When Bruce Trachtenberg came to me soon after last year’s annual Communications Network conference in LA and asked if I might be interested in executing a national survey of foundation communications professionals, I was super stoked.  It wasn’t just because I had once been the communications director of the public engagement and survey research organization Public Agenda for six years and I am a huge social science data freak.

I was most excited to be a part of Communication’s Network’s “2011 Survey of Foundation Communications Professionals” because, coming out of the LA conference, I was deeply aware of just how much communications for social good has changed since the last survey in 2008.

I think that most of the time, social science research essentially provides evidence and some hard numbers for hypotheses that are already fairly well accepted.  This research was exciting because, while talking to our colleagues at the annual conferences is immensely helpful, there really isn’t much in the way of solid information about how the whole of the field is actually approaching its work on a daily basis.  The research is focused on foundation communicators, but it also has many insights for nonprofit communicators related to how foundations are prioritizing their communications funding and their relationships with grantees.

“Foundation Communications Today: Findings from the 2011 Survey of Foundation Communications Professionals” contains some serious revelations.  For one, we found that there are hardly any differences in the actions and priorities of those who invest time and resources in creating formal communications plans and those who do not. And yet, there does seem to be at least one crucial difference between the two groups that may make such processes a worthwhile investment of time (you’ll have to read the report to get the 411 on that teaser).

The “Websites, Online Capacity and Social Media” section of the report contains some of the information Bruce and I found most fascinating. For example, the organizations of nearly half our respondents now have blogs. In this section, as in the all the others, we really tried to connect various pieces of information from across the questionnaire. We wonder aloud why, since respondents say they want to do so much more with multimedia, the average budget allocations for multimedia are so small. We also go beyond the finding that almost all foundations are now engaged in social media to look at the differences between private and community foundations on which types of social media work best for them.

We covered much more territory in this survey than the 2008 survey in about a third fewer questions.  Still, the survey was a significant investment of time for those who participated (we know just how valuable 20 minutes can be in a foundation communicator’s day), so we are immensely grateful to all who participated and provided both essential quantitative answers and some immensely insightful qualitative responses.

The last section of the report presents some of the questions that occurred to us as we examined the data – implications for future discussions among us all.  We hope that you will take us up on the invitation to ask the questions that arise as you read the report.  My personal feeling is that the best research provokes even more questions than it answers.  I hope you will flatter us with many questions and comments.

The communications world has changed tremendously over the past five years.  There’s no arguing that.  But just how many ways has it changed for those of us in cause communications?  Social media, the evolving newspaper industry, “net neutrality” issues, personalized technology and mobile devices everywhere are just a few innovations and developments that come to mind.

Fenton Communication’s Chief Strategy Officer Lisa Witter has attempted to make sense of it all and delineate the major trends in a presentation titled “The New Normal: 12 Driving Forces in Communications.”

She has delivered this outline recently to groups such as the Skoll World Forum, the Conference Board, the National Association of Social Work Deans and Directors and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and most recently she spoke to a large group of communications professionals at a gathering at Philanthropy New York.

While her presentation and its core concepts were developed for purposes unrelated to the Communications Network annual conference, it is quite a nice quirk of timeliness that her 12 Driving Forces are being disseminated just before our annual meeting that starts on Wednesday

Many of these 12 forces, plus those on other people’s lists, will surely be discussed, dissected and debated at the conference.

The 12 Driving Forces Witter talked about had been identified through a scenario planning process lead by former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser that drilled down on the question: “What is the future of media and how should cause communicators be preparing for the challenges and seizing the opportunities they present?” While the ideas she is presenting to audiences across the country come out of a learning process that occurred in Fall 2009, Witter is still refining and reorganizing the main points as the media world continues to see major shifts in short periods of time.

These are the most recent formulations of her 12 Driving Forces:

1. Mobile: Internet Everywhere
2. Globalized Net
3. Information Overload and Curation
4. Personalization and Filtering
5. Broadcast to Bi/Multi-Directional
6. The end of journalism?
7. Fragmentation by Affiliation
8. Convergence
9. Micro-Targeting and ROI Advertising
10. Transparency as a Value
11. Feedback is Instant
12. Authenticity/Voice/Uniqueness as a Value

As with many macro-level analyses, the areas of exploration here are not news to anyone who closely follows communications issues. Rather, it is the thoughtful explanation of how things are changing and what are the implications for practitioners around each of these driving forces that really has salience.  For example, it is not enough to know that consumers are using technological filters more and more to help manage the information coming at them. You have to know what filters they are using, how they work and how to design your communications to rise to the top. And it’s not enough to know that citizens are expecting greater transparency from all institutions, but exactly what that means for any foundation or nonprofit is different and requires a process of real soul searching delving into practical implications.  Witter’s presentation was a great prompt for my thinking on these topics.

I want to share with you what Witter says all this means for “cause communicators.” I will be keeping these implications in mind as I discuss communications trends with my colleagues in LA later this week.  She says that, while good storytelling will continue to be essential, how and where those stories are told and how they are passed along will change.  She says that to take advantage of the media evolution, you’ll need to develop these three new core competencies:

Content: Cause communicators must become their own media by creating original content that moves by being timely, emotion-driven and targeted.  Broadcast on multiple media platforms where you can engage audiences directly. Be part of the conversation by sharing and “remixing” content by others.

Calculate: Take advantage of digital metrics and the social web to “listen” online to who’s talking about your issues and how they’re talking about them.  Develop campaigns that join these conversations.  Take risks, experiment and refine.  Nurturing a culture of failure can lead to the best ideas.

Community: The media evolution has made it easier for people with the same passions to connect with each other.  Your role is to help them find each other and mobilize a community around your cause. This means putting your supporters, not your organization, at the center of your communications.  Catalyze ideas and encourage others to crowd-source and use their own creativity and networks to spread the word.

This is sage advice that communications professionals should take to heart and use to help their organizations navigate the new landscape. The 12 Driving Forces Witter has identified are important ones that we should all be thinking about as we evolve in our own communications work.  It’s rough terrain out there.  Better have as accurate a map as possible.

Several major recent developments that have contributed to the fracturing landscape will be the jumping off point for discussion.  These include: the startling federal court ruling on “net neutrality” that may change how major media conglomerates package programming and freeze out competitors’ products; the release of The Knight Commission report “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age;” the diminution of influence newspapers and TV journalism and related decline in resources available for news gathering; and the vast growth of information dissemination on social networking and news aggregation sites.

For communications professionals, it may seem like the shaking ground is turning to quicksand.  This conversation will help us figure out just what the terrain is and how to find solid ground. So, here is the summary information on the next PPC-NYC meeting:

What:  Brown-bag lunch (that means bring your own lunch!)

When:  Wednesday, May 12, 2010; 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. (informal networking from 12:00-12:30, program begins at 12:30)

Where:  Ford Foundation, 320 East 43^rd Street (between 1^st & 2^nd Ave), New York, NY

Topic:  Navigating the Shifting Media Landscape. Vincent Stehle will lead off the discussion.

RSVP:  Space is limited.  Please let me know that you are coming by emailing me at mremaley at ppcnyc dot org

Vincent Stehle is a consultant to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. He was, from 1998 to 2009, the Program Director for Nonprofit Sector Support at the Surdna Foundation, a family foundation based in New York City with assets approaching $700 million. The Nonprofit Sector Support Program focused on strengthening the policy and advocacy role of nonprofits, their internal management, and their ability to adapt to changing political, economic, and technological environments. Under his direction, the NPS program became a leading force in support of nonprofit technology and public and independent media and spearheaded the practice of social enterprise and other new funding strategies for nonprofits. Before coming to Surdna, Stehle worked for ten years as a reporter for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where he covered a broad range of policy and management issues for the nonprofit sector. He has also written extensively for other publications, including The Washington Post, The Nation, and Symphony Magazine.  Stehle has served as Chairperson of Philanthropy New York (formerly the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers) and on the governing boards of YouthNoise, VolunteerMatch, and the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). Currently he is a columnist for the Chronicle of Philanthropy and serves on the board of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media.

Timothy Karr oversees all Free Press campaigns and online outreach efforts, including SavetheInternet.com and its work on public broadcasting, propaganda, and journalism. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time Inc., New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy for the Huffington Post and on his personal blog, MediaCitizen.

We hope to see you on May 12.

Miller has broken up her advice into topic areas: “A Custom News Feed,” “Check Your Lists,” “Attend a Conference, Virtually,” “What’s Around You Right Now,” and “Ask Questions.”  Each section has at least one good piece advice for the information consumer and a key understanding for the information distributor.  Check out the piece!

By the way, don’t you love that little graphic I made of the Twitter birdie eating the Times?  ha ha.  Old media getting eaten by new media!  That laugh just never gets old, does it?

A new book by Derek Bok and published by Princeton University Press, “The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being” is going on the very top of my “to read” list.  This is a brief description from the publisher:

During the past forty years, thousands of studies have been carried out on the subject of happiness. Some have explored the levels of happiness or dissatisfaction associated with typical daily activities, such as working, seeing friends, or doing household chores. Others have tried to determine the extent to which income, family, religion, and other factors are associated with the satisfaction people feel about their lives. The Gallup organization has begun conducting global surveys of happiness, and several countries are considering publishing periodic reports on the growth or decline of happiness among their people. One nation, tiny Bhutan, has actually made “Gross National Happiness” the central aim of its domestic policy. How might happiness research affect government policy in the United States–and beyond? In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard president Derek Bok examines how governments could use happiness research in a variety of policy areas to increase well-being and improve the quality of life for all their citizens.

Bok first describes the principal findings of happiness researchers. He considers how reliable the results appear to be and whether they deserve to be taken into account in devising government policies. Recognizing both the strengths and weaknesses of happiness research, Bok looks at the policy implications for economic growth, equality, retirement, unemployment, health care, mental illness, family programs, education, and government quality, among other subjects. Timely and incisive, The Politics of Happiness sheds light on what makes people happy and the vital role government policy could play in fostering satisfaction and well-being.

The New York Times gave the book a review this past weekend, and while the review is worth reading, I discount most of its negative commentary.  The reviewer, Alan Wolfe, seems hostile to the entire field of behavioral economics and makes several poorly founded arguments against the book’s themes.  For one, he questions whether it is the role of government to attempt to maximize happiness. My counter argument is that government has no greater mandate to maximize family income, and yet it has been attempting to do just that in a thousand different ways.  Governments make value choices.  Why not place value on happiness?  Wolfe also implies that the theories and findings produced by the larger field of behavioral economics are not really trustworthy.  To counter that incorrect assertion I can only say that the field is growing in respect and voluminous documentation because hundreds of respected academics are contributing a great deal of time, resources and intellectual capital into proving its merit.  There is more than 30 years of research showing that, indeed, often what we thought would make us happy actually does not, and more broadly in B.E. literature, that human beings are not the great rational, economically motivated people our government usually assumes them to be.

The NYTimes review does have enough key points from the book itself to convince me that it is worth buying and reading.

]]> http://www.ppcnyc.org/2010/02/recommended-reading-the-politics-of-happiness/feed/ 3 http://www.ppcnyc.org/2010/02/two-new-journals-to-check-out/ http://www.ppcnyc.org/2010/02/two-new-journals-to-check-out/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:52:56 +0000 Michael Hamill Remaley http://www.ppcnyc.org/?p=139 It is kind of surprising given the economy — but very welcome nonetheless — that two new journals have been launched recently that public policy communicators should consider checking out.

The first one that caught my eye is the Journal of New Organizing. The JNO is an online publication devoted to advancing effective organizing practices, leadership development and campaign innovation in the progressive community. It publishes original research, reporting and analysis of organizing practice and theory by practicioners, academics and expert observers. Founded in 2009, the Journal aims to advance public analysis, actionable knowledge and transparent dialogue in the organizing space, from local community organizing to national campaigns to new media innovations. The Journal encourages and solicits feedback, letters, article proposals and original submissions.

The first edition has articles on:

- Socially Networking Your Data: An Obama Campaign Case Study

- Coalition Organizing on Campus: A Student Perspective

- Keeping Hope Alive: The Story of Obama’s Neighborhood Teams Following Election Day

- Lessons Organizers Can Learn from the Military

The JNO looks to be an interesting read, looking beyond grassroots organizing to larger communications campaigns.

Also new, and discussed in some detail on the Communications Network blog, is the The Foundation Review.  TFR is the first peer-reviewed journal of philanthropy, written by and for foundation staff and boards and those who work with them implementing programs. Its mission is to share evaluation results, tools, and knowledge about the philanthropic sector in order to improve the practice of grantmaking, yielding greater impact and innovation. It intends to provide rigorous research and writing, presented in an accessible style. Each issue of The Foundation Review provides peer-reviewed reports about grant programs including reports by foundations on their own work.

The Communications Network had this to say about TFR’s most recent edition:

A recent example of this trend is the fact that The Foundation Review (TFR), which only began publishing a year ago to help improve foundation practices, has devoted its entire fourth — and forthcoming — issue to an exploration of the strategic use of communications within and among foundations….

I couldn’t agree more with the observation that tools and how-to’s still dominate our knowledge of communications practice.  And that also suggests that we need to to do more to demonstrate what communications are helping foundations achieve.  The more we can show, the more we can encourage wider adoption of and support for communications activities that add, and in measurable ways, to the work foundations do.  As noted, there’s already a lot of talk about harnessing the power of communications to advance philanthropy, and support for these efforts are coming from other quarters besides communications professionals who work for foundations.

If you check out either of these journals, please let me know what you think of them.

The piece does a great job of explaining why the English language is particularly vulnerable to these “crash blossoms”:

After encountering enough crash blossoms, you start to realize that English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read “McDonald’s Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers,” there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment.

Communications professionals write lots of headlines for press releases and other tools where we have to compress our language. So the possibility of creating a potentially embarrassing “crash blossom” when we are shortening phrases is something we need to be vigilant against (although I suppose it could be a brilliant strategy for getting attention, if done just perfectly).  It’s all very funny when it happens to others, not so funny when 1,000 tweeters re-tweet your embarrassing mistake.

The piece, written by RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, is generally neutral on the potential positive or negative impacts of this trend for the public.  It names some of the most high profile new players — ProPublica (a member of PPC-NYC), Global Post, Politico, Kaiser Health News, The Fiscal Times and the Chicago News Cooperative — and puts the outsourcing of news gathering in a bit of historical perspective.  It raises only one example — the Bush Administration producing its own “news” to try to manipulate Medicare debate — of the potential negative ramifications the trend.  The analysts cited in the piece mostly states the obvious: that the “respected” newspapers and its readers need to be aware of any potential agenda of the news producing source and take that agenda into account.

What the piece fails to notice is that most of the new nonprofit news producers are unlike the generalist syndicates of the past like Associated Press and Reuters that were in the business to make money.  Instead, most of the new news syndicates have been created because of a perceived inadequacy of the current news coverage of specific topics or geographic locations.  THIS is the real trend.  News syndicates have been around forever and large news organizations have always relied on them and freelancers.  But the fact that nonprofits and foundations who want to see better coverage and more public attention to their issues are taking more control and creating their own news.  That’s the news here.

These are some of the key points the author makes that should be noted:

“There are more pressures than ever to acquire content from outside sources, and there are going to be even more going forward,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and former newspaper editor who blogs about the news business. That means that despite declining resources, newsrooms, he said, “have to get better at due diligence in terms of who this provider is,” and at explaining it to their audiences.

And…

“We went through a corporate era, and with more media fragmentation, maybe we’re going back to a stage when individual owners are really more in charge,” said Philip S. Balboni, president and chief executive of Global Post. For an established news organization, “there is, of course, a greater danger when you outsource than when it is fully within your control,” he said, and it will become more important than ever “to be very careful about who you use and to monitor the content that you use.”

Read the article.  More and more foundations are taking on a “news production” role and I am pretty sure this is a topic we should explore at  a PPC lunch session soon.

Despite this, there were some important ideas that Public Policy Communicators should be aware of:

Advertisement that Watches You

Forensic Polling Analysis

Good Enough is the New Great — this, in my opinion, is the MOST important idea in the issue for PPC members

Social Networks as Foreign Policy

Subscription Artists

Web Searches in Real Time

And any manager would also be interested in reading about these topics:

Myth of the Deficient Older Employee

Random Promotions

All in all, the NYTimes Year in Ideas continues to be essential reading, but I would prefer if they stuck with substance and not with useless “ideas” like empty beer bottles make better weapons and non-trends like “heritage chic.”  There should be more than eight applicable ideas for public policy communicators in the whole thing!