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Listening Before Telling

So much communication practice in civil society falls prey to the disease of Scaling Up Talking. Thus I would read Ricardo Ramirez and Wendy Quarry's forthcoming book Communication for Another Development: Listening before Telling, purely on the strength of the title. They base their ideas about communication on the development principles first laid out by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation: needs-oriented, endogenous, self-reliant, ecologically sound, and based on structural transformation. I invite you to ask this question of all your communication programs: Do you listen before telling? Posted: 5/18/09; 6:07:55 PM #

Survival Strategies for the Arts

It's John Killacky's emphasis on leveraging social capital that really hooked me on his Survival Strategies for the Arts, in the latest issue of Blue Avocado. Of his ten ideas, my favorites included these: (2) Place matters, (3) Invite the public in, (4) Let audiences co-author meaning, (8) Risk failing, (9) Have the Conversation, and (10) Become a cultural citizen. He adds a postscript on what audiences can do, although given his approach I really wonder whether that word - "audience" - oughtn't be in quotes. Posted: 5/18/09; 5:56:48 PM #

Social Strategies & Supporting Tactics for Viral Campaigns

When I talk to organizations about "viral" strategies, I consistently get the impression that what people want is to take their existing messages and somehow "make" them go viral. Sometimes they realize that they need different messages. Rarely do they realize how much they have to invest in understanding their stakeholders and in strengthening the capacity of those stakeholders to be communicators. In Social Strategies & Supporting Tactics for Viral Campaigns, Sverre Sjothun addresses several of these issues. I particularly like how, if you go with the epidemiological metaphor, you need a population of healthy hosts in order to really spread a virus. What he doesn't emphasize is how that population needs to be richly connected. Just as swine-flu won't spread if everyone stays in their homes, messages won't spread if people aren't talking to each other. We seem to prefer to take time crafting images than nurturing those connections. What a waste! Posted: 5/18/09; 12:49:56 PM #

At the Intersection: Midwives of Nonprofit Technology
	Before the late nineties, it took genuine vision to to see the potential that information and communication technology had for civil society. In At the Intersection: Midwives of Nonprofit Technology, Jillaine Smith asks for your recollections of the people who had such vision. Posted: 5/18/09; 9:26:31 AM #