This Friday is Chicago's Talk Like Shakespeare Day, created by Chicago Shakespeare Theater to raise awareness of "da Bard"

“WHEREAS, in conjunction with Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s annual celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, Chicagoans young and old, at school, work, and home, will be encouraged to incorporate phrases like ‘prithee,’ ‘thou,’ ‘fie!’ and ‘knave!’ into their parlance as a way to celebrate the legacy of the language….NOW THEREFORE I, Mayor Richard M. Daley, do hereby… proclaim [Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, 2010 and] encourage citizens to let boldness be thy friend.”

Last year we wrote (Microsites? Yea Verily) about how Michael Wood, director of planning and program development for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and his colleagues cooked up the bardic birthday bash Talk Like Shakespeare Day to raise awareness about Shakespeare’s heritage (did you know Shakespeare contributed more than 1,700 words to the English language?) among new audiences. Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of the first day of school, a post on school recruitment and what other nonprofit communicators can learn about outreach from an advertising and promotions ace.

Pamela Jefferson-Waits, advertising and marketing expert, used the red carpet treatment to bring students and their families to St. Ethelreda Catholic School this fall.

What’s the secret to successful nonprofit marketing? What if it was as simple as making time to do it, planning a series of straightforward tactics, executing with some flair, and sticking to the plan? Simple, no?

You decide, after hearing this story from Pamela Jefferson-Waits. Pamela has years of experience in advertising and promotions, including at agencies that served corporations such as McDonald’s and Kellogg. She left the advertising world in September 2008 to care for her ailing father. Then, one morning last January at church, she casually mentioned to the principal at St. Ethelreda Catholic School—an old family friend—that she was looking for a new position. The principal signed her up to help with enrollment for the school, in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood and she started in February.

Her first move: jazz up the spring enrollment activities. Typically the school has had an open house, but this year, taking a cue from something the principal has done to welcome students every September in recent years, Pam planned a “Red Carpet” evening. Read the rest of this entry »

Tamms petitions (from flickr)

Tells you something about advocacy that it’s been 10 months since last I blogged about Tamms Year 10, the organization that started as a bunch of poets and morphed into an all-volunteer advocacy group working to close the state’s Supermax prison (post last June 26 here). Victories take a while.

They’re headed back to Springfield March 25 to add to 24 sponsors already on state Rep. Julie Hamos’ HB 2633.

UPDATE: as 1 of the group pointed out to me, the bill is a far cry from closure, merely requiring some adherence to minimal standards. …

(Progress Illinois has more here). If you’re of a mind to support the legislation, which strikes me as so enlightened even our former governor Rod Blagojevich would have supported it, you can visit Hamos’ web site to learn more and sign her petition supporting the new bill. But also worth checking out their web site, a nice basic way to keep folks in touch — including a great list of news coverage down the right side, btw (disclosure, the Workshop has done a few workshops and some pro bono coaching with the coordinators over the past 10 months),

Quick conversation this afternoon with Tom Feltner of Woodstock Institute this afternoon… at the end he said, “I’m just looking in our database… what’s your right title again?” and checked to make sure he had me accurately in his org’s list. Yes! It took 30 seconds for him to update his record for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Last fall, you may have gotten our brochure, Get Serious… About Storytelling featuring Cedric Lee of Lake County PADS, a homeless intervention and prevention agency in Chicago’s northern suburbs. Last night, Darlene Hill, Fox Chicago reporter, profiled Felicia Coleman, who’s stayed at the shelter three times in recent years with her family, as part of a story on “Homeless Shelters Taking In Former Middle Class Families.”

The video is here (or click the image above)–quality online was a little spotty for me, but it was worth it to here a great example of a nonprofit communicator, in this case Cedric (who actually is not even identified in the piece, I believe–but Lake County PADS’ does get it’s name into the story), on message. Just like he said during our PMR workshop almost a year ago:

Today the picture of homelessness the average homeless person today is a 9 year old female.

Is this short line in a short segment a major victory? Well, maybe not, but I think it’s a huge deal when we nail the details like this because I find again and again with communications, it’s getting the small stuff right that helps to build, over the longer term, to bigger victories. One small quote for Cedric, one giant leap for nonprofit communications-kind!

It’s the time of year when we take a (quick) break to look back at the past 12 months and document how nonprofit communicators are using what they’ve learned to communicate and create change. If you have a good story about a communications victory (preferably after working with Community Media Workshop–sorry, this time it’s about you, but it’s about us, too), tell us in our survey.

Cedric Lee had two hours to pick and prepare clients of Lake County Public Action to Deliver Shelter, PADS, for a WGN-TV interview. But after attending Community Media Workshop seminars over the previous 12 months, he was ready for the task.

“Community Media Workshop helped me get organized and told me how to do it,” Lee says.

Lee first found out about the Workshop when he was invited to a n October seminar in Gurnee, underwritten by The Chicago Community Trust. In January, he took the Professional Media Relations course, a 15-hour course spread over five half days. Since then, he says, he regularly uses the Workshop’s online news release creator as well as a media list he generated from the Getting On Air, On-line & Into Print guide. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Square Neighborhood Association did something radical in the past year: they took Monica Garreton Chavez off education organizing and assigned her to be their first-ever Technology and Communications Coordinator.
Much of Monica’s time is now spent refreshing the organization’s Web site,  staffing weekly communications committee meetings, and working on a first-ever marketing and branding campaign for the venerable Chicago community organizing group.

“I remember when I applied to work at LSNA and I looked at the Web site, I wasn’t sure how organized they were,” says Monica, 28. “Stuff was out of date and I wasn’t sure what they were about. Now I understand that’s because everyone was so busy doing the actual work they had no time to put it up online to reach other audiences.” Read the rest of this entry »

They started with poetry readings, but now the Tamms Year Ten Committee are pushing HB 6651, a state law to deal more justly with some 400 Illinois prisoners who today face the kind of situation Franz Kafka imagined: solitary confinement all day, every day, for ten straight years, no-one tells you why you’re there or how to get out.

As a diverse, all-volunteer group of social justice activists, former prisoners, and others fights what one called “dungeon discipline” in Illinois, they offered a useful insight for advocacy campaigns generally during a spokesperson workshop we did with the group Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

There were 2,410 comments on the Tribune article “Immigration Debate Grows from Web roots” by Tony Olivo a week or two ago. That’s 121 pages of comments on the Trib web site!

The story documented confrontations between folks who defend immigrants’ human rights and immigrant haters and send-them-all-homers on the Internet. It was a great example of a trend story that exemplifies the trend it reports on. Read the rest of this entry »

It was supposed to be a quiet Tuesday as I worked on details for the Making Media Connections conference. At 8:47 a.m. I got the first email about a proposed promoters ordinance.

After reading the ordinance I nearly spit out my coffee. The surge of emails in my inbox, blogs, Facebook, websites about the proposed promoters ordinance kept coming.

I thought of the groups that I’ve worked with like Teatro Luna, Teatro Vista, Proyecto Latina and Oye Listen and what life would be like if this ordinance passed for them. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Read the rest of this entry »