Wondering where I’ve been (I’d like to think so!) — the answer is, since January, mostly learning how to use my new phone I’m an android now, i guess. You know–the mad whirl of a nonprofit trainer leaves so little time for blogging, dahlings. I have been saving some good stuff up, so watch this space!

Just a quick note now to frame some thoughts on prevention in the LGBT community–today Chicago Dept of Health sponsored “Getting the E-Word Out.” (presentation below except for Gustavo and Simone’s darn it–hey guys send me your slides!). Also fair warning, they are slightly mangled as everyone had their own backgrounds and i just dumped all into one slide deck.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bianca Berkhia, discusses La Casa Norte’s campaign to get 50o Facebook fans by the end of 2009 and how her organization uses social media for its fundraising and communicaitons today from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Ever since Beth Kanter posted in November about whether small nonprofits can succeed with social media (a post that garnered a lot of comments), I’ve been wondering about stories and proof that, indeed, integrating these new modes of communication into our work is part of our future at nonprofits with budgets under $1 million — especially organizations that have been around a while, and those that provide traditional sorts of services. Found a couple stories these past two weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Robyn is a marketing and communications consultant for nonprofits and can be reached at stein.robyn @gmail.com

Robyn and I met a few years ago at the TrueSpin conference, Jason Salzman’s biennial gathering of nonprofit communicators in Denver (more about that at the bottom). In October over NYC-diner toasted corn muffins and coffee we discussed that the basic rules of communications adapt well to the online world–as Robyn demonstrates in thinking about audience, and how to segment or subdivide those we seek to reach into smaller groups, the better to connect with them.

How do you identify and then reach the audiences, niches, microgroups you are trying to attract to your campaign, your issue, your organization?”

It used to be formulaic. You could buy a list of 25-35 year olds, send a prospect mailing to a specific zipcode, target the readership of a local, regional or national media outlet, buy an ad in an appropriate publication. Not any more. Now there’s a dizzying array of techniques available enabling us to reach an exponentially larger audience. When did it become so complicated?

The quick answer is it happened when our inner audience screamed out for attention individually and collectively. It happened comparatively slowly during the dotcom surge; it sped up when palm pilots were the thing. It hit lightning speed [literally] when our Blackberrys and iPhones could load 100,000 apps including the ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Today, real time is actually real time and quick is an understatement. So how do we connect to the audiences we want to engage? Read the rest of this entry »

Luis De La Torre's art studio in a Bridgeport warehouse is classic, but threatened by a tough market. That is one of the themes that may emerge from Studio Chicago, a year-long project to promote events for or about artists and the spaces where they create--one of several new initiatives to help market arts events. DeLaTorre artist from Flickr, used w/permission.

I love this picture of Luis De La Torre’s studio. I also know from my co-worker Diana that it’s touch and go for Luis (who is her husband) to maintain his space because of economic hard times disproportionately affecting the arts market.

Two new arts-marketing initiatives highlight collaboration and capacity-building to help local organizations build audiences and patronage: Studio Chicago and the Chicago Art Exchange. Read the rest of this entry »

Shoot and Score, by V'ron, from flickr

I scoff at Christmas decorations in stores before Thanksgiving is over, but in the spirit of, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em & for those of us already thinking about spending our scant $$ for holiday gifts–it seemed like a good moment to list nonprofits that sell stuff — specifically, gifts for the holidays!

This post was inspired by lunch a week or 2 ago with Megy Karydes — writer, marketing/PR consultant and born and bred Chicagoan. So, full disclosure, a bunch of these are folks she works for.

I’ve looked through the sites though, and fell comfortable this is a solid list of great causes offering cool stuff.

Artisans 21 around the corner from my home in Hyde Park is one of the country’s oldest cooperative art galleries, I was there this morning, and saw some photos and demitasse cups for espresso that caught my eye (rather large for those who like me need their coffee strong and lots of it).

Bright Endeavors aims to break the cycle of poverty experienced by inner-city, homeless and at-risk young women 16–25 by teaching them skills to become self-sufficient, successful adults. They make Dreambean Candles as well as other products, like an $8 jar of bath sea salts to a $60 Tealightful Gift Box which includes candles, bath tea bags and fair trade, organic tea.

Greenheart, in Bucktown, carries fair trade and handmade items from more than a dozen developing countries as well as local organizations. Megy says the nonprofit ecofriendly and fair trade shop hosts a launch party Dec. 2 for a new line of copper and brass jewelry from South Africa.

If you would like to give a gift to charity in honor of a friend or family member, consider Hope for a Hurting World Catalog from Heartland Alliance, one of our region’s largest and most vital advocates for and providers of human services. Gifts range from $15-550 and include an infant care kit to healthy snacks for an after-school program. 

MayaWorks works with women in Guatemala to make gifts, home accents, jewelry and, most recently, introduced a baby collection. Baby booties for 6-12-month-olds are $15 a pair. Their best-selling item? yarmulkes.

Update! If you are more of a gift card kind of person — or you have to give a gift card kind of a gift — Oakbrook, Ill.-based nonprofit Opportunity International lets you buy a card whose recipient can designate the funds for a microloan to a woman enterpreneur in Kenya, Ghana, Colombia, Mexico or the Philippines. It looks pretty simple to do, check it out at OptInNow.

Update! Porchlight Counseling Services, an Evanston-based agency that offers counseling and other resources to survivors of college sexual assault, are selling “(k)no(w)more beads” this holiday season–beaded bracelets with an amethyst stone as a centerpiece: “(k)no(w)more beads represent empowerment, resistance, and community connectedness by insisting that the public know more about sexual assault and demanding that sexual assault be no more,” Stephanie Boehmer of Porchlight writes.

Reason to Give, the Firebelly Design-initiated campaign for supporting Humboldt Park families, plans a “holiday pop-up shop” with lots of artists and inexpensive art at Firebelly’s studio from 5 to 10 p.m. Friday, Dec. 4.

Sweet Beginnings markets Beeline, a line of honey-based personal care products which are handmade by individuals facing barriers to employment, particularly those with histories of criminal conviction.

I think of The Enterprising Kitchen, which helps women work toward self-sufficiency and economic independence by handcrafting soap and body care products out of its Ravenswood studio, as a grandma of Chicago’s social-enterprises. They offer products from $5 to $350 or will be happy to make up a custom order (baskets, anyone?) if you’d like.

WomanCraft is a nonprofit in North Lawndale whose green, handmade paper sheets are embedded with wildflower seeds including flax, cornflower, echinacea, coreopsis, larkspur, and black-eyed Susan seeds. A set of 10 cards is $13.

Need more inspiration? A few more posts featuring Chicago and some Midwest nonprofits’ gift ideas: from About.com and the Reader’s great Holiday Shopping event calendar.

Buy, buy, buy! Who am I missing do you think? And/or, if I missed your organization and you would like me to add you, let me know here.

(You can also add your nonprofit to our brand-new nonprofit organization directory here).

I’ve been meaning to share this for a while. At the end of the summer, one of the more intriguing responses to our annual survey of nonprofit communicators was to the question, “How has the economic crisis affected the way your organization communicates?”

It was a bit of a good news/bad news response:

• Read the rest of this entry »

Mattie Jordan-Woods, executive director of Northside Association for Community Development in Kalamazoo, asked a question during the meet the press panel at Tell Your Stories-Lansing today.

A pitch usually starts when we decide on our own or as an organization that we want media coverage. But there’s a problem with that from the get-go, according to our panel of Lansing, Mich.-area journalists today.

The problem is, journalists do not really care what we want. “Our problem and our responsibility is to serve our audiences,” as Rick Pluta of Michigan Public Radio Network said at the panel, part of Tell Your Stories mini-conference co-organized by Michigan Nonprofit Association and us with support from C.S. Mott Foundation yesterday. ”Everything that we get approached with is going to be assessed with, ‘how well do I serve my audience?’”

So the right first question to ask yourself, before you pitch a reporter, is not what you want, nor what the journalist you will pitch wants, either. The right first question, is, what will delight, or anyway satisfy, the person who will read, see, or hear the eventual story?

In a funny sort of way, social media should make this that much easier for us as we all become more like journalists by thinking through what our own audiences want to read, see, or hear from us. Anyway, just one thought: next time you pitch a story, imagine you were the reporter—how would you frame the story to get an audience to check it out? If you can answer that question for a reporter when you pitch her—you are way ahead of the game.

Can’t resist including two more tips from today’s panel:

• Jam Sardar from local station Newscenter 6 shared an Asian-American Journalists Association resource on how to get in the media.
• Another thought—not to over-generalize from the group who came out today, but based on what they said about how they Facebook – to monitor others’ traffic for possible story ideas, ask friends for specific source ideas, and other useful stuff.

What’s been your experience with pitching reporters? What questions do they ask and how do you know when you’ve been successful (before a story appears)?

Ingrid Gonçalves, communications director at Center for Labor and Community Research from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

When Ingrid Gonçalves said during a round of introductions that she had five Web sites to create or update, I knew I had to try out the flip camera to get her story. It turns out to be a great story, not so much for how unusual it is, but for how typical it is, I think you’ll agree! (Apologies, this time the wrist is really shaky–I’m still learning!)

Ingrid was one of about 20 folks at this morning’s search engine optimization workshop this morning, led by
Tim Frick from Mightybytes. Tim delivered a workshop highlighting how to get found online, drawing on info from his forthcoming book tentatively titled Return on Engagement from Focal Press.

Below the fold here you will find, in the somewhat unlikely event that anyone finds it useful, my more or less complete notes on Tim’s presentation, which I found useful in charting some benchmarks for SEO. In a nutshell, here’s the Tim Frick program (of course it makes more sense when you see him lay it out, but still, it’s a good one):

1. Content, content, content–Have a content strategy and implement
2. Install an analytics package so you know what your Web visitors are doing when, etc.
3. Use alerts to see who is talking about you
4. Track user behavior and adjust your approach as appropriate
5. Rinse, lather, repeat (in other words, go back to step one, fine tune your site–”it’s never done” Tim says)

What do you think– is this an accurate description of what you do right now? Or what you aspire to be doing? Let me know in the comments or by email! Meantime enjoy Ingrid’s story and if you want more, click to see some notes in the rest of this (phew) looong post (hopefully, doing justice to Tim’s presentation): Read the rest of this entry »

Twike Ride in Champaign from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Students, staff and a faculty member or two turned out last night for a leadership and communications training sponsored by the University YMCA just off the campus of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

It was a great training, but for me the biggest surprise of the evening was when one of the participants, Matt Childress, gave me a lift back to my hotel in his personal Twike–a German-made electric, three-wheeled motorcycle that also moves by pedal power. He drives to and from his job doing IT in the university chancellor’s office most every day of the year.

Matt had told me earlier in the evening that he came out to the communications workshop “How To Really Get Heard” because he recently formed an Illinois EV (electric, or exotically-fueled, vehicle) club, and he wants to “learn how to get the word out, gain membership in the EV Club, and hopefully stop having to do all the work myself….well, maybe.” The club exists primarily as a Facebook group right now.

So what struck me–other than just how incredibly freaking cool it was to ride at about 45 mph through downtown Champaign in a space-age pod vehicle that totally turned heads — the University Y building is right next to a sorority house, and as we were getting in voices from the sorority were calling to Matt “hey, can I get a ride?” Along our route, such as when we stopped at red lights, people said “hey, what is that thing?” I think the reason I decided to blog about Matt’s twike, though, was because of how he uses it to evangelize for electric vehicles and getting us out of our gasoline cars generally.

While he was letting me drive it around an empty parking lot (sorry, no video of that!), Matt explained that when he was himself a student some years ago at the university, one professor had a mauve, psychedelically painted VW bus — which was so high profile in the small college town, everyone knew all about it. So part of Matt’s calculation in purchasing the twike, used, from a friend, was the potential for raising awareness around the campus that it represented.

My head is now full of intriguing miscellaneous facts, such as:

• The state of Illinois has no license plate for an electric motorcycle currently–electric cars, yes, but not 3-wheeled electric motorcycles (I’m sure my facebook friend Gov. Quinn can get right on this–maybe he should join the EV club group)
• A twike runs on C batteries–a lot of them–and you plug it in to keep it going–instead of gas a meter in the tiny onboard computer tells you how much volts you have, at rest or when it’s turned on–if you fall to about 250V (i think, or thereabouts), plan to power up or push pretty darn soon
• Getting in or out is a lot like getting in or out of a canoe–lower yourself to the seat butt first (the body is made of light plastic)
• It’s sort of like owning a foreign sports car used to be in the 1970s–hard to find a place to get parts and service! While there are lots of different kinds of EVs (electric vehicles) out there, the twike costs $35,000 new and you have to import it yourself from Europe. But it does last a long time. Maybe it helps if you own it in a college town–Matt has had some help with repairs (since the nearest repair shop is in England) from the guy who fixes the electron microscopes on campus.

But to get back to Matt as evangelist. At every stoplight, or anytime folks like the sorority house residents or others call out “What is that thing?” Matt explains.BTW, this whole explaining to passersby all the time thing is starting to get a little old for his 8-year-old daughter, Matt says (but I think she’ll love telling the story when she gets older–if she does not die of mortification when she’s 13 first).

Of course, the passersby don’t always understand what he’s talking about right off. My favorite response last night: “I don’t understand anything you said, but that looks really cool!” Raising awareness… it’s a process. But you don’t have to enjoy the ride in an EV for long to be convinced how cool it is… couple that with the communication efforts, and it’s a force to be reckoned with.

by Thom Clark
One year ago today, as we all awaited the final days of an historic election campaign, our mentor Studs Terkel passed away, his absentee ballot un-cast. The self described eclectic disk jockey, Pulitzer prize winning author and cheer leader for humanity would have railed against the media for it’s mis-coverage this past week of worker protests against bonus-buck bankers conferring in Chicago, just as I remembered him yelling at the tube’s cable talkers on a Sunday morning 54 weeks ago when I last visited him at his home. “Will Barack make it?” he wondered as the latest debate was being parsed. “What a mess the Cubs and Sox made of their seasons, again,” Studs moaned in the next moment. Then he moved onto our 2009 Terkel awardees (Scott Simon, David Jackson and Alden Loury). There was never a dull moment in Studs’ living room.We miss ya Studs!