3 out of 4 U.S. households are not heterosexual married couples with kids, but you wouldn’t know it from the greeting card aisle…

It’s May, which means everywhere you look you’ll see spring-colored, floral reminders that Mother’s Day is coming, and you better be buying something for all the mothers in your life.

You would never guess from this commercial onslaught that Mother’s Day was actually founded by peace activists as an effort to recognize mothers who had lost children to war. The woman who eventually won the campaign to set aside the second Sunday in May as a time to honor mothers was so disappointed by what her creation became, that she protested the holiday to the point of being arrested for disturbing the peace in 1948.

We want to recognize the people who care for us, and our children and other people’s children all around us. But the traditional notions of who moms are, what they do and how they do it don’t fit for a lot of us. As a result, the cards on the shelf at the local stationary store can be anything from inappropriate to downright cruel. My point is, mothers don’t just do laundry, and we don’t all want to be rewarded with brunch. Motherhood is complicated and mothers are complex – and in fact many of us are motivated by parenthood to take a more active and activist bent on building community and changing society.

In an effort to recognize and celebrate the many ways we mother in our world today, our client the Strong Families Initiative has commissioned e-cards from 8 incredible artists, including Nikki McClure and Melanie Cervantes. These cards are made for the mothers of today. There are cards acknowledging families with two moms, single moms, activist moms, and professional caregivers. Other cards can help you acknowledge moms dealing with loss, separated from their children by immigration, incarceration, or even death.

Visit www.mamasday.org to personalize them for the mothers in your life, or drop hints that you would like one sent to you! Mama’s Day Our Way activities also include a blog and social media conversations about what it means to be a mom today, as well as opportunities to take action on behalf of families.

Visit www.strongfamiliesmovement.org to learn more about Mama’s Day Our Way, and how the Strong Families Initiative is engaging thousands of organizations and individuals around the idea that all families matter, and should have the rights, recognition and resources they need to thrive.

(Image courtesy Nikki McClure)
. . .

Amanda Cooper is a LightBox collaborator and mama who hopes you celebrate the mamas in your life every day.

These days, everyone is a communicator. After all, how hard is it to send a tweet, post to a blog, or even shoot and upload a video?

Many people in charge of foundation and nonprofit communications have taken advantage of this trend by encouraging others in their organizations to develop and share content through online social networks.

Indeed, as they increasingly see that their messaging can be amplified by many voices, both on staff and off, one can imagine foundations asking: Do we still need professional communicators on staff? Why can’t we all just say what we have to say? In a world of decentralized distribution of news and ideas, do we even need a communications department?

That last question obscures a fundamental fact. A successful foundation communication program isn’t simply the sum of its tactics, regardless of whether those tactics involve “old media” like sending out press releases or more contemporary activities such as blogging, tweeting, or posting to Facebook.

What matters most is the strategy that unites these otherwise disparate elements so that the right message is delivered to the right audience through the right channel with a clear goal in mind.

That may be why the roles and responsibilities of communications staff members are actually deepening instead of fading away. And that’ll continue to be the case as digital communications evolve and the competition for the attention of policy makers, community leaders, and others grows more fierce.

The changes under way in how grantmakers get their messages out can be seen in Foundation Communications Today, a report from the Communications Network that analyzes the findings from a survey of a hundred and fifty-five communication staff members at foundations across the country.

Almost half the communicators polled for the report said the leaders of their foundations had taken steps to ensure that communications strategy was incorporated into grantmaking, advocacy, and other work undertaken to advance the foundation’s mission.

Why are foundations making communications a key element of their work? Because most foundations are in the business of advancing the public good, and the changes they seek to foster require demonstrating, sharing, and, in many cases, encouraging both public and private-sector investment in new solutions to challenging problems.

To convince foundation leaders to make communications integral to their organizations’ work, communications staff recognize they have an internal selling job to do. Yet, as our survey shows, they are succeeding in their efforts to make other parts of the organization see both the benefits of integrating communications into their work and sharing responsibility for its implementation. As one respondent told us: “We have endeavored to be a much more well-integrated organization. Complete integration will take time, but our program officers think about communications at the start of the grant process rather than at the end of it.” Another said: “As we are doing more and more advocacy, it seems communications is taking on a greater importance and our board has allowed our budget to reflect this, despite having much less money since the market collapse.”

Let’s be honest: we have a ways to go. Many of the communicators we surveyed said that efforts to better integrate communications into everything their foundation does is happening slowly, and a small but significant share said communications strategy is barely considered in decisions about advancing the mission and that it tends to be addressed at the end of a big project rather than throughout. And then there was this response: “Program staff seem to be making decisions without thought to the importance of properly messaging our work. Initiatives are designed without any communications goals — or input asked for — and later the communications department is asked to cobble something together.”

Still, our communications brethren are making progress, and the survey provides valuable insights into specific ways communications departments are successfully working with and supporting the efforts of their program colleagues to advance their organizations’ missions.

Asked to choose from a list of possible activities in which they might participate, for example, providing support for program-related events — which could mean anything from organizing a discussion of experts to arranging a movie screening showcasing a grantee’s work — was identified as the most common form of support, with some 79 percent of respondents saying they regularly do this. And more than two-thirds of communication staff members say they advise/work with their program colleagues to develop content for Web sites.

Many foundation communicators also play a critical role in helping bring the important work their organizations do to the attention of key audiences. For instance, close to half of those polled said that influencing public policy-makers was a high priority, followed by community leaders and grantees.

The survey also shows how the work of foundation communications is changing. Almost half the respondents said they work for organizations that have blogs, while three-quarters (!) said their organizations host videos on their Web sites. Survey respondents also estimated that, on average, a quarter of their communications dollars in 2011 would be spent on electronic communications, more than on any other “channel,” although printed annual reports and other print publications still consume a sizeable share of the communications budget. At the same time, increased capacity for new media and related digital work was cited as a high internal priority by 60 percent of survey participants, more than any other response.

In short, the findings suggest to us that a foundation communicator these days must be adept at orchestrating a variety of communications tactics, from traditional media outreach to tweeting and blogging, if he or she hopes to reach key stakeholders in immediate and thoughtfully focused ways.

It’s also quite clear that every good-sized foundation needs at least one professional communicator on staff. Simply put, the jobs we do are central to ensuring that a foundation’s message is heard and actually makes a difference.

(Image courtesy Blue Focus Marketing)

. . .

Bruce Trachtenberg is executive director of the Communications Network, an organization of people who work for or on behalf of the nation’s grantmakers, and Michael Hamill Remaley is vice president of communications and public policy, Philanthropy New York.

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.”

It’s hard to sum up three packed days of learning, but these were the standouts for us.

Time is the most precious and limiting resource.

While nonprofits’ need for tools is not particularly surprising, NTC attendees were jonesing for tools that could save them time and boost productivity—in essence, tools that could help busy nonprofiteers clone themselves.

That said, it can sometimes feel like we are drowning in a sea of the wrong tools or suffering with tools not designed with nonprofits’ needs in mind. NTC attendees were looking for do-able, relevant, practical tools and NTC sessions delivered.

• Idealware’s Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook can help your organization create a policy that can guide your entire staff and grow a social culture.
• Connect to and hire hundreds or thousands of real people using Mechanical Turk and accomplish big jobs that can be broken up into small tasks, for just a little money.
• More than a few heads turned our way during the Marketing Meet & Greet session as people discussed ways to manage editorial content for websites, newsletters, and social media. On their minds: LightBox Collaborative’s Editorial Calendar.
• Devon Smith of ThreeSpot gave a fast-paced 5-minute Ignite presentation on 14 research and analysis tools for digital media, including If This Then That (ifttt), which has a lot of productivity potential.

Emotional and visual storytelling has folks excited – and bit overwhelmed.

Rally Illustration

You might recall that LightBox is a proponent of visual recording and facilitation, and other ways of bringing a little graphic fun to nonprofit communications. Visuals and data visualization were frequent topics throughout NTC.

• The desks of many nonprofiteers will be strewn with napkins soon thanks to keynote speaker Dan Roam. He showed (and his book, Blah Blah Blah contains) methods for distilling ideas to their simplest form and then conveying them vividly, which combines the visual and the verbal.
• Sponsor Rally created graphic notes of several NTC sessions, for those of us who aren’t ready to dive into the hyper-rich and very detailed collaboratively-created session notes.

NTEN’s community is filled with smart folks. 

Finally, it was great to meet so many people “IRL” (In Real Life) who I’d met only virtually and also to connect with my nonprofit network here in San Francisco and afar. Several smart folks have already started reflecting on and sharing their NTC learnings:

• Zan McColloch-Lussier of Mixtape Communications is already thinking how to apply Dan Roam’s directive to draw to nonprofit mission statements.
• JD Lasica from Socialbrite has a meaty recap listing his NTC highlights.
• Peter Genuardi from Giveo managed to narrow down his three top marketing observations from NTC.
• My friends over at TechSoup Global have offered up a handy roundup of where they made their contributions at NTC.

Looking forward to more reflections from others in the days and weeks to come.

Got a NTC recap to share? Let us know in the comments below!

(Image courtesy of Nonprofit Technology Network)

. . .

Lauren Girardin is LightBox Collaborative’s tactical curator. She’s looking forward to the 2013 NTC in Minneapolis, MN on April 11-13.

So I thought I’d check out how do-gooders had made use of April Fools’ Day in the past few years — to highlight their issues, get new supporters on board, or bring a playful dimension to their often sober work.

For sheer scope and scale of the ruse, there’s no one more effective year-round than the Yes Men. They’ve created a hoax edition of the New York Times, declaring an end to the Iraq war. They’ve staged a fake press conference announcing Chamber of Commerce support for climate change legislation. And they’ve created the incredibly goofy SurvivaBall, a self-contained living system for surviving climate disasters.

But if your budget doesn’t allow for a Yes Men-size prank (or if you think your staff will crack up too soon and ruin the joke), there are still creative ways to make use of April Fools.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) created three spoof messages in 2011 to highlight the perils of climate change:

• Climate change pushes Groundhog Day to January
• “Jersey Shore” cast warns of NJ sea level rise
• Giving away “Snuggies” to reduce carbon footprints

UCS sent the first message to supporters, and then gave them the option to share any of the three via social media or email. The result was a good bump in site traffic and increased social media buzz — and it’s still paying off a year later, with a mainstream press hit noting that Punxsutawney Phil could be out of a job if he doesn’t adjust to the new shorter winter.

Staff at charity:water showed their silly side by posting their April Fools jokes to their blog and sharing on Instagram – making the point that in addition to their critical work providing clean water to developing countries, they know how to have fun, too.

Missoula folks angry that major Missoula employers Macy’s and Smurfit-Stone had closed their doors — and laid off hundreds of workers right before Christmas — publicized their version of what these longtime employers should have done when they left town. They sent out a press release and blanketed Missoula with fliers about a completely fake “thank you Missoula” concert and gala event, complete with food and cash giveaways. You can read more about this prank and others in this Huffington Post article by Joseph Huff-Hannon and Yes Men co-founder Andy Bichlbaum.

And lastly, fellow LightBoxer Lauren Girardin pointed me towards an oldie but goodie cartoon from the archives at CompassPoint. The cartoon’s take-home message: make sure your April Fools joke lands right. If it’s too subtle, or simply makes people afraid, your message will get lost. Let on that you’re pulling your audience’s leg before they have a chance to get irritated.

Because the last thing April Fools’ Day is about is making people angry, right? Says the mom who’s sure to have a “kick me” sign on her back come 4/1/12.

So, what are you planning for April Fools’ Day?

(Image courtesy Flickr user Will Montague)

. . .

Isobel White is a LightBox collaborator who can’t keep a straight face but hopes you can.

The campaign was a big boost to Uniting NC’s profile. We raised $3500 for a statewide billboard campaign that reminded North Carolinians of the values they share with their immigrant neighbors. The billboards themselves attracted a huge amount of media attention, with dozens of stories in local, regional, and even national outlets like The Huffington Post.

If you’re considering your own crowdfunded ads, here are three things to think about:

1. Shorter campaigns have more momentum. Campaigns raise most of their money at the beginning, when there’s a new story to tell, or at the end, when the pressure of the funding deadline creates a sense of urgency. There’s not as much to talk about in the middle of a campaign, so why not shorten it? We ran a three-week campaign (based on the advice of a guy named Craig Mod, who wrote a great case study of his own Kickstarter project), and it worked well for us.
2. Don’t ask for anything less than $25. Almost half of the donations to the campaign came in the form of $25 donations—we offered everyone who donated that amount a poster of one of the ads. Asking for anything less from your supporters is setting the bar too low. Another quarter of our donations came in the form of $100 pledges, so it’s probably worth including that as an option in your campaign as well, and higher pledge levels (we used $250), will make $100 seem more doable for your supporters.
3. The money raised isn’t the most important thing. It might not even be the second most important thing—that’s probably the media attention that the billboards earned. The most important thing is the chance to connect with new supporters willing to amplify your message—and who are ready to put their money where their mouths are. Uniting NC saw a 5% bump in their email list through the campaign, and more than half of the donations to the campaign came from new supporters.

That’s the big lesson of the Uniting NC campaign: the ads are only a means to an end. Sure, it’s nice to have a way to share your messages directly with a wider audience, but that’s only the beginning. A smart earned media strategy can leverage even a small ad buy into a much bigger story.  Even better, a good ad funded through LoudSauce can attract new support for your cause from people who want to publicly associate themselves with your message. That’s the kind of support that money just can’t buy.

For more lessons learned from the Uniting NC campaign, check out the full case study.

(Image courtesy Flickr user elycefeliz)

. . .

Heath Wickline is a raconteur at LightBox Collaborative and hopes your crowd finds you. 

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.)

. . .

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

Oddly enough, Valentine’s Day has the answer: Speak to their hearts and make them fall in love.

In social media as in the real world, if you want to be ‘Liked,’ start expressing yourself in a way that makes your audience feel.

Emotional media compels rather than convinces; it activates an internal drive beyond rational thought. We like to believe that we “think therefore we are,” but recent neuroscience research suggests the opposite – unless we can feel, we can’t really think. Specifically, we can’t make decisions and without decisions there is no action. Since action is what you need, it is to your cause’s advantage to speak the language of the emotional brain. Here’s how:

The language of the emotional brain is sensual, not verbal. A powerful social media message then, will not contain words or numbers, but rather anything that appeals to the 5 senses. Two very important rules follow from that:

Rule #1: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Use images, videos, music, art, movement, color, anything that appeals to our 5 senses.

Rule #2: Show Me, Don’t Tell Me
Since I follow the rules, I will now show you, rather than tell you how to create emotional media.

This video has received 42 million views, about a million a month since 2008. Why is it emotional media? There are no words, just music and dance creating a feeling. What if your non-profit organization dedicated to easing racial tensions, uniting cultures, or encouraging cross-cultural exchange used this to promote your cause using a short call to action at the end? If you did, it wouldn’t matter that the specific activities of your organization weren’t detailed – what one gains from watching this is a sense of uplift that compels good will. You know which organization did understand the power of this example of emotional media? Visa.

6.3 million views since 2008. What if your organization dedicated to protecting lions or their habitat used something like this? The Born Free Foundation dedicated to doing exactly that released a video called “Christian the Lion – full ending” and created their own YouTube Channel to take advantage of the popularity of this video and promote their cause.

Andrea Keller is an artist who was asked by New Roads School in Los Angeles to help bring the people whose names graced their classrooms to life. Seeing the chain link fences surrounding their school as a grand needlepoint canvas and also as a huge pixilated digital file, she engaged the kids in doing exactly that. The fences effectively served as a living mission statement of the school. As the Head of School remarked, “We try to send the message that when people work together with a common purpose great things can be accomplished.” What if your organization thought about creative ways to make your mission statement tangible to your audience?

“Showing Emotion is the New Black”

There are more examples of emotional media than there is room in this post. Unfortunately most of them are created by for-profit corporations who are ahead of non-profits in understanding the power of emotional media. The most tweeted takeaway from the 2011 word-of-mouth marketing conference was by the director of U.S. Communications for McDonald’s: “For brands, showing emotion is the new black.”

Unlike hamburgers, your cause is worthy of real emotion. It’s Valentine’s Day – time to remember what it is you deeply love about what you do. What made you fall in love with it? What compels you to give your heart and soul to your organization? Now show us.

(Image courtesy Boston Herald)
. . .

Darci Andresen is a communications professional and evolutionary biologist who believes that your non-profit can rule the social media universe and catalyze lasting change – just listen to your heart.

The good news is that there is a way to tap into these values to increase acceptance of people who are part of an “out group.” The social science literature is clear: conversations in the context of friendship reduce prejudice. And it’s not just correlation; there is strong evidence that these interactions cause attitude change.

That’s the good news. The challenge is, these conversations aren’t always easy to have. They can be awkward, difficult, or risky. In the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality, we have seen how difficult it is to engage people to have these conversations. As Matt Foreman of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund says, it’s like we’re working toward equality with one hand tied behind our backs.

The Haas, Jr. Fund engaged LightBox Collaborative to research these thorny questions. Together we wondered: how can we motivate, engage, and support gay people in having these conversations with their straight friends and family? And what are the results of conversations, not just on the straight person’s attitude, but on the quality of the relationship and the gay person’s well-being?

We dove deep into these questions and learned enough to create a model mapping the conversation path toward greater acceptance and openness. Here are just a few of the highlights of what we learned about the journey:

Many gay people are no more motivated or influenced by appeals to rights and public policy than “movable middle” straight people are.

Instead, strong motivations for gay people to have these conversations include:

• Living openly and authentically
• Having better relationships with the straight people in their lives
• Concern for young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning

The conversations may be easier than we thought. Not only are casual conversations about ordinary life as a gay person easier to have than conversations that make being gay a big deal—these casual conversations also work better at increasing understanding and acceptance.

We heard from gay people who have had these conversations that their relationships with the straight people in their lives are better than ever, and that the discomfort of potentially awkward conversations is well worth gaining greater well-being and the freedom to be yourself.

Holly Minch and I have just returned from Creating Change, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual organizing and skills-building conference for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and their allies. While we were there we did a workshop on our research findings. What we heard back is that this line of research, learning, and strategy is necessary for creating the change we envision: a culture that is safe, welcoming, accepting, and fair for all people, including people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Several people told us how meaningful it was to see themselves and their experiences reflected in a study like this.

A 90-minute workshop—or a 500 word blog post—just scratches the surface of this research. We are grateful for the enthusiastic feedback we heard at Creating Change, and we are looking forward to the next steps: taking what we’ve learned and turning it into tools and strategies for action. If you are interested in reading the full report, sign up to have our blog delivered to your inbox. We’ll be blogging about our findings when the report is released.

(Image courtesy Flickr user Chris Blakeley, Creative Commons)
. . .

Cynthia Scheiderer is a LightBox Collaborator who has high hopes for many more courageous, authentic conversations.

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.