Yesterday at Ragan Corporate Communicators conference we presented on “seven sins of nonprofit communications strategy.” Downloads at bottom of this post, more details here another day.

Among these mostly for-profit and larger nonprofit and government folks, two themes struck me:

1. It’s all about social media: I chatted with the editor of State Farm’s magazine for agents who noted she is “still a print person”–like that’s the exception to the rule. Definitely solidified my sense of new media/tech as game changing for everyone, and it’s nice to see that we’re in a big boat of folks figuring this stuff out as we go.
2. Bosses: At larger organizations, working with supervisors is even more part of the challenges than we are used to. Especially government agencies are challenged by what they can and cannot do online. Guess this is the flipside of not having anyone dedicated to communications at all!

Anyway, for yesterday’s participants and interested folks, here’s the powerpoint slides and a handout on working with supervisors:

• Seven Sins, Two Stories
• The CMW Tips for Working with Supervisors

We’re using PRWeb to help spread the word about Making Media Connections.

PRWeb is part of Vocus, one of the 80 lb. gorillas in the PR services world. For a base price of $80, PRWeb gets your release out. That’s the base price, they offer virtually unlimited options to ‘upsell’ your release–basically the more you spend the more little stars they put next to your release, and the more options you have, like getting to see who downloaded the release, adding a podcast, adding a video, getting them to do the writing for you, etc., etc.) They feed directly to Yahoo News’ press relases page. Read the rest of this entry »

From Breeze Richardson:

Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ 91.5 FM) invites you to be a member of our audience on May 17th for a live broadcast from the Chicago Green Festival, as part of our Chicago Matters: Growing Forward series.  This hour-long program will be hosted by Chicago Public Radio’s Alison Cuddy and will feature conversations with the organizers of the Green Festival and members of Chicago’s sustainability community.   We’ll also invite your questions during a panel discussion exploring our local green economy.  This is an opportunity for you to find out how going green is changing our region! Read the rest of this entry »

I was rummaging around in the back end of the Chicago Tribune Web site just now and discovered Colonel Tribune: “the Chicago Tribune’s web ambassador.” Who is thus guy and how come I’ve never heard of him before? He’s kinda cute. I guess. So now I’m wondering: who the hell is he, really (Charlie Meyerson, are you reading?)–and will he confirm me as a friend on Facebook? (We actually know some of the same people as it turns out). Not only that but he understands how to use Twitter. I am jealous.

It was a sunny warm morning when I arrived at Union Park for the March. A swirl of people began to fill the park. Some of them arrived on foot others in big yellow buses. An army of paleteros also descended onto the park the bells on their carts clanking merrily. American flags blowing lazily in the wind.

I decided to take a moment and ask a few folks why they were there and what impact they wanted the march to have.

Jorge Andrade

“El año pasado nadie nos ayudo, este año queremos que alguíen nos ayude. Nosotros somos parte de la fuerza laboral y contribuimos con nuestros impuestos a este pais. Hay muchas familias que tienen años aqui pagando impuestos y pore so necesitamos que el gobierno nos ayude.

Tony Wasilewski
Young Polish Initiative

We need to change the immigration law because so many people are being deported everyday. This isn’t only a Latino problem. People need to know about the other people being deported. We need to keep families together to strengthen the country. My son Brian asks me everyday, “ Why doesn’t the U.S. like my mommy?” My wife Janina was deported in February to Poland and can’t come back for ten-years. She had been living in the U.S. for 18 years.

Alie Kabba
United African Organization

This year I want us to send a clear message that the community is united across ethnic boundaries and we are hopeful that the plight of 12 million undocumented gets the human rights it deserves and takes the center stage in public policy. As a community of color we are coming together and sending a shared vision of America and we want to be part of this society.

Jose Larios
Dream Act Mascot/Student
Kelly High School

We need people to know more about the Dream Act and for workers to get paid what they deserve and not be afraid to ask for a raise. The Dream Act gives opportunity to students to bring something to this country and help their families.

When I finished chatting with folks I began thinking about how powerful the movement of people is. People migrating from place to place, urban caravans colliding with cities. Marching gives us an opportunity to come together and create dialogue between ourselves and the society we live in. -Diana Pando

P.S. Check out the photos marchers posted from their cellphones throughout the day at www.photobucket.com

This morning my wife passed the business section of the Chicago Tribune over to me–section-front story on nonprofits using social networking by Wailin Wong. Ack! “I was going to pitch this story today!”

My first thought was, it’s like that story in the movies when a couple meet, realize they’re perfect for each other, but one of them is already married or in a relationship. A romantic tragedy! It happens.

Here we are, bringing national social-media experts to Chicago to work with nonprofit groups for as far as we know the first time ever at Making Media Connections, a perfect local angle. But of course my agenda is not necessarily the same as the reporter’s, and maybe we have not yet done a good enough job of getting the word out about the event. Obviously so, since we were not compelling enough to make it in this story. It happens.

But then I was kinda peeved. Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Barry, doyen of the New Communities Program web site and blogger at Community Beat, made a blog-worthy point today about blogging and communicating online for nonprofits about another way web stuff has changed the game for nonprofit communications.

It’s not just about pitching journalists vs. telling our stories online, he pointed out. By investing in your online presence through blogging and posting stuff and etc. it helps to raise an organization’s profile overall.When journalists go looking for info online–as they do, more and more (I also met with a recently laid-off assignment editor today who said the ‘do more with less’ syndrome in newsrooms has really and truly changed the kind of work she’s been doing for more than 25 years–and for the worse), all that content you’ve been putting up is like an advance payment on potential news coverage when that searching reporter stumbles on your site.

Sort of like always-on pitching, instead of having to gear up to get news coverage story idea by story idea.

Well, we received a whole bunch of suggestions from folks on our list about great nonprofit Web sites. A couple of things stand out just from looking at them all:

1. Great navigation. If you look at all these sites, you will see that they almost all use some kind of tabs at the top or, for simpler sites, down the side to help visitors navigate around the site. A particularly creative and useful example is Open Books, http://www.open-books.org.
2. Great art and pictures. Maybe it’s not fair to compare the rest of us to Marc PoKempner, www.pokempner.net – he is a nationally known photojournalist, after all – but he is not alone. And it’s not just photos. Lifelube.com uses six icons to visually organize its information. (such as: http://www.aidschicago.org/lifelube/images/menu_blog_on.jpg) Read the rest of this entry »

Patricia Jane Pennell and I looked over “Green Pursuits” game for Grand Rapids community planning at a Communicating Land-Use Better workshop April 21.

Monday with a group of land-use planners we talked about using stories and leading with our values to catch our audiences’ attention instead of putting them to sleep or sending them away puzzled about what we really were talking about, anyway. The training was a mix of Sue O’Halloran’s storytelling techniques and Action Media’s findings on how to communicate around issues.

From the evaluation by and large people loved it (definitely the first part, the second is still a little abstract). Read the rest of this entry »

Just thought it was kind of cool to read in the paper last week that Jack Kresnak, who recently retired from being a Detroit Free Press reporter to run Voices for Michigan Children, was named Journalist of the Year by his local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. There’s more of us than you think and nonprofits and news outlets have quite a lot in common — low salaries, long hours, and a sense of mission that keeps us doing our work anyway….