Acronym

America's Second Harvest, the largest U.S. hunger relief nonprofit, has developed an unusual public and policy maker awareness tool—a week-long photo essay—to “spotlight the many faces of hunger in America.” The daily images depict one of the 25 million Americans who depend on a local food bank to survive. The vehicle sought to push Congress and the White House to pass the revised Farm Bill; legislators did so May 14, but a presidential veto was expected at press time.

The virtual photo essay appeared right after Stamp Out Hunger!, the nation’s largest single-day food drive, which was organized May 10 by the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). The group partners with the Campbell Soup Company, healthcare organizations, local food groups, and many other community-based organizations and businesses to pull off the massive effort.

Like America’s Second Harvest, NALC tried some new public awareness and engagement tools this year in the 10,000-plus cities and towns holding food drives. While the 16-year-old campaign has generated more than 836 million pounds of food, campaign leaders were especially focused on increasing donations in 2008 because of the jump in demand for food bank assistance and a drop in food donations, especially at this time of year.

To break last year’s distribution record of 70.7 million pounds of food, NALC is trying to leverage some surprising findings it discovered after last year’s drive and to introduce new engagement experiments:

(1) Giving doubled or even tripled when people were given a simple plastic bag with the postcard. In Florida, for instance, the Publix food chain donated more than 8 million plastic bags, and the pounds of food donated are “big numbers,” says an NALC spokesperson. “We found tremendous success in areas that put out plastic bags…. People seemed to react more to a bag than a postcard. You can’t miss it. You save it, look at it, get a guilt trip, and then fill it.”

(2) NALC took more advantage of the massive public relations power of lead partner Campbell Soup, which increased the number of announcement postcards to 124 million, developed a TV public service announcement that features the Harlem Globetrotters, ran special coupons and dozens of full-page advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and placed notices on Web sites. It also helped produce inflatable soup cans and yard signs for NALC sites.

(3) While NALC always produces a video of some kind, the latest 10-minute DVD, “The NALC Food Drive: Making America a Better Place,” includes an original song about the drive, “Feed the Nation,” written by a local letter carrier. A major rollout of the new logo incorporates the organization’s name and the highly recognized Stamp Out Hunger slogan. The logo has been put on everything from t-shirts to posters.

Continue reading "New Outreach Strategies Strive to Relieve Hunger" »

VITAC, a provider of closed captioning and other accessible media services, is launching a “CaptionsON” awareness campaign that includes providing up to 150 hours of pro-bono captioning service to nonprofit organizations who respond between now and June 8, 2008. Given that the lengths of videos vary, the company projects that 600 to 1,300 videos could be captioned.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for nonprofit organizations nationwide to ensure that their audiovisual material, intended for general audiences or their clients, students, or employees, is accessible through captions," noted Bobbie Beth Scoggins, President of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), which also administers the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) and co-founded the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT). "CaptionsON will have a positive and profound impact on the deaf and hard of hearing and hearing communities alike."

Visit the CaptionsON site for details.

More from the 2008 Digital Now conference. A common theme bubbled up in several of the sessions today: focusing on users.

Specifically, many of the thought leaders have hammered home the importance of thinking like your members and website visitors, listening to them for their needs, and asking them how your content and services should be structured.

Dan Guarnaccia, VP of product marketing at Sitecore, listed the seven habits of effective websites. Number one on the list? “Your members are in charge.” Later on, he talked about taking an honest look at your website and finding the holes – the places where your members look for content and either miss what’s there or find nothing at all – and patching them up.

Matt Loeb, CAE, staff director at IEEE, conducted extensive usability testing for the online portal for IEEE’s magazine, Spectrum. Members were asked to complete tasks on IEEE’s website and were monitored as they did. Their feedback? The site navigation stunk (in so many words). So they redesigned it.

In the same session, Gary Rubin, chief publishing and e-media officer at the Society for Human Resources Management, said he intentionally downplays the brand of SHRM’s print magazine on SHRM’s website. “People are going to our website for broad content, not our magazine,” he said. Content from the magazine and other resources is arranged by topics and categories – which is how visitors browse and search – not by what publication they came from. (Take-home test: check your association’s website. Are the names of your publications more prominent than the content in them?)

The real doozy came from Jim Bower, founder and chief visionary officer of Whyville, an educational online virtual world for kids age eight to 14. Bower argued that the human brain interprets information in three-dimensional space, and so Whyville is constructed for children to learn by moving through and interacting in the Whyville community. He said two-dimensional information (including that on a computer screen) is “an artifact of the printing press.” Whyville seems alien to most adults, but it works: Whyville has drawn 3.3 million users. Engaged users. The kids even participate in their own governance system.

The big picture: as association staff, it’s way too easy to develop deeply ingrained interpretations of everything about your organization. Don't allow this to guide how you deliver content and services to members and consumers, because they see your products in entirely different ways.

- There's a new association blogger in town (at least, relatively new): Bob Wolfe of the Young Association Professional blog. I enjoyed his recent post on how he's using wikis to improve committee workflow at his association.

- The Association Forum of Chicagoland has launched a new YouTube channel. If you haven't seen the "Association Professionals Through the Ages" video they did a few years back, now's your chance (it's hysterical), but there are also more serious videos on topics like creating a business continuity plan and data mining. (Hat tip to Sue Pelletier, who linked to this from the face2face blog.)

- If you're interested in communications, the Institute for PR has started a new "Essential Knowledge Project" that may be of interest to you. So far they've collected papers on crisis communications, ethics and public relations, and trust and credibility--all publicly available.

- If you're interested in the relatively new idea of widgets, Jeff Cobb at the Mission to Learn blog has kindly collected links to more than 50 of them.

- Last but not least, this isn't really new, but it's good stuff: Jeff De Cagna and Cindy Butts have both posted their thoughts on mission statements. If you've ever suffered through hours of mission-statement wordsmithing, you might want to see what they have to say.

I was reading Jamie Notter's post on his blog about an education session that ASAE & The Center delivered on board-staff communications, when a thought occurred to me.

I don't think it was the case with that meeting, but often we specifically tell participants in a workshop or breakout session that it's a safehaven where they can discuss anything or get advice on anything without fear of their need getting out--which if you're talking about what an SOB your board chair is or how a person on your staff is irritating you, could be embarrassing. I'm a member of the media so I've always been sensitive to what should be reportable and what shouldn't be -- and I think most attendees get that and can be reasonably assured that the staff of the organization holding the event would be sensitive to such things.

Could the advent of social media and "everybody's a journalist" change that comfort level? Could it change the candor with which people are willing to talk about their problems and their experiences at such meetings?

This week marked the launch of a new website for my association. We’ve been working with developers since last November to craft a new look and feel for the site and develop a streamlined structure that would not only put a fresh face on the organization, but also make information accessible enough to cut back on the volume of calls and emails we receive. After being live for only a few days, the new design has received positive feedback. I get the sense that even the most tech-shy of our members will be giving the site another look.

The transition from our old website (and my anticipation of how members will relate to the new one) got me thinking about the major role that design plays in our use of the internet. Each time we visit a site we make initial judgments about its content based on its graphic interface. Contemporary graphics, colors, and fonts, along with up-to-date navigation and menu conventions engender an immediate and basic level of trust that we’ll find what we’re looking for. Clashing colors and poor organization on a site’s homepage quickly make us doubt we’ll read anything of value within its pages.

As manager of our website’s words I’m all about communicating value to members and other constituents. I realize that the articles, issue summaries, and event descriptions I’ve worked hard to gather and post will be viewed differently now that our site looks fresh and new. The real test will come several months down the road when a little of the shine has worn off and members expect our site’s content to live up to its pretty face. It’ll be my challenge to ensure they find the value they’re seeking.

The latest edition of David Weinberger's self-described "intermittent" newsletter, JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization) was recently released. The first article divides people into three categories:

Web utopian - pretty much what it sounds like, these people believe the web has and is fundamentally changing human society for the better.

Web dystopian - people who think the web is having a profound effect on our lives, but a profoundly negative effect.

Web realist - people who think utopians and dystopians build the web into much more than it is, that it enables some things but has significant limitations.

A quick aside - here's a juicy tidbit to get folks upset with me: Sometime in the not-to-distant future, I plan to wrote a post on the Myers Briggs... it won't be complimentary. One of the arguments will be it's detrimental to think of things in absolutes (thinking or feeling, for example).

Pulling this post back together, I think rather than putting somebody into one of Weinberger's categories, it's more accurate to think of everybody as being on a sliding scale, with utopian on one end and dystopian on the other. (I know, not exactly a brilliant deduction.)

My point in all of this is I'm guessing most people reading this are closer to utopian. And much like the way you're supposed to use the Myers Briggs to learn to interact with those around you based on their type, I think it's useful for web utopian leaners to think about two things when talking about technology with others: (1) does the person lean to utopian or dystopian? and (2) how much does the person really care?

Assessing those two things will help you frame your position in a way that will be most meaningful to the person you are talking to.

Venable LLP’s Jeffrey Tenenbaum presented on the legal tangle of copyrights, trademarks, and things associations need to be mindful of in an age of digital publication.

For the curious, he distributed an excellent set of handouts for his session.

The highlights of what the attendees were asking about:

Copyright basics—content that is created by volunteers or paid consultants is specifically not owned by the association and is owned by whoever creates it. That means magazines they’ve submitted to a magazine, handouts at a session, or even a recording of the session itself. For the association to own it, the creator must assign his or her copyrights to the association in writing.

Links are ok—as long as you are not implying that the content is in some way owned by your organization, linking to someone else’s work does not violate copyright.

Mashups and making other changes—it’s a gray area. Tenenbaum reports that this is one of the areas where litigation is relatively common. In general, you can take someone else’s work and, if you change it enough so that it is a completely different expression (essentially it becomes a different work). How much change is enough? It’s a risk, and if you engage in this sort of activity, you should be prepared for lawyers and courts to decide.

Contributory infringement—let’s say a member posts someone else’s copyrighted work on your blog as a comment. If the association has no monitoring system and no disclaimer that people must agree to before posting comments, is the association liable? The horrific answer is, yes. The same is true for postings that violate antitrust. The simple solution is a click-through form where authors agree that they will not post anything that infringes the rights of others (or antitrust laws or any of a number of other things).

Fair use guidelines—Using someone else’s copyrighted material without permission is allowed, albeit in a very limited context. The three basic guidelines:

The amount used is a small percent of the total.
It is being used for an educational purpose.
Your used cannot infringe on the copyright owner’s ability to earn a profit on the work.

The big red flag—when developing a new product or service, associations typically use a hodgepodge of staff, volunteers, and paid consultants to develop it. It is critical to get all nonstaff members to sign a copyright release form, or the pieces that they develop belong to them, not to the organization.

What does the Super Bowl have to do with associations and nonprofits? You’d be surprised. Almost 90 millions Americans are expected to watch the Patriots-Giants game February 3, so I’m hearing buzz about the involvement—current and past—of associations in everything from cool messaging for lucky ticket-holders (Mothers Against Drunk Driving and cab wraps), to those super-popular, ultra-expensive TV ads (let me get out my list).

Recently, for instance, I ran into online speculation about whether any of this year’s $2.7-million, 30-second ads either from old-timers (Federal Express, Pepsi, Gatorade, etc.) or newer-comers (GoDaddy.com, Victoria’s Secret) would prove as controversial to associations and nonprofits as in 2007.

Last year, the National Restaurant Association was noisily unhappy when a “demeaning” Nationwide ad depicted singer-now-more-famous-for-short-marriage-to-Brittany-Spears Kevin Federline as a fast food cook fondly recalling his glory days as a rap singer. The post-airing ruckus about Federline’s apparent unhappiness with a fast food career upped the online viewing of Nationwide’s ad by an estimated 12%, according to market researchers, and has piqued interest in the company’s advert this year.

Likewise, America’s beloved Snickers bar got in trouble when its marketers created a Super Bowl ad that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation accused of promoting prejudice and violence against gays. In the ad, two mechanics sharing the candy bar accidentally kiss and then “try to distance themselves from any perception of being gay by ‘doing something manly,’" said HRC in a press release. In addition, one of the three alternative endings to the commercial shown on the Snickers Web site depicted the men “violently attacking one another – which sends a dangerous message to the public condoning violence against gay Americans.” Parent company Mars Inc. pulled the entire campaign the day after the game.

And, finally, who can forget the General Motors ads with that appealingly pathetic factory robot that was fired from its job for making a mistake? The resulting “suicide” via a leap off a bridge in a dream sequence sparked immediate reaction from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which was furious about the “inap­propriate” use of “depression and suicide as a way to sell cars.” Surveys showed that the public appeared to agree the nonprofit.

Click here for a fascinating free abstract from an article published in “Measuring Word of Mouth Vol. 3” by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association that further details the influence of controversy in building brand awareness via Super Bowl ads.

This year, nonprofits and associations might have greater concerns because of the increasing sophistication of marketers, who now create elaborate and engaging cross-media campaigns aimed at building excitement and brand awareness well before kick-off time. According to Peter Hershberg, managing partner, Reprise Media, “Unlike many lost in the previous years, marketers are expected to finally use search and social media sites to capitalize on the excitement and brand awareness generated by their ads in the big game.”

Continue reading "The Super Bowl: Are Associations Ready to Get in the Game? " »

I have been invited to a AMA conference for "medical communicators" - seems like a great opportunity to network with my counterparts from around the country, and it's even on 'my' coast - which heightens the appeal. So, I've told them I'm planning to go. In fact, I've told them four times, and counting.

Three separate sources in the organization have sent me emails inviting, then prompting me to reserve a spot. The first message, from someone I’ve met, wrote "Respond to this message to let us know you're coming, and you'll get a discount." So, I did, and he confirmed it, twice.

The next message, from someone else, sent two weeks later, said "Respond by the early-bird deadline to get your discount."

Confused, I wrote my contact to ask whether I needed to pay by that early-bird deadline, or just reserve a spot, which I had already done. Twice.

He apologized, and assured me that my place was held, and I had nothing more to do – real registration wasn’t open yet, anyway. Fine. A bit miffed, I waited to hear when *real* registration was open.

Except then I got another "Early Bird Deadline Extended!" message from the original contact on January 9, telling me about the new 'pre-registration deadline.' Which, thinking I've already responded, I skipped, until this weekend when I looked more closely at the message. This one actually links to a registration site. And the language has changed!

Suddenly I'm confused and a touch panicky - have I just cost my employer money by assuming I was all set? 'Pre-registration deadline' sounds like the date by which one must *pay* to get a discount.

So I go online this morning to register, though I may be late. Better to get it done, anyway. But there is no program, there is no fee to pay, and aside being forced to RSVP for a luncheon identified by acronym I don't know and that is not defined, there’s nothing specific at all.

I think all I’ve just done is tell them I’m coming. For the fourth time.

This is no way to market a meeting. For all their outreach, I still have little idea what I’m in for.

I don’t know yet: when is the housing deadline? When will real registration open? Now that I’ve pre-registered through their system, will it let me register again when it’s time to choose my itinerary and pay? And when exactly might that be?

Lessons: 1) ‘Save the date’ marketing is great, but keep the number of messages at that end limited – to one or two. 2) Know what the right and left hand are doing. It confuses and alienates people when they get duplicated messages that don’t acknowledge what they’ve already done to respond. 3) Don’t aggressively market the event until you’ve got the program, deadlines and details set. 4) If you want people to pre-register, make it *real* pre-registration, so that it’s possible to pay at that time. We don’t want to register twice.

Elliott Masie's Learning TRENDS e-newsletter today has an interesting riff on ways to use video to reach your members and customers. He cites a New York Times article on the rise of lunchtime video--office workers viewing some news or entertainment highlights with their sandwiches.

Masie suggests, "What if we harnessed the concept of Video Snacking for learning? Imagine your organization producing a short, 5 to 7 minute show every day for viewing during lunch."

Could your association take this idea and run with it in a way that works with the ebb and flow of your members' schedules?

Wells Jones, CEO of the much-lauded Guide Dog Foundation, is a great storyteller. That's not a label many nonprofit leaders work hard for, but Wells has found that stories can get you places that appeals letters and political allies cannot: into people's wallet, mind and heart.

I was interviewing him recently after our Key Philanthropic Organizations Committee (KPOC) meeting, having already talked to him once before about his foundation's successful revision of its governance practices. We had spent a good chunk of the KPOC meeting talking about leadership, organizational excellence and the differences and synergies between our Seven Measures of Success book and a new publication, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant.

We were all intrigued by the differences in data about leadership between these two books and even Good to Great's Jim Collins, who had been involved with both publications. One thing none of these books did, though, was explore in any real depth the types of communication techniques that great organizatonal leaders routinely find most effective: compelling storytelling.

So I asked Wells how he created the storytelling culture that is so apparent on his Web site and how his staff and volunteers collect and use those powerful anecdotes to show the real impact of the organization. You can read his responses in the profile department of ASAE & The Center's new philanthropic Web section, but in the meantime I wanted to share what he said was his favorite program-related story.

"This story relates to a Marine who lost both of his arms in Iraq above the elbow, so he wears two prosthetic arms," Wells said. "And he also has some balance issues. We trained one of our dogs to work with him to help provide balance, fetch items and do various tasks that the Marine needs to get done.

"So he’s outdoors with his dog one day, and they are having down time--he’s playing Frisbee with his dog--and when he throws the Frisbee, the dog brings it back, like all of our dogs do. But then one time when he throws the Frisbee, one of his arms goes with it. The dog goes over and looks at the Frisbee and then looks at the arm, looks at the Frisbee and looks at the arm. Finally, he makes up his mind and grabs the arm, which he takes back to the Marine. And the Marine is laughing really hard about this, thinking, 'What fun!' but then he realizes what the dog just did: The dog made a decision that his owner had to have the arm first before he could bring the Frisbee back. It’s a wonderful, wonderful story."

Now ask him to tell you the one about the two old-time war vets who have raised half a million bucks in just a few months....

I was in Hallmark at Tysons Corner last night and on the wall covered with ornaments that sing, move, spin, blink, talk, crack jokes and wield festive light sabers was a brand I recognized immediately: UNICEF. How many people worldwide must recognize its colorful trademarked globe encircled by children holding hands?

It made me ponder the power of a brand that makes people feel so positive and happy that they want to hang it on their Christmas tree. Look at the booming business that Starbucks does with its annual line of “perk-y” ornaments. Hershey, too. And Coca-Cola, Disney and many more.

As I unpacked my own decorations that night, I saw ornaments issued by my church, my children’s schools and—I admit it—Starbucks. Not one ornament represented any of the myriad associations to which I have belonged for years, none for the organizations that have most influenced my professional and personal life.

Now, I don’t expect associations to leap into action and start mass-producing holiday décor, but it would be interesting to ask ourselves if we were 100% confident that if we did, our members would (1) recognize our brand right away, and (2) feel warm and fuzzy enough about it to consider showcasing us among the items they hold most dear.

Social media is about social connectivity, and while English may be the de facto language of business, language can be a severe restraint in making connections with different cultures. This post points to a tool that is nothing short of amazing. Not surprisingly, it comes from Google: the Google Translator.

With this tool a user puts in your Web site and chooses from 11 different languages to translate the page into. In three seconds or so, the page appears, but it’s been translated into the chosen language. To test the service, we performed rigorous, extensive research, which consisted of one staff person fluent in Spanish and another who does pretty good with German looking at translated Acronym pages. This extensive research led to the conclusion that “it does a pretty good job.” One example of the confusion they saw: The post “If you can’t beat them, join them” was translated as “If you can’t hit them, join them.”

In case you don’t trust this extensive research, the Wall Street Journal had an article (creepy article, if you ask me, as it talks about how Ford relies on machine translation for translating assembly procedures for its international assembly plants—they say it’s “not perfect” but it’s “good enough”… Good enough? Yikes, I’d rather they be closer to perfect if I drove a Ford.) and ars technica has an in-depth blog post looking at a Spanish translation.

Oh, and, of course, there’s associated widgets. Here's one. If you can find a place for this monstrosity of a widget icon, you can show people that your site is instantly translatable into other languages.

Building on Jason’s excellent post yesterday on "Crunching the Numbers," we’ve been experimenting with using ManyEyes to analyze the content in Associations Now. I’ve only just started playing with it, but so far it’s been interesting.

A tag cloud shows me that some of the most commonly used words in our August-October 2007 issues (other than the obvious “association” derivatives) include “board,” “member” and its derivatives, “open,” “leader” and “leaders,” “questions,” “information,” “power,” and “responsibility.” I’m comfortable with that (although I think the word “responsibility” was somewhat skewed by our social responsibility coverage in the September issue).

Word trees are fun to play with, too; you enter a word or phrase and you can trace its uses in their immediate context. For instance, in August-October 2007, our authors talked about how associations are …

- "much more influential with the political sector than the economic one"
- "starting to look more and more like businesses serving a consumer niche"
- "obviously different from public companies in important ways"
- "going to experience higher membership growth"
- "heavily invested in maintaining their prominence and influence"
- "capable of addressing the practical needs of individual members"
- "pretty good at managing internal issues"

We’re going to continue to upload data until I have a year’s worth of issues up there, just to see what we can see. And of course, since ManyEyes makes all data publicly accessible, you can work with the data sets as well—search for “associations” under data sets. Are there other analyses that might be worth doing? Ideas are welcome!

Jeff De Cagna recently posted two tag clouds comparing an article he wrote for the August Associations Now on “ungovernance” with a more standard article on association governance. The two tag clouds, side by side, show distinct differences in the terminology that each article uses and emphasizes.

Setting aside the subject matter of the tag clouds Jeff created, I think he’s on to something that could be an interesting or even enlightening way to evaluate your association’s communications or publications. What if you created tag clouds based on your last few months’ worth of press releases, or your last newsletter? What would it show you about the words you use frequently and the words you downplay?

We’re going to try creating tag clouds with stories from the last few issues of Associations Now. I’m curious to see what we can learn from the exercise.

(Wondering what a tag cloud is? Wikipedia has a basic explanation. Wondering how to create them? Jeff created his through Many Eyes, a free website sponsored by IBM.)