Last week I attended NTEN's 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.
(crossposted from my personal blog)
I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.
The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below.
Community building talent is the single most important resource in the modern world.
How to engage and mobilize members
A Communications framework for thinking about how organizational objectives are met through interaction. The correlating Development framework is in parenthesis.
- Welcome (Prospect)
- Educate (Cultivation)
- Ask (Involvement)
- Thank (Stewardship)
The Seven Steps
- Assessment: Defining your goal (What behavior are you trying to change in undertaking a communications strategy?), audience (an explicit, targeted "who" and their values), evaluating your infrastructure (orthodoxies, structure, time, leadership)
- Awareness: Start by searching NTEN, TechSoup, Idealware, etc. (Link Research)
- Training: A discipline of doing things. How are stories told, infrastructure built and actions communicated to regular people?
- Content Production: "The currency of the new world"
- Technical Support: An example: how to know when to build and when to buy
- Partnerships: Who is going to stand up for you?
- Planning: What are the components that revolve around your goal?
Other Links
- Strategic Communications Plan Generator from The SPIN Project
- Tech Savvy Communications Toolkit from NPower Seattle
- Storytelling: Andy Goodman, Seth Godin, The Gilbert Center
I shot this video with a Casio EX-S600, which shoots full-frame (640 x 480) MPEG-4 video. With a two gigabyte SD Card it can shoot approximately an hour and a half of video at medium quality before its battery dies. The Casio's AVI wrapper is incompatible with iMovie (or any Quicktime decoder), so I first used VisualHub to repackage the video as an MP4 before importing into iMovie to add titles. I exported from iMovie as DV and then converted that with VisualHub into MPEG-4. Compressed and at quarter-frame (320 x 240) the entire video was 105 MB. This time I uploaded to Google Video since Blip.tv stalled out.
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