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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Reinventing You, by Dorie Clark: a review

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What you do over the course of your life changes slowly, and a lot of it remains the same. The part of what you do that you get paid for–now, that may change drastically. How do you remain true to who you have been AND acquire a reputation for being the person who can do the new job?  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. Dorie Clark puts it a little differently: “Define your brand, imagine your future.”

Dorie Clark photo

Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You

Your brand is not a logo or a slogan.  It’s how people perceive you, whenever they stop to think about who you are.  You need to know how you are perceived, and Clark gives tips on finding that out.

She also explains how you can change your brand when the perception of you is getting in the way of what you want to do with your life.  Making connections in your chosen field, getting the feel of it through informational interviews and volunteering, developing new skills where they seem useful, acquiring a mentor: all of these really make you the person who can do the job and build your reputation for being that person.

You can also toot your own horn, as long as you stay on key.  “Explain why your transition adds value to others and is an authentic extension of your true nature.”

Dorie Clark was generous to me about a year ago as I started to make communications the center of my work. She helped me to say, “Communications has always been the part of my work I did the best. I’ve done a lot of it in my previous work. Now, I am looking to make it the center of what I do.” If you don’t know Dorie personally, you can still get her advice in her authentic voice in Reinventing You. Highly recommended.

 

In Nonprofits We Trust

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The nonprofit agency where I used to work ran a Head Start program.  Head Start serves children ages three to five.  You would think that parents of six-year-olds would forget all about the program. Image

Yet long after their children went on to kindergarten, parents kept coming back to the Head Start program.  They asked for help getting affordable housing, food, and clothing.  They asked the Head Start staff for advice about school choice, immigration, parenting, and even how to respond to violence in their homes.

Our Head Start staff had become trust agents.

As Chris Brogan and Julien Smith say in their book of the same name, there’s an unbelievable amount of information available today because of the internet, yet some of it is partial, wrong, or even dangerous. If you can show people that you know what you’re talking about and you are on their side, they will trust you and listen to you.

Nonprofits are in an especially good position to win people’s trust.  Look what the Head Start program did.

  • They spent time with parents. Teachers invited parents to assist in the classrooms, stop to talk when they picked up their children, come to parent meetings, and actually help run the organization through the Policy Council.
  • They listened.  Head Start hired staff who spoke the languages the parents spoke, and the staff made sure the parents’ words went to the ears of the program director.
  • They showed they were “one of us.”  Half the people who worked in the program were former Head Start parents!
  • They found and shared useful information, from how immigrants could cook healthier food that would still be familiar in their culture to how learning disabled students could get services from the public schools.
  • They built and leveraged relationships that would benefit the parents and children. Doctors did free medical care.  Bankers gave free workshops on credit and family finances. Another department of the same agency helped families avoid being evicted from their homes, while partner agencies gave books and conducted literacy activities with families.

Some nonprofits are based in a geographic community, while others create communities of interest through their work.  Either way, they are ideally positioned to be “trust agents.”  All they need is the internet savvy.  There are ways to learn that.

Do you work for a nonprofit that has earned the trust of the community (real world or online)?  How do you do it?

 

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review

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You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there’s a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Robin Hood Marketing  Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.Andresen, until recently the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn’t let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves–we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.Read the book for the “Robin Hood rules” she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are “focus on getting people to do something specific” and “appeal to your audience’s values, not your own.”

Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They’ll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don’t, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

  • What can we ask people to do that will be “fun, easy, popular, and rewarding”? (for supporters)
  • “Who wins when we win?” (for partners)
  • How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists–they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That’s what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that’s been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately–even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers’ Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual’s behavior, or even a lot of individuals’ behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody’s lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it’s just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That’s selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

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