Do-gooders achieve great things, but we can always do better (myself included). Sometimes, all we need is some focused training time.

For 13 years, the SPIN Academy has brought together a diverse group of people united by one goal: to improve their ability to use communications strategies and tactics to make a better world.

In August, more than 60 participants learned how to be better advocates for the aging, LGBT community, immigrants, women, students, families . . . essentially, to better advocates for all of us.

The SPIN experience

This was my tenth year as a SPIN Academy trainer, helping participants think through how they could take their SPIN learnings back to their organizations to increase their impact.

But at my first SPIN Academy, I was a participant, with just a few years of professional progressive communications under my belt. Like many people, I had learned how to do my job on the job. I had little time to take a step back to gain perspective and little context for thinking about how to do it better.

My SPIN Academy experience gave me the framework to not only become a better communicator, but also to become a better advocate for strategic communications in my organization. When I returned to the Brennan Center for Justice (my then employer), I was able to improve the discipline and rigor with which we approached our communications. We became more strategic — doing more planning, framing, and audience analysis. And ultimately, that strategy focus made us more effective.

SPIN in the always-on culture

When I was a SPIN Academy participant (in what now feels like the dark ages!), most organizations didn’t expect staff to have laptops or work remotely.

This untethering allowed participants to network, learn, and reflect without the distracting pressures of their day-to-day workloads. Being offline also made it possible for participants to more objectively evaluate past work and to plan for how to take that knowledge into future planning.

This year, many SPIN Academy participants had to spend their breaks checking email and keeping projects moving. This commitment to the cause is admirable, but I hope future participants are encouraged to leave the day-to-day behind in order to more fully immerse in all the opportunities that the Academy provides.

Recharging the batteries

When you’re a professional do-gooder it can feel like so much of the world is organized in opposition to what we are trying to achieve. SPIN has re-energized me.

This new spark comes from the people who candidly shared their struggles and successes. I’m inspired by their dedication to their communities and causes, and their determination to build the skills and competencies they need to do their work well and have a positive impact.

Thunderous applause

Thank you to the many people who made the SPIN Academy 13 possible: our fiscal sponsor, Community Initiatives; our foundation supporters Four Freedoms Fund, Just and Fair Schools Fund, Marin Community Foundation, The Atlantic Philanthropies, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Stuart Foundation; and our many talented trainers, coaches, and consultants.

▶ Like the SPIN Academy on Facebook for news about future Academies.
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Amanda Cooper is a LightBox collaborator with a talent for crafting meaningful messages.

Applications for the 13th annual SPIN Academy are now open! The SPIN Academy is a four-day residential communications training retreat for nonprofit leaders. This year’s event will take place August 23 – 26 in Petaluma, California.

Once again, the LightBox Collaborative team and other nonprofit communications experts — led by Holly Minch and myself — will share their skills and experience with SPIN Academy participants through highly interactive workshops and individual coaching sessions.

At last year’s Academy, the very talented multi-media producer Chris Jordan created a short video to show what the SPIN Academy training retreat is all about.

The SPIN Academy has always been a special place where learning about strategic communications, storytelling and message development is combined with workshops like Op Ed writing, spokesperson skills, social media, and other tactical skills that progressive communicators need to change hearts and minds on their issues. The SPIN Academy continues to grow and change along with its participants and the shifting media environment. This year’s event is expanding into new areas like branding, brand messages, and internal communications.

If you or someone you know could benefit from the skills we teach at the SPIN Academy and would like to join a growing cohort of nonprofit communications professionals, applications are open through Friday, June 17.

▸ Learn more about the SPIN Academy and apply today!

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Heath Wickline is a raconteur at LightBox Collaborative. He is looking forward to training more progressive communicators at SPIN Academy 2011.

LightBox Collaborative is hosting a series of skills-building workshops at CompassPoint to shed light on communications topics for nonprofits throughout the Bay Area. Our next session, Storytelling for Success (also the subject of this post) is coming up on January 13.
▶ Register Today!

Storytelling may be as old as time itself, but it’s also one of the strongest communications tools available to your organization.

Well-constructed stories are stronger than statistics, taglines, and logos combined. They’ll stir emotions and tug heart-strings in ways that facts and figures can’t. Heck, even I’ve been a sucker for the right story.

Storytelling is a vital part of nonprofit communications. Here are three of our favorite resources to help you and your organization become more powerful storytellers:

• Kivi Leroux Miller shares five universal questions people will have about your organization that are best answered with stories. It’s a strong place to start when building your bank of organizational stories.
• Thaler Pekar & Partners offer tools and tips for persuasive storytelling through personalized, experiential, and highly interactive programs for small to large groups through individual coaching. These tools will strengthen your storytelling muscles.
• Andy Goodman gives excellent advice in his book, Storytelling as Best Practice, including on building a story bank, on how to use stories to become a better communicator and a more effective presenter.

With these resources, you will be on your way to using stories to portray your big cause at a human scale and weave connections with your entire community.

(Image courtesy Flickr user Nic’s events, Creative Commons.)
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Holly Minch is LightBox Collaborative’s chief engineer and founder. She hopes to see you at her January 13 CompassPoint workshop on “Storytelling for Success.”

This video offers “a-ha” moments from some of the most impressive do-gooder communications professionals out there, including moderator Mary Lou Fulton of The California Endowment, Teresa Detrich of the Lumina Foundation, Kirk Brown of Resource Media, and LightBox Collaborative’s own Holly Minch.

The video was filmed during and immediately after the “Wisdom of Crowds” breakout session at the 2010 Communications Network and CommA Conference, which also inspired a blog post about wise crowds by our collaborator, Heath Wickline.

Thanks to Susan Herr of PhilanthroMedia for making the great video, and to Communications Network for hosting an event that continues to inspire! Watch more videos by Communications Network.

James Surowiecki, financial columnist for The New Yorker, set the tone in his plenary talk at this year’s Communications Network and CommA conference, held in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

Surowiecki’s premise—and the topic of his 2005 book, The Wisdom of Crowds—is that a crowd, when assembled according to some fairly specific criteria, is able to give a better answer than an expert or even a group of experts. This may seem counter-intuitive, but Surowiecki has the data to back up his claims.

The mechanics of assembling the crowd and aggregating their answers effectively aren’t easy, of course, but the implications are profound. There were at least a half dozen big ideas in Surowiecki’s speech worth sharing, but I’ll limit myself to three:

1. Crowds and Market Research

   As communications professionals, we’re used to targeting audiences as narrowly as we can, and when we’re researching messages, we often start by assembling a group that looks a lot like our target audience. To arrive at better answers, Surowiecki suggests market research should use large, heterogeneous groups.

   The key to using these crowds is to ask questions that get your research subjects to give their opinions on what other people will think and do. It turns out that people are quite good at understanding and predicting the behavior of their fellow human beings. By asking a large group, you also control for some of the bias and obfuscation that can result when you ask people to be honest about themselves.

   Fifteen minutes into his presentation, Surowiecki had my attention—and had me questioning one of the basic ways that we do our work as communicators.

2. The Role of Communicators

   To work correctly, wise crowds need to have legitimate independence of thought, which is quite hard to come by in the real world. We tend to form like-thinking groups throughout our work and personal lives.

   If independence of thought is so important to optimal outcomes, where does that leave us as communicators, focused as we are on message discipline and repetition to break through the noise of everyday life? Surowiecki’s ideas point communicators toward a role as connectors, aggregators, and promoters of the best ideas—shaping conversation by activating our large networks of loose connections. This idea aligns with the shift away from mass media to social networks, and reinforces the importance of authenticity in our communications work.

3. The Value of Diversity

   Perhaps the most important point I heard in Surowiecki’s talk was a powerful argument for the value of diversity. Wise crowds depend on it. Part of what gives wise crowds their power is the way in which a group of people from different backgrounds—socioeconomic, cultural, education, life experience—can reach conclusions that a more narrowly constituted crowd (even one filled with “experts”) would miss. The diverse group can see into each others’ blind spots and explore a broader range of potential solutions to a problem. Their diversity of background also gives the group cognitive diversity, and they reach better solutions because of it.

The mechanics of assembling wise crowds and aggregating their answers are complex, and I wish that Surowiecki had had time to go into them further. Applying these lessons to the complex social and policy questions that we most often deal with is also challenging. But the ideas presented by Surowiecki were truly thought-provoking, and worth the price of admission alone.

And that was just the first session at the Communications Network conference! For descriptions of and reactions to some of the many other fine sessions, check out Philanthropy411, which brought together a team of bloggers to cover the conference, and of course, The Communications Network blog.

Wise crowds, indeed.

(image courtesy Flickr user TheBigTouffe, Creative Commons)
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Heath Wickline is a raconteur at LightBox Collaborative. He is looking forward to the upcoming series of communications trainings that LightBox Collaborative is hosting at CompassPoint. First up: “Your Communications GAME Plan” on October 21. Register today!

The 12th annual SPIN Academy is in the books. Dedicated social change activists gathered with expert trainers for some serious communications skills-building and networking. With an atmosphere that has been described as “summer camp for progressives,” we couldn’t have asked for a more fun event.

Last week was my eighth SPIN Academy, and my return as event organizer—Holly‘s been at it even longer, helping found the event back in 1999. Planning SPIN Academy reminded me what a privilege it is to work with people who are so passionate about their work. It also put me in a nostalgic mood, as I reflected on how dramatically things have changed—and what has remained the same—in the field of strategic communications.

The model of strategic communications that forms the framework of the SPIN Academy hasn’t changed at all: start by articulating goals, identifying audiences, and crafting messages that your audiences will connect with, then push those messages out using the tactics most likely to reach your audiences.

While strategic communications remains as relevant as ever, what has changed is the means to share those messages. When the SPIN Academy began in 1999, online communications was an emerging concept, not the essential tactic it is today. Social media wasn’t even a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye (given that he was only 15 years old at the time).

This year, of our ten sessions, two were exclusively devoted to online communications and social media. Those topics also came up again and again, a necessary part of nearly every conversation.

It seems cliché to say that it’s the younger folks who really get this online stuff, but it was clear that our next generation participants had valuable knowledge to share with the more senior folks. It was remarkable to see the interplay between the youthful immersion in technology and the battlefield experience of those of us who are not getting any younger.

Another way the event has changed is in the participants’ buy-in on the whole strategic communications idea. Years ago, we had to spend a lot of time trying to win over skeptics, demonstrating to them how being strategic about communications doesn’t mean you’re lying or selling out. We also used to need to show a lot of evidence of how being strategic was the most effective way for an organization’s communications to succeed.

But not anymore. It seems that more organizations have internalized the importance of doing communications work and in doing it right. Our SPIN Academy participants are also simply more experienced than they used to be. So this year, all of our trainers had to step up their game to keep up with the sector’s increased skill. What a good problem to have! I’d like to think that the SPIN Academy has something to do with this.

The passion that our participants bring to SPIN Academy hasn’t changed a bit. When you bring a group of smart, funny, highly-skilled advocates for social change together, the mood is bound to be exhilarating.

The SPIN Academy remains an important, unique event in the field of strategic communications for nonprofit organizations. And I still feel very, very lucky to be a part of it.

Photo by Chris Jordan, www.chrisjordanmedia.com
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Heath Wickline is a raconteur at LightBox Collaborative. He is looking forward to training more progressive activists at SPIN Academy 2011.