We hope you’ll join LightBox Collaborative at our series of skill-building workshops at CompassPoint. The series is designed to shed light on communications topics for nonprofits throughout the Bay Area.

Session topics include social media, strategy, crisis communications, messaging, visual facilitation, and presentation design and delivery.

Each session functions as a stand-alone workshop, or you can group them to create a cohesive professional development study series. The workshops run through summer 2011 and registration is now open for all sessions.

Communications series schedule:

• Messaging What Matters: Making Meaning to Make a Difference – December 15
  You’ll gain tools for brand-level and program-level message development to guide your communications efforts, from the highest level vision statement down to the day-to-day messages you can share to motivate supporters and engage your community in solutions.
• Storytelling for Success – January 13, 2011
  Learn how to leverage the power of stories to inform, persuade, inspire, and engage. Get insight on how to use stories as a management tool inside your organization, and how to tell stories that inspire deep connections among your donors, volunteers, and others.
• Social Media and More: Communications for Engagement – February 17
  What can social media do for your organization? This workshop will help you learn the social media strategies that can engage your audiences in deep and authentic conversations about the issues that matter most. You’ll leave this session with lots of ideas and a focused blueprint to guide your organization’s social media strategies.
• Presentation Skills – March 15
  Go from dull and deadly to inspiring and engaging! This session will offer tips and tools for designing great presentations, building great PowerPoints and delivering great talks to help your organization shine.
• Communicating in Pictures – April 18
  Learn how to integrate visual elements into your group work. Use flip charts, stickies, big paper, or even index cards to spark the visual and kinesthetic thinkers and up the collaboration level of any group with simple visual tools. After this workshop, with your powerful new set of visual facilitation skills, you just might get a reputation as an artist.
• Crisis Communication – May 17
  This session will help you identify those moments in which you might need to respond to and craft a plan so you’ll be ready before the you-know-what hits the fan. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
• Fun and Games for Serious Strategic Clarity – June 7
  We’ve created a series of games designed to help nonprofits jump start strategic thinking, engage in real-time planning, and identify actionable approaches. You’ll learn how to use this new, fun tool to initiate dynamic, nimble strategy in your organization.

(image courtesy Flickr user batmoo, Creative Commons)

Storytelling is at the heart of effective communications. But powerful storytelling doesn’t always come easy to the nonprofit sector.

To address this need for some schooling in storytelling, last week’s CompassPoint’s Nonprofit Day 2010 included the first Communications Institute. A conference within a conference, the Institute was designed for attendees who wanted to spend their Nonprofit Day discussing the state of the art in nonprofit communications. LightBox Collaborative is proud to have partnered with CompassPoint to design the Communications Institute.

CompassPoint has also asked LightBox Collaborative to develop a series of trainings, which will kick off later in 2010. Look for more details about this exciting project on our blog, Facebook, and Twitter in the coming months.

Here are the highlights from the Communications Institute:

The Minute Message Model

Jennie Winton and Zach Hochstadt of Mission Minded hosted the Minute Message Model, their new workshop. They taught attendees how to stop talking about what you do and focus on why you do it through a framework for effective storytelling.

One of the insights Jennie and Zach shared was the key building blocks of any good story: narrative and the moment of reflection.

• Narrative (“First this happened, then this happened, and then…”) is not simply a way to hook your audience. Narrative also shows how your organization’s work leads to real changes in people’s lives.
• The moment of reflection, which appears at the end of many well-told stories, reminds people why they should care.

Combine narrative and the moment of reflection, and you’re on your way toward winning your audience’s support.

We don’t want to give too much away since Mission Minded is hosting another Minute Message Model training on September 14th in San Francisco.

Excellence in Engagement

The “Excellence in Engagement” panel featured three smart individuals who are telling gripping stories in innovative ways:

• Jacob Colker of The Extraordinaries talked about opportunities available via new networks being catalyzed by technology. He gave a tour of his company’s microvolunteering platform, which allows individuals to become part of a nonprofit’s story in a powerful and unique way.
• Will Valverde of Watershed Company highlighted email and online campaigns that engage their audiences in a narrative of advocacy and inclusion, including the Humane Society’s “Thistle’s Story,” National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Queer the Census, and Planned Parenthood’s The Pill is Personal.
• Cara Jones of Storytellers for Good showed a video she’d shot in Kenya just the week before about the personal story of a woman carrying on her mother’s charitable work—a reminder that good storytelling benefits from powerful characters the audience can care about.

Strategic Communications Planning

LightBox Collaborative’s Holly Minch closed out the Communications Institute with a session on strategic communications planning that tied together the day’s learnings. Holly provided participants with a framework that will help ensure that their stories serve a strategic purpose in their communications work.

Whether your issue is climate change or healthcare, for a successful communications plan you should first define measurable goals and identify target audiences. Then, craft messages that truly connect with those audiences—messages that will imbue your audience with shared values and embed them in familiar narratives. It’s a tried-and-true method for moving constituents to action.

Moment of Reflection

This quote, shared by Cara Jones, could have easily served as a motto for the first Communications Institute at CompassPoint’s Nonprofit Day:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

- Maya Angelou

(image courtesy Flickr user __Olga__, 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 at CompassPoint.