For more information about our upcoming Making Media Connections Conference, visit the website at http://www.communitymediaworkshop.org/mmc2011.

Check out some of the photos from the 2010 Making Media Connections conference. Special Thanks to our photographers Bob Black, Olga Lopez and Jonathan Werve. They look great!

Well you’ve might have seen last night’s post regarding what to do to prepare for our conference and if you’ve got everything lined up then here’s our list for the top 5 things to do while at MMC2010

1. Follow the conversation and participate. Follow the conversations online and on the ground. Our official hashtag for the conference is #mmc10 but you can also follow #mmc2010. Various panel sessions will be live blogged through out the day including information from @npcommunicator. Feel free to post the best quotes and ideas you here from experts and peers!

2. Introduce yourself to journalists and other communications experts. There will be many journalists and experts presenting and participating in our conference, the best time to connect with them would be just after their panel session. Tell them your name, your organization and something that may be relevant to you that you may have heard form them, then make your pitch. Have you contact card and any other materials you may have prepared to give away so you can follow up later.

3. Join or start a topical discussion at a table during lunch. If you’ve made enough of the right connections early in the day, why not invite them to join you for lunch to discuss things learned in the panel sessions, follow through with a pitch, or gather ideas from peers.

4. Pickup some books and resources. There are some great titles at the book table at the conference including “Share This” by our keynote speaker Deanna Zandt. Other titles include Tim Frick’s book “Return on Engagement: Content, Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing” and “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survice and Others Die” by Chip & Dan Heath.

5. Grab some free Art patches from Chris Drew. For years now, Chris has volunteered at MMC. Many have enjoyed conversing with him as he creates silk screen patches on-location. He is currently challenging a city “eaves-dropping” law for recording his arrest by Chicago police while giving away his art to the public. He has a fascinating story to share – one that may be taken all the way to the Supreme Court and help define our First Amendment Rights here in Chicago and fully realize a Free Speech Artist’s Movement.

I’m a total geek and when it comes to conferences there are a few things I usually do before heading out to participate. MMC2010 is unique and gives you the opportunity to connect with many people within the communications sector here in Chicago – journalists, communications staff, development folks, executive directors, technologists, PR professionals, educators, bloggers, techies and so much more! Here’s my top 5 things to do to prepare for the 2010 Making Media Connections Conference:

1. Prepare and rehearse your elevator speech. You will meet many potential journalists, freelancers and bloggers who may be interested in your story. Rehearse you elevator speech and be ready – but most importantly, be comfortable about what you have to say. If you need more tips, visit our website to get started.

2. Prepare a wifi or wireless communications device to participate in online conversations. Whether its your mobile phone, laptop or even iPad download a twitter client app to participate or monitor conversations taking place at the conference. Our hashtags this year are #mmc2010 and #mmc10 – why are there two? Not sure, but that’s what people seem to be using. Twitter client apps like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck can save searches in their own columns and can update automatically depending on your settings. You can even share some of the tweets or activities using your facebook app or via the Facebook website. You might have some friends or colleagues that can’t participate the day of but might be interested in hearing what’s happening. You can follow the workshop for updates @npcommunicator. Last year Lumity provided a mobile internet lab for our conference but will not be here this year, but MobileCitizen will and Columbia College Chicago will be providing free wifi… woohoo!

3. Bring plenty of contact cards and any materials that can reference your work. Most likely you will not have the chance to sit and talk to the person you’ve been wanting to pitch for hours on end, but the next best thing you can do is give them material that can help them find more information about you and your work.

4. Bring all of your conference information, including a print out of your registration information, maps to help you plan where you will park and the times and locations of your workshops and panels. You can find all of this information on our conference site. Rooms, locations and schedules for Wednesday and Thursday can be found here as well.

5. Check in with your staff who will not make it to the conference. Get some feedback from some of your staff that can’t make it. This will help you decide which panel sessions to drop into or what sort of materials you can gather from other organizations, news outlets and vendors.

These are just a few suggestions I know I usually follow. Do you have any you can share with others? Let us know! See you MMC2010!

- Demetrio

Event starts at 6 p.m. at the Film Row, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor. See you there!

We’re fortunate to have an all-star panel to lead a great discussion and to answer your questions. Let’s meet them:

Alex Pope: Alex is executive development officer, operations at Advocate Charitable Foundation, the fundraising arm of Advocate Health Care. Advocate is one of the nation’s top 10 health systems based on clinical performance and is the largest health care provider in Illinois. Alex is the past vice president, fundraising at National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. He has been a development officer for nearly 20 years, and has served in leadership roles with a number of not-for-profit organizations, including the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the Earthwatch Institute, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. A Certified Fund Raising Executive, Alex serves as President of the Chicago Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals and sits on the Board of Directors for Community Media Workshop.

Barbara Talisman: Barbara is President of Talisman Associates, Inc., a consulting firm that provides hands-on fundraising, Board training and development, and executive coaching services to the nonprofit sector. She has been in development since 1983, and her experience ranges from corporate partnerships and special events to board and membership development, grant writing and major gift solicitation. Barbara is a social media early adopter and is constantly learning, updating and sharing her knowledge with her clients. She began her development experience on the campaign trail for national and local political candidates. Her fund development experience began at the American Heart Association and continued at the Anti-Defamation League. Barbara is an Association of Fundraising Professional Master Trainer, has published articles in several philanthropy and fundraising publications, speaks throughout the world on fundraising, blogs regularly at Talisman Thinking Out Loud and uses her radio program, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to connect people, information and resources.

Celeste Wrobolewski: Celeste is Vice President of External Relations for Donors Forum, a nonprofit membership association that promotes philanthropy and a strong nonprofit sector in Illinois. In this role, Celeste directs the organization’s statewide marketing, communications, and fundraising activities. She has worked in many roles in the nonprofit sector, holding executive leadership positions in marketing, communications, volunteer development, fundraising, and management. Before coming to Donors Forum, Celeste has worked at Anixter Center, Lakefront Supportive Housing, Public Allies, and YMCA of the USA, where she authored the YMCA Communications Handbook, The Seven Rs of Volunteer Development and other publications. Celeste has previously served on the national Communications Committee of Independent Sector and is a graduate of Leadership Greater Chicago.

Topics
Before opening up to your questions, we intend to tee off the discussion with a few questions:
What are the elements of an effective communications and messaging strategy that achieves both communications and fundraising goals? How might social media fit into this strategy?
What are the elements of a good story that works for all purposes?
Do you have any tips for collecting good stories?
But what are your questions? Please leave them in the comments or send them to me via Twitter (I’m @egculbertson). Hope to see you Thursday! Online registration is now closed but you can still walk in to register and participate!

A contributor to Huffingtonpost.com, Anderson is a member of the Trotter Group, a collective of African American columnists representing newspapers from coast-to-coast, and of the AfroSpear, an international group of black bloggers. He has also been a contributor to Ebonyjet.com.

In 2007, Anderson taught the MBA 590 class in business presentation in the spring semester at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is currently an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago. Anderson was selected by The Kaiser Family Foundation Traveling Media Seminar to tour South Africa during the summer of 2007. He and five other journalists, from the U.S. and the U.K. traveled throughout South Africa for nine days while participating in an in-depth study of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

From February 2006 until July of 2007, he was a freelance op-ed page columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. His political commentary ran every Sunday in the newspaper’s “Controversy” section.

Anderson was the editor of Savoy Magazine, until the national publication experienced financial problems in late 2005. Before taking the helm of Savoy in November 2004, he was the editor of N’DIGO, a Chicago weekly publication that has the nation’s largest African-American newspaper circulation.

As a career journalist for more than three decades, Anderson has worked for some of America’s best-known media corporations—Dow Jones, Johnson Publishing Company, the Tribune Company, Post-Newsweek and Viacom. In 1988-89, he had a stint in municipal government, serving as Press Secretary for Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer and running the press office.

Anderson is a co-author of the non-fiction book, Brothers, which was published by William Morrow & Company in the spring of 1988. He is also a contributing author to Restoration 1989: Chicago Elects a New Daley, a book detailing the 1989 Chicago mayoral election, published by Lyceum Books in the fall of 1991. Anderson’s chapter is entitled, “The Sawyer Saga: A Journalist, Who Just Happened to be the Mayor’s Press Secretary, Speaks.”

In his 10 years at the Tribune, Anderson worked as a city hall reporter; participated on four award-winning investigative series; worked as a general assignment reporter; did police and court beat reporting; and periodically wrote concert and record reviews.

From September 1983 until January 1985, he wrote a signed political column that appeared every Friday on the Chicago Tribune’s op-ed page. The column was transmitted weekly by the Knight-Ridder/New York Daily News/Tribune wire service, where it was available to some 130 newspapers.

Anderson has also been a commentator on 848, a public affairs program on WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s NPR station. He is on the boards of Arts Alliance Illinois, Keep Chicago Beautiful and Gilda’s Club. Anderson is a past board director of the National Association of Black Journalists and has served as an officer of the Chicago Association of Black Journalists.

During his career as a print journalist, Anderson appeared on the “Today” and “Donahue” shows and was a regular panelist on the “Chicago Week in Review” on WTTW-TV, the local PBS station.

Monroe Anderson made scores of appearances on other local television and radio programs and lectured at a number of colleges and universities including DePaul University, Indiana University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and Iowa State University.

He earned a B.A. degree from Indiana University’s School of Journalism in Bloomington in 1970, with a double major in journalism and English Literature. He is married to the artist, Joyce Owens. They have two sons, Scott and Kyle.
January 2010

Cate joined the staff of Chicago Public Radio in May 1998 as an editor for Eight Forty-Eight, Chicago Public Radio’s weekday morning newsmagazine. She later became a contributing editor for Eight Forty-Eight and interim news director.

Cate has received more than a dozen Peter Lisagor awards and three Sigma Delta Chi awards, including as editor on a project that examined abuses among children at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. She is the editor for on ongoing look into Illinois’ youth prisons called Inside and Out.

Prior to joining Chicago Public Radio, Cate worked as editorial director and planning editor for WBBM 780 AM. She’s also worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor.

Cate has a M.A. in Journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in English from Mundelein College.

Cate lives in Skokie with her husband, Richard. They have four children and a granddaughter, Madeline.