It’s almost an American ritual to complain about taxes as we rush to the post office to file before the deadline. That old saw about “death and taxes” will be repeated ad infinitum.

But not me. This year, I’ll be skipping down the street, singing merrily about the joy of investing in our communities.

Why? Partly because I had the privilege to travel this year, and while walking a dusty road in a far away country, I had occasion to contemplate how much I missed sidewalks, and how easy it is to take the basic infrastructure we enjoy (like sidewalks!) for granted.

An Investment in the Common Good

But more than that, I believe that those of us who work every day for the common good have a special responsibility to help others understand the value of the common resources and common assets we all share.  We all pay taxes and we all use public structures paid for, maintained or protected by taxes. Libraries, clean air, schools, parks and yes, sidewalks are all brought to you courtesy of taxes.

Taxes aren’t something to complain about – they’re a reflection of our values, and an investment in our communities.  So if you care about the commons, I urge you to SHARE about the commons.

Changing the Conversation

Along with the rest of my LightBox Collaborative colleagues, I am pleased to support the work of these important organizations as they advance the conversation on the worth of our investments in the commons:

• Demos is partnering with the American Prospect on a six-part series demonstrating why taxes matter.  Rich with infographics, the stories show how taxes pay for the things that underpin our public life and connect us to one another through our communities, our states and our country.

• Community Coalition is celebrating taxpayers for their investments to build the basics we need for a functioning society – like clean water, police, parks, roads and more.

• Our colleagues at CompassPoint have teamed up with Kim Klein and the Building Movement Project to create Nonprofits Talking Taxes. Fun videos, webinars and workshops engage the nonprofit sector in conversation on how taxes mirror community values, and actions nonprofit leaders can take to ensure that taxes reflect an investment in the common good.

What are you glad to be investing in this Tax Day?

(Image courtesy flickr user futureatlas.com)

. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder and wishes you “Happy Tax Day.”

Tired of the daily barrage of advertising trying to sell you things you don’t need? Especially when nonprofits and their important causes rarely have the budget to benefit from smart, well-placed ads? Now, through the magic of crowdfunding and clicktivism, there’s a way to harness the power of advertising for the greater good.

LoudSauce has set out to be Kickstarter for good causes. They help nonprofits design ads for any medium—billboard, transit, print, broadcast, online—then serve as a platform to raise the funds to run the campaign.

“Our vision is to transform the medium of advertising from one that primarily drives consumption to one of civic participation. What if we had more power to shape which messages were promoted on our streets? What if our billboards inspired us toward a future we actually wanted?”—LoudSauce website

Case Study: Uniting NC

LightBox team member Heath Wickline helped Uniting NC use LoudSauce to promote the message that North Carolina respects and values immigrants.

“The success we had with the Uniting NC campaign really demonstrated for me how well the platform can work as a way of turning goodwill into concrete support. Uniting NC was able to run a statewide billboard campaign that they just wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.” —Heath Wickline

Social Media Fueled

To encourage contributions, Uniting NC used a short video that appeared on their LoudSauce page. Simple and moving, it shows people holding up signs about why they value diversity and immigrants, including:

“A doctor from India saved my life.”

“Without Latinas, I wouldn’t have learned to dance!”

“Because diversity is the spice of life.”

LoudSauce is deeply grounded in social media: when you give, your Facebook avatar shows up on the campaign page, and you can easily share the campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Those contributing $100 to Uniting NC could even have their thumbnail photos appear along the bottom of the billboard itself—since new media drove the creation of the “old media” billboard.

When is it the Right Strategy?

Of course, neither advertising nor crowdfunding are right for every organization or campaign. For ads to be effective, you have know who you’re trying to reach and have clear and realistic goals for what the ad campaign can accomplish. And what it can’t. Advertising is only effective when deployed as one tactic of a carefully planned strategy. For example, you might use an ad to gain media attention, boost a lobbying effort, launch a new initiative, or make a small organization or campaign appear bigger than it is.

For crowdfunding to work, you have to have a crowd who wants to give you their funds. Social media is not something an organization can simply jump into expecting immediate success. It takes time to build relationships with your supporters. They have to trust you before they will want to publicly associate themselves with your campaign or organization.

LoudSauce is an exciting new way to raise the big bucks advertising requires. What great ad campaigns have you dreamed of running if you only had the budget?

(Image courtesy inneractive.)

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Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder and is excited by the evolution of crowd power.

The re-emergence of Newt Gingrich takes me back to his earlier heyday in 1994. That’s when he took out his Contract On America. (OK, he called it the Contract With America, but “on” is so much more accurate in so many ways.) While it largely failed to make policy changes, it did usher in the nasty, unproductive partisanship that continues to plague our nation. And now Newt is bringing it back to try again. But I digress.

Back then, I was working for the Sierra Club, which was particularly concerned about Gingrich’s policy proposals because it would have gutted a wide array of laws and regulations that protect clean air and water, wilderness, wildlife, and human health. It also provided new subsidies for logging national forests and exempted Big Oil from various environmental laws. In the eyes of the Sierra Club, the Contract On America amounted to a War on the Environment.

In fact, we had an enewsletter titled as such – which we called “the Daily WOE.” One of my responsibilities was to help publish the Daily WOE informing the media and activists of the emerging details of why the Contract really would be disastrous for the environment. We were telling activists they had to act immediately to organize and write their Congressional representatives or all would be lost. Those familiar with grassroots mobilization recognize it’s threats to the things people care about that tend to motivate the action needed to protect them. While it’s important to create urgency for our issues, in hindsight I think we can all agree that serving as the daily harbinger of woe for our constituents is perhaps not the best position for an organization’s brand….

Further, while the communications department was busy saying the sky was falling, the development department was appealing for funding with a message of hope—that our organization was busy saving the beautiful flora and charismatic megafauna of the world. Those familiar with grassroots fundraising are well aware that people tend to give to solutions, not to problems.

Yes, people are unlikely to contribute to something they perceive to be hopeless. Still, they need to understand the problem they can help solve—with their dollars or their activism. And both contributors and activists will be more motivated if they feel they can make a difference in fixing the problem. In my story from the Sierra Club, while each department was using a smart communications approach for our specific goals, we were, in effect, contradicting and cancelling out each other’s messages to our key supports.

Of course the last thing you want is for your organization to be caught talking out of both sides of its mouth. Get your departments talking to each other to align your messages for all your audiences, then tailor that general message to appeal to each specific target. Keeping an up-to-date editorial calendar is a great way facilitate and promote this coordination. Check out the latest version Lightbox Collaborative has prepared to help you align your organization’s voice.

Has this ever happened in your organization? What are your successes and challenges in aligning messages across your organization?

(Image courtesy www.onevoicechorus.org)

. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder and is happy to no longer focus on her daily woes.

This quote from Rick Moyers at Meyer Foundation captures the key question that many nonprofit leaders are asking in today’s multi-platformed world. Media and communications opportunities seem to change almost daily. Is your organization’s staff keeping up?

Many organizations hire communications specialists, expecting them to do whatever it takes to publicize the organization and its issues. Back in the olden days, that meant producing newsletters and collateral, and getting stories into print and electronic media. With far more limited media and other ways to talk to members and other key audiences, it was a reasonable expectation.

Effective communications have always been integral to achieving program goals, but the job was largely left to the “experts.” Program staff mostly provided ideas, background information and fact-checking. Today, however, with media as diversified and interactive as it is, this model is not only unrealistic but unwise. Instead of leaving the job to the communications staff, your organization must build a staff that communicates.

Old media activities were more like lectures—pretty one-sided. But the new communications ecosystem is about sparking and participating in conversations—across multiple platforms—to build relationships with your audiences. A meaningful presence requires all hands on deck to monitor, participate in and respond to relevant dialogs. It’s what builds your organization’s credibility and influence.

Your program staff is probably already reading blogs, tweets and other content ripe for sharing. But do they take the next step and post it to the organization’s Facebook page or retweet it? The trick to effective communications today is ensuring that the entire staff feels responsible for its success.

Here are a few tips to get your team to contribute to the conversation:

• Support and align empowered voices. While it’s important for all communications to promote an organization’s desired reputation, staff members will be more motivated to participate in social media if their own personalities can shine through. Make sure your social media guidelines are clear and easy to follow, but let people be themselves, too.

• Coach your team to communicate for success. Today’s communications director should encourage the team to get in the habit of content creation. Now more a coordinator and cheerleader, it is up to her to infuse best practices in social media and storytelling throughout the organization’s work, and to encourage the entire team to come up with stories and ideas to post to the blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and wherever else your audiences live.

• Build relationships. Whether it’s old media or new, all staff should build the personal relationships with key reporters and bloggers that will improve coverage of your organization.

• Make it easy. While you want your staff to play an active role in the online conversation, including writing blog posts, you don’t want it to be all-consuming. This is where the editorial calendar comes in. It’s the best way to coordinate all communication activities online and off.

• Keep it on the agenda. Discuss communications opportunities at every staff and board meeting to keep communications front and center. In addition to surfacing upcoming conferences, events, and decision points ripe for media attention, it will help create a fertile environment to grow new ideas to work into the editorial calendar.

Communications: it’s not just for the professionals anymore.

(Image courtesy Flickr user KEXINO, Creative Commons)

. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder and hopes that 2012 is the year of the empowered communicator.

Last year, we offered an editorial calendar designed to support nonprofit communicators to act as their own publishers. Over the course of the past year we have continued to test this format with our clients and refine it. And, now, we are excited to present the new and improved editorial calendar for 2012.

Earned Media is Dead

OK, reports of the death of traditional media may be greatly exaggerated. There are still reporters out there with column inches to fill, but far less of them than there used to be. But many causes and organizations are finding that it’s a lot harder to get picked up in the local paper and/or the national news than it used to be. And traditional media coverage is now increasingly driven by conversation and content that starts off in the online space, on the communications platforms and channels driven by nonprofits themselves.

Content is King

So long live new media, which places your nonprofit organization in the driver’s seat. From email blasts to Facebook pages, in many cases it’s now nonprofits that find themselves with channels in need of content. Given the proliferation of low-cost tools, your nonprofit can spark conversation, share your message and advance your cause all on your own terms. But it takes content: you’ve got to feed those media platforms and seed those conversations. Relevant, compelling content attracts new advocates to your cause and deepens relationships with constituents, all without relying on a reporter to relay your message.

Align Your Team

Now that your nonprofit is the publisher managing your own communications channels, an editorial calendar can be a great way to manage your content pipeline. Our 2012 editorial calendar is presented as a Google spreadsheet. Each month has its own tab containing LightBox Collaborative’s ideas on 2012’s opportunities for your organization to share ideas and information and generate conversation.  We’ve included red-letter dates to help spark your creativity on the conversations that will advance your cause via new media and traditional media opportunities. Download a copy and customize with calendar hooks, program dates, events and other important dates that your organization can leverage for successful communications.

Tailor the Tool

As you map out your work plan for the year ahead, we recommend you also augment our list with a review of your organization’s 2012 work plans to identify key areas of focus. These can be gold mines of content for your communications platforms. At an upcoming staff meeting, you might create a chart for each month and post it around the room, then ask staff to mark key dates on the charts – including events, conferences, key issues up for consideration in the legislature, or program milestones. This way, your editorial calendar becomes a tool your entire staff can use to ensure that your communications efforts are in line with and supportive of your day-to-day work, which creates alignment and efficiency in your efforts for the year ahead.

Let us know what dates you think we should have on the 2012 radar. We look forward to hearing your tips on how you customized your 2012 editorial calendar.

(Image courtesy Flickr user theparadigmshifter, Creative Commons)

. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder.

In honor of National Nonprofit Executive Director Appreciation Day, we’re pleased to share some ideas about the important role that organizational leaders play in effective communications, particularly during times of change. Since change is just about the only constant that nonprofits can count on these days, the topic seems an especially relevant one as supporting change becomes an ever more important part of every nonprofit leader’s job.

Our colleague Laura Peck at Claros Group has put together a brief article illuminating the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of communicating change and how leaders can support people through change. She also includes some hard-won lessons about communicating change to your internal team and external stakeholders:

• Have a clear strategy for communicating up front about the change.
• Recognize that resistance (certainly “theirs”, maybe your own) is a normal part of implementing change.
• Create involvement and opportunities for input whenever possible.
• Be creative in how you solicit feedback and engage people.
• Model the behaviors you are asking for in others. As Gandhi reminds us, “We must be the change we wish to make in this world.”

Share the article with your favorite change leader or your team and take a moment today to show your appreciation for the nonprofit leaders who have dedicated their careers to a cause.

(Image courtesy Flickr user chintermeyer, Creative Commons)

. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder.

Recently, a pattern emerged that we couldn’t help but notice.

We’re being asked, again and again, to speak about the building blocks of strategic communications. First it was the more than 200 program staff (most of them not communications folks) at one of our clients, who were all eager for practical tips. Soon after, I gave a pair of well-received talks on communications strategy at CompassPoint’s Nonprofit Day. Then, LightBox collaborator Lauren Girardin spoke to YNPNsfba about taking nonprofit communications to the next level.

We realized that these groups and many others are in a similar position: they need effective communications, but they don’t necessarily know where or how to start. Luckily, we have lots to share on the matter.

Picking the subject of our first video training was easy. At LightBox Collaborative, we see sound strategy as the core of every successful communications effort. The GAME Plan is our favorite tool to teach do-gooders how to articulate goals, identify key audiences, select the best messages to move audiences to action, and determine the best means to engage them.

Watch LightBox Collaborative’s first communications video training: Your Communications GAME Plan

Although our video trainings will be chock-full of information, videos alone can’t replicate the insights revealed during in-person training or consulting. Each nonprofit or foundation’s best-fit strategic communications will be unique. But, we hope our new series of video trainings will help by illuminating the path ahead for your powerful strategic communications.

We’ll share more video trainings on various communications topics over the next few months. Which communications, strategy, messaging, and marketing topics would be most valuable to you and your organization? What do you want to hear from us?

As nonprofit leaders know all too well, the practices around setting and refining organizational strategy are changing profoundly. Leaders are more concerned than ever to have evidence-based mandates, to share stories of impact amidst fierce competition for stakeholder attention, and to refine business models for greater sustainability in an unpredictable economy.

Earlier this week at CompassPoint’s annual Nonprofit Day (#11npd), I had the privilege of speaking on a panel with Jeanne Bell, CEO of CompassPoint and Jara Dean-Coffey, Principal at jdcPartnerships. Our session, “Rethinking Strategy,” examined the intersection of impact, brand, and business model.

Recognizing that leaders need real-time tools to address strategy in a dynamic environment, we offered three questions to get to the heart of the matter:

1. Is it working and why?
2. Who’s buying?
3. Who knows and who cares?

These questions may sound like the domain of strategic planning, but as Bell pointed out, nonprofit leaders no longer have the luxury of time in which to make critical decisions. In our rapidly-evolving context, Bell said:

“A deferred decision is costly and not necessarily more informed. Better to invest in the pivot point than running out your resources waiting for the change to happen to you.”

Nonprofit leaders are called on to make vital decisions in real time. Clarity on these three questions can take the place of traditional strategic planning processes, freeing you and your organization be more nimble and more adaptive to the shifting landscape in which you operate.

Is it working and why?

As nonprofit leaders, we’re in the business of changing the world, and it is this quest for impact that drives not only the day-to-day work of our organizations, but also the marketplace economics of the nonprofit sector. Dean-Coffey explained it this way:

“Nonprofit leaders want to be able demonstrate the value of their efforts on a continuous basis. That means engaging in evaluative practice — not in evaluation as a one-time event, but as an ongoing practice that reaches beyond performance measurement and monitoring in the relentless pursuit of quality and value to improve organizational performance.”

Where the quest for resources is increasingly competitive, the ability to articulate impact is often a key differentiator in the marketplace.

Who’s buying?

Simply put, a nonprofit cannot be sustained if no one is willing to pay for the services it provides or the programs it offers. Clarity about the value the buyer derives from the nonprofit is critical as leaders seek revenue streams to support their program offerings. As Bell said:

“For better or worse, it’s all earned income now. We’ve trained donors to look for return on investment in the form of mission impact.”

In no small part, the trend toward the articulation of impact stems from the fact that impact attracts resources. People don’t give money to problems — they give to solutions. Foundations often want to invest in scaling what works. Understanding the motivations of the buyer is a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace of ideas.

Who knows and who cares?

The success of your cause hinges on how you engage your staff, board, volunteers, donors, constituents, community members, and decision makers. Without their interest and active support, you can’t achieve results.

In the new communications landscape, nonprofit leaders have a strategic imperative to communicate — to share information and build emotional ties to your cause among your stakeholders and community members. In turn, these people can become passionate champions for the cause. Smart, sharp communications is the key to building that army of passionate champions who can buy in to programs and help increase an organization’s impact.

So how is your organization operating at the intersection of impact, business model, and brand? How are you clarifying and communicating impact in order to sustain it?
. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s Chief Engineer. She is a strong proponent for strategically getting to the heart of the matter.

Inspired by this great photo essay which asks the deceptively simple question “Why do you do what you do?” I’ve been musing about the key moments in my career that continue to inform my work at LightBox Collaborative today.

Like the summer of 1998 when I accidentally roped the nation’s oldest environmental organization into a 10+ year campaign.

I was working in the press office of the Sierra Club, in Washington, D.C. Perhaps you recall the hot conversation topic in Washington that summer? Monica Lewinsky. All. The. Time. It was clear that the Sierra Club’s media strategy wasn’t gonna cut through the chatter unless it related to the impeachment of President Clinton.

We decided to look beyond the nation’s capitol, to turn our attention to issues surfaced by Sierra Club members. One of the major concerns we heard in states after state, all across the country, was the massive livestock factories dotting America’s rural landscape. So, we decided to do what any savvy, leading organization would do: issue a report!

The research for this report turned me into a real dud, full of gloomy facts. Livestock generated 2.7 trillion pounds of poop annually….The average mega-hog operation consumed 73 million gallons of water each year….The dairies of Central California generated more waste than the entire population of Texas….Oh, I was a real laugh riot at parties. But, eventually, the research was done and the report ready for release (much to the relief of my friends and family).

On the big day, I sat down at my computer to write the press release. I happily typed away until I realized that I had no headline. I had no news. Uh oh.

I wandered down the hall to the office of a senior colleague and asked, “What do you think if…we, um, called for a moratorium on factory farming?”

Coffee in hand, she barely looked up from her Washington Post: “Sure kid, sounds great.”

So that’s what I did. I sent a press release to the national media calling for a ban on the construction of any additional large-scale farms. The headline declared: “Sierra Club Declares a Moratorium on Factory Farming.” With a few strokes of the keyboard I picked a big ol’ fight with a strong, motivated, well-funded opponent.

Oops!

While you may deeply value the contributions of your 23-year-old interns, I suspect you’d rather not see them setting national policy. Particularly not the kind of policy that will leave your organization on the hook for years and years of campaigning…and yet that’s exactly what happened.

Because the organization wasn’t clear on the goals of their communications in the first place.

We had a great communications product — a well-designed, well-researched report. But we didn’t know what we wanted that product to do for us. We didn’t have a clear outcome in mind. So we accidentally ran butt-backwards into a campaign.

That’s the problem I’ve spent my whole career since solving: strategic clarity. Who does your organization need to talk with? Why? How will you know if that conversation is effective? What’s the change you are trying to cause? How are you trying to change the world?

. . .

Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s Chief Engineer. She wonders what mistakes you’ve made that turned out for the better?

Our awesome clients at CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and Meyer Foundation recently teamed up to release Daring to Lead 2011, the third in a series of such national studies produced over the past ten years.

More than 3,000 nonprofit executive directors shared their hopes and fears to provide a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s really like to run a nonprofit today.

And the picture is a little overwhelming, according to the study: The continuing economic slump means that raising the money and meeting the rising demands for services are both tougher than ever. Long hours and low pay mean it’s difficult to hang on to great staff. Boards of directors seem ill-prepared to partner with executives to meet the challenges. You can visit the Daring to Lead site for the full report and to learn about the implications for nonprofit executives and boards, philanthropy, and capacity builders.

But it’s this finding that makes our team here at LightBox Collaborative stand to salute nonprofit leaders: Despite the profound challenges of the role, nonprofit executives remain energized and resolved. The executives in the study give a candid picture of the challenges for certain, but they also exude resolve, commitment and confidence in their organizations’ abilities to serve.

A while back, we declared National Nonprofit Executive Director Appreciation Day in honor of those leaders who so valiantly serve our sector. We’re marking our calendars again this year, and counting the ways we’re so very grateful to these leaders who dare to make our sector strong and our nation better each and every day.

What about you? Why do you dare to lead?

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Holly Minch‘s most daring act of leadership was to launch the LightBox Collaborative, based on the idea that collaboration creates the strongest organizational culture.