the Communications Network blog

Pittsburgh Foundation's Grant Oliphant on The Upsides of Philanthropic Failure

In the second in our diavlog series (dialog+video+blog), I have the privilege of speaking with Pittsburgh Foundation President Grant Oliphant about what foundations lose when they fail to share the tough lessons learned -- especially what went wrong -- in their philanthropic efforts. In my estimation, it is seasoned leadership that Grant describes here, that is each day helping the sector live up to new levels of potential and promise.

As he and others in this series currently being produced make clear, communications isn't a series of tasks.  It is a deeply human endeavor that, first and foremost, promotes relationships that teem with honesty and integrity.  Sectoral tendencies to publicize only our shining achievements can't help but undermine such efforts.

Running time is 30 minutes. To view select topics, fast forward to the time indicated:

• Why do communicators make great foundation presidents? (1:05-3:10)

• Why does Grant Oliphant love to talk about failure? (3:10-5:43)

• What kinds of mistakes are we talking about? (5:43-11:52)

• We have to keep ratcheting up our expectations... (11:52-30:00)

Susan Herr

Are Annual Reports Less Glossy This Year?

Call this eating humble pie. I find myself in the odd position of wanting to point out  -- and applaud -- three examples of how the annual report can be used to help convey important messages and further understanding among key audiences about the vital work foundations do around the nation and world, especially in these trying times.  

In the past, I've been among those critical of foundation annual reports, mostly because of the low -- if any -- return on investment they seem to yield.  Either I've been wrong in making such a blanket criticism or -- and hopefully so -- the conversations that many of us in the field have been having about annual reports has lead to a rethinking of how they can serve a more strategic purpose and go the extra length to do a better job informing people about the power and promise of philanthropy.  It also could be that the tough year we've been through has necessitated slightly less "glossy" messages than in the past.

The three reports, all selected at random from email announcements I've received over the past few weeks, are from the C.S. Mott, Teagle and Hewlett Foundations.  In each of these reports, presidents of the respective foundations go beyond the typical year-in-review presentations to deliver compelling messages that are worth reading and reflecting on.

The Mott 2008 annual report describes how it is "responding to the twin challenge of declining assets and greater need, with a particular focus on Flint and southeastern Michigan, a region the national media has sometimes dubbed 'ground zero' for the country’s economic crisis."  In his message, Mott President William White notes that the foundation does not have the resources to solve all of the world's problems, let alone Flint's, "but what we can do is figure out where we can have impact to bring about some fundamental changes that will improve the lives of people."  Previewing the content that makes up the bulk of the report, White says, "In the material that follows, we have tried to paint a realistic picture of our hometown, acknowledging its challenges, but also highlighting the many good things that are taking place."

Networking Matters

Our Fall 2009 conference has come and gone, and while the memories are still fresh, I wanted to share some observations.

One, the Communications Network is stronger than ever.  We've been on a rebuilding effort since 2006, and each year both membership in the Network and participation in our conferences have continued to grow.  Our first conference back in 2006 attracted some 130 brave souls -- almost twice the number of registered members at the time.  This year, we had more than 220 people, and probably could have exceeded 250 if there had been enough space for more people.  And as 2009 draws to a close, our membership tops 330.

Two, attendees expect quality and excellence.  Those who have completed our post-event survey show they want engaging and informative presentations and are looking for takeaways they can use when they return home. 

Three, we are not a bashful group. More than 120 conference attendees agreed to be videotaped and their comments posted on the website in which they share their thoughts on everything from what's changed and what's stayed the same about foundation communications to overall impressions of the conference and reactions to individual sessions.

Four, and finally, the value of networking cannot be underestimated.  One of the hallmarks of our group -- and since its original inception as a volunteer organization more than two decades ago -- is that people who work in communications for foundations, nonprofits or organizations that support both, genuinely enjoy learning from each other.  They willingly give and are eager to take what others are willing to share. 

To me, that still is the essence of the Communications Network.  By taking advantage of opportunities the Network offers to share with and learn from each other, we can achieve excellence in our own pursuits, become a standard-bearer for quality communications, and also offer important guidance and direction to many of the nonprofits our respective organizations support. 

Put another way,  the reason we take part in what the Network offers in the first place is so that we can draw on the knowledge, wisdom, experience, and plain old practical advice available -- all which helps us use communications more effectively to advance the missions of our respective organizations.

Now that the New York City conference is behind us, we're looking ahead to Los Angeles next September. If you want to attend, send an email to be added to the priority registration list.

--Bruce Trachtenberg

Conference 2.0 Strategies Capture a Bigger Picture

At the recent Communications Network annual conference held at the Ford Foundation in New York City, 20 volunteers known collectively as the Gorilla Engagement Squad, used Flip Cams to conduct video interviews with 120 conference attendees.  In addition to asking participants what resonated from the sessions they attended, Gorillas asked: “What has and hasn’t changed about foundation communications over the past five years?” 

What Has Changed About Foundation Communications in the Last Five Years? from Communications Network on Vimeo.

As commander-in-chief of the Squad, I was thrilled to see the wealth of engaging compelling content captured by my colleagues using what I call a “conference 2.0 engagement” strategy. It’s all just a further extension of the evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in which we recognize that folks are no longer satisfied to be talked at -- we want to talk amongst ourselves.

As these videos demonstrate, it no longer need be just the insightful experience of presenters and the quick chats with folks in the halls that shape our experience of conferences.  Conference 2.0 engagement strategies -- captured by our peers -- can communicate the collective mood of a gathering.  Because this organized collective of my peers chose to commit acts of journalism (did Clay Shirky coin that great phrase?) I can quickly test my sense of reality by perusing the Twitter stream or viewing eight or ten brief videos featuring 40 or 50 of my colleagues. 

While I love to be inspired by those of you who shape panels and present winning experiences, I’m more of a sucker for how we, as participants, let what we hear shape and inspire us. 

So here’s my take-away, that I’d like to test with your sense of what you heard at the conference and in these videos:

The collective fear of” seasoned” (a.k.a 35 year old +) foundation communicators is receding.  Assuming budget cuts don’t get us, digital natives who intuitively grasp new(fangled) media tools, aren’t going to either. We are growing more confident in our capacity to adapt to a landscape where change is the only constant. Clay Shirky’s exhortations to experiment are not a threat -- they are an oft-repeated invitation we are ready to embrace.

Whether you agree or disagree, we welcome you to talk back on our blog here.  I’ll be inviting the Gorillas to chime in since, whether they know it or not, their work is not done here. 

Susan Herr

Brand Meet Twitter, Twitter Meet Brand -- Reflections from 2009 ComNet Conference

This is the first of several installments in which we couple reflections from the Fall 2009 Communications Network Annual Conference (#comnet09) session presenters with feedback from attendees of those sessions captured by the Gorilla Engagement Squad.  First up:  Eric Henderson, Special Advisor for Living Cities, reflects on his session entitled, "Brand, Meet Twitter. Twitter, Meet Brand." We lead with post-session analysis provided in this clip from Debra Rubino, Director of Strategic Communications at Open Society Institute-Baltimore who relates session content to the OSI-Baltimore blog she guides entitled: "Audacious Ideas."

Deb Rubino from OSI-Baltimore Heads Into "Twitter Country" from Communications Network on Vimeo.

From Eric Henderson:

While listening to some feedback for "Brand, Meet Twitter. Twitter, Meet Brand" and talking to many people afterward, I think we achieved the sort of "trip to the gym" that I hoped for.  That is, I wanted to depose "guruism" for a moment (starting with Elvis leaving the building!) and invite us all to think together, to "work out" using the presentation as a solid jumping-off point.  The reason for this approach lies in the very definition of social media.  If we really value the knowledge generated by the crowd and by knowledgeable collaboration, then I'm more interested in creating the critical thought paths and platforms we can use as practitioners - compared to getting lost and disoriented diving into each and every one of the latest greatest Twitter apps and nuances.

Walking through "old" screenshots of Twitter, dating back to the first Tweet in March 2006, you could see that each iteration of Twitter, as with any of the popular social media channels, is largely created by ...YOU.  We are, thus, in the crew of experts. But only if we learn how to lever that perspective.

Learn the tool and then make it do what works for you.  Ignore popular headlines like these we examined: "Twitter is the second coming of the telegraph!" and "Twitter is useless."  This is to take nothing away from the Twitter folks or any other social media outlets.  The much appreciated genius they have is to know how to  incorporate the data streams we give and convert that into something attractive and of greater and greater use for all of us.  The point made, though, was to not let the tools run us and not to be intimidated by any new application.  "We just gotta jump in!"  But that's no blind leap.  

That's where we spent our time weaving in and out of Twitter and the brand context for how we use it, particularly on the case study.  The one slide that I received the most requests for was the one that detailed the entire communications process from content generation to target audience measures to the place for specific tools, Twitter included. (Eric's presentation can be found here.)

I heard a few sighs of relief, people glad to be reminded that they've done a good part of the hard work by simply knowing their brands and how to build strategy to execute on any platform.  So, when we approached it from this standpoint, we heard questions and interested talk around what we know best -- managing the brand.  "Where should I put Twitter in my marketing annual plan?"  "How can I create a measurement system that works for me?  What can I do to get other people on board in my organization using those measures?"  

Many thanks for an engaging session.

ComNetwork Chair Eric Brown on #ComNet09

Eric Brown, Communications Director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, took over as chair of the Communications Network at a board meeting immediately prior to our sold-out conference in NYC.  In this brief clip -- the first of more than 100 interviews captured by conference participants, collectively known as the Gorilla Engagement Squad, Brown describes the extent to which participants wanted to focus on social media and how strategy is superceding tactics.  

Communications Network Board Chair Eric Brown on ComNet09 from Communications Network on Vimeo.

What's Driving Your Social Media Policies?

In a post on his blog, Mitch Hurst, communications consultant and Network board member, offers some thoughts about social media policies for foundations.  Hurst says that these policies sometimes become "guardrails" that "exist partly to keep you from driving your career off a cliff."  Hurst believes a better approach to creating a "decent organizational social media policy is finding the right balance between minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity."

For instance, he argues that instead of creating a set of restrictions, such as forbidding what words staff "can use in a tweet," Hurst says employees should be trusted to do these four things:

• Associate their social media page with their employer if a significant amount of the links or content they're posting is related to their professional obligations;
• Note prominently in their profiles that their views don't necessarily reflect the views of their employer;
• Not post stuff that's going to land them in the society section of the local newspaper; or the police blotter;
• Fan, friend, follow, etc. your organization's social media pages. The price for playing.

You can read the full post here.

--Bruce Trachtenberg

Making Sure The Important Stories Get Told

It seems that philanthropy abhors the absence of news outlets and news services as much as nature abhors vacuums.  Increasingly foundations are funding a range of nontraditional ventures to fill the growing gap caused by the shrinking number of newspapers or disappearing beat reporters who used to specialize in topics of national importance such as education and health. Examples range from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Kaiser Health News, an independent news service that provides coverage of the policy and politics of health care to ProPublica, which specializes in traditional investigative reporting about issues of national importance such as tracking how the federal stimulus money is being spent, and which is primarily funded by the Sandler Foundation.

One of the latest examples of a foundation-funded project to increase national and regional coverage, this time of education, is the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University. Through initial support from the Gates and Lumina Foundations, the Hechinger Institute is transforming itself from a training organization for journalists to “a source of in-depth, analytical and explanatory journalism about education."  According to the Institute’s director Richard Lee Colvin, who previously was the lead education writer at the Los Angeles Times, this change is occurring at a time “when traditional news media outlets have cut their spending on news-gathering due to a loss of advertising revenues.”

Colvin says the Institute will function like a broker–seeking funding from foundations that want to increase coverage of education and then using that support to write and publish stories in partnership with mainstream publications as well as publish on and distribute through its own website.

Even as recently as “five years ago the idea that some outside entity, and one supported by foundations, would have anything to offer a commercial news operation would have been laughable,” Colvin adds. "It would have been viewed as compromising journalistic integrity. Today, things have “completely changed. All sorts of new arrangements are being set up every day.”

While being supported by foundations, Colvin is quick to add that the Institute operates without any editorial oversight by its benefactors and that foundations are not the focus of its coverage.  Instead, it’s the issues driving the foundations’ work that the Institute seeks to focus on and, in the process, helps foundations raise awareness of the work they are supporting while also informing the thinking of policy makers.

Not just a network, but THE Network.

Last week, I went to the Big Apple for the annual Communications Network Conference. My participation, as they say, was de rigeur, given that I’ve been a Board member for several years and have had some involvement in planning the program—but last week, I was struck by how much I’d want to be at the conference even if I didn’t have an official role. It’s gotten that good. Here are some of my biggest observations and take-aways from last week:

The mise en scene matters. I think the physical space one’s in can really affect one’s mood. Put me in a windowless office, and I’m apt to get morose and bored; put me in the Ford Foundation’s historic space, and I’m properly awed and eager for ideas and interactions. The gorgeousness of the vintage décor and sweeping views both heightened the rich history of Ford’s work and also, it just made the whole conference that much cooler. Also, if you know anything about planning meetings, you know that for things to go that smoothly, there must have been an entire crew of people working to make it so. So a special thanks to Ford for being so generous with its space and good people.

Conference sessions will continue to be hit-or-miss, but we’ll continue to try for the best. With the heroic Sherpa-like help of Bruce Trachtenberg, the Network Board members do end up putting a lot of effort into putting together a good program for conference attendees. Why? Because we care. So, we offered the presenters a special training. We scheduled conference calls with them ahead of time to go through the themes and format of their presentations. But we can’t control everything. Some sessions rocked, some sessions didn’t seem to go anywhere; some speakers were less than scintillating. However: I’m still pretty pleased with the results, even if they’re less than perfect. Why? One, because the good sessions were really, really good. There were some sessions that really prompted me to re-think---and re-imagine—some of the communications work I’m doing at RWJF. Two, all of the sessions I attended—good and bad—helped me benchmark my own strategic communications efforts against what the rest of the field’s doing. That’s invaluable training, right there, because no matter how experienced you are, you can’t get complacent about what you know and don’t know. It goes against the nature of our craft.

The Network members are my true peeps. I like all sorts of people, but I really like hanging out with people who care about communications and social change. And now that the Network’s membership has grown exponentially over the past several years, I feel like the Network is truly delivering on its core premise: it connects me to the people I want to know and want to learn from, the people who are doing the best work in my field. It stands for excellence in strategic communications and philanthropy. And at the Network conference, I feel that in more ways than I can possibly count.

One downside to all of this success? It’s a minor quibble, really, but the conference has gotten a little more crowded, a little less intimate. I appreciate the host committee’s efforts to overcome the crush effect by encouraging us to play colored-dot games with each other (even if I didn’t exactly play along)., but I still had moments when I felt as if I was threading my way through a throng of noise and too many people. But then again, I always ended up finding a great place to roost.

--Minna Jung

But Wait...There's More...

In addition to the posts we featured, several conference attendees wrote about experiences at the Fall 2009 Communications Network Conference on their own blogs. Here's a sampling:

Playing learning games to spread nonprofit social media
Gordon Mayer of the Community Media Workshop describes the Social Media Game he conducted as a conference session.

"This is a revolution. It cannot be contained by the insitutions."
In her post, Thaler Pekar summarizes Clay Shirky's Thursday morning keynote.

Dancing as fast as we can.
Bill Silberg's conference "takeaways."

Thanks to all for these and other musings on the conference.

--Bruce Trachtenberg