See What’s Out There

Unfortunately, I missed this year’s Communications Network conference. The Communications Network is the premier group of foundation communicators. If you don’t know about them, check out their site, and you can see on their blog lots of info from the conference.

Last week we asked our friends on Twitter, “How has your personal or business blog helped you achieve goals for yourself or your organization?” Check out some of the responses below:

Next week’s question: What is your favorite social networking site and why?

Mik Moore, the editor of Jspot, a Jewish social action blog, the Director of Communications and Public Policy at Jewish Funds for Justice and the co-executive director of Jewish Council for Education and Research (JCER), a political action committee supporting Obama, created The Great Schlep, a project to get Jews to travel to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.

The idea is that Jews in Florida can determine the outcome of the election and that the best way to get Jews to vote for Obama is for their grandchildren to come down and convince them. (Most observers say the Democrats win Florida and they win the election, and we know from 2000 that even a few hundred votes the other way make the difference.)

They got the best spokesperson ever for this, Sarah Silverman, who I not-so-secretly love to death.

Here’s Sarah explaining The Great Schlep (if you are offended by bad words, don’t watch it.)

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Link [The Great Schlep]

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday about our latest project with the US-Muslim Engagement Project, which launched yesterday.

The piece, “Report Seeks Engagement With Muslims by Diplomacy“, discusses the origins of the interactive website, ChangeTheStory.net, that See3 developed:

After 18 months spent examining the deteriorating relations between the United States and the Muslim world during the Bush administration, a diverse group of American leaders will release a report in Washington on Wednesday calling for an overhaul of American strategy to reverse the spread of terrorism and extremism.

The report, “Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World,”; was produced by 34 leaders drawn from religious, business, military, foreign policy, academic, foundation and nonprofit circles. The group included Democrats like Madeleine K. Albright, who was secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, and two former Republican congressmen, Vin Weber and Steve Bartlett.

What came out of this report was a need to make the information accessible to a wider audience, so Intersections enlisted See3 to develop ChangeTheStory.net and to provide much of the video content for the site.

Robert Chase, Founding Director of Intersections said, “Our goal was to build an interactive experience for concerned individuals, educators and religious leaders, to provide entry points into the report, which is not necessarily accessible to the common person, and to help people apply the principles of the report to their local settings.”

See3 produced 14 videos for the site, which also offers timelines, maps, discussion guides, educational tools, and plenty of resources.

There has been a lot of media coverage of the report already, and we hope that ChangeTheStory.net continues to educate and engage on this important issue. Even the presidential nominees have been involved:

The McCain and Obama campaigns have been briefed on the report’s recommendations, and both were receptive, said Mr. Weber [chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy] and other members of the group. There is a briefing on Wednesday for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and members of Congress, and a public release at the National Press Club in Washington.

Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the Republican leader of the Foreign Relations Committee, has sent the report to his colleagues with a letter saying it contains “constructive recommendations on how we can approach this pressing concern in a bipartisan framework.”

Chase explains, “We wanted to create something groundbreaking, distinctive, and totally compelling to a public that has the potential to build bridges between U.S. Muslims and people of other faiths.”

Did you know? Taglines are the best way to succinctly convey nonprofits’ value, but 7 in 10 nonprofits rate their taglines as poor or they don’t have one at all.

To remedy this problem, the Getting Attention blog has released a new, free Nonprofit Tagline Report which features in-depth analysis of current practices and a guide to making the most of a tagline (in eight words or less) shaped to responses gathered in a survey of 1,900 nonprofit communicators earlier this year.

From the press release:

Maplewood, NJ – A newly-released report based on survey findings drawn from 1,900 nonprofit communicators shows that most nonprofits don’t have an organizational tagline that works to make their organizations’ value clear, and easy to remember and repeat.

“You might say ‘A tagline is a terrible thing to waste’,” says Nancy Schwartz, communications consultant and author of the report, alluding to the classic UNCF tagline ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste.’ “A nonprofit organization’s tagline is, next to its name, the marketing message most frequently heard, and the easiest and most effective way to convey its brand,“ says Schwartz, president of Nancy Schwartz & Company (www.nancyschwartz.com) and blogger at Getting Attention (www.gettingattention.org).

“A strong tagline complements an organization’s name to convey its unique value or impact with personality, passion and commitment. Nonprofits that fail to make the most of their taglines are basically throwing that opportunity away,” she says.

Schwartz sees taglines as a key tool in building strong nonprofit brands, which are more important than ever in these times of increased competition for dollars, members, volunteers and other supporters. “Nonprofits can develop a tagline at the organization, program or campaign levels to freshen up their messaging, emphasize their commitment and/or revive tired positioning,” she says.

More key findings from the report:

· Nonprofit taglines that work generally fall into one of four categories, describing an organization’s focus of work; impact or value; core values or spirit; or strategic approach.

· An effective nonprofit tagline:

o Relates to an organization’s name, without repeating it

o Must be easily accessible, memorable and repeatable

o Is specific to that organization

o Runs eight words or less.

o Features verbs.

· The leading reason that nonprofits don’t have taglines is…they never thought of it (33%).

· Human services lead the way in having taglines (75%), with grantmakers just behind.

· Environmental organizations hold up the rear, with only 30% using taglines (while the field is becoming increasingly high-profile, complex and competitive).

Download the report here:
http://www.gettingattention.org/nonprofit_tagline_report.html

The folks at NTEN have already begun planning for their Nonprofit Technology Conference 2009, and they’re asking the nonprofit community to vote for the sessions they like the most.

Last year we ran two great sessions: “The Age of YouTube” and “How to Show, Tell, and Active with a Video-centric Microsite“.

This year, we’ve submitted 8 sessions that we want to lead. Click on our session titles below and give them 5 stars (or as NTEN puts it, “I’m already there in my mind”) if you like what you see.

1. Online Video: Tools of the Trade
2. Online Video: Creating a Strategy
3. Hands-On Video Production: Documenting the NTC
4. Viral Video: How to Make it Work for Your Organization
5. You Made a Video, Now What?
6. Web 2.0: How to Get the Buy-In You Need
7. Drupal for Dummies
8. Ning: Building a Custom Social Network

See you at NTC 2009!

One of the small stories in the election is the role of Jewish voters, particularly in swing state areas, South Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Most of us are familiar with the general slanders against Obama, there has been particular focus on his supposedly being a Muslim (he’s not), the strangeness of his name, etc. This misinformation is being used particularly with religious and older Jewish voters for whom Israel’s safety and the support of the US for Israel are paramount. Even a small move of Jews away from the Democratic party in Florida, for example, can change the outcome of the election.

The Jews in the Obama camp just launched a counterattack - Israelis for Obama. [And of course the counterattack takes the form of video produced primarily for the web.] Have a look:

Link: [Jewish Alliance for Change]

I was in Las Vegas over the weekend for Blog World and New Media Expo. It was terrific, mostly because of the people who attended, some of the best bloggers and new media people around. We had @chrisbrogan, @msaleem, @jasonfalls, @lizstrauss, @stoweboyd, @guykawasaki, and many many others (@name is Twitter handle).

Some of the conference highlights were the session with Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week) and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park.

The best way for sure to get the gist of what I learned is from Twitter. In every session people were Tweeting their notes.

If you don’t know Twitter, sign up. It’s basically micro-blogging — blog posts of 140 characters or less. It is also a social network, in that you follow the posts of specific people and they follow you. But you also have tags on Twitter, so everyone writing on a same topic can add a tag (in Twitter a tag starts with a #) and you can see a live stream of all posts with that tag.

So, for example, check out:

#bwe08 — this is the main conference tag

My session tag was #nminside

We had notes like this:

Blogging is a promise, if you’re not willing to fulfill that promise, you shouldn’t blog #nminside #bwe08

Q: How do we control comments? Brand control issues, we’re moving towards a world of radical transperancy #nminside #bwe08

Another interesting one was #cred and #asse9

If you aren’t sure what to do with these, go to Twitter Search and type in the tag with the #

And if you are not, follow me on Twitter @Michael_Hoffman and @See3

Guerrilla advertising example here that shows that the post-action video can be seen by many many more people than would actually see the action itself.

Link [YouTube]

Every month, a group of bloggers in the Chicago area meet up to share tips, advice and the latest trends. See3 caught up with them at their September 2008 meeting where we talked about fun websites like:

Swurl.com: Lifestreaming tool that brings all your web content to one blog
Fotoviewr: Elegant photo galleries for your Flickr photos
Touchgraph.com: Easy way to visualize your data
Chicagotalks.org : Local citizen news and journalism

We also chatted with the group organizer Barbara Iverson and local bloggers Gordon Dymowski and David Kadavy about what’s special about blogging in Chicago:

Hey bloggers! Check out the Dogooder Blog Network and spread the good.