Mattie Jordan-Woods, executive director of Northside Association for Community Development in Kalamazoo, asked a question during the meet the press panel at Tell Your Stories-Lansing today.

A pitch usually starts when we decide on our own or as an organization that we want media coverage. But there’s a problem with that from the get-go, according to our panel of Lansing, Mich.-area journalists today.

The problem is, journalists do not really care what we want. “Our problem and our responsibility is to serve our audiences,” as Rick Pluta of Michigan Public Radio Network said at the panel, part of Tell Your Stories mini-conference co-organized by Michigan Nonprofit Association and us with support from C.S. Mott Foundation yesterday. ”Everything that we get approached with is going to be assessed with, ‘how well do I serve my audience?’”

So the right first question to ask yourself, before you pitch a reporter, is not what you want, nor what the journalist you will pitch wants, either. The right first question, is, what will delight, or anyway satisfy, the person who will read, see, or hear the eventual story?

In a funny sort of way, social media should make this that much easier for us as we all become more like journalists by thinking through what our own audiences want to read, see, or hear from us. Anyway, just one thought: next time you pitch a story, imagine you were the reporter—how would you frame the story to get an audience to check it out? If you can answer that question for a reporter when you pitch her—you are way ahead of the game.

Can’t resist including two more tips from today’s panel:

Jam Sardar from local station Newscenter 6 shared an Asian-American Journalists Association resource on how to get in the media
Another thought—not to over-generalize from the group who came out today, but based on what they said about how they Facebook – to monitor others’ traffic for possible story ideas, ask friends for specific source ideas, and other useful stuff.

What’s been your experience with pitching reporters? What questions do they ask and how do you know when you’ve been successful (before a story appears)?

Ingrid Gonçalves, communications director at Center for Labor and Community Research from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

When Ingrid Gonçalves said during a round of introductions that she had five Web sites to create or update, I knew I had to try out the flip camera to get her story. It turns out to be a great story, not so much for how unusual it is, but for how typical it is, I think you’ll agree! (Apologies, this time the wrist is really shaky–I’m still learning!)

Ingrid was one of about 20 folks at this morning’s search engine optimization workshop this morning, led by
Tim Frick from Mightybytes. Tim delivered a workshop highlighting how to get found online, drawing on info from his forthcoming book tentatively titled Return on Engagement from Focal Press.

Below the fold here you will find, in the somewhat unlikely event that anyone finds it useful, my more or less complete notes on Tim’s presentation, which I found useful in charting some benchmarks for SEO. In a nutshell, here’s the Tim Frick program (of course it makes more sense when you see him lay it out, but still, it’s a good one):

1. Content, content, content–Have a content strategy and implement
2. Install an analytics package so you know what your Web visitors are doing when, etc.
3. Use alerts to see who is talking about you
4. Track user behavior and adjust your approach as appropriate
5. Rinse, lather, repeat (in other words, go back to step one, fine tune your site–”it’s never done” Tim says)

What do you think– is this an accurate description of what you do right now? Or what you aspire to be doing? Let me know in the comments or by email! Meantime enjoy Ingrid’s story and if you want more, click to see some notes in the rest of this (phew) looong post (hopefully, doing justice to Tim’s presentation):

Tim broke the session into three big parts and some add ons: Strategy, On-domain content, and Off-Domain Traffic. This made really good sense to me, and here’s a bit more highlights from each part:

Strategy
In 2006-2007, Tim added a content management system, CMS, to his Web site and started working on it 10-15 minutes a day. Pretty soon he was working on it 20-30 hours a week. Or as he puts it, “We got in over our heads very quickly.” This section covered some thoughts on how to avoid that–I’m sorry, I did a really poor job of noting these down!

On-Domain Content

• Tip: Think about design from a standpoint of what promotes your credibility, such as: speedy loading, reliability (think spelling), useful content
• Good resource: Andrew King’s book Website Optimization, from O’Reilly Media
• It’s important and useful to use an XML sitemap generator com (like this one) to help you to tell Google about the content at your site as well as how frequently your site updates (which governs how frequently your site is crawled)
• Thinking about keywords–this was a simple exercise of just writing down 5-10 words for how you imagine your audience looks for you online, then 5-10 words that differentiate you from your competition, then cut in half. Ultimately, the goal here is to come up with a short list that will fit into phrases that people use to search for you. A number of sites can help with this. Wordtracker.com is one.
• We talked about how cool wordpress is (Tim led the way, we at CMW agree!) and looked at back ends of Wordpress, which Tim uses—he showed us Timfrick.com—which he notes took him 4 hours to build — and he joked, 3.5 hours were for the logo at the top of the home page.
• In terms of where keywords go: Tim showed us how to think about putting them in  the title: (65 characters is as much as fits easily in a page title—this will autoload above the url window in your browser), in the headers, and in the names of the image files (so take an extra minute to rename the image files, not generic like image01234)

Off-Domain Traffic

Twitter Phishing! If this happens to you, benefit from Mightybytes experience just the other day. This would be very valuable info for someone who has been a twitter phishing scam victim. It happened to Tim just this past week, one of his mightybytes colleagues blogged about what happened and what to do if it happens to you here.

Use RSS Feeds. Really! Use them.

ShareThis, video, Facebook, twitter (be strategic—get followers that care about what you’re going to say)—the way to get followers is to follow others, flickr (MightyBytes makes beer and has their flickr site set up with pix of it–this made me thirsty); niche networks that fit your work;

Other Tools: news releases, esp. online–eg PRNewswire, PRWeb. This was kind of intriguing: instead of, or in addition to, google news alerts, Tim actually also uses a service that predates the google news alert called gigaalerts. We’re gonna give it a try.

Twike Ride in Champaign from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Students, staff and a faculty member or two turned out last night for a leadership and communications training sponsored by the University YMCA just off the campus of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

It was a great training, but for me the biggest surprise of the evening was when one of the participants, Matt Childress, gave me a lift back to my hotel in his personal Twike–a German-made electric, three-wheeled motorcycle that also moves by pedal power. He drives to and from his job doing IT in the university chancellor’s office most every day of the year.

Matt had told me earlier in the evening that he came out to the communications workshop “How To Really Get Heard” because he recently formed an Illinois EV (electric, or exotically-fueled, vehicle) club, and he wants to “learn how to get the word out, gain membership in the EV Club, and hopefully stop having to do all the work myself….well, maybe.” The club exists primarily as a Facebook group right now.

So what struck me–other than just how incredibly freaking cool it was to ride at about 45 mph through downtown Champaign in a space-age pod vehicle that totally turned heads — the University Y building is right next to a sorority house, and as we were getting in voices from the sorority were calling to Matt “hey, can I get a ride?” Along our route, such as when we stopped at red lights, people said “hey, what is that thing?” I think the reason I decided to blog about Matt’s twike, though, was because of how he uses it to evangelize for electric vehicles and getting us out of our gasoline cars generally.

While he was letting me drive it around an empty parking lot (sorry, no video of that!), Matt explained that when he was himself a student some years ago at the university, one professor had a mauve, psychedelically painted VW bus — which was so high profile in the small college town, everyone knew all about it. So part of Matt’s calculation in purchasing the twike, used, from a friend, was the potential for raising awareness around the campus that it represented.

My head is now full of intriguing miscellaneous facts, such as:

• The state of Illinois has no license plate for an electric motorcycle currently–electric cars, yes, but not 3-wheeled electric motorcycles (I’m sure my facebook friend Gov. Quinn can get right on this–maybe he should join the EV club group)
• A twike runs on C batteries–a lot of them–and you plug it in to keep it going–instead of gas a meter in the tiny onboard computer tells you how much volts you have, at rest or when it’s turned on–if you fall to about 250V (i think, or thereabouts), plan to power up or push pretty darn soon
• Getting in or out is a lot like getting in or out of a canoe–lower yourself to the seat butt first (the body is made of light plastic)
• It’s sort of like owning a foreign sports car used to be in the 1970s–hard to find a place to get parts and service! While there are lots of different kinds of EVs (electric vehicles) out there, the twike costs $35,000 new and you have to import it yourself from Europe. But it does last a long time. Maybe it helps if you own it in a college town–Matt has had some help with repairs (since the nearest repair shop is in England) from the guy who fixes the electron microscopes on campus.

But to get back to Matt as evangelist. At every stoplight, or anytime folks like the sorority house residents or others call out “What is that thing?” Matt explains.BTW, this whole explaining to passersby all the time thing is starting to get a little old for his 8-year-old daughter, Matt says (but I think she’ll love telling the story when she gets older–if she does not die of mortification when she’s 13 first).

Of course, the passersby don’t always understand what he’s talking about right off. My favorite response last night: “I don’t understand anything you said, but that looks really cool!” Raising awareness… it’s a process. But you don’t have to enjoy the ride in an EV for long to be convinced how cool it is… couple that with the communication efforts, and it’s a force to be reckoned with.

The Secret to Managing Tech for Nonprofits… May Be To Buy This Book from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

(Apologies for the shaky wrist with the camera–it’s a first date with the flip camera for me).

After the pitchman-style intro, Steve delivered a thoughtful presentation outlining some of the issues the book takes up.

Working at a small organization, I tend not to think about or understand as much of the issues that the “IT department” has to deal with. It was kind of refreshing to talk about technology and not discuss social media–the focus was more on aligning IT with overall organizational operations and strategy (the subject of Steve’s chapter in the new work).

Someone from the local nonprofit technology capacity builder Lumity raised the debate about who does it better – corporate sector, nonprofits, or government? The consensus was that for infrastructure, the corporate sector wins, but when it comes to social media, Queta Bauer of Cultural Communications (and CMW board member) expressed the consensus of the group that if it can be used without spending a lot of cash, we in nonprofit land are champions.

Incidentally, more info about the book can be accessed online three ways:

• Through a wiki: with material from each chapter, highlights from a 2-day conference on the material in the book held in September
• By reading some quick takes at Steve’s blog, where he’s on a mission to write a post about each chapter (Steve’s about halfway through)
• And, of course by ordering the book: available for sale or a deeper look at Amazon.com.

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the copy my boss paid for as soon as I can!

Geoghegan: verb, trans., (from attorney Thomas Geoghegan, whose run for the U.S. Congress seat previously held by Rahm Emanuel in 2008-09 received plentiful national but scant local news coverage). To be obscured from local Chicago news coverage in spite (because?) of national prominence.

Example: Although the arrival of protesters and the nation’s top union officials in Chicago posed a serious challenge in the debate over banking regulation, consumer financial protection, and related issues this week, local news outlets largely Geogheganed the topic, giving it minimal coverage.  (* note and disclosure, I used to work with National People’s Action the group co-sponsoring and organizing the Showdown in Chicago).

Noticing this today and yesterday reminded me that when Tom Geoghegan ran for Congress last March, it really seemed that he got more and deeper coverage in the Washington Post than the Chicago Tribune (see here–admittedly, a list of opinion pieces from his old campaign site–unfortunately a lot of the coverage is now locked away inside newsbank and other archives).

The Showdown in Chicago banking protests Sunday thru today are all over online–even in Costa Rica–notably at the Huffington Post. Can’t help noticing that Chicago’s metro news more or less took a pass — did I miss it on TV news last night? if it was on, I am thinking it was a blip — and in the Tribune this morning a small photo and in the Sun-Times the headline “Bankers group says it won’t be deterred by protesters” — from Bloomberg news.

Fortunately for the organizers, they were not relying on the news media alone to get the word out–in addition to the blog and online news sites mentioned above (and Progress Illinois, which has been offering a steady stream of coverage, plus of course our own Newstips here and here ), their own site has a great wrap up and twitter feed (or search twitter for #abashowdown).

Not that the front pages of Sun-Times (property tax increases) and Tribune (H1N1, I think) were lacking in drama. Just that this juicy rabble rousing opportunity to safeguard the interests of the people (ie, get readers!) seems to’ve passed them by.

Looking at nonprofits through the prism of our taglines–thanks to Nancy Schwartz’s new Nonprofit Tagline Report, which came out this week, I just have to say it: We are one earnest group of people.

If you’re at a nonprofit and online, chances are you know about this, but if not–Nancy, a New York-based marketing guru, solicited and received input from literally thousands of folks at nonprofits, including a final vote that produced 13 best taglines by popular acclaim:

• Arts & Culture: “Big Sky. Big Land. Big History.” — Montana Historical Society
• Associations: “Building community deep in the hearts of Texans” —TexasNonprofits
• Civic Benefit: “Holding Power Accountable” — Common Cause
• Education: “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste® “— UNCF -The United Negro College Fund
• Environment & Animals: “Because the earth needs a good lawyer” — Earthjustice
• Grantmaking: “If you want to be remembered, do something memorable”. — The Cleveland Foundation
• Health & Sciences: “Finding a cure now…so our daughters won’t have to. ©”— PA Breast Cancer Coalition
• Human Services: “Filling pantries. Filling lives.” — Houston Food Bank
• International, Foreign Affairs & National Security: “Send a Net. Save a Life.” — Nothing But Nets
• Jobs & Workforce Development: “Nothing Stops A Bullet Like A Job“— Homeboy Industries
• Media: “Telling stories that make a difference” — Barefoot Workshops
• Religion & Spiritual Development: “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” — The people of The United Methodist Church
• Other: “A head for business. A heart for the world.” — SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise)

Nancy writes that the 13 winners were selected from 60 finalists drawn from 1,702 nonprofit taglines submitted to the 2009 Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards competition. More than 4,800 nonprofit professionals cast votes in the final selection round.

“It’s a huge missed opportunity for nonprofits that don’t implement a tagline,” Nancy adds. “Especially when you consider all the places a tagline appears throughout a nonprofit’s marketing and communications program, and how many people potentially digest an organization’s tagline in any given year.”

Humor works, but maybe not for a tagline, I guess. Next year, Nancy, I propose an alternative taglines competition with some outlandish-but-real key phrases (organization names suppressed or actually not even envsioned):

• Because people at nonprofits need to eat, too.
• Cleaning up other people’s messes
• Streeetching your donation as far as we can
• We protest at banks. Because that’s where the money is

Also, one wonders–what’s up with the trademarking a tagline? Is that for groups that use their tagline for heavy fundraising, or what?

Also perhaps worth noting that nonprofit sector sometimes sees more great beginnings than great middles, I think, so it’s great that Nancy’s pulled off the second annual edition of this report.

What do you think? Are earnest taglines most appropriate, or could they still work with a little more ‘heh heh’ or ‘hmm?’ to them?

Even at 4 p.m. on a gray day with drinks just 30 minutes away, philanthropic communicators enjoyed the social media game (photo by Thom Clark)

At noon Friday with the annual conference over and done till next fall’s event (slated for Los Angeles, BTW), someone from the Boston-based Barr Foundation who participated in the Communications Network social media game tracked me down–to return the cards his group used during the game. “No, you keep them–if you want, take them back to your organization and try this at your office,” I said.

He was one of eight folks who left with sets of the game cards. (the presentation and handouts can be downloaded here and more on the game as originally conceived and developed by Beth is here).

One of my main reflections on presenting the social media game at the conference is about diffusion of ideas across the nonprofit sector: given especially that we are somewhat limited in the channels available to communicate new ideas and practices across nonprofits and philanthropy, the generosity of Beth and David Wilcox in sharing this method and the key role of Creative Commons in providing a way to structure that kind of sharing is truly helping to build the sector.

We played with 6 groups of about 7 people each. Each group chose s scenario from a range of options. We started at 4 p.m., I made my way through about 25 minutes of introductory “teach” (ie, “talk” with some q and a) and then, right around the time that thoughts are usually turning to the bar… the crowd really got into it! All about the genius of the game and the value of learning from, or maybe that should be with, each other (see Beth’s nice post on social learning from last week).

A couple thoughts on how the game works, what appeared to be key learning moments for the group at the CommNetwork conference, and, per Christine Mulvin, 1 thing you’ve got to have to play it well:

It’s about strategy
One nice learning moment for the CommNet folks came when two groups chose to be an international arts organization. As the first of these groups presented their strategy, the people in the second group started laughing—they had made exactly the same choices. The fact that two groups with the same goal independently came to essentially the same strategy helped people to understand there could actually be, if not exactly right and wrong solutions, at least some solutions to a problem that are more effective than others.

We know how to make choices, even when we don’t have all the data:
Here was another learning moment and it’s one of the reasons why I like the social media game so much. Most people do not know about every single Web 2.0 tool out there. Let me rephrase that. Probably no human being knows about every Web 2.0 tool out there. Just too darn many. That’s overwhelming and intimidating, and it causes us to forget that what we’re really good at is not being walking encyclopedias, but making good choices.

The game throws people into a situation where they are forced to make choices. By the end, they are asking questions that really have nothing to do with the tools, but rather surface some of the other key barriers to greater social media implementation.

For example someone asked, during the debrief of the game, what policy to follow on using images of people, such as photographs of children. We discussed creative commons, of course, and some policy options and release forms and so forth—but then went on to point out that release forms is not a social media problem—it’s more human relations and logistical in nature.

A lot of the hidden barriers to social media adoption (hidden in the sense that they are not in the top 10 challenges list most folks reel off, but are laying in wait just one step ahead, after the workshop is over are just these kinds of problems. But helping people practice making choices with social media helps to ground all the new opportunities in what we already know and understand.

The Social Media Game Makes Us Draw on Our Experiences
As a side note, it’s wonderful how when people get into the game they bring their own experiences into it. After the session wrapped up, one of the participants added that his wife works at an arts organization; he told me he drew on what he knew about her work to help fill in the gaps in the story the objective cards had left. It’s another reason the game works—because it allows people to draw on their experiences of making choices in the past, tallying with what they already know how to do.

Social Media Game Note
That brings me to my last point, one that was raised by Christine Mulvin of Cincinnati. She noted that the game may not work for total beginners: if no-one at the table has any experience with social media tools, the short blurbs about each tool that are included on the cards just won’t be enough information to make good choices. So she recommends and I think she’s right that at least one person in each team has to be at least a bit conversant with Web 2.0. (no, that’s not a contradiction: you need to know something about Web 2.0 to be overwhelmed by the variety of tools out there, no?)

Hopefully many of the 40-odd folks at the workshop last week will go out and play more social media games, and those who participate in those sessions will lead the game on their own, after which the people in those workshops will play the game with still others, after which… well you get the idea!

Reporter Tara Malone and Publishers Mary Gavin and Susan Noyes spoke at a Meet the Press forum we co-sponsored with Evanston Public Library yesterday (more pictures at the Community Media Workshop Facebook page)

Used to be, questions at a meet the press panel sponsored by the Workshop focused on how to reach the journalists and how to pitch them.

Yesterday we held a communications strategy and Meet the Press forum at the Evanston Public Library and we had some of that, but more questions were about the future of the news and how the panelists were experiencing changes in the business. One takeaway: print’s not dead yet.

Our panel featured:

• Mary Helt Gavin, publisher of the Evanston Roundtable
• Tara Malone, beat reporter for The Chicago Tribune (notably, one of the crew who brought us the preferntial treatment for U of I insiders story), and
• Susan Noyes founder of MakeItBetter.net, an online news and community site for the North Shore.

The theme of dying print came up pretty early on in the Q and A. It was timely too, since Susan from MakeItBetter described her recently revamped home page and imminent plans for a 50,000 print-run publication. “Advetisers like…multiple points of contact,” Susan said, making the point that by doing events, online, and print she can “surround” her audience with her advertisers’ messages. She also has a unique subscription model: fees individuals pay are donated back to nonprofits (I wish we had heard more details about this, we’ll have to follow up next time we speak with MIB folks, sorry).

Tara spoke to how new online news has changed her daily routine. Some days are fine and stories that go online first will hold up and work fine for the next day’s print edition; other days, where she has to file five updates five times during the day and then do a new, more analytical, story for the next day’s paper edition, are more grueling, she noted (note to her editors: she wasn’t complaining, just explaining). Several people noted that U of I reporting by Tara and others exemplifies why there needs to be a Tribune in the first place.

Ad while the Evanston Roundtable Website is an integral part of her strategy, Mary gave print the most ringing endorsement of all, noting that printing a newspaper is still at the core of her business. I thought her response to a “what’s your biggest challenge?” question was telling for the industry as a whole, too: finding advertisers, was her response. Some of the advertising that has evaporated in the past year with the economic crisis is gone forever–but it’s quite reasonable to assume that part of that drop is cyclical, too.

So, still no answers on the future of news front–it strikes me that publishers are going to have to get used to making less (possibly a lot less) money than they did in the past. Lower margins are going to make it harder to do the more lavishly-funded kinds of projects newsrooms are used to, I’m sure. Should change a lot about newsroom management… a subject about which, perhaps, the less said the better.

Valerie Denney led a webinar on messaging for the Workshop today.

Listening in and reflecting on Valerie Denney’s webinar this afternoon on “Develop and Sharpen Your Message,” a couple of key messages about nonprofit messaging.

Valerie had a nice mnemonic to remember three key aspects of a strong message, “the three Cs” test:

• Clear: it should be easy to remember
• Connect: it should speak to your audience
• Care: it should be linked to values

Keeping those three Cs in mind, (similar other versions are floating around out there, such as one from marketing expert Gail Goodman here; BTW according to eHarmony, all 3 of the 3 cs of great sex are “communication”–why not 4? but I digress) here’s another key lesson:

Messages are for the people who hear them

You create the message — but it speaks to the audience you’re trying to reach. So think like your audience as you get ready to speak to them if you want to get or keep their attention.

Valerie cited an example from her own work: A client, working for green energy, was seeking to site a wind farm in an Illinois farming community. After learning residents in the community around the proposed wind farm had concerns about the project’s impact — for example, that heavy equipment needed to build the tower might tear up the roads in the area costing the town money– they developed messages that responded to residents’ needs (for example, the wind farm owners would be paying significant property taxes). What they didn’t do was tout their own environmental credentials…. less relevant to the audience in the surrounding community.

I would like to hear a little more about one point Valerie made: she said if you scare people with your messages (”The sky is falling!”), that tends to turn off the audience because a scared audience may just tune the message out.

What if your message really is scary? Should you tone it down? Or rephrase it? Or go for broke?

Valerie ended on a high note for the union, environmental, government, and other folks on the call: “It can seem like people don’t care about your issue, but I really believe everyone of these issues is connectable back to something people care about.” I totally agree–it’s a bit of work–but well worth doing!