by Michael Remaley, HAMILL REMALEY breakthrough communications & Public Policy Communicators – NYC

Among the many important and practical ideas that have stayed with me since last week’s Communications Network conference in Boston, perhaps the most penetrating has been one advanced by Eli Pariser in the first plenary. He spoke stirringly about a range of issues revolving around the themes of his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.  The idea that really struck me was the connection he made between the mutating corporations controlling information and the great food-industrial complex that has had such an immense impact on our lives over the past 60 years.

My friend and colleague Lucas Held also talked about how this idea hit home for him at the conference. Over the past week, as I’ve clicked “like” several times and chosen which stories I wanted to read online, I’ve done so with Eli’s voice in the back of my head.

Pariser’s food/information corollary is brilliant. The comparison of the food industry and the companies controlling our information intake provides an exceedingly useful means of examining the existential conundrums we face in our daily information consumption.

As a hardcore fitness freak, I must admit that I have been condescending and judgmental toward those who are overweight. Even though I know that there are many elements of our system and policies that conspire against those who are overweight – food policy that makes sugars and grains cheap, transportation policies that keep people in cars, family histories that induce unhealthy diets and sedentary living – I still tend to blame individuals for their poor choices.

We now face a similar set of issues and questions around information intake and how we exercise our roles as engaged citizens. If the links you see and the results of your searches are basically the product of your previous explorations, do we have anyone but ourselves to blame for the quality of the information that these companies present us?

The PR flacks of the food industrial complex have for years told us that they simply produce the products that consumers want. But we’ve come to realize that what they have been selling us for more than half a century is not what our bodies need but what provides instant gratification and maximum profit for the companies. Pariser has performed an Upton Sinclair-like service by illuminating the fact that Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other powers of the Algorithm-Industrial-Complex are in a similar position to impact our lives.

In the past week, I’ve been clicking on more political postings, “like”-ing negative stories that I want more people to read and trying to spend less time online looking at items that are merely entertaining. Still, just as with the food industry, I know that my own healthy choices may have little impact on the rest of the world. So the question is, how can we create a system that encourages healthy information consumption and the exercise of active citizenship without limiting or otherwise “censoring” people’s access to LOLcats, TMZ and Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter feed.

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought since I heard Pariser’s message, but I still can’t offer any viable solutions. I suppose the first thing to do, just like the healthy eating/exercise problem, is raise awareness. But looking at our nation’s success in that realm, I’m skeptical of our ability to make progress through awareness alone. Perhaps we need to get the successful anti-smoking campaign people on this issue. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this.

Earlier this year, the Communications Network published the results of a survey of communications practitioners at foundations across the country.  The survey provides a helpful glimpse of the kind of work foundation communicators do, as well as the challenges they face. But there’s more to the story than the work itself, and to help round out the picture, we’ve started a new feature called A Quick Word With… Over the course of the series, we’ll invite people from different foundations — all sizes and types — to tell us about themselves, their work and where they draw their inspiration.

We kick off the series with Gail Fuller, director of communications, Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York City.

A recent communications success you’re proud of?
Redesign of our Web site, which launched in December.

The target audiences for your communications efforts?
Primarily grantees and applicants, with limited media focus. My interest is in highlighting the work of our grantees, and bringing greater awareness to our interests—democratic practice, peacebuilding and sustainable development.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
The fanciful side of me thought of being a real-life Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot.  The other side of me, which loves to write, thought I’d become a children’s author. Of those, one I hope to still fulfill.

RBF’s site has many slideshows. Do you find them to be particularly effective?
My fascination with slideshows began with The New York  Times’ One in 8 Million slidecasts. I find slidecasts effective and cost-efficient; and a simple way to tell the sometimes complex stories of our work.

Is RBF into new media?
With the launch of our new site, we also launched Twitter and Facebook pages. We felt it was important to create an official Facebook page that drives visitors to our Web site. However, Twitter has been our primary social media focus.

Do you do an annual communications plan?
When I joined the RBF in 2005, I conducted a communications audit and created a two-year communications plan; and two years later I repeated that process. Having gone through many program reviews and having a much better sense of the Fund, I no longer create a formal annual communications plan. Instead as the yearly RBF goals are set, I develop communications objectives and strategies that help meet those goals.

Your undergraduate major?
Speech Communications from Wake Forest University.

Your favorite underappreciated journalist?
Amy Goodman comes to mind first. Democracy Now! is a wonderful source for global news.

Does RBF evaluate communications?
We conduct surveys with our trustees, staff, grantees, and applicants; and we also participate in the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s perception surveys. As RBF’s first communications director, my job actually evolved from a 2004 CEP survey.

As a major funder of “Democratic Practice,” how does RBF define “public engagement”?
We shifted from a goal that focused specifically on civic engagement to strengthening our democracy by looking at the democrat deficits—a decline in civic engagement; reduced participation in the formal institutions of democracy, and declining trust in all institutions, especially institutions of government—that impede us.

Last big improvement made to your Website?
Complete Web site redesign in 2010. The additions of moderated comments, a blog, and Twitter link were key steps for the Fund in engaging with our key audiences.

Favorite communications tool more foundation communicators should use?
Follow grantees via Twitter. We are able to track real-time news about and from our grantees.

Last nonfiction book you read?
The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics. As events unfolded in Egypt, it was interesting to follow Al Jazeera and the greater role international media is playing in informing the world of current events.

Most interesting locale RBF has taken you?
South Africa in 2006. It was a wonderful experience, and helped shape the grantee communications work I would later undertake in South Africa and NYC.

Something you learned recently from a communications colleague?
I received wonderful advice from colleagues last year on social media that helped shape my report and presentation to the board; and it was the catalyst for moving us forward into the social media realm

RBF ever talked publicly about failure?
Yes. Following both CEP grantee surveys—in 2004 and 2010—we shared our results on our Web site; and identified key weaknesses to address.

Got a novel deep down inside you?
Yes, and I have several journals with story ideas and characters that have over taken my closet. My next birthday milestone in five years will be 50. Hoping to have made a dent in writing a children’s book—since I missed the milestones at 30 and 40.

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.

This post was developed and researched for The Foundation Center’s Glasspockets initiative and appeared originally on its “Transparency Talk” blog.

“If you hit the bull’s eye every time, you’ve set the target too close.”

I thought of this, one of my favorite aphorisms, at the Communications Network’s annual conference last September when the Hewlett Foundation’s Communications Director Eric Brown talked about his organization’s “failed grantmaking” contest.  Hewlett’s smart internal exercise forces each department to name one grant from its portfolio that did not meet expectations, think through and explain what went wrong and help the entire organization learn from its failure.

This is a learning exercise that more foundations should consider adopting. But more than that, it is an important example of how Hewlett’s leadership has set the tone for candor about the unavoidable truth of philanthropic experimentation: failure is part of the equation.

It is no coincidence that Hewlett is also one of the few foundations that has talked publicly about initiatives that didn’t live up to expectations. It is also no coincidence that Hewlett’s profile on Glasspockets gives a good indication of its commitment to transparency.  I would assert that Hewlett’s reputation for being one of the most innovative, thoughtful, and effective foundations is directly related to its transparency, willingness to publicly question its strategies, and forthrightness in discussing the limitations of its successes. And that reputation further enhances its ability to exert influence and make change.

The hard sciences learned the importance of sharing candid assessments of “failed” experiments centuries ago. In fact, scientists seem to treasure results that do not meet expected outcomes even more highly than those that confirm what is already believed to be true.

I am hardly the first person to call upon foundations to talk more openly about failure, experimentation, and unexpected outcomes. (See list below.) Hewlett’s Paul Brest seems to have really kickstarted the conversation in 2007 by writing and talking about his foundation’s experiences. That was followed by Robert Giloth and Susan Gewirtz’s seminal 2008 piece in Foundation Review, “Philanthropy and Mistakes: An Untapped Resource.” Many others, including Bob Hughes, Larry Blumenthal, Edward Pauly, Grant Oliphant, and Sean Stannard-Stockton, have added important insights about the need for foundations to be more open about their lessons learned.  The conversation about failure and experimentation seemed to grow and deepen over the past three years.  So you might think that foundations would be making major changes in how they communicate about failure.  You would be wrong.

Foundations give a lot of lip service to supporting “experimentation” in social sciences. But you almost never hear them talking about outcomes that failed to meet expectations, and even more rarely, those that call their basic strategies into question. If foundations want to be real leaders in advancing social change, they must move past the endless happy-talk that makes every grant sound like a success. Instead, they should use their web sites to detail how they are evaluating their work and what they’ve learned from unexpected outcomes.

A foundation sharing its experiences with grants gone wrong is still very much the exception.  Anyone who is on the receiving end of foundation annual reports and newsletters knows this is true.  But to substantiate my assertion, I decided to do a little systematic poking around.

I figured the 21 largest supporters of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (most of which are also supporters of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations) would be the foundations most attuned to the value of self-reflection, evaluation, and sharing results that defy expectations, and also those that would have budgets big enough to support substantial evaluation efforts. I spent many hours exploring the nooks of crannies of these foundations’ web sites.  I looked at numerous publications and evaluation sections of the sites, and I searched each site on the terms failure, failed, unmet expectations, unmet objective, unmet goal, experimentation, mistake, lessons learned, and assessment.

What I found was that few foundations make it easy to learn from projects that didn’t go as spectacularly as planned, let alone talk frankly about what has been learned from the shortcomings of foundation strategy or execution.   Many of the 21 foundations I examined made no mention at all of evaluation criteria and organizational outcomes, even though their association with CEP and GEO implies that they demand that kind of forthrightness from grantees. The majority of the foundation sites I examined had a few project evaluation reports scattered among other foundation supported research – and many of those evaluation reports were laudatory with pablum like “real collaboration is a challenge” tacked on at the end.

Some of the best exceptions were Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation. Each of those foundations not only makes it easy to find many project evaluations that are balanced in presenting positive and negative outcomes along with what was learned through the process, but also present self-critical examinations of foundation strategy and progress as whole. It is also not a coincidence that each of those foundations’ profiles on Glasspockets indicates a commitment to transparency demonstrated by making public an assessment of overall foundation performance.

But perhaps the best example – the foundation that gets the Gold Star for Succeeding in Failing – is the James Irvine Foundation. The evaluation section of its site describes their approach to evaluating grantee success and links to all of its individual evaluations of initiatives. It also links to a Foundation Assessment section that has foundation annual progress reports for the last four years.  These progress reports are exceptionally detailed and well-documented, as well as frank about successes and failures.  Irvine has also produced “Insights: Lessons Learned” publications with candid assessments of their experiences with collaborations and other grantmaking practices. A search of the Irvine site on “lessons learned” produces lots of useful and interesting evaluative information and insightful critical analysis.

We are all members of the social science community and contributors to the social experiment that is American philanthropy. We now have enough examples of foundations talking humbly about their shortcomings to know that such candor only accelerates social progress and enhances the reputations of those philanthropic leaders. We’ve seen no evidence that talking forthrightly about the real-world circumstances leading to failure damages nonprofits or the foundations involved, so I wonder why foundations seem so reluctant to take on this leadership role.

What has your organization learned from experiments that didn’t meet expectations?

Selected Readings: A Chronology of the Dialogue on Failure and Experimentation in Philanthropy

• Center for Effective Philanthropy (unattributed). “Indicators of Effectiveness: A Call for Foundations: Understanding and Improving Foundation Performance.” 2002.
• Paul Brest. “Evaluating Our Work. Hard Lessons about Philanthropy & Community Change,” Commentary on The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation website. March 2007.
• Paul Brest.  “Hard Lessons about Philanthropy & Community Change: Reflections on The Neighborhood Improvement Initiative.” March 2007.
• Stephanie Strom. “Foundations Find Benefits in Facing Up to Failures.” The New York Times. July 26, 2007.
• Paul Brest and James E. Canales. “Let’s Stop Reinventing Potholes.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy. August 9, 2007
• Sean Stannard-Stockton. “The Poster Child for Failure in Philanthropy.” Stanford Social Innovation Review blog. May 14, 2008.
• Robert Giloth, Ph.D., and Susan Gewirtz, Annie E. Casey Foundation. “Philanthropy and Mistakes: An Untapped Resource.” Foundation Review, September 2008.
• Maisie O’Flanagan, McKinsey & Company; Jacob Harold and Paul Brest, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy.” 2008.
• Sean Stannard-Stockton. “Anatomy of a Failed Grant.” Tactical Philanthropy Advisors blog. March 25, 2009.
• Grant Oliphant with Susan Herr (Online Video Interview). “What’s the Upside of Philanthropic Failure?” The Communications Network. December 2009.
• Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and Council on Foundations (unattributed). “Evaluation in Philanthropy: Perspectives from the Field.” December 15, 2009
• Larry Blumenthal. “A Helpful Guide to Failure in Philanthropy. Use Carefully.” Philanthropy News Digest, Commentary & Opinion. January 7, 2010
• Bob Hughes. “Can Failure Be the Key to Foundation Effectiveness?” Center for Effective Philanthropy blog. January 11, 2010.
• Grantmakers in Health (unattributed) “Taking Risks at a Critical Time.” Essays written specifically for the 2010 GIH annual meeting. March 2010.
• Edward Pauly. “Philanthropy with Impact: A Guide to Evaluative Thinking for Foundations and Donors.” A guide published by Forum for Active Philanthropy. 2010.
• Robert G. Hughes. “The Role of Failure in Philanthropic Learning.” Book Chapter In: To Improve Health and Health Care XIII, pp.93-106. Publisher: Jossey-Bass. 2010
• Patricia A. Patrizi. “Death Is Certain, Strategy Isn’t: Assessing RWJF’s End-of-Life Grantmaking.” Published in New Directions for Evaluation, by Wiley Online Library. Volume 2010, Issue 128, pages 47–68, Winter 2010.
• Ellie Buteau. “A higher bar for transparency, accountability.” Philanthropy Journal. September 14, 2010.

Having read the report “Talking to Ourselves? A Critical Look at Annual Reports in Foundation Communications,” and helped create its companion discussion site WhyAnnualReports.org, I didn’t really think I would pick up any new insights when I joined in on a webinar covering the same topic. I was sure wrong about that.

In case you missed it, you can hear and see playback of the Communications Network hosted webinar at: http://bit.ly/gL1u7A

Moderated by the always astute Andy Goodman, the discussion produced several new pieces of quality thinking that helped me crystallize my own opinions about foundation communications. With dozens of fellow foundation communicators participating in the webinar, there was a considerable amount of diverse thinking about annual reports contributed.

The report’s creators Mark Sedway of Philanthropy Awareness Initiative and Mary Green of Williams Group first presented the core findings and conclusions in the report, which painted a rather unflattering picture of the annual report’s ability to reach engaged citizens.

Reacting to the research report’s findings, Goodman said, “If a grantee came to a foundation with a plan for a communications project and said, ‘This one piece of outreach is going to do all these things, we’re not going to actually measure whether or not it does them, and we’ve already heard from the people we’re trying to reach out to that they don’t pay attention to it,’ I couldn’t imagine that a foundation would actually fund that project.”

The fulsome discussion that followed had many points of view, including those who are still strong believers in the worth of annual reports and those who are adapting them to the web with more interactive features.

I was particularly interested to hear from Charity Perkins of The Duke Endowment who talked about her experience. She had been at the 2008 Communications Network Annual Conference when this topic was discussed and at that time stood up then to say that, regardless of her feelings or any facts on the matter, she believed her foundation would continue to publish an annual report until after the trustees were dead and gone.  But, when she brought the information on the questionable efficacy of annual reports back to her foundation in 2008, her trustees actually decided to do something different. Since then, they have been doing a considerably downscaled print report and have created a great annual report micro-site online with imbedded video and a report delivered verbally by the president and board chair. It was great to hear that, when foundation leaders were presented with the current thinking on annual reports, at least one foundation made a big change.

Apparently, that foundation wasn’t the only one!

At the end of the call, the webinar leaders presented a screen where participants could register whether or not their foundations planned to produce another annual report.  The results:

Would your organization be willing to end production of printed annual reports?

Already Have:             31 %
Yes:                                    24%
No:                                    22%
It Depends:                        22%

That stands in stark contrast to what people seemed to be thinking just two years ago when a survey of Communications Network members revealed that 90% expected to continue producing annual reports (21% saying they expected to continue producing them but spending less and 69% saying they expected to continue producing them and spending the same), 8% said they expected to produce an annual report in only an online format and just 3% said they did not expect to produce another annual report.

Admittedly, the quick-survey sample from the webinar is not an exact match with the full membership survey sample of 2008.  Still, the webinar’s informal poll results seem to match what I’m hearing from my foundation colleagues across the country.

Is the foundation annual report dying a slow death?

Tell your fellow communicators what you think by going to the Share Your Thoughts section at the bottom of the WhyAnnualReports.org home page.

The November 2010 meeting of Public Policy Communicators NYC was all about how to develop effective communications plans.  We set out to examine:

- How to produce realistic, focused communications goals and objectives.

- How to gain clarity and agreement on the specific target audiences and the modes of communication best suited to reaching them.

- How to get REALLY REAL about time allocation with both staff and organizational leadership on trade-offs, opportunism and sticking to a plan.

Edith Asibey – who has been a consultant to many foundations and international nonprofits on this topic, is a board member of our partner The Communications Network and is currently doing just this kind of work on a daily basis at The Atlantic Philanthropies – led our discussion.  And, of course, the PPC members in attendance contributed lots of great thinking about how the concepts we were discussing played out in their work.

Edith began by stating her position that communications planning is a prerequisite for effectiveness.  “How do you know if your communications are effective?” she asked.  You simply can’t know if you haven’t taken the time to create a real plan against which to measure success.  Further, while large-budget organizations may have the luxury of spending in a way that throws lots of resources onto the wall to see what sticks, those with limited resources face an even greater imperative to plan in ways that directs resources only to the efforts that are most likely to have the greatest impact.

She asked the group to consider two questions: First, how would you rate the quality of your existing plan? It became clear that very few in the room considered their plans particularly good, let alone excellent, and quite a few had no plan at all. Second, she asked the group whether or not their organizations actually stick to the plans that they create. The commonalities in the responses showed that many of us are in the same boat – one that leaks.

That second question also produced a line of conversation among participants that became one of the strongest themes of the day: How do you create a plan that is targeted and strategic, but also allows for flexibility and responsiveness to opportunities within the news hole?  Some said that you can create a plan that actually allows for that kind of flexibility – one which has a limited number of deliverables but which also has more loosely defined areas where new opportunities will be pursued. Others said you simply had to live with knowing that you will never fulfill your plan in its entirety. “If you stick to a plan exactly, then you probably won’t really be that successful,” one person asserted. Edith said that planning for flexibility can actually help deal with unpredictability and challenges by defining priority areas, so that those opportunities that fall outside the priorities don’t become distractions.  But, she said, sticking to the plan and pursuing other opportunities will always be a balancing act.

Steering the conversation toward specific ways of making more productive communications plans, Edith presented an example from a media campaign she led in Paraguay several years ago. She talked about the ambitions of the campaign and showed the goal statement that the campaign organizers had developed in the planning process: “Raise awareness of the Paraguayan population about the major environmental problems facing the country: deforestation, soil degradation, water pollution, loss of biodiversity.”

To many of us in the room, it seemed like a decent goal.  Edith said that, in fact, this was an example of a “monster goal,” one so broad and ill-defined that it could not adequately focus the work or lead to any understanding of how well one had moved toward achieving the goal.  Several people in the room commiserated, saying that they had all seen communications plans that sought to “raise awareness” among a general population, among “media,” “thought leaders,” “within the community” or other hugely general audiences that provided little guidance in how to really target and reach key people within those populations.

In developing more meaningful goals that drive good plans, it is essential to gain clarity and SPECIFICITY about:

-       Goals (these are the ways in which you want the world to be different within 3, 5 or 10 years, and which your communications efforts will have contributed to making happen)

-       Objectives (while we did not cover it in detail during the meeting, I would like to include here an excerpt from Asibey’s “Are We There Yet?”: Objectives are different from goals: they are more specific and have a shorter time frame, typically one to two years. Think of objectives as a series of benchmarks on the way to your goal. Most likely, you will have a few intermediate objectives that will progressively lead to your goal. A good objective should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Result-focused and Time-specific.

-       Audiences

-       Messages

-       Messengers

-       Tactics

-       Measurements

The process of gaining clarity and specificity about these elements will lead organically to an effective and focused communications plan.  In fact, Edith said, specifying audiences is the only way to create good strategy. In the Paraguay example, she suggested, as an alternative to working with such a broad goal, to instead create a series of concrete, incremental objectives that would anchor a much better communications plan.  As an example, she suggested an objective that looks like this:  “Secure support of 30 mayors in the most affected provinces to protect water sources.” This objective not only focused on mayors—a well defined target audience – but also honed in on the environmental element that had the greatest potential impact on the whole system.

This led to a discussion of one of the other major themes of the day: the often delicate relationship of communications to “program.”  Clearly, when communications become central to the organizational discussion about how to achieve goals, some tensions arise about the right mix of communications efforts that are integrating “program objectives” and efforts aimed at heightening general awareness of the organization, improving its reputation.  Some in the group expressed some anxiety about asserting themselves too strongly into the work of “program,” and said that their charge within the organization was to stick with media relations aimed at improving general awareness of the organization.  Others embraced the idea of stepping back from the frequent task of trying to place OpEds from the President of their organization and helping the organization think through how communications could really help achieve program goals.

Asibey noted that the ability to play the role of internal consultant on how communications can produce program results may depend on how long you’ve been at the organization and how much trust has been established. She said it helps to sit down with program folks and really understand what they want to accomplish and learn more about their target audiences so that you can figure out how communications can help reach them.  Those discussions with program people will also help flesh out the messages and messengers that will resonate with target audiences.

She said that, if your plan includes audiences described simply as “policy makers,” “funders” or “the media,” it is not specific enough.  She cited an example of an organization she worked with that, instead of laying out categories of people they wanted to reach, went through an extensive process that resulted in exactly 450 named individuals that they wanted to influence.  Once they identified those exact individuals who they believed could advance their objectives, they developed messages and modes of communications tailored to how those individuals receive information.

The remainder of the discussion ranged over participants’ experiences trying to force greater specificity to how the imperative to focus on core audiences squares with the new pressures many of us are feeling to spend more of our time and resources on social media, the effects of which seem to be diffuse at best.

Edith conceded that even good planning won’t solve all of these challenges, still “Specificity is very satisfying!”

Many in the group expressed a desire to talk more about this subject and delve more deeply into the planning process, which lead to a discussion of planning resources. One attendee said that PPC-NYC member Nancy Schwartz, who runs the Getting Attention! blog, is a great resource and an effective consultant helping communicators develop good communications plans.

Other PPC-NYC members who do consulting in this area include:

Douglas Gould, Douglas Gould & Co.
Rochelle Lefkowitz, Pro-Media Communications
Amy Sutnick Plotch, Amy Sutnick Plotch Consulting
Michael Remaley, HAMILL REMALEY breakthrough communications
Farra Trompeter, Big Duck Communications
Lisa Witter, Fenton Communications

Asibey’s communications evaluation report “Are We There Yet?” also provides great insights into communications planning and how to go about it.  Those seeking communications planning literature should also check out the Knowledge section of The Communications Network’s website at: http://comnetwork.org/knowledge_research

At 2 pm ET (11 am PT), Thursday, December 2, 2010, the Communications Network is holding a no-holds barred online conversation about why foundations continue to publish annual reports, whether they really are a strategic investment in time and effort, or if there is a better way.  Because of the importance of the topic, the Network is making a limited number of spaces available to non-members for this webinar on a first-come, first-served basis. Email Bruce Trachtenberg for details.

The occasion for the conversation is the release of “Talking to Ourselves? A Critical Look At Annual Reports in Foundation Communications” and a companion dialogue site, WhyAnnualReports.org. (Full disclosure: the site was created by HAMILL REMALEY breakthrough communications, which is headed by PPC’s director.)

A co-production of the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative, the Williams Group, and the Communications Network, the report and website were inspired by a spirited 2008 Communications Network conference session that explored the value of foundation annual reports.

We want to grow the dialogue about the worth of annual reports.

The featured webinar leaders are:

-       Mark Sedway, project director of the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative

-       Mary Green of the Williams Group

-       Andy Goodman, the storytelling guru who will act as moderator

The phone lines will be open so you can say what’s on your mind.

To get a jump start on the conversation, click here to read “Talking to Ourselves?” online in magazine format or here to download a pdf.

To see what advance reviewers had to say about the report and annual reports, visit WhyAnnualReports.org. The site creators also hope you’ll add your own comments between now and December 2. And those of you who do, we hope you’ll take part in the webinar and be prepared to say more.

To register for the webinar, email brucet@comnetwork.org.

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 prominent foundations, to their great credit, are doing a good job of fostering public dialogue on how to support community journalism and international reporting. But a related concern has, at least to my understanding, gone largely unacknowledged.  That is, the uncertain future of independent documentary photography.  But interestingly, documentary photographers are coming to the aid of foundations and nonprofits.

“Documentary photography does face many great challenges because the media industry, which is changing so quickly, is not adequately supporting this important work,” The Magnum Foundation’s President Susan Meiselas told me.  As a leading photographer for nearly 40 years whose work has appeared on the front page of The New York Times, has been exhibited on the walls of The Whitney Museum of Art and was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, Meiselas speaks with authority.

“Even though photographers are accustomed to flexible work arrangements and producing work that they must convince outlets to distribute, the fundamental changes occurring in the media world are choking off funds for the development of documentary photography projects.  That’s why we created the Emergency Fund,” Meiselas says. “We are attempting to take up the challenge of creating a new economic model to support work that focuses on critical issues.”

Media organizations are cutting back and supporting far fewer photographers in projects where they go into the field and produce the images that powerfully illustrate the humanity, the messiness, and the beauty of our world.  Meiselas says that independent documentary photographers play a very special role, approaching social issues with an open mind and not trying to produce images that support specific foregone conclusions about the nature of an issue. But the fact that they are not tethered to organizations leaves them unsupported.  Which is where the Magnum Foundation comes in.

The Magnum Foundation is working with social purpose organizations through its BE SEEN initiative to pair them with exceptional documentary photographers to tell their own stories through images.  For example, in 2009, the Woodcock Foundation provided support for Ashoka, one of its grantees, to collaborate with photographers to begin documenting the projects of Ashoka Fellows through the use of photography, video and multimedia.  The plan is for their work will be showcased in “an exploratory web landscape populated with stories about individuals overcoming obstacles to improve their own lives and communities, inspired by the social entrepreneurs whose insights were a catalyst for social change.” The Woodcock Foundation’s support of the pilot produced two exceptionally engaging examples of multimedia storytelling, and Ashoka is currently seeking funding to complete the vision of documenting the work of 30 Fellows.

The Magnum Foundation has a particularly impressive history of working with human rights organizations. Meiselas’s own 30-year history of working with Human Rights Watch has included a series titled “In Silence: Maternal Mortality in India.” It is an arresting example of how stories can be told powerfully with strong documentary photography (the multi-media for the project was produced by Magnum in Motion, which assembles visual narratives for online and offline platforms, including screenings in museums, festivals, and workshops.).

The Foundation’s BE SEEN initiative additionally provides personalized service and advice on how organizations can optimize their visual communications efforts.

The Magnum Foundation has a brochure that makes a strong case that “powerful images can open minds.”  I asked Meiselas about the nature of documentary photography as it relates to the proliferation of photographic images that come from the cell phones of average citizens in African villages, the streets of Tehran and the hills of West Virginia, and which are being used by media outlets to show the “reality” of conditions on the ground.

“Images abound, surely. There are tons of images being uploaded every day and they are hard to perhaps distinguish at times, especially when they are so decontextualized… it’s sort of like noise, cacophonous noise with no clarity,” she said. “But documentary photography can produce a coherent story, a narrative structure with a progression of images that evokes deeper meaning. I very much welcome the accessibility of digital democracy and love that citizens are able to photograph their own experiences, but I think that professional documentary photography has an important role to play in modeling narrative story telling through visual images.”

The Magnum Foundation is closely associated with Magnum Photos, the collective of independent photographers founded sixty years ago by such luminaries as Henri Cartier-Bresson. One of the priorities of the foundation is to make the extraordinary and growing archives of Magnum Photos more accessible to foundations, nonprofits and other social purpose organizations.

Meiselas and I talked at length about how BE SEEN differs from the growing number of stock photo services available on the internet.  “BE SEEN is not a ‘click & buy’ process, we actually want to talk to you and find out what you are trying to accomplish, think about what kinds of images are available in the archive and work with you to find the right images.”  And, while service is one of the important differences, anyone can browse the Magnum Photos archives online unassisted.

Having used many of the stock photography services in my work as a director of communications, I was very curious to see the difference for myself.  As an experiment, I did a search on “religion” at Magnum Photos and then at iStockphoto.com. The resulting images told me everything I needed to know and definitely supported Meiselas’s case.

The stock photos are staged and clichéd.  They are Anglo-centric and explore very little of the unknown.  The Magnum Photos, on the other hand, are visually stunning.  They have texture and extraordinary vibrance. The variety of subject matter that came up on my Magnum search was vast and fascinating.  Each image seemed to tell a singular story that might lead to other related images that would tell a fuller story, and they made me want to learn more about the subjects in the photos.

Magnum Foundation has attracted supporters like Open Society Institute and The Atlantic Philanthropies, but still, there are many who are not yet aware of the state of independent documentary photography or what this kind of photography can accomplish for social purpose organizations.  Meiselas’s metaphor of “noise” versus “clarity” got me thinking about a parallel with foundation support for public radio. It seems to me that Magnum is to stock photography what National Public Radio is to talk radio.  Magnum and NPR both strive to demonstrate that investing in excellence produces insights and discoveries that commercial sources rarely do.

One of the Magnum Foundation’s most immediate objectives is simply to have more foundations and nonprofits know that the work of its photographers is available. So check out the Magnum Photos archive.  And think about whether or not pairing with a documentary photographer through Magnum Foundation might be a productive way of developing images that powerfully tell your organization’s story.