicago Community Trust as senior program officer. We're hoping he will be our person at the Trust!

Stories from Delivering on the Pitch

2006-03-16T08:22:00.000-06:00

This morning Keith Hartenbarger, former CLTV and Trib Corp staffer, is leading a workshop on how to work with television and radio for our nonprofit communicators.

I've been thinking that by our very nature of being nonprofit communicators we're always behind the scenes--and since we're not at for-profits are groups are not always that high-profile, either. Well, I'm going to change that. Here's a few stories of the folks at our sessions and what they're working on.

Government counts, too. Here's Eileen Sotak's story--and picture!

She is an enforcement supervisor with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she has worked for 28 years but is just now taking on media work. "We really don't have a media person as such, so a lot of members of management get involved with media outreach," she said. What htey do, she says, is "the investigation, mediation, settlement, and or litigation of employment discrimination."

We might work with her on repositioning the agency or finding some new words of fewer syllables to explain it--particularly because she says their media goals include, of course as for many of us, getting their success stories out to the media but also making sure businesses know what they should and shouldn't do, and programs the agency has available to help them. They also want people who have been discriminated against to know that there is a governemt entity they can go to.

City News is dead... long live city news

2006-02-13T17:27:00.000-06:00

There was big news today, too: new daybooks from the Sun-Times and Tribune--apparently the City News idea is too good to kill.

Briefly, the City News daybook is paid for by subscribers in most news media businesses, who traditionally paid for content they could use in their own stories without attribution in addition to a variety of services that included the daybook, a schedule of what's newsworthy for the coming day that is distributed each morning (If you've ever thought that it seems like the news is the same on all the different channels, one reason is that all the producers are always reading from the same schedule).

Anyway, ever the competitor, now that the Tribune has closed City News Service, the Sun-times has a new daybook up and running and here's the information. Sun Times News Group Daybook:

News can be E-MAILED to STNGwire@suntimes.com
Or FAXED to 312-321-2148
Or MAILED to STNGWire, c/o Chicago Sun-Times, 350 N. Orleans, 9th Floor, Chicago, IL 60654

The STNGwire staff will be available 24 hours a day starting Monday, Feb. 13. The direct phone is 312-321-2147. If this e-mail did not reach the appropriate media contact for your organization, please forward it, or let us know the proper person to contact. If you have questions, call Jeff Mayes at 312-321-2895.

Thank you
Jeff Mayes, STNG Editor
312-321-2895

The Sun-times news really comes to us thanks to Clare Fauke from Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 1--she is planning an upcoming event featuring John Edwards and hotel employees and when she agreed to, in the words of the original City News Bureau, 'check it out.' Thank you Clare.

Meanwhile Mitch Dudek, who worked for Tribune's City News Service, is apparently going to start up a similar effort from Trib Tower. But the fax number we have is the same as the Tribune City Desk fax. So we'll wait to investigate.

I have to go home! More on this later.

The time does get away from you; more tips

2006-02-13T17:07:00.000-06:00

Gads, the time does go past. It sounds so easy, when bloggers tell you, you need to post once a week. I'd say the problem is not finding something to say, but choosing from the rich soup of material.

Just to take one item from the past couple of weeks, we have been doing our regular Professional Media Relations training for about 23 people from across Chicago and suburbs, and last week we had three alumni at different stages in their career come speak about their experiences: Mikki Leventhal from Columbia College Chicago, Mike Burke from Bounce Learning Network, and Marissa Graciosa from Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

All three shared how-to tips; the funniest were Marissa's since she framed them in terms of mistakes she made while learning along the way:

1. Getting bawled out by a reporter for calling her to pitch it at 4 p.m. on a Friday. (Moral: call earlier in the day, earlier in the week)

2. Disposing of dozens of uneaten breakfasts when just 3 people showed up at a breakfast briefing for journalists with ethnic media at 8:30 a.m. on a weekday in the downtown Union League club. (Moral: go meet journalists who work in the neighborhoods in the neighborhoods where they work, or at least close by)

3. Making an enemy out of a reporter in one section of a newspaper by simultaneously pitching a second reporter at the same paper without telling the first one. (Moral: simultaneous pitching without full disclosure is a bad idea).

Media guides and wikis

2006-01-27T14:27:00.000-06:00

"Wikis pose a threat to costly media directories" is the headline of a post stirring things up at Micro Persuasion, a blog by Steve Rubel on "how new technologies are transforming marketing, media and public relations" (The headline to this post links to Steve's item).

As the publisher of a non-costly media directory (Bacon's, per book, $695, three books covers the country; Getting On Air & Into Print: $69 to nonprofits, covers Chicago, Illinois, and parts of the Midwest), I disagree. Quality info costs money--to acquire, organize and distribute.

It's another topic to try and pick up at greater length again, soon. Next week I am going to the True Spin Conference in Denver, where among other folks I'm looking forward to meeting Martin Kearns of Green Media Toolshed. Nonprofits join this organization to gain, and share, resources such as media lists. They pay money to join. If nonprofits will pay for it, it must be a commodity.

What the hell is NP? and tech note

2006-01-27T14:11:00.000-06:00

In response to my first questions (ahem), Elizabeth Wampler from Greater Southwest Development Corp. asked why "npcommunicator"--for nonprofit, of course!

For a long time at Commuity Media Workshop we strugled to define our audience--before we came up with this label, "nonprofit communicators."

To label something is of course to over-simplify. For example, the idea of nonprofit communicators obscures the fact that development staff, organizers, or program staff are the folks at most nonprofits who are also responsible for communications, or public relations--more or less interchangeable terms today, no? They do this work in their spare time, otherwise defined as the time that they ain't got.

Another day we'll go into who's to blame for this state of affairs and why. In the meantime, let's just say that while the label oversimplifies, it also restores some sanity for us in defining our audience. As all good marketers know, the more narrowly focused and targeted we are in the folks we try to reach, the better we can anticipate their needs. And np instead of nonprofit, just because it seemed like a lot to type. But I could change it if it's confusing, I guess.

Secondly, as to typepad, Elizabeth, I've been pretty happy so far with Blogger and it was totally free, but I think if I had $10 a month I probably would do Typepad. Hell if I know. Andreas Ramos suggests starting with blogger and then maybe moving to Moveable Type. The most super guide to blogging I've found on the Web, by the way, is "How to be Heard" by Stephen Downes--it's more on the technique of blogging than the technology but I found it really helpful. What made me think of answering this is that I wanted to "trackback" to something on another post and Blogger does not suppor that. But since I still do not know what trackback actually means or how it works, this is no big deal.

Elizabeth you are, like, reader number one. Thanks for asking.

Building relationships with journalists

2006-01-26T08:50:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I was on a panel with Larry Bommer, who reviews theater for Chicago Tribune, PerformInk, Free Press and other area papers and Karin McKie, a publicist in the performance world. The Athenaeum Theater's Arts Management Project sponsored the event, which was on 'building relationships with the media.'

What I know about Chicago theater is basically nil; fortunately Karin seemed to know just about every company and every reporter who covers the biz, and Larry described how he has been on both sides of the news--as reviewer and also having plays he wrote reviewed (The Reader, where he works, panned one of his pieces).

My biggest surprise of the evening was how many folks were unfamiliar with the idea that they have to begin their relationships with journalists by pitching them, the way you would pitch a book idea to a publisher or an ad idea. Of course, this is how much of the news gets made--someone calling up a reporter and asking, "Do you have a minute for me to pitch you a story?"

In fact, we always preach "Call, Fax [or Email], Call." In other words, figure out which reporter or reporters might be interested in your story, then call that reporter to pitch the story and only then--if the reporter is interested-- do you send the news release. Since so much random wordage comes in to newsrooms, the advantage to pitching ahead of time is to make your press release a wanted press release, which helps to move it above the rest of the dreck coming to reporters.

I used to say in trainings that 60 percent of the news came from pitches, but that's not based on any very scientific information--I wonder if anyone has any idea how much news comes from pitches?

The real point to being thoughtful about pitching is in support of the Workshop's other sermon: the reason to communicate with a journalist in the first place is never just about seeing your name in the paper, but about getting out the story you want told.

That's why we urge folks not just to pitch, but to be thoughtful about what goes into that pitch before picking up the phone (also important so as not to annoy the reporters on the other end!). How do you write a good pitch? We urge folks to play the 'headline game.'

The headline game is, if you were writing the headline on the story you want to see in tomorrow's newspaper, or as a teaser before tonight's TV news, what would it say? Nine times out of ten, that's pretty close to what you ought to say when you speak with a reporter.

We discussed what to say in terms of how to write it down and package it into a press release. To be clear, the connection between the pitch and the press release is this: write a strong release and the pitch will be easy.

So how do you write a good press release? Larry Bommer had the quote of the evening on this (he is a playwright, after all): "If you're blowing your own horn you're going to hit wrong notes."

Theater, he said, is about creating "subversive alternative universes" not reflecting their own image back at smug bourgeois audiences -- and a good press release must capture the energy of your play, dance, or other performance work and just straightforwardly present what makes it stand out.

Fight Crime Invest in Kids is hiring Communications Coordinator

2006-01-24T10:48:00.000-06:00

Communications Coordinator
Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Illinois

FIGHT CRIME: INVEST IN KIDS ILLINOIS is a state affiliate of a national, non-profit advocacy organization comprised of over 2,500 police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, other law enforcement leaders and violence survivors who support public investment in programs that cut crime by helping kids get started on the right track and stay there. The major issue areas are preschool, after-school programs, prevention of child abuse and neglect, and youth mental health services. The three-person Illinois office is a joint project of the Illinois Center for Violence Prevention and the national FIGHT CRIME: INVEST IN KIDS.

Responsibilities: We are seeking an energetic and creative Communications Coordinator to be based in Chicago. He or she will have primary responsibility for the development and implementation of FIGHT CRIME: INVEST IN KIDs Illinois’ earned media strategy, which is centered on putting forward law enforcement leaders and crime survivors to call for public investments in young people that are proven to prevent crime. This position also has responsibility for connecting our nearly 200 Illinois members to our media work as well as coordinating our work on new membership recruitment.

Competitive salary and benefits. Please fax, email or mail completed questionnaire (available here), resume, writing sample and cover letter to:

Communications Coordinator Search
FIGHT CRIME: INVEST IN KIDS Illinois
70 E. Lake St., Suite 720
Chicago, IL 60601
Fax: 312-922-2277
Email: illinoisjobs@fightcrime.org

Training Resource

2006-01-24T09:38:00.000-06:00

The Communications Network, a nonprofit PR association primarily for communications staff at foundations, offers free 90-minute webinars on communications topics. The next two are:

January 2006
25 ~Wednesday ~ 1:30 PM EST
The Power of Building Relationships: Finding the Invisible String

FEBRUARY 2006
8 ~Wednesday ~ 1:30 PM EST
Turning A Report into News

Check it out at their schedule page.

Here's the fine print:
There are a limited number seats which will be available on a first come, first serve basis. Using a Webex platform, participants will receive a toll-free number and website login directions. These sessions will be available after the workshop "On Demand," allowing participants to listen and follow the live sessions.

Ongoing Learning Workshops are intended to offer public-interest organizations with limited staff and resources an opportunity to gain information and tools on particular communications issues and/or topics. The 90-minute workshops are professional development seminars that provide an easy way to connect, share ideas and learn about current trends in practice.

Two lessons from week one

2006-01-21T11:31:00.000-06:00

Well, chalk one up to experience. Two lessons from week one:

First, find the right platform to blog on.

WordPress seemed like a sexy, clean and user-friendly blog platform. Marnie Webb (of Techsoup and Ext337 blog fame, who will be at our June 7-8 Making Media Connections conference) told me about it & that's where I first created this blog. But the name of the blog by default is the same as your user name and since this is a project of Community Media Workshop, not just Gordon Mayer, that didn't feel right. So I moved it to Blogger.

Second, deciding what's appropriate to post will be the first challenge.

We provided communications training for the Midwest grantees of Hispanics in Philanthropy last week, and a couple of great, and funny, things came out of a storytelling as effective communications segment. It's exciting when people actually start coming to grips with language by figuring out exactly what words they want to use to describe their organization.

In this session, we ask folks to come up with a metaphor for their organization, since we know that images often stick with people they meet long after a specific conversation is over. I think I'd better ask Carlos, from the session, if it's OK to lay out his image before I post it here for the world.

I wish I could remember, in order to give credit where it's due, who first suggested (in some blog posting, somewhere, I believe) that one barrier to nonprofits effectively using the Internet is their sensitivty to reputation and low tolerance for risking their organization's 'image' by speaking clearly and openly--or even in words of less than three syllables.

On the other hand that may just be a rationale for not posting more, sooner.

First Post

2006-01-12T11:13:00.000-06:00

Community Media Workshop has been following blogging from the sidelines for more than a year. We've decided to dip our toes in the water around two specific goals.

Goals: Our first goal is to provide useful information to nonprofit communicators who often lack the resources they need to gain access to the news media and journalists looking for stories 'off the beaten path.' Our second goal is to create a forum to let people know about the culminating event in our annual calendar: Making Media Connections, June 7-8, 2006, on the campus of Columbia College Chicago in the south Loop community.

This blog is inspired by four members of the smarter sex: Christine Cupaiuolo, formerly the blogger at Msmusings.net and now with poppolitics.com, Barb Iverson, Columbia College resident expert on blogging, Tracy Van Slyke, publisher of In These Times magazine (this was her idea), and Marnie Webb, whose own blog on nonprofits and technology based at CompuMentor and TechSoup is a pacesetter for nonprofits online (if you run your mouse over the links in the blogroll to the right, you get a brief description of their blogs).