This is the first in a 5-part video series for employee recruitment and on boarding produced by Amdur Spitz & Associates. Read more about the services ASA provided for Gateway here.

Summary:

ASA facilitated the planning process and helped to create the Chicago Cultural Alliance, a consortium of Chicago’s ethnic museums, cultural centers, and historical societies whose mission is to effect social change and public understanding of cultural diversity through first voice perspectives. The Alliance connects its diverse member organizations to flagship arts and cultural institutions, universities, schools, businesses and government agencies.

Challenges: Once we established that there was political will for the Alliance, the challenge was to engage participants in a planning process that built trust across a wide variety of cultural organizations.   Communication, cultural understanding, goal setting, and working through funding/competition issues were some of the biggest challenges.

Activities:

• Facilitate 18-month planning process with steering committee from core members and partner institutions
• Design and wrote comprehensive organizational business plan along with organizing documents such as by-laws, membership agreements, pro-forma budgets, etc.
• Launched the Alliance in 2007 with 20 ethnic museum and cultural center members, and two institutional partners. The boards of directors of each of the 22 member and partner organizations signed and approved a memo of understanding, and all pay annual dues to belong to the Alliance.
• Led and staffed the Alliance for the first two years. Recruited the board of directors. Served as the first president after incorporating as a 501 c-3.
• Designed program to help build the infrastructure of core member organizations, and wrote grants that funded it.
• Incubated the Alliance by providing leadership, communication, organizing and building strategic partnerships.  Successfully transitioned leadership to a new board of directors.

Results:

• Launched the Chicago Cultural Alliance in 2007 at the Chicago History Museum with over 2000 attending.
• CCA is a national model and offers capacity building workshops for core members, public programs and cross cultural dialogue, communications and marketing, partnerships with major museums, and participation in major public policy forums such as the Chicago 2016 Culture Committee, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the US Dept. of Education’s International (see U of C plan)
• At the end of 2009, CCA has 3 full-time staff and raised $260,000 for programming. It has 28 core members and 8 partner institutions. ASA president Jennifer Amdur Spitz serves as the Board Treasurer.

Two suburban housing developers were in the process of building and approving subdivisions with over 1800 single family and duplex homes in rural DeKalb County.  Work had been progressing well when a small, but very vocal community group began to organize and oppose all development. After the Village elected a new mayor with a no-growth platform, the developers teamed together and jointly hired ASA to reverse the tide.

Challenges:

• The ‘no growth’ community organization had considerable support from nearby municipalities, had succeeded in replacing the village mayor through a smear campaign. It was bolstered by a successful county-wide ‘no-growth’ political campaign.
• Sitting Village Trustees had been bullied by the ‘no-growth’ faction. They were intimidated and personally threatened. Law enforcement was called in, but they were loyal to (and related to) the new mayor.
• Editorial opinion of local newspaper was anti-growth

Approach:

• Identified allies, helped them to organize themselves into a campaign,  and created enough political cover for them to come forward and reach out to others.
• Activities:
• Developed messages and campaign materials for trustee and mayoral candidates supportive of community improvements and growth
• Provided spokesperson training for candidates and trustees supportive of growth to help them better articulate their position to community
• Provided PR and communication support to the business association, trustees, candidates and community organization to help them explain their growth position
• Designed and conducted a resident opinion survey in collaboration with the business association and produced a report

Results

• Growth candidates won election
• Generated more balanced reporting from local newspaper
• Each developer won approval for preliminary plats and annexation agreements

Amdur Spitz & Associates not only created a vibrant youth engagement program for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, we also fulfilled their multimedia needs for the project, creating a series of webisodes on the Goto2040 website and distributed on DVD.

We asked youth to imagine their community in the year 2040. How will people live, work and play? What will people have done to address problems like global warming, energy costs and poverty?

We asked students to express their Bold Ideas for the year 2040 through the arts. The following video clips reveal students of all ages engaged in discovery, collaboration and problem solving., The Bold Ideas program model is flexible and inter-disciplinary. It was successful in science, social studies, art and other classrooms as well as in after-school settings. Webisodes posted regularly through the process helped to build awareness for GOTO2040, and created fun entry points to the website.

Read more about what Amdur Spitz & Associates did for CMAP here.

Summary:

How do you get people in the 7-county Chicago Metro area to care about urban planning?  How do you get the independent municipal governments to come together around a cohesive vision?  ASA named and branded GOTO 2040, Imagine that… and developed integrated communications and public engagement strategies that personalized the challenge and piqued people’s imaginations.

Challenge:

CMAP’s branding challenges were two-fold; CMAP itself was a newly formed government entity whose role and responsibilities were little understood among stakeholders; and CMAP was embarking on a comprehensive planning process for the year 2040, with a state mandated timeline that was marching forward. CMAP retained ASA to develop a brand, design a multi-part communications and community engagement strategy and consult with their internal communications and community outreach staff

Activities:

• Naming and brand research
• Message platform
• Online interactive and social media consultation
• 5-part public engagement campaign design
• Community events
• Graphic design, logo, brochures
• Webisode video production
• Contest design and promotion
• Media strategy
• Youth engagement strategy and implementation
• Networking and constituency building
• Community outreach staff training
• Communication with elected officials
• Community Partner Program

Results:

• The urban planning process can be dull.  ASA’s worked with CMAP to personalize it and pique people’s imagination. Outreach strategies meshed with agency methods, and took advantage of existing networks and contacts to catapult into new networks. As a result, tens of thousand participated in GOTO2040.
• Abundant media coverage of events, milestones, and the public engagement strategies reached hundreds of thousands.
• A robust website with an “Idea Zone” invites community engagement, and offers opportunities to engage at many levels, from posting photos to leaving feedback on policy papers.
• Through the community engagement campaign and partnerships with cultural organizations, the Burnham Centennial and Chicago Matters, and many other non-profits and foundations, GOTO2040’s messages saturated the Chicago region.

Whether it is marketing or advocacy, building and managing consortia or engaging the community;  the impact of our work is measurable in the media, on the web, in public policy, in publications, on film, and in the thriving initiatives we’ve built in collaboration with our clients.

Check out the media clips to your right to see our work in progress.

Contact ASA if you want to Make Change. Whether you want to revitalize your brand, build strategic partnerships, or perk up your numbers, call us today.

We offer a free one-hour communication strategy consultation. You present your challenges, we’ll help you think through solutions. We’re not afraid to give away our ideas. We have lots more where they came from. Email or call to set up an appointment.

Amdur Spitz & Associates, Inc.
100 N. LaSalle St., Suite 300
Chicago, IL 60602

ph. 312-377-3805
fax. 312-377-1804

contact: jennifer@amdurspitz.com