the Communications Network blog

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

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.

Watch This Space

In just a week, the Fall 2009 Communications Network Annual Conference kicks off at the Ford Foundation in New York City.  We are expecting about 230 people--a terrific mix of foundation communications professionals and program staff, individuals who work for foundation associations and other nonprofits, as well as some from communications firms that work with both foundations and nonprofits. (And they are a patient bunch--our conference sold out in 3 weeks, way back in mid-May!)

We've put together a stellar lineup of speakers and panel presentations, all focused on helping conference attendees excel at using communications--everything from new and emerging technologies to the tried and true--to advance the work of their organizations and philanthropy overall.

To help conference attendees stay on top of the many sessions and discussions that will be occurring simultaneously over the course of the conference and to give those not attending a flavor of what's taking place, we've recruited a crack team of bloggers, tweeters and video cam users. We're calling them our "Gorilla Squad."  They'll be observing and reporting on what they see and hear and we'll be posting regular updates to our blog.

So, we invite you--beginning on October 14--to keep checking this space regularly for conference reports and updates.  Also, you can follow us on Twitter at #comnet09. Whether you are attending or observing from afar, don't hesitate to offer your comments or even pose questions you'd like answered.

For more information about the conference, including the agenda, discussion topics, and list of attendees, click here.

We also want take this opportunity to thank this year's sponsors:  The Atlantic Philanthropies, The California HealthCare Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, DeSantis Breindel, Hattaway Communications, and Lipman Hearne.

--Bruce Trachtenberg

Remembering Frank Karel (1935-2009)

By Larry Meyer, Communications Network Board Chair and President, Meyer Communications LLC

We’re saddened to hear of Frank Karel’s passing Saturday after a long battle with cancer.

For years, Frank has been the singular leader, visionary and ceaseless advocate for communicating the value of philanthropy.

Many Communications Network members, past and present, owe Frank Karel a debt of gratitude for the way he eased the path for us.

My story is typical.

As a brand-new communications director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation back in 1995, I recall how bewildering … how Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass …  this new work of mine was after a career at The Miami Herald and elsewhere in print journalism. 

All this jargon … “corpus” and “grantees” and “anticipated outcomes” and “say what?” For several months I searched for a like-minded practitioner, someone who could school me on how to understand and explain grant making, but it was lonely down here in Miami at the tip of the Sunshine State.

I attended my first Council on Foundations annual meeting the next spring in Honolulu, and scanned the schedule seeking reasons to justify the long trip. Walking down the hotel hall to my first meeting of the Communications Network in Philanthropy, I was met by a big grinning bear of a guy named Frank Karel. He immediately established an alumni connection to The Herald with me (he was The Herald’s first science writer). He swept me into the room, found me a beer and introduced me to my new peer group. The stress level dropped and my pre-Facebook friend list grew, starting with Frank. I was impressed that a vice president  with the gee-whiz Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who’d worked at the National Cancer Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation, was so gregarious, self-effacing and fun – unlike the self-important crowd so prevalent in this field.  Take a hint, people. 

In conversation with Frank, you could count on him to challenge a bald assumption with a trademark: “You lie!” (And in the pre-Joe Wilson era, he meant it nicely). He was proud of his work, he loved his spouses and always told you so, and geez, did he love his Gators.

Frank took it on himself to be the center of our labors, and never turned down a request to reconnect, answer a silly question or refer me to good people and good info. More important, he used his platform and reputation to advocate tirelessly for improved and clear communication by foundations for their work and causes. He was a central actor in the creation of the current-day Communications Network, and setting our path. He set a standard for us, and gave our part of the sector the rationale to ratchet up the investments in staff and resources to do our communications jobs back home better than before.

He was never prouder than when his spouse Betsy endowed a new teaching chair in his honor at the University of Florida, emphasizing public interest in communications. And he was frustrated when the current financial crisis hamstrung the state of Florida in matching the generosity of the $2 million commitment. Our work goes on now without Frank to coax, cheer and lead. But I know he’s got our backs. 

Well, that's my story.  What's yours?  Please leave a comment.

Photo credit Frank Karel: Randall Hagadorn

Different Yes, But Revolutionary Change?

In a recent mailing, communications consultant Doug Gould, president of Douglas Gould and Company, poses a provocative question to people involved in public interest communications: Are the communications changes we are experiencing revolutionary?

Answering his own question, Gould writes: “sadly" they are not.

While noting that the “the traditional business models of public relations and advertising have been upended by the rapid shift to Web-based communications and the explosion of the blogosphere, all at the expense of collapsing traditional media,” he adds:

…organizations that need to advance policy in the public interest should know - this is not revolution. The crucial fundamentals remain the same; we just have to build on trends of the last 15 years, in particular, media consolidation at the top and fragmentation at the bottom. Until the financial crisis, newspapers and other media were merging into news and entertainment conglomerates. Simultaneously, many Web-based specialty publications and blogs offered more places to acquire information, albeit without the verification applied by traditional media.

Gould maintains that the changes we are experiencing are mainly “about delivery systems.” In fact,  according to research his and another firm conducted “the mother lodes of information that feed the bulk of blog posts are ‘old media’ stalwarts such as The New York Times and NPR.”

The Payoff from Betting On A Documentary Film

On September 15, PBS will air THE PRINCIPAL STORY, a documentary funded by The Wallace Foundation that portrays the challenges principals face in turning around low-performing public schools and raising student achievement.  For Wallace, there was some risk in underwriting a film that was meant to advance its program goals but without having any say in the editorial content.  In this blog post, Jessica Schwartz, senior communications officer, describes how the foundation navigated the process, discusses lessons learned, and offers advice for others who want to use film to advance mission.

A good way to engage target audiences is to inform the discussion without controlling it. That’s what The Wallace Foundation set out to do by funding a documentary film project that advanced its strategic goals, while maintaining the filmmaker’s independent voice.

By way of background, Wallace is nearing the end of a decade-long exploration of education leadership and its impact on school turnaround and student achievement.  We believed that a film documentary could point to the fundamentally changed role of today’s school leader – and inspire interested audiences to learn more.  We have been developing our website as a knowledge center, with downloadable reports and articles, to serve just this purpose.

In other words, the film documentary or media project, when independent and well done, conveys “third-party” credibility and makes the case for further exploration and, ultimately, action.

This “hybrid” approach – i.e., neither funding a worthwhile project that was tangential to our goals; nor creating our own media product with “filmmakers for hire” – came with trade-offs.

Yes, It's That Easy!

In his 2001 memoir, legendary television news producer, Don Hewitt, attributed the success of 60 Minutes to "...four words every kid in the world knows: Tell me a story. It's that easy."

Although Hewitt was talking about a television news program, my friend Joanne Edgar believes there's a lot foundations can learn from the 60 Minutes formula for success.  In a letter that appeared in the Chronicle of Philanthropy last week, Edgar, who is a communications strategist and a former foundation communications director, argues that grant makers that tell stories will have a greater chance at success than those that don't.  She writes: 

Foundations are in the business of improving people's lives. Even foundations that fund pure scientific research are doing so with the end goal of making the world a better place. Data and analysis are important ingredients of success. But if we do not capture the personal and institutional stories that illustrate change, we miss a key opportunity to advance our goals. If we do not tell the stories of what works — or if we do not acknowledge what does not work — we lose the opportunity to expand our lessons.

Stories help grant makers and grantees argue successfully for replication of successful reform. Daniel Pink points out in his book A Whole New Mind: "When our lives are brimming with information and data, it's not enough to marshal an effective argument. Someone somewhere will inevitably track down a counterpoint to rebut your point. The essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative."

Let's Shout Out Our Work On Diversity and Inclusiveness

Guest Post: Paul Bachleitner

Some aspects of foundation work are harder to bring to the public's attention than others.  For a number of foundation communications officers, promoting their organizations' efforts to advance diversity and inclusiveness ranks at the top of the list.  And while this work is too important for us to allow it to fall beneath the radar of public awareness and discourse, convincing CEOs, staff, and boards to serve as visible ambassadors on the politically murky issue of race sometimes can be a tough internal sell. In addition, finding ways to connect with the public and with communities of color may also require some different approaches than your standard outreach. 

Yet, as I learned over the course of producing the Diversity in Philanthropy Project (DPP) case study, good examples abound of how foundations have found creative ways to bring attention to this important work.  In talking with with communications officers at the Ford, Marguerite Casey, Packard, C.S. Mott, and The Denver foundations, I also heard about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. Their responses are detailed in the DPP case study, which will be published in the Fall, and ahead of the Communications Network Annual Conference, where I, along with several foundation colleagues, will be presenting on the topic.

To get a conversation going now, I'd like to use this post to call attention to some of the more innovative approaches to communicating about diversity and inclusiveness and to see if you have thoughts and experiences of your own to add.