[roundtable] Communicating Your Brand & Key Messaging

5:11PM Feb 16, 2022

Speakers:

Valerie Neumark

Sia Magadan

Keywords:

audiences

people

organization

aspirational

share

mindsets

chat

feel

minutes

communicating

message

invite

design

group

person

rooted

talking

words

values

community

While we wait for everyone, feel free to grab your wake up beverage of choice or if it's afternoon where you are your mid day refresher.

As you're coming in if you have access to have your name and whatever organization you're a part of, so that when we do our break up group, our breakout groups, I don't combine people who are in the same organization that would be super helpful. Or if you know that you'd like to be with the people in your organization, then drop us a note to that effect as well.

Great to see some familiar faces and some new faces.

Another minute now we're we're ready?

You want to just start? Sure.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. This is routed first round table of the New Year communicating your brand and key message messaging, if you will, it's Wednesday, February 16. We are being recorded just so you know reminder to those who may just be joining us. Again, thank you so much. Next slide. Now for those of you who are new who exactly is rooted, we are a fully remote communications and branding organization. We also do website development. We are an organization that leads with our values. And what exactly are these values? We have them listed here. Anti racism definitely is very important to us route of actively combats racism within ourselves and invite others to join us. We believe in equitable access to opportunities and resources. If you ask me, that's the key to so many things. partnership through listening and building trust with many of our clients and in our coaching practice. We make it a point to be relational and not transactional. And you'll hear some of this today as we're going through our session. community led breakthroughs we build capacity by respecting and nurturing one another's diversity. collective learning leads to the most innovative and effective outcomes we found. We believe in a fearless curiosity. We invite you to bring your inner child to these sessions because they haven't been laid out in a while. Health and Healing so important, especially in the times that we are in. We believe in reflection, being flexible, and strength are not an end result but a continued practice. It's not a one off whenever you need to do things, go ahead and do them. Next slide.

So who are we?

My name is sia Magadan. I am the director of community engagement for rooted. I live here in the Bay Area in Concord. I am and for those of you who are visually impaired, I am a dark skinned African woman with a very lush and lively fro that's black with frosted tips. Dark brown eyes as well. I'm wearing a denim shirt. I currently reside on Miwok Bay land. So for those of you we like to definitely honor our indigenous brethren and recognize that we are on their land and so I'm going to hand it over now. Oh, more importantly, I am a new mom to the yummiest little boy ever. His name is Arturo and thankfully my husband is home so todos with hanging out with a dad today and I'm going to pass it over to my co host Valerie

Hi, everyone. My name is Valerie Neumark, my pronouns are she and they, and I'm the Director of Strategy and education at rooted. I live in the San Francisco East Bay on Chinua Aloni. Land. And what else Oh, and then about me, I am a red haired person with blacker than the glasses. Today I'm wearing kind of a red tie dye V neck shirt under my black and white rooted hoodie, because you know, gotta represent. So thank you all for being here. And I put in the chat already, to share your welcome and introductions, your name organization pronouns, where you're coming from, and we can paste the native land link in there if you don't know, whose land you are on. And anything you'd like to share with us today that you want to bring or that you hope to gain. And then any accessibility needs that you want to share. And please, if you're, if the chat is not accessible to you today, then please turn on your mic now and share with us so that we know and can make sure we're repeating things out loud. And in the last thing to that is that the live transcript is going and and also let us know if you're not able to access that the link you should have received in your email already, or to be able to click through from your zoom screen, but let us know if there's any other issues and things we need to attend to at this time. Huh.

Thanks so much. Hello, good morning, Michelle. So please feel free to drop your name organization's pronouns and where you're coming from shout outs to Maryland. It's where I grew up in the silver spring area. recently moved to California like five years ago, because I was snowed out. I'm so tired of digging my car out in the snow. I know. But I still keep Maryland deep in my heart, good morning, Stacey. Thank you for joining us. And please, we want to definitely make this as inclusive as possible. If there are any accessibility means that you feel free to share with us. Please do if you are someone who does not want to have their camera on please do not feel compelled. things going on in the background at your spot. That is fine. We welcome you to just be off camera and stay with us with your ears. All right. Hello, Jeremy. I know Mandela partners. Alright, so today, here's our agenda. Definitely starting with our welcoming community agreements, Intro then we're going to start out with the simple reflection, thinking about the communication and opportunities that we may have missed out on. Definitely going and then we're going into a breakout, where you will be paired with other individuals as we work through and do a solution style room, then we'll do a share out with the entire group. Then we'll move into communicating with our aspirational audiences, those groups that we've had a little difficulty getting with, then do some more reflection, another breakout another share out and then we'll be done. We definitely want to honor your time today and just make this as beneficial as possible. Hello, Alicia. Jenna, Jackie. Thank you so much. Alright, next slide. Okay, Zoom etiquette. Real quick. We're just gonna touch a couple of things. We wanted to be exhaustive. Be aware of your camera angle, we invite you to stay fully clothed, but no dry cleaning is necessary. We don't need you to dress up. But we definitely don't want to see your summer outfit just yet. Please use your name and organization. Feel free to drop that so that we know how to address you and include your pronouns. Why? Because it's simple. If it's important to you, it's important to us and keep your mic turned off unless you are responding. Thank you. Alright,

so a little bit here about the design Justice Network and just about how rooted thinks about us all being designers, everyone here. You know, probably a lot of the people in your world. If you don't already think of yourself as a designer, now is the time. So why is this pertinent we really like to ground our work in the design Justice Network principles, as well as the liberatory design process. And the ideas behind all of this is really to embody our values and think about how we can communicate in ways that are more inclusive when we say that we you know, are focused on anti racism when we talk about centering those who are closest and most impacted by the decisions and the outcomes of the processes that we're a part of. What we mean by all of that is to, to think about the ways that we can be designing with designing in community rather than designing for anyone that is part of our community. So here we use design to sustain, heal and empower, as well as to seek liberation from exploitive and oppressive systems. If you're not familiar with the design, Justice Network principles or the liberatory design process, we highly, highly recommend. Taking a look there, especially the liberatory design process has some great tools that help us center our practices and think about how we can co create and CO construct a new paradigm of design and one that's diverse and inclusive and equitable and healing for each other and for our communities as a whole.

Alright, so next up, we have the community agreements that allow us to create a space of belonging, we definitely encourage you to approach everything with curiosity, be open to new ways of doing and thinking challenge yourselves, be okay with discomfort, sit with it, accept and expect non closure, sometimes you may get to, you know, put the period at the end of the sentence. Sometimes it's a comma, sometimes it's a hyphen, engage and be present. practice mindful listening. I know we are all so busy and so much is going on but as much as possible for you. Try to focus and be with us. Be aware of power dynamics, consider the space you consume, speak from your lived experience and always assume best intent, and acknowledge the impact of your words on others. Except restraints as presented. We invite you to ideate Yes, and embrace being messy for those of my Taipei friends. Put aside the perfectionism because this is like a teaching hospital where you're allowed to fail in a safe environment and see what sticks and what doesn't. Now this next one is I like to call it Vegas rule, Sesame Street rules, what's shared here stays here, what's learned here leaves here, be willing to slow down notice and name what is coming up in the room. And this is like we said, a space of belonging. If something is coming up, be okay with naming it. If you don't have words for it, it's alright, throw it out there together, maybe we can come up with something we invite you to definitely number nine is so important. Take care of yourself and have fun. If you have bio needs, definitely take your turn off your camera, do what you need to do. We do have breaks programmed in here. So we want to let you know that we're being mindful. And then if there's anything else that you have used in your own organization, feel free to drop that in the chat, so that we can add it to future trainings. All right, 2022. We've titled it the year of the great follow through. And what do we mean by that we previously on our blog, started this year with a post talking about performative ally ship and how things have kind of waned since everything took off in 2020. And so there were a lot of promises and a lot of things that people pledged to do that kind of got stuck in the pipeline of progress, if you will. And so we want to be an a resource for organizations to follow through on what it is they want to do. So in communicating your brand and key messages, our hope is to be able to do that with you here today. Next slide.

So hopefully, you got our email yesterday, and I also pasted it in the chat. But your little bit of pre work coming into our session was to think about an aspirational audience that you've been having trouble connecting or engaging with. And this can be as you know, simple as someone or a type of person that you have engaged with in the past and somehow that that connection dropped off, or as your organization has pivoted during COVID and you're directing your work towards new new groups of people and and think across the range not just in terms of the people that you're in service to maybe there's people within your community that you're indirectly associated with versus directly. Or maybe there are people that are sort of like one step away. So you know, you provide books to different schools, but the students within those schools are sort of not directly an audience that you interact with, but it's an aspirational audience that you want to connect with, for example. You know, oftentimes people will start to send her donors in this work and We just really encourage you not to do that and to think about other audiences that you may have missed or marred your messaging to them and made your community felt feel less inclusive, less accessible to them. And so this is really a time in our space today, as sia said earlier, for experimentation, a place where you can feel safe to make mistakes and, and know that we're we're trying to that the only ways we can really change our communication practices and stop reproducing some of the harm that has been done over centuries, is to be thoughtful, and to take the time to rethink how we're communicating and what we're saying and what might be influencing what we're saying. So hopefully, as we go through these next couple slides, that will give you a little more time to think on that homework. And here, the reason that we do all of this work is that your brand is central to everything that you do. A lot of the time, people will talk about brand, as though it sits under your business goals. But we really like to think of brand and values and mission and vision and your community as truly being in the center. And that by having a strong brand that you're able to communicate clearly. And to leverage it will build capacity and build your reputation within your community. And then that will lead to greater cohesion and trust, which will in turn build not only external, global identity, but the operational capacity of your organization. So think about even when you're doing your hiring, what do what are your hiring practices? What does it sound like, when you put a job posting out into the world is your brand are your values, your mission, your vision being communicated clearly to the type of people that you're trying to attract to your organization. So here we have a link also, to a great article within the Stanford Social Innovation Review that we you know, just highly recommend people taking a look at it's quite long. So you know what I read it the first time it was over a couple sessions. But take some time to reflect on this work. And, and, and what brand really means within your organization, and how you're talking about that grant.

And I've just dropped the link into the chat. So for those of you who are following along and are unable off the slide, I made it that much easier and dropped it into the chat. So question to get us thinking as we're about to move into our work. If there was evidence that your communications were limiting your impact, possibly undermining your case for equity and missing those you seek to help? Would you do something about it? Have you all had meetings within your organization where we're wondering why aren't we attracting this group of people? Does our target audience know that they are our target audience? Consider Where might you be experiencing an illusion of progress? All right, next slide. Okay, so here, we have our first, you know, example, you've identified your target audiences, you've done your interviews, but somehow we're just kind of stuck in the pipeline of process. And what does that look like? You have people on your team where we're working on doing incremental additions. And to that I always ask, how long is incremental? Like, what spent amount of time is that? Because sometimes this is where things go to die? As far as okay, we've had, we've had a visioning committee, we've had the board weigh in, and then there just is no product, there's no execution. You know, what is the holdup as far as getting to where we want to be? Things to think about.

All right, so we're gonna start with an individual writing and reflection. What I want you to do is think about your aspirational target audience, reflect on a time when communication was missed or marred in some way, consider what you could have done differently, or what you might need an outside perspective around. Some examples are in your quest to grab the attention of donors or you to humanizing the people you are in service to what an impacted individual or a community partner feel like you understood their perspective. And these are just simple things. I know for me, my background is in fundraising and development as well as out of school time planning, and a lot of the terms sometimes we use even in our end of year campaigns are kind of what's the word I'm looking for it It takes the dignity out of what it is we're trying to do I always say like in your grant writing, are you bringing dignity to the to the populations that you're trying to fund? Or are you using the key terms to grab the attention of the donors to make them feel good, but in that, you know, and it comes across, even in the things that are going out and the people that you're trying to help are seeing these and they're like, yeah, these terms are not very complimentary in describing the situation. So take a couple moments. And what we want you to do is just think about Oh, no.

Oh, I was just gonna say we'll take about between about six to eight minutes to do your individual writing reflection. And then we'll take a tiny screen break and then move into our breakout groups. So I will start a timer and we'll give you about a one minute you know, alert before we start to move everyone

anyone have any questions? Go ahead and do some writing and reflection. Okay, just

about one more minute, is everyone does anyone need more time or you feel

ready all right. So we have a little thing that we like to call the 2020 20 as a way of keeping yourself refreshed, so every 20 minutes, we invite them to look 20 feet away from your screen for 20 seconds and you do this three times. So I generally do left above and then right. So we're going to start now definitely take a moment, your 2020 20 I'll meet you back here in like 60 seconds All right, thank you so much, feel free to take that back to your organization's and use it as you will. For this first breakout, there will be groups of three self facilitated, you will have about 30 or so minutes. Each person will have two minutes to share their scenario examples spend about one more minute on any clarifying questions so the other members of the group will be able to ask them and then you have three to five minutes to discuss potential future interventions as well as underlying assumptions to your challenge. We invite you to get inspiration from each other's reflections and feel free to request feedback or perspective on your own if it would be helpful to your creative process. So val is going to have you all broken up and then you will go into your rooms and please be mindful we will also have a timer so we'll let you know when we're getting close to the time to reconvene. But definitely take advantage of this introduce yourselves to each other also recognize each other's pronouns.

me it think we'll be okay because I think our pros the presentation part in the second half I don't think it's going to take us 10 minutes but we gave ourselves 10 minutes since I like intro part. So I think our welcome just takes 15 and we need to stop kidding myself.

hoping you had and a beneficial time in your breakout rooms? Are there? Is there anyone who would like to share on behalf of their group? Or what were some of the interesting observations or some of the things that you are coming away with? Pick yourself off of you please feel free to

I'll talk and this is Stacey from Fuse theatre. And it was interesting in our group, like just really, I think because of the pandemic, we're all just really struggling to figure out what is our aspirational audience? You know, for a theatre company. We've flipped around so many times in the last two years. You know, I think it's, it's even hard to, to just who do we want to reach? Like it's and we were all all expressing that I think in our group, my group can speak up if they had a different viewpoint. But I think we're all sort of struggling with how to what turn what it's or what aspirational audience do we want. So just identifying has been a challenge, I think for everybody. Hmm,

that's interesting as a theater group, so then you have you all move to online performances slowly.

Not slowly, we did it in a month, because we were in the middle of a festival. And so within a month, we had to flip around like a bunch of theater artists who are used to working in community in front of live people being on screen. And so you know that saying about we're building the plane, as we're flying it, we were trying to figure out how to build the plane while we flew it like it was. It was a crazy time. So we we didn't even think about who we're trying to reach. It was a now. And now that our challenges were like this small company rooted in the Bay Area. We have artists in New York, we have three artists in New York who are part of our company, and we have audiences all over the country. But so it's just I don't even know anymore who our audiences it's, and we're going back to in person in May. It's our first in person since 2020. So no idea what I'm doing right now. That's why I'm here. I need to get re centered Val to refocus.

Awesome, thank you for sharing.

All share a sort of totally different kind of theme that I felt like I heard from one other person in my group, which is that sometimes it's easy to like use words about equity, and living them and like, and like being like, what do we mean when we say this? Are we really doing what we are saying that we're doing when we say that we're centering equity, prioritize prioritizing health equity? Like I personally think like when you're in the communication space, you can really feel that words like are these just words or like, is it something that we're really doing and what would it mean to really be doing that? So that was a theme that I heard a little bit in our group.

Is that one of those? Remember, earlier I was talking about the incremental changes or the barriers to progress. And so we can get lost the word sound great. But then when you are like in practice, is this really happening? Or is it one of those things where people are like it'll happen? You know, we're moving towards that. How many times we heard we're moving towards that. And we've been moving towards it for like, two years, I was like it's gonna happen or not. Thank you for sharing a little of both. Yeah, definitely. Anyone else want to share out? So we've heard audiences are changing. And we're getting lost in the use of those really good buzzwords.

I think another another challenge that we face. So can you hear me? Yes. Oh, okay. It's it's like, another Fallon challenge is when an organization has the aspiration to reach different audiences, but maybe doesn't actually know what programming would, you know, attract that kind of audience? It's like, where, you know? How do how to how does one get, you know, you know, help with that, you know, just because if you're only if you're predominantly attracting a certain kind of audience and want to break that open a bit, it's just I think some of it involves change, you know, changing some of the programming or like, at least adding on to the programming, but I'm needing help to do that authentically and respectfully, and kind of all those things.

Oh, that's a good one. How much input? Are you getting? Or do you have any relational ties with maybe a member, you know, maybe a subject matter expert from the demographic that you're trying to reach? Or someone who's already ingrained in the community where you could begin a potential partnership there, that way, you can also get data information. And then maybe there's things you already have, but it's one of those things where there's a disconnect where they don't know or you all aren't advertising or putting it out there in a manner that would bring those people in? Mm hmm. Yeah. It's, it's hard, is at the other end, then you have, there's so many other things. I love the nonprofit spaces, we have so many different things going, then you have small shops, there are people, two teams of like four people trying to do everything. And it's like,

that kind of that's kind of ours, it says it's a very small, yeah, kind of trying to keep all the balls in the air, and then knowing that adding on would actually increase the audience and make the organization stronger, and that kind of thing. Mm hmm. Okay. Awesome,

thank you for sharing. Now, as they're sharing. If as you're sitting there, and you're thinking about something that could be a possible solution, or something you feel like a thought that maybe one of our friends who've shared could pursue definitely a drop in the chat, unmute yourself, our names are up there. So you can call the person by name and say, Hey, I have an idea for the theater for fusion so that we can because I'm wondering who hasn't attended a show, you know, when you think about, you know, aspiration audiences, and you're like, well, who's left? I'm like, Huh. Anyone else want to chime in, please feel free. Another things that I was sharing with them with our little group was the how what you said really had an impact. Before the break out. It had an impact on my thinking about our website. You know, like what you said, made me think, hmm, I opened my website and I look at it. And I realize it's interesting that we always have like white people helping brown and black people who got jobs would happen if we find pictures that are the other way around. And we work with people with disabilities. But we we help actually companies, through our disable disabled workers, and why did we actually show our disabled workers who are the professionals that are helping companies to make their websites accessible for everyone with any disability using any assistive technology device, greater than, you know, showing the person with a disability being held? Why don't we show actually people with disabilities, helping companies to increase their business making their websites accessible? So I just want to say thank you so much for your your presentation before the breakout because it definitely helped me start thinking about we definitely need to rebrand, we organize all our website. And by the way, high value probably remember me from Spanish speaking I don't work there anymore. I started at the Center for Accessible Technology in January.

So nice. I was excited to see you!

And thank you for sharing that were just like I was saying bringing dignity to equity, where we don't just show that and I'm going to date myself back in the day. Um, I don't know how many people remember Sally Struthers. They used to do these feed the children ads and my family were from West Africa. And they would be like the children are dying and she had this terribly weepy voice. It made it seem like and so as an African I was like, but we're not all starving. Why is she like what is? But it was the tear jerker, you know, especially in development with it, use the words and the imagery to extract the donations. And it just painted broad strokes of like, oh, everyone in Africa is just destined to this, like he, I know that you can't do that, you know. So thank you, Alicia, for sharing because it's true. You know, you definitely want to show that a physical disability does not mean that I can't be abused, or I don't have power. Anyone else

I just wanted to plus one to Jackie. And the use of words like buzzwords like equity and saying of the things and I feel like you were like saying the same words I say all the time, like what do we mean when we say this actually rooting into like, literal definitions and what is what are we talking about? And, you know, in our group, we were talking a little bit about that. And as storytellers it's like, well, we can tell stories, but if we don't have facts to back them up, then they're just fiction. And so in organizations having organizational policy and process that actually backs up the buzzword that you're using to generate funding and doors, audiences or capital or of any sort social or financial.

Thank you, Crystal. I think I want to pause there to say okay, I feel like the main thing that you know, a lot of us process crystal, you hit it on the head What is the process for your individual organization in order to see change enacted or to get the website redone? Like what are the policies so that we can go from okay, we recognize this thing is off, we recognize that this doesn't really capture our mission, our values, not hitting our target audience. What's the process to get it changed? You know, is it one of those things where you have to have at least everybody weigh in, and then this person is not here? This person can jump on the Zoom? Is it we're waiting for too much to happen? Like is it seamless? How do we go from okay, this is an issue. We're not really hitting our areas to boom, we can get it done. What's the process and that can be something to think about. That was a time for us to breaker. Alright, so we have a five minute break coming up. So definitely take that time to take care of any needs or issues that you need to feel free to turn your camera off. We will be here and we will reconvene back in five

so into the second half here we're going to focus on crafting some new key messaging so that you can really communicate your values and mission more effectively, I think part of in the breakout and and, you know, the share out the, like the ideas of how do we really put some of these things in practice? How do we, you know, not just have de IB equity, buzzwords that people are saying but that aren't actually embodying. And so spending this time again, to keep a lens of experimenting and to the liberatory design process says to build, build a think and learn. And I just really appreciate that. Because if we don't have a space to try new ideas and new concepts, like I said earlier, we're just going to reproduce the same things over and over again, because we're conditioned to do so. So our hope here in the second half, is to be able to experiment a little bit and then start to build a plan of engagement that can build trust and not feel transactional, to the aspirational audiences that we're wanting to interact with. And I think to Stacey's point of who, who's aspirational. That can be a whole other thing. And so I'm glad that that got elevated to because we have some tools that we can share out. And I'll make myself a note to include it in what we send, after our session today to help figure out who those new audiences might be. So you're moving on here. And so one of the things here is, does your brand messaging currently reflect your organizational values? And when we say that and think about that, it's, it's really, how are they being actualized? How are your values showing up in your programs? You know, do you have even explicit values that are listed on your website, or that are in your materials that everybody has access to and understands? Or is it more that there are these implicit values that people just sort of understand about you, but they don't know why they think that and routed actually had this exact experience. I think it was about two years ago now. And we were doing some stakeholder interviews. And people were saying like that they sort of understood what our values were, but they didn't, they didn't know if they actually need those to be true, they just sort of like thought that they were true. And that was kind of an eye opening experience to us that we were like, Oh, we have not sat and articulated our values clearly enough. So then we actually went through a values exercise and got really explicit, which is why you now see that slide earlier in our presentation. So when you're thinking about this, do you think about it? And through the lens of like, do you currently have a one size fits all message that you're using? And is that unintentionally excluding audience members, and I'm gonna say that again, because sometimes we don't really think about how we might be portraying something will actually exclude the very people that we're trying to reach. Because oftentimes, it's through a very white lens. Because our society, you know, has sort of conditioned us to center to center whiteness, right? And so how do we, how do we undo that? How do we dismantle it? How do we using our words and our imagery and you know, to Alicia has points earlier, sort of disrupt the the things that people oftentimes are seeing, so if you did audit your message, and looked across all of the things that you're currently saying, or the images you're currently using, what changes would you make, and it's okay, if you don't know, but if something like feels icky, that's usually a good place to start. And, and we're gonna have, again, a reflection in just a minute to give you some time to think about that and to reflect on the places that might feel achy. And maybe you don't have the words yet to describe what you think is problematic. But that's what we can be here to help each other uncover. And take note, for those who have experienced our cohort in the past or might be interested. This is the kind of thing where we go a lot deeper into this and sort of try and break it apart.

So what we want to do now is share at least two of the mindsets from the liberatory design framework, and you've heard us referenced this before, in my opinion. liberatory design allows you to be more unintentional in your design process. It requires you to do a lot of self reflection with the goal of minimizing the effects of biases and maximizing the potential for non oppressive partnership. Being self reflective allows you to become more aware, it increases your capacity to work with humility, curiosity and courage. It requires you to acknowledge and challenge your own assumptions to uncover you know what is unfamiliar to me in this situation, and maybe the whys of why we're doing what we're doing. It also requires you to ask yourself, How does my identity, my gender, my class, my race, any other identifiers, position me relatively close to privilege or oppression. It also requires you to seek out new knowledge about privilege and oppression and expand your own awareness and understanding of what equity means. So it actually helps you to do more follow through as opposed to just using the words. So one of the mindsets is practicing self awareness. A lot of what I just basically said is here, but I love how they have created the slide deck. And we can also drop that into the chat afterwards so that you can see I think they're about like 12, mindsets, and all. But this is one, we just want to highlight two or so for the sake of the session. Practicing self awareness, who we are determines how we design looking in the mirror reveals what we see how we relate and how our perspectives impact our practice. All right, next slide. Take action to learn another mindset. And the complexity of oppression must be addressed with courageous ongoing action experiment as a way to think and learn without attachment to outcome. So we call this a low risk experimenting, that gets us past being stuck or needing to get it right immediately. This is like why we call it a fail safe environment. This mindset right here says, Okay, we're going to do what we need to do in order to learn so that we can come out better. So we're using these mindsets, we're going to think about our key messages, and what we currently have and think about all the external facing materials that are going out your one pagers, if you will, your website, any sort of like, you know, fundraising material, or things that you do to talk about your organization and the programming all of those things, what are some of the messages that are on there, and are they effectively communicating your mission and values. Finally, what we'll try to do is in the second half, develop a plan of engagement that builds trust and does not feel transactional. Next slide.

So to that point, we're going to spend, again, about six to eight minutes doing some individual reflection in writing, and thinking about how your identity or the identities of who you're messaging to shape how it's communicated, and therefore how it's received. You know, don't feel embarrassed or ashamed, just be honest with yourself about your positionality, about your closeness to privilege, or distance from privilege, all of those kinds of things. You know, that's what why we love our self awareness slide. And so now we'll take an opportunity to try to rewrite or edit one of your key messages to be more compelling to one of your aspirational audiences. And if you were struggling to come up with aspirational audiences, that's okay, pick an audience that you already are connected to, in some way, shape or form. We just always encourage you not to use donors as that audience in this space, we have plenty of time that we have to focus there in other spaces. So here when we're together, let's let's approach that differently. And then this last piece of brainstorming a way to experiment with this message out in the real world, something that feels low risk, something that feels safe to fail. Sometimes that's using social media, sometimes that's just asking another, you know, like sia said earlier, an expert in the field or an expert that you might know, that has closer connection and is more proximate to who you're trying to reach and discussing with them. Sometimes it's just gathering some people within your organization and having a brainstorm about it. There's lots of ways to do low risk. And hopefully here as we're together we'll provide an opportunity to do

I also say, Inquire within your organization's inquire of the person who rarely speaks up because you'd be surprised at what they've been observing. If there's someone who you you know, rarely chimes in or just kind of sits in observed a lot. You don't hear from them, ask them you know, their thoughts or you know they have any ideas and see if that yields any great insight.

All right, so some of you and your writing have looked away from your screen, but we're going to definitely encourage you to do another 2020 20. All right, thanks again. Okay,

so hopefully this time the breakout is fixed. Actually, I know that it is because I was able to fix it. But here I just pasted the break, break, break out activity into the chat. Your group's either we'll have three or four people. And so just make sure that you have to each person takes about two minutes to share what they wrote. And then give a minute for everyone else in the group to ask any sort of clarifying questions, and then move into discussing ways to hone or improve and if you if the person presenting has a specific thing that they'd really like people to comment on, please make sure to share that. And, you know, the last part here is just you know, get some inspiration from one another and come into the space knowing that we can copy each other and share and repeat things that maybe someone came up with that we really liked. and be able to use this as a space to generate some new ideas and get some feedback. So any questions before we move into our breakout rooms you'll have about 20 minutes. And again, we'll give you some alerts as we go along the way to help you pace yourselves. So here we go.

welcome back

okay, we're moving into what did we harvest harvest now let me stop my share so everyone can look at each other

there we go How was this for you all you can use your reaction emojis for you this last breakout room set that was it all right few chairs some thumbs up some love yes

all right anyone who are willing to share what did we harvest during the session? Were you able to get some solutions? Were you able to get some best practices or tips that could be beneficial to others

I think one thing that came up in our group was that it was hard to think of ways to reshape a message when like now without having really any additional guidance or constraints because we kind of felt like well I at least kind of felt like I had I thought about the message before and I couldn't really think of a different way to say it so I want I needed like other needed I needed people or help some other way besides just like thinking about it on my own were you able to share that with the group and then possibly come up with another way to think about it? Yeah, we started talking through it a little bit but not we didn't really come through like with concrete strategies yet the worst? We were definitely talking we're able to start talking at least

okay

would anyone based on that would anyone benefit from doing like an office hours? Were like CNI could just like host an hour and people could bring their message and, and we could all talk through them. Yeah, I see some thumbs up.

head nodding.

Whoo. Okay.

Is it tomorrow? Am I Sumaira? Mera mera? Yes, mera? The gentle beginnings of conversation spark any ideas? Or do you feel like you definitely could use the office hours to keep going with it?

I think I could definitely use the office hours to keep to keep going. Going with it. Um, but yeah, we're just working. But I think the conversation that we had was was definitely valuable for me. Awesome.

And they want to know the solution seems a lot harder than defining the challenge. I mean, it's like I feel like we we all have slightly different situations, but I think everyone in our group recognize what the challenge was, but actually how to address it. Is not always obvious. Mm hmm.

We didn't necessarily talk about the micro, but yet how if you also, just in a communications role had to, like bring others with you with a new message like, how do you generate? What was that? Yeah, Brian, right, especially from like leadership, who may have different ideas of like your audience,

is that where a lot of the barriers are, as far as leadership, quote, unquote, the board, are some of you contending with a this is how we've always done it type mindsets.

Ours is a 35 year old organization. So it's more reputation. You know, it's the reputation we have and who we serve, and try to break out of that mold. You know, that's been a little difficult. Mm hmm.

Sort of the, I guess the piece, I would always there's sort of two things I think about in this in this face is a backdoor rebrand, like, what are the small incremental things that you can change that people that are lower threshold and people might not notice. But you know, the people that you're that you're wanting to speak to, and connect to will notice the difference. And so it's a little bit asking for forgiveness. But oftentimes, people won't notice. And they'll just feed it, they'll notice, like later on, that something has shifted, but it can be incremental over time. And so there's another there's a card within the liberatory, design process cards that that speaks to that of like, of that incremental change. And I know we only have two minutes left. So yeah, the backdoor approach is great. And we can talk about that more. And we'll schedule and office hours coming up so that everyone can, you know, get a little bit more help with this stuff. So I'm just going to go through some last couple the quick slides here, I pasted into the chat already this engagement planning brief. And a lot of this can help you do a little bit of an audience audit. But in a more simplified way, for those of you that have used our, like spreadsheet discovery doc spreadsheet in the past, that's a little bit overwhelming, we kind of toned that down into something that's a little bit more simplified. So I pasted in the chat, it's in that resource folder. It's, you know, the URLs here on the screen as well. But just sort of helps you map out everything because sometimes you just need to write it all down. And then you'll start to see some of the trends and some of the things that are happening over and over again. And one of the things that C and I were talking about on the while you all were in breakouts was are you capturing who's attending and who's a part of your community and who you are reaching? And how are you identifying who's missing, that might help you figure out your aspirational audiences, because maybe you just need to audit who you've got again. But you'll see here, there's these four bullet points that helps you walk you through auditing your messaging your audiences, thinking about how you're engaging with people at different places, and their engagement journey with you. And then into some like really kind of nimble campaign planning in order to engage with them directly. This last piece is just a couple upcoming events, we'll have another community roundtable in just a couple weeks that we'll be sending out information about, as well as our next coaching cohort, it'll be five sessions, but over 10 weeks, to give some more space in between sessions for reflection, and all of that kind of good stuff, and multiple our multiple Office Hours along the way. And so if you are interested in that, you can email me and we'll do 50% off for coming to our different community events. And then we'll also be having a couple half day training, that are all about narrative framing all about the things that we're talking about today and how to actually work on and change that messaging through the lens that you're intending to and how to do that and kind of an incremental way. And so I know we're just a time please take the survey, I pasted it in the chat also send an email to follow up. It helps us improve all these sections know what was useful, what could have changed what we can do more. And then our last thing for our goodbye, is share one thing into the chat you'd like to commit to do the next time we write a new brand new message. A lovely rest of your day.

Thank you all so much for joining us. Please be on the lookout we will be sending a follow up emails to try to organize everyone for the office hour. If you have questions or just want to throw something out there, feel free to hang out or drop it in the chat. Thank

you good to see everyone

Felipe yay liberatory designed to everyone. Poor Thank you. Thank you. No, thank you. They see great Whoo.

Flip the needs of the audience Cool. Good.

Oh, actively try to speak to new audiences

Thank you very much. It's really you guys always put on wonderful programs. I was disappointed because our communications person from and homeless going older signed up, but then I didn't see her Mariah Bradley. Oh, okay. We now. I mean, you know, we're still small and mighty. But we have hired a communications person and I don't know what happened that she wasn't able to come. I mean, I was like, I as soon as you guys sent out the invite, I sent it to her and she signed up and I don't know what happened. I actually I don't know our phone number. I realized and I text I emailed her like, Where are you calling here? Oh, anyway.

Oh, she can watch the video. Yeah.

Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. Okay. Bye.