Keynote: A Checklist for Prosocial Messaging Campaigns

Keynote: Joy and Grief at the End of the World as We Know It

Communications work at its best is collectively breathing life into the world we want to live in. Creating space for grief, healing, and growth is required. But, with our current pace of work and competing responsibilities, is it possible to do that AND implement comprehensive, action-oriented campaigns grounded in the reality of now? Anna will share some insight into the balance communicators must strike in building out campaigns that are values-centered and as internally impactful as they are externally compelling.

Keynote: When morals and mission collide, where do we go from here?

What do you do when your mission-based organization isn’t living up to its mission? How do you hold your organization accountable?

Keynote: Creating Compelling Messages for Controversial Times

In a country that's so polarized, how do you make messages that appeal to both sides of the debate? How do you talk about topics like mental health and substance use disorders, without increasing stigma? Using examples from PGP's evidence-based campaigns, Dr. Joe Smyser, CEO, will explain how his team connects with communities and forms compelling messages for controversial topics.

5 Ways to Nurture and Strengthen an Engaged Supporter Base in Times of Uncertainty

A #GivingTuesday Case Statement: Our Successful Strategy for Digital Communications, Gift Officers, and Collaboration Magic

How to Streamline Your Communication Strategy So You Can Increase Your Time, Money and Impact

Between wearing too many hats, being understaffed, and not having a clear strategy, donor communication tends to take the back burner. Nonprofits are left without a consistent source of income and their impact suffers. In this session, I’m going to show you what a leveraged communications strategy looks like and how to write up a strategy that actually produces better plans. Three nonprofits will share their experience using this kind of leveraged strategy and show you what their plans look like. You will leave this session with three tips for creating a leveraged communications strategy that does part of the work for you, a sample strategy, and an easy path to get started right away. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to improve and manage your existing strategies, regardless of your organization’s size.

Takeaways:

• Tips for creating a leveraged communications strategy
• How to write a strategy that produces results
• How to get started on their strategy right away with a sample for reference

Train All Staff to be the Marketing Team

Case Study:  Follow along as the Poe Center for Health Education tackled the challenge of effectively training a staff of 45 to promote the organization: persuading the nay-sayers, getting staff to buy in, creating what to say, and when, where and how to say it. Using a team approach of staff and board members, the Poe Center's marketing/public relations committee successfully tackled the challenge and are making progress towards an entire organization of marketers.

Takeaways:

Using a grassroots model to get staff to buy in

Integrating board and staff efforts to develop a training

Developing dynamic ways to train staff

How Progressives Take Back the Internet

By fusing together social listening with a CRM of micro-influencers, Main Street One and Natalie Carey with Potential Energy Coalition will walk through how we captured the organic narrative happening around a social issue and deployed hundreds of messengers to deliver trusted messages that turned the tide.

Takeaways

• How P2P / micro-influencer content is the future of campaigns
• How to take insights from social listening to actionable message direction
• The power of using real stories as digital advertising to motivate and persuade at scale

Chat Bots for Advocacy and Voter Engagement

Learn about the power of chat bots for advocacy and turning out voters!

Takeaways:

• How to use chat bots for advocacy
• Pros and cons of chat bots, including a variety of use cases
• Lessons learned

We Didn't Start the Fire: Strategies for Nonprofits to Avoid Political Firestorms and Keep from Getting Burned

The nonprofit sector increasingly finds itself at the center of political debates, further blurring the line between the political and social sectors. There are methods – rooted in strategic framing and crisis preparedness – that nonprofits and foundations can use to play a role in politically-charged issues while protecting their reputations in the long term. This workshop will explore the basic elements of reputation management for nonprofits, prevention techniques that allow nonprofit leaders to assess risk and navigate around it, and methods of assessing ideological attacks on your brand and determining an appropriate response. We will explore evidence-based messaging strategies designed to help social sector leaders avoid common political traps and stay above the fray, while contributing substantively to the public dialogue.

Takeaways

The basic elements of reputation management for nonprofits

Prevention techniques that allow nonprofit leaders to assess risk and navigate around it

Methods of assessing ideological attacks on your brand and determining an appropriate response

Make Your SEO Work for You

Organic search results are critically important to nonprofits and are earned through effective Search Engine Optimization. After you’ve generated your website’s current SEO score it can be hard to know where to start. Using the guidelines that we employ when we run SEO audits for our progressive nonprofit clients, we’ll introduce the basic language and concepts of SEO and then walk them through the score improvement process. Each attendee will leave with a glossary and a checklist to audit their organization’s website and identify next steps.

Takeaways:

• What is SEO, how it works, and why it matters
• Explanation of SEO scores, what they mean, and how to determine yours
• Steps you for the non-developer to improve your website's score and

how to triage what will impact your score most!

Building Long Term Engagement in the Era of Black Lives Matter

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, people across America flooded civil rights nonprofits with first-time donations. In order to turn this momentum into enduring change, though, these organizations have to quickly adapt their communications infrastructure and systems to fully engage hundreds of thousands of new supporters—no easy feat!   This session tells the story of how one nonprofit - the Advancement Project - urgently upgraded its organizational capacities in 2020, so that casual donors can be transformed into long-term racial justice champions. Attendees will learn how the Advancement Project created a comprehensive supporter engagement roadmap to guide these efforts. This session will give firsthand insight into: how to use data to understand the needs and interests of new supporters and develop a segmentation strategy; welcoming and listening to new supporters, and weaving them into the movement; establishing governance and ownership for digital outreach to increase coordination across internal teams; and evaluating and evolving technical capabilities in response to change.

Takeaways

• How nonprofits can quickly improve communications systems and processes in response to rapid changes in their operating environment
• How strengthening data and communications infrastructure improves how organizations can engage with new supporters
• The critical importance of nonprofit communications in sustaining and strengthening the Movement for Black Lives

Mastering Data Visualization: A Case Study from IDELA

Effective data visualization helps organizations communicate clearly and empowers audiences and supporters to take action. Yet it can be frustrating and time-consuming to implement data visualization successfully.  In this 1-hour session, you’ll learn about a cost-effective, open-source approach to data visualization recently pioneered by IDELA, a product of Save the Children—one that’s highly adaptable, easily updated, and relevant for decision makers across our mission-driven sector.  After a brief overview of data visualization benefits and opportunities, the IDELA team will offer a presentation and demo on their breakthrough tool, the IDELA Data Explorer. Attendees will benefit from their lessons and experiences piloting this innovative tool and learn how their own organizations might explore similar approaches to making data come alive.  NOTE: We envision this as a 1-hour session, but a 15-minute version can also be presented as part of a panel.

Takeaways:

• Cost-effective ways to engage audiences using data visualization
• Successes and failures in developing an open-source data tool, and implementing it with diverse communicators across the globe
• Data visualization principles and practices that make it easy for users to understand complex information and take action

Panel: Directing at a Distance

The pandemic caused most of our teams to scurry to work from home in a hurry. In the past year, many nonprofit communicators have thrived in this new environment engaging co-workers and supporters in novel, exciting ways. On this panel learn from a few of those thrivers and get tips on how to direct at a distance.

Panel: Online Activation

The Power of Guest Blogs

Presenter: Laurie Ehrlich

In a cluttered marketplace, an authentic and powerful voice will be the one to break through. An authentic content channel, like a guest blog, will give you a platform to showcase your expertise and talk about that know-how on multiple digital channels.

Takeaways:

• The benefits of a blog
• Who should write for the blog
• How to track progress

How to Create a Simple and Effective Lead Gen Strategy

Presenter: Heidi Gollub

Successful Project Case Study: How a free resource led to national press and growing our parent database by 100% in three months

Takeaways:

• How to create free resources to attract a new audience
• How to attract a national audience with earned media
• How to use Google ads to drive traffic to your resources

Case Study: Our Wave

Presenter: Kyle Linton

Our Wave is a nonprofit that was started in 2018 to create a place for survivors of sexual violence to safely and anonymously share their stories. After two years in operation, we have reached over 100,000 survivors through the tools and educational content that we have developed. Through this event, I hope to share some of the ways that we assembled a diverse team of individuals and created a large amount of impact with limited funds.

Takeaways:

• Leveraging technology to scale nonprofit impact
• How to leverage software tools to monitor and adjust impact
• How to build a blended culture of volunteers with hard and soft skills

Panel: Vivacious Virtual Events

COVID-19 means social distancing, but it didn't mean we had to give up on socializing! Learn from nonprofit communicators on how they successfully pulled off online events during the pandemic.

Case Study: Taking Your Event Virtual and Knocking It Out of the Park

Presenter: Julia C. Toepfer

Like many companies and organizations, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) had to make some tough decisions about our upcoming events when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We couldn’t afford to completely cancel one of our largest fundraising events of the year or stop offering our critical legal services, so we went full-on virtual. In the first eight months of COVID-19, NIJC transitioned a 1,000+ person fundraising luncheon, a 5K, a celebration for our volunteers, educational presentations for community members, and legal clinics and workshops to entirely online formats. And it was hugely successful. So much so that virtual events will be an essential part of NIJC’s communications, fundraising, and program strategy going forward. We gained many more supporters and new donors, reinvigorated existing supporters, reached new audiences, and in some cases, raised more money than our normal in-person events. Here’s how we did it and how you can too.

Takeaways:

• Why online events can be critical to achieving your organizational goals and mission
• Most important things to consider when transitioning an offline event to online
• Roadmap for planning and executing an online event

How to bring connection, stories and meaning to life through virtual events

Presenter: Molly Sutherland

Our 500+ Person Gala celebrating our 15th Anniversary was scheduled for March 27. Yup. Learn how we turned that into a powerful and meaningful marketing campaign culminating in a 30-minute virtual event. I'll spill ALL the tips and tricks I wish we knew at the beginning of planning!

Takeaways:

• Why it's not as simple as just putting an in-person event online (and how to tell your team that!)
• How to plan an event that takes advantage of what virtual has to offer!
• Prioritizing bringing connection and stories to life through the screen

Workshop: Google Grants

Google Ad grants is a free $10K in search advertising a month. But spending all that money and using your grant effectively – while keeping in line with Google’s ever-changing rules – can seem like another full-time job. In this course, learn everything you need to know to efficiently manage your ads and get the most out of your monthly $10K. BONUS: Learn from a nonprofit that used Google Ads and blog content to grow our website traffic 222%!

Workshop: Spokesperson Prep for Civilians

We tell ourselves that the best spokesperson is the one who tells a story. So why do we limit our spokesperson pool to EDs, presidents and comms directors? This session will help comms staff prepare members, stakeholders, clients, activists and volunteers to serve as spokespeople for your organization. Their stories bring life to tables, charts and data. Partner with them to craft statements, stories, op-eds and responses to interview questions that are authentic, meaningful - and hit all your talking points.

Takeaways:

• How to help members/volunteers/clients/etc. craft an effective story
• How to link the story to the message
• Tips on working with inexperienced speakers

Advocacy Communications: The Good, The Bad, and The Wildly Successful Subtitle: Small Budgets and Big Messages

Success. In the world of politics and engagement with elected officials, many will tell you that you need a team of lobbyists and a large budget to be successful. I'm here to tell you that those requirements are the exception, not the rule. Especially, when like most nonprofits and trade associations I know, have ENGAGED, ACTIVE advocates. As we move forward in continually uncertain times, it is vital that nonprofit professionals learn the skills needed to effectively communicate with elected officials and get priorities accomplished.

Takeaways

• Big Budgets DO NOT Equal Success: Some of the largest organizations who spend more than some nonprofits' yearly budgets on advocacy lose to those same nonprofits on key issues for their constituents.

• Money DOES NOT Vote--Constituents Do! Nonprofits have always had the best tool going for advocacy: PEOPLE. You are some of the best at making connections with them on issues they care about. Translate that connection to success!

• What happens when 7,000 emails are sent to one person's inbox? Powerful advocacy tools and how to wield them effectively.