April 13, 2007 - 12:18pm
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Nonprofit Communications 2.0

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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.

Peter Drucker

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.

  1. Welcome (Prospect)
  2. Educate (Cultivation)
  3. Ask (Involvement)
  4. Thank (Stewardship)

The Seven Steps

  1. 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)
  2. Awareness: Start by searching NTEN, TechSoup, Idealware, etc. (Link Research)
  3. Training: A discipline of doing things. How are stories told, infrastructure built and actions communicated to regular people?
  4. Content Production: "The currency of the new world"
  5. Technical Support: An example: how to know when to build and when to buy
  6. Partnerships: Who is going to stand up for you?
  7. Planning: What are the components that revolve around your goal?

Other Links

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.