This is gonna be a community centered storytelling session AKA, talking about your projects talking about your brigade, how to connect with local press things like that. And downstairs, where the people in person I think is do we know what's going on other
and so the same the other session that's happening right now is identifying problems. And gaps with research than addressing social challenges with technology. I think that's downstairs. And then on gather is the brigade project branch with Micah and Gabrielle. So thank you for being here. And we'll get started.
Everyone, my name is Cole. I work on the Code for America, Code for America marketing team, and I've gotten to have the chance to work with a lot of brigades over the past two years on storytelling about various projects that you all have been working on, and very excited to share some of the examples of those today. And then also go through for anyone who is interested in sharing more stories about their brigades or their projects, just some tips that we can use and we'll try and work with anyone who wants to basically create a pitch about a project that you're working on, to have you leave this session with like a paragraph pitch, that we might be able to turn into a feature on code for America's website or help you get out to local media and the like.
I'm Erin Burnett. I'm on the network team here and I have a communications background and love making memes. So that shows up in this presentation.
Okay, first we're going to start with an icebreaker. So if you're in the room, I welcome you to turn to your neighbors at the table or if you're on Zoom you're welcome to plug into the chat. But I would love for everyone to share a mundane skill that you're really good at. So when I've asked this question in the past some answers that I've loved have been parallel parking shout out to anyone who was really good at that. Picking a ripe avocado at a grocery store. Building Ikea furniture, whatever it might be.
jangling necklaces, that's a great one.
Yeah, you have a few seconds to or a minute, I don't know. Share your skill with the people around you.
causes that they're good at icebreakers.
I'm really good at
nice Kristen Molina I feel like you have multiple you want to share
Yeah, if you want to shout out your skill we would love to hear it
I'm a professional jar opener. Yeah. Oh, any hard to open jars just give it to me and I just can't channel my energy into opening it.
That's an incredible skill.
Wonderful. What about this table?
I can usually like no scope where people's glasses are in their kitchen and just like walk in there and myself something without them. Or to say you can walk
into any kitchen and just know intuitively what's behind each cabinet. That's a great skill.
Whatever you are.
When I look at a Google Doc, I can tell if people just made the text bigger and bold and set it using proper header levels and I have to fix it.
Let's have both an identification and a fixing skill
we've got a parallel Parker that's great.
Okay. I'm really good at untangling things and I find real joy so if you have like a charger that's all tangled up, send it my way and I will work on it.
All right. I think something I'm really good at is remembering to not throw out the directions of like microwave meals. Because sometimes you know when you like get overconfident, toss it away and then have to go back into the recycling. I've gotten good about not doing that and your skill.
I'm really good at calculating the walking distance like to the minute of getting from mostly getting to the ferry terminal in Portland. Very specific
things that were shared in the chat, extreme organizing, and putting together Ikea furniture. Okay, I'm gonna turn this one over to em for the biggest challenge you might have in communicating about your brigade or project.
Okay. The Instacart orders here, by the way,
completely unrelated. Okay, so oftentimes with brigades, we might have a wonderful project we've put a ton of work into, and it's hard to get people to be as excited about it as you are. And it's also just hard capacity wise. You're already organizing the meetup. You're trying to recruit volunteers Oh, we've got to, like redo our onboarding process. We need to list things on the website and post to social media and maybe write a press release. This is a lot to do at once. So there are many challenges that we're dealing with with these projects and just telling your story in general. These are some that I've I've encountered with with my brigade in Maine. I think it's it's hard in a volunteer scenario to know where to start. Do we first post to social media? Do we have a plan first? Do we just learn how to talk about our projects? First? Do we make relationships with local press? It's kind of hard when you have 12 million things to do and you don't really know the order to do them and you don't know who to talk to. So do we talk to those local press people do we talk to or try to delegate tasks to people within our brigade to do that? And as much as we think these projects and what we're working on is the coolest thing in the world and it really is. Not everybody even knows what civic tech is or why it's so important. We're not in a scenario which in which people in the community know what we're doing. We're not like, Hey, we're a food bank. We need volunteers to help distribute food. It's actually takes five more steps than that to explain what civic tech even is. So these are some of the challenges that we face. And I want to introduce or invite everybody here to think about what storytelling and communication challenges you might have. And Cole mentioned, trying to walk away from this with a pitch and it's not like a fully written press release or anything. But given that we don't have that much time. If you do have a communications challenge. You're invited to start working on that right now. So that doesn't have to be about a specific project. It could be I just want more people to join our brigade. Great. you'll identify the audience, we can talk about that in the different steps. This could be I want to recruit more people into leadership for my brigade. It could be we want to find a new sponsor. It could be we want just you know the community to know about our project more so you're invited to either together with people at your table, or just solo start to think about that. And this is a time that you can use to walk away with like a written product that can hopefully be honed and used for many purposes.
I think especially in this room where we have people who are coming from all over the country, people who might not have that much of a background on your brigade. This can be a really good chance to sort of bounce ideas off of people who might have familiarity with civic tech, but who don't necessarily know about your specific project or what your brigade is working on, just to sort of get some feedback of where are these things obvious to me but might not necessarily be understandable to other people. I think we also have a really good opportunity in the room and I don't know if these are online, but these impact sprint posters that are all along the wall in the room and around the hallway outside are really good examples of clear distillation of what brigades have been working on and the ways that they have tried to sort of describe a cohesive narrative of their projects at various stages, because I know that another challenge that I've heard from brigades, it's like, how do we talk about what we're doing if we haven't actually finished this project? How do we build a narrative when we don't necessarily have a metric that we can point to and say, here's the exact results of our work, if we're sort of in the middle of something and we want to get more people onto this project. I think there's some good examples of that around the room of just projects at various stages that the members who are working on them have really created good narratives around them.
So I'm gonna do start backwards from this community questions but I'm curious from the group in the room and then our two wonderful virtual participants, Kristen, and Rochelle, do you who in your brigade or in your group that you're working with is responsible for communications? And I coming from a very small brigade, there's not one person who does it, it's kind of an afterthought. So for those brigades who do have like an actual comms person, we'd love to hear that. Don't go back to Leslie.
Stand up since I'm so short. Yes, I am standing.
I'm Leslie. Scott. I'm with code for Casey Cofer. Casey is a program of KC Digital Drive. I've been on the core team for a long time. I'm not sure how long but I've just been an employee of PC digital drive for a couple of years now. So we are even though we have a nonprofit infrastructure, we still struggle with this. So I think that we're going to be able to do a better job. We have somebody just in general doing more communications for our organization, and I wrote down that I need to talk to her about that when I get back. So I guess I just wanted to say even though our brigade is inside, you know, a program of an organization we still struggle with it so those small brigades don't have any formal organization don't have a fiscal sponsor. Don't have you know, it's it's even harder, so don't despair. I think we're all in it together. Absolutely.
Hello, I'm Kat Joseph. I'm co director of code for Philly and we have a really amazing communications lead on our brigade. Her name is Kat also, and one of the many reasons why I love her and she's just amazing because she started out just offering to do social media. very modestly, but her posts that she does on Instagram and the stories are so masterful and creative and her tweets are really good. And then I asked her if she'd be interested in being are like stepping up a little bit and be like our communications lead and also do blog posts. So she jumped right into that I taught her how to use the website and make the blog posts and she's been posting about our fellowship and things like that. And yeah, she's amazing. I wish you were here but they couldn't come.
Shout out to Cat what cats Thank you, Walter cook for Sacramento. We have a communications lead also very awesome. renames Briana Hernandez and she just organically grew into the role and we and I would say first and foremost if you get a communications person, hang on to them. They are awesome. If they really enjoy and are passionate about what they're doing, which she is she's really boosted our social media really got people to come in into our virtual meeting or virtual meetups. And then also democracy labs you help this promote that now we're getting volunteers on our projects through that. So really great and also helps us out with our communications. A lot of us are more technical and so she really helps us round those rough edges and also call thank you for the right up to us in a for trash AI.
So I would just the presentation later we have an as an example. Go team. So case
in point communications, and so hang on to the people and also when you recruit, be intentional. So we decided during the pandemic, really to pivot and really try to grow beyond we were at a very core technical group. So we really tried to grow beyond that. And I think that's been very fruitful. So we've had very Fe do that, you know, connection with us and embryonic came along with our communication. So overall just really good but being intentional about looking through those roles.
Everyone Yeah, I cover Boston. We also during the pandemic did a kind of non traditional for us recruiting for someone that wanted to do communications and it's been really fantastic. I think just like you were saying, like, we're not always in a position to say oh, we're like a food bank. We you can come volunteer with us and our food, but this is one of the roles where that is kind of possible, and it's pretty well defined. And so in this particular situation, it's worked fantastically, a ni ni n at corporate boss that has been doing an amazing job on our social So social media stuff. So thank you for giving us opportunity to prop them.
Yeah, and we'll leave some space later for more talking and discussion. But if there's interest in in discussing like, well, we don't have a full you know, one person to do this role we can we can talk about that more. There are ways, I think using some of Sierra's tools from direct democracy helps to to kind of share the load
Alright, so one of the first things we want to talk about is defining your audience mean credit on all the means to Monday in scale so that says I'm sorry without an audience are pointless. So this is sort of the the key step you might want to take first is just identifying who's actually trying to talk to so some examples of some audiences that you might be trying to talk to, could be new recruits. You want to bring more people.
Okay, audiences, you might want to be talking to our new recruits. You want to bring people onto a project. You're just starting in brigade and you want to get more people. You might even specifically be looking for a communications person and how do you do like it's like the paradox of the chicken and the egg. Other audiences, you might want to be talking to our funders or sponsors for hack nights, anything like that. Your local community, especially if you've built a tool that you want to have engagement with it, or it's a service you're trying to provide to the community. It's only as useful as the people who can bring up with so if you're trying to get into that audience, or to other people in civic tech, so many great stories that I've seen from brigades are, we've built this tool and we'd really love if other people also adopted it in their places because it might be even more helpful if we brought this onto a larger scale. So some questions that you can just sort of start to ask, as you're considering this are who needs to know about your work? Where do they actually consume information? So this could go a bunch of different ways. We've already had people mentioning social media and Instagram Stories. We've had people mentioning local press or opportunities and maybe brought our civic tech publications, but really just thinking about if you're trying to attract a very specific audience into your brigades, Information Center, where do you need to reach them? So where do you have to go to find those people and then what information does this group actually need? So a new recruit might need very different information from a funder or other people in civic tech might need very different information from your local community. If you're trying to talk about a tool that you built for your city, the information you're going to be presenting in that pitch might be a little bit different than if you're talking to other people in civic tech, where you really want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how you built this tool, or talk about the ways in which it might be useful in other contexts. So these are just sort of also the whole deck will be available afterwards too, so you'll have chances to go through this a little bit more in depth, but these are just sort of like stripping off questions to figure out who you want to talk to, and where you might actually have the best chance of reaching those people. Okay. Okay.
So I'm just going to introduce the meme and then let Cole talk about what a good story is. Yeah, so you might be familiar with this setup, where you are in a local community. You see what is wrong with what is happening? Maybe that's Deloitte getting a $6 billion contract. I don't even think they run that large but exaggerating here. Um, and a good story really does have a company oftentimes will have a compelling villain or a, this is what's wrong here. And here's a better way you can set it up in a way that actually applies to your local community, wherever you are, this is happening. And hopefully you're not actually getting attacked by Deloitte directly, but if you are, let us know we'll
Got Your Back we would love to run your anti Deloitte PR campaign. Yeah, also, what I think is like interesting about this meme is that it does illustrate a central theme of a good story, which is that there's conflict somehow, and like you don't even need text on this meme to like already understand what it's going to be about. Like there is a disagreement between people. Like often we're not trying to say that there's like a disagreement at the foundation of every single project that you're working on. But there probably is a problem that you're trying to solve. And so going into what actually makes for a good story. These are all things that you already have, at this point. It's just sort of defining them for other people and writing it out in a way that makes for a cohesive narrative. So a good story is told from a unique viewpoint, which often in civic tech is like a really fascinating angle of coming at things. And that you might be saying, here's a problem that doesn't necessarily look like it's affecting you are that doesn't look like it is technical, but we're coming in with this specific skill set. And we can think of a way that we might be able to solve this better than other solutions we've seen so far. Often, I think this is like a real challenge in civic tech is to bring an element of emotional resonance into your story. So you're like, how do we make our GitHub repo I'm not a coder. So I don't know if that's like a reference that makes sense. But how do we make this look compelling to people who don't actually know about tech or who aren't coders, or who don't see why this specific thing actually relates to their life in this community? And it makes people care even if they wouldn't necessarily gravitate towards this specific content. So I think we have an example for this one, but some questions that you might want to answer are what makes your brigade or project unique? What drives your passion for this? Brigade? And what information or resources do you have access to that others don't? So a great example of like a compelling story that we have here is also on a poster over there and I think Carlos is here somewhere. But this your spotlight that we did on the Motor America blog, that was about code for code for Tulsa and how they're using data. Yes, thank you, Ben. Doing the Vanna White showing the poster. How call through Tulsa is using data to tell a fuller story about life in the Greenwood neighborhood. So specifically relating to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. So what's really like compelling I think about this story, which we're gonna see written out in some of the further examples but it has a really good hook and that it's saying there's been this centennial anniversary of this event. It's laying out a problem, where it says when we talk about Greenwoods wealth, it's in the abstract, but every time we talk about Greenwoods trauma, it's in very specific detail. So it's giving a reason for why this project is here. And then it sort of maps out why this is a project that you might be interested in as a reader. So it says this neighborhood story deserves to be told in its totality. This is a really interesting way of laying out your project to someone who might not have an awareness of this and that it really does create a compelling story arc. It has numbers in it, but it also talks about people, it has a conflict and that when we talk about Greenwoods trauma, it's in numbers, but when we talk about wealth, it's in the abstract, and then it goes into why you should want to hear the whole story. So I think this is a really good example. I also try and like link when we send out the slides all of the longer write ups of these pieces. So that you can see how different brigades have talked about their work.
Okay, so I have had this sense or feeling recently in the last couple years, especially during the pandemic where a lot more people are accessing services in the state level, unemployment systems, things like that. rental assistance systems and in Maine, our unemployment system failed and a lot of people were aware of it and I was just kind of the depth to that story was very shallow it was Oh, God. Government is bad and it doesn't work again, typical. But there's more to that right. And I think that as brigade members and volunteers, if we see that there's actually a very timely hook here in saying, hey, this unemployment system failed because of the procurement process. And actually the state's doing the exact same thing again, with a different system. So I don't know how familiar everybody is or you know, if that like excites you at all, but that is a timely hook when people are already not because of your activity, but because of what's happening in the world. They're paying attention to this. So there might be a story about the unemployment system. failing. And, I mean, we'll we'll talk about this a little bit more, I think, but that reporter might want to talk to you. Even if the story is already out. They have done their research. They like maybe looked up what Tyler technologies does or something like that. And they don't know that you exist until you reach out. caveat that all takes time. Building relationships takes time, like being able to respond to a reporter when they're like I have a deadline or two hours talk to me now. That's that's not something that everybody can do. Sometimes building those relationships comes back years later. So they might have you in their head is like, oh, yeah, I want to talk to that person. So the hook exists all around us, but especially when something's like already happening. People are already paying attention to it and it doesn't just have to be about those kinds of mega software systems that can be you know, we're working on a map of environmental pollution and toxic pollution. And look, this just happened again. Obviously, you have to communicate that with humility and empathy for what's happening, but recognize that when the eyes are already pointing towards something, that's a time where you might get other people paying attention and seeing the connections that are hard for you to build themselves. This is sort of like working with momentum that's already built up.
And speaking as a former journalist, the pitches that I was always most likely to respond to when people would say like, Hey, here's a story. Are you interested in speaking with me about it would already provide me with the timely hook. So if I have to go and look for it myself, I'm probably a little less likely to respond to this. But if you say, you know, it could be something huge that's in the news, like the failure of this unemployment system, but you can also kind of manufacture your own hooks. So if your project is evergreen, like it's working on something that has, you know, just been a problem forever. What you could do is say like a city council is voting on this bill. Next week. My project is related to the subject that that bill is about. And sometimes that is enough to just say like, that's a great start for a story. I think we see a good example of this in here and that we say there was a centennial anniversary recently. And like that's a marker that you can tie the story to. And there's another example here. So code for Boston, shout out to the people from code for Boston in the room. In this one, they were talking about the state vaccination campaign that was having some issues and that people couldn't actually find spots to get the vaccines. So the team's sort of pitch. They got actually a lot of local media pickup about this tool that they built in that it was basically just helping people get appointments. And they have a really like compelling narrative code for Boston is working on one goal, get more shots and arms and they're talking about something that is already in the news cycle, which is that the state system for helping people schedule appointments isn't actually working at the volume that it needs to work at as leaving spaces off, things like that. So if there is a news hook that you can really easily tie to in the current news cycle, which is sometimes hard because the news cycle turns over so rapidly. You can always try and manufacture something and just looking at where is the subject popping up in my place or in the national news in even like a vague sense that I can tie it to like that city council voting example.
So I referenced this earlier, but a lot of you know, we don't necessarily need to only focus on local news, but a lot of people in the community don't really understand what civic technology is. And we have to bridge that gap for them when talking about what we do. And this is a challenge like I don't know that I've ever been able to explain what Code for America is and under, like three sentences. So I'm curious like if if there are people who have this pitch deck I want to invite you to share when someone asks you, like, what do you do in your brigade? I want to know if anybody has a compelling one because it's difficult and we're not relying on information that is already out there or understanding.
Thank you. Excellent question, because I believe when I say Code for America, probably people probably think like actual code, like building codes because I'm a civil engineer. So usually, I say, and I get this question from time to time, especially in other professional setting, so I say Code for America. We build open source projects for the local communities similar to Habitat for Humanity, except for digital digital services. So
so that's a great like, just building on something that people already understand. And then adding a new flavor to it. I like that. No jargon. Yeah, so the word procurement probably shouldn't be in your explanation anywhere. Does anybody else have a good pitch that you use?
Challenge?
No. But I want to invite that okay. So related to kind of, you know, civic technology and not relying on that understanding, you can rely on your own kind of reasons for being here. And so some of this like you want to make people connected to your story in a way that makes them care about it. What is locally relevant to it? Why if this is a story affecting people whose houses are flooded, why do I care? My house isn't flooding. I think there are easy ways to make those connections. And, again, having conflict or a problem to solve. Having a story that kind of shows how to solve a problem is is another way for someone to feel connected to that.
Yeah, and I think one key thing here is it's really hard to care about something that you don't understand. It's like why very few people care about procurement or like zoning law, because it's often written in a way that's really obscure and uses a lot of jargon, and isn't super accessible to someone who doesn't have a legal degree or something like that. So sort of taking something big, like zoning law and bringing it down to a personal level. So from this big abstract concept to like, this is the reason why your community isn't walkable, makes it a little easier for someone who might not have the in depth knowledge that you have about a specific niche subject area. Just shut it up. Just like invite them in and show them how it might be affecting their personal life or people they know. And I think we have an example here from Vermont. I don't know if Mike is in the room and wants to know Mike is giving a different presentation right now nevermind. But this is a post that Micah wrote for the Code for America blog that talked about how code for BTV is Burlington. Yeah. Burlington partnered with Vermont legal aid to expand record expungement so like record expungement on its own, while people in the room might be very familiar with that. It's like not very broadly known. And people don't tend to understand like, the criminal record will have compounding effects years and years later. So I think they do a really good job in this post of saying that, like people who live with criminal records face all sorts of legal blockades that you might not recognize if you haven't had that specific lived experience. And then it says like, you can get free legal services. But even if you have free legal services, it takes a lot of time. And the attorneys who are working on this can only help so many people. So what we're Burlington did was they partnered with this legal services, and they created a system that auto fills these forms. And I think that's something that like a lot of people can connect to because, like the need to fill out 1000s of pages of forms for government service is something that probably many people have experienced. And they say that they can then create petitions that are generated 50 to 80% Faster, which is that number in itself, you might not necessarily have a connection to your saying okay, these attorneys spend less time but then they take that into the actual number of people who are helped. So rather than before when they were able to process 2500 expungement orders, they were able to process 14,000 after they started using this expungement autofill process. So I think this is a good example of a couple things, and that it explains why you should care about this thing. Why should you should care about record expungement and then it explains in Numbers that relate to actual people rather than broader percentages that might be harder to connect to why this project was so effective, and why it's been so impactful, which I think has been a really good piece of collateral for them to use. For recruiting new people to work on this project and also a good example of talking about their partnership, so that if they then want to work with other organizations in the future, they can point to this and say, we've already worked with this legal aid organization we know how to plug in where people already have their processes going. We can sort of help you make that more efficient.
Okay, we mentioned this a little bit. Talking about a technical project. It helps to have actual stories of people. So if we're talking about an expungement project or any other brigade related project, who is affected by that, who are we actually working to to help by a project and I think Cole references but not having that means the emotional resonance is difficult for someone who is not technical to actually relate to the story. And one thing I'll relate to kind of more related to the last one is where was I going? I might have just lost it. Oh, yeah, well, it's connecting to an actual community problem and making someone feel related to it versus a savior narrative. So when we have actual community problems, we've identified that we want to fix we are here to help the entire community. We're not here to just help individuals in a way that makes me feel good. And I think that's an important thing to identify with. Your projects is both compelling characters and stories about people affected. And also framing that as we're we're here to like better the entire community, not just like, we're here to make ourselves feel better about helping a specific group. So identifying that kind of full picture of characters that one of which is your actual community, because everybody is affected when more people in the community have legal records or can't access jobs or housing or things like that. It's not you don't have to be directly affected to actually feel that we all kind of feel that when we live in communities with problems like that.
Yeah, I think this is sort of one of the key tenants of like building with not for you're not helicoptering into places with the Savior narrative. You're really a part of this community that you're trying to help. And I think here, being able to if you've sort of done for your project, some research, you've talked to some people who are directly experiencing this problem. So in the example of record clearance, you've talked to people who have criminal records who have tried to clear them. You have talked to the attorneys who have been working on this. It can be really compelling to have those people speak to their experiences. In your narrative, to say, you know, like, this was really difficult for me to live with this record, it was really difficult for me to get it cleared. And I think that that can just bring it a little bit more into you know, like the abstract of an expungement autofill program to the very personal of I can't find housing with my criminal record because no one will rent to me. And making that sort of comparison drawing from the personal out to your project abstract, can just make it a little bit easier for people in your community or funders, or anyone who you might be trying to attract to see the actual impact on human beings, which is really like what civic tech is about, even if we're doing things behind our computers. It is about helping people. So we have another example of a record clearance project, but this time in code for Durham's arena, where I think they do a really good job here of illustrating what it can feel like to live with a criminal record, and that they say it can feel like a shadow that follows them everywhere. And that's why record clearance is so important. And then they especially call out that people with low incomes can't necessarily afford to clear their records because it still requires an attorney because it's really difficult and complicated. And they I think just do a really nice job in this post talking about the actual impact on people. That their petition generator creates.
Okay
I think there's also I know that I've I've fallen into this sometimes too is when you're working on a project you want to portray the narrative authentically and that means being yourself. So if you are someone who's very privileged financially, economically, racially in any number of ways, it's good to be aware of that and also not to pretend like you're someone that you're not. So being authentic, doesn't mean doesn't mean you have to start off with a lot of disclaimers or qualifiers feel that, you know, you're You're so different from some people in the community you're trying to work with. It just means like speaking from your own experience, and again, this doesn't just affect other people. You're a member of the community that you're working with. This affects you because you care about your community. So I think this is something to be very kind of aware of is like we don't need to pretend like we're someone that we're not in in creating a an authentic and compelling narrative. Yeah, I don't know what else to add here. Let's see. Yeah, I
think you've covered a lot of it. But yeah, I think acknowledging the gaps that exist between you and your brigade, or you and your community are like very relevant. And I think that it's also necessary, especially if you're working on something like record clearance and there's no one on your team who has a criminal record like acknowledge that. And then as I'm sad, you can acknowledge that it's, you're still affected by it because you're still a part of this community.
Okay, I remember it's something that I was gonna mention, too. With communications. I think sometimes there's a impulse to have a silver bullet of like, if we were just really good at tick tock, because that's blowing up right now. Everybody's gonna come to our brigade, or like, what time of day should we post to Twitter so that everything goes viral? There's no one single answer there. And I think this third bullet aware of the places you can tell this story and the places you can't I mean, if you're really good if you have someone come in the door to your brigade, and they're like, I just want to make memes. Can I do that here? Like, yes, absolutely. Like we can make that happen. But if you don't have the skill set, you don't already have a community or large followings. And you're like, let's spend a ton of time to learn tic toc because this is the next big thing. That might not not make as much sense as it could to say, hey, there's a really active subreddit for our local area. I already have an account. I'm going to start promoting our brigade there. That's a great place to share that message. It's maybe not the best to invest in some thing that might feel like the next big thing. Also, those change so often that it's kind of hard to keep up these days.
I think also hear, especially if you're trying to get word out to your local community, like it might feel like a place like Tik Tok or Instagram is like the best place to go but as Emma saying, if you don't necessarily have that skill, investing a lot of time into making that can maybe not be the best use of your time. Whereas like, a lot of local news organizations, like the reporter emails are online, and like they're very hungry for stories. And it might actually take less time to just shoot off an email to someone and say, Hey, like I have this story about this local community. Are you interested in talking to me about it? Here's my timely hook. And maybe that is like something that even if you don't necessarily have a lot of time to go out and write something, or produce some content, and then a quote to a journalist who you have seen has written some interesting stuff who has good fall in the community can sort of be a way of navigating around time shortages or things like that. So an example of this here, we have code for Sacramento. Shout out to Walter and they're talking about some like they have some really good parts of this pitch. They're talking about the specific timing hook and that California has passed this regulation that requires municipalities to have an acceptable level of cleanliness. I think they do a really good job in the story of saying like, We are all affected by this, especially because it was two different brigades who are working together, and we're like we are all a part of this community. And we are seeing this problem together. We joined together because we're all jointly affected by this. They lay out a really interesting problem, which is that trash it's very difficult to quantify. It's inefficient and time consuming the way that they currently measure it. But we know that data could make that easier. That's why we have this project together. Walter I don't know if you want to add anything.
Thanks for giving us the excellent write up really helped us extensive exposure the project so it's called trashi.org where we use computer vision to help with these manual processes. So right now, municipalities and government agencies have to report on the litter in their right away jurisdictions and also it's just a huge problem in California. So we created a basically a web application where if you're doing these assessments or just any money, anybody for that matter. Also, researchers are very interested in cataloging these images because right now, it's a very growing field. It's just started, you know, in the last 510 years, so, um, help helps with researchers with cataloging and helps with the manual assessments, and just overall promote awareness around litter so use a computer vision then to identify literally nice photos and then give back the metadata. So, you know, again, we're always looking for exposure, and I think all of these points in this presentation really resonate with us as far as spreading the message of the project. So
a lot of people have seen a write up of openings campaign. Finance thing, I think it's on the back area of the wall. But last two years ago, when I was working on a campaign, we had paper based campaign finance records and $50,000, which is kind of a lot of money and locally, was just in a manila folder under a stack of papers, and it didn't get reported. And that was its own news story. So this open main project, there's there's endless numbers of hooks that kind of come into this and I just remember that but that's that's one I think, is very relevant and
I like talking about
Okay, so now we're gonna have an activity for you all to work on, which is putting together all this information into a pitch. So a basic structure that you could follow but you don't have to because I don't believe that there should be rules on this necessarily, but some ways that you could follow it could be, let me tell you about this problem. Let me lay it out. Here's an example of how someone could be affected so often that's like, it could be a personal story. If you're able to highlight someone in your brigade or someone in your community who has spoken to you about this problem or it could be a little bit more abstract. You could say, you know, like a mother with this child could have trouble getting childcare assistance from this program until we were able to do this and it can be sort of an abstracted personal scenario. Then you can say here's how it's been handled so far. So like in the trash AI example, you could say, researchers are documenting this all by hand and it's really inefficient, but there's a better way. Hopefully, that's your solution. And you're saying this is it. And then with these resources on hand, explain why you're the right people to take this project on. So I think we're gonna give you all some time to put together maybe like a paragraph pitch about your brigade or about your project, and then we can share out afterwards if anyone has one.
Yeah, and depending on who your audience is, like, there's the recruiting more volunteers, getting a sponsor getting donors, there's a better way is key because there's a better way you could sponsor us and we could do even more. There's a better way you can join with us, and we can do this even better with your help. Like that's kind of a place where your, your ask goes in. So I'm curious, I don't know if people have been looking at or considering their own pitches or if you just also we can spend some free time I think we've got 15 more minutes. Either questions or sharing out an example of a project that you want to highlight, or if anybody has a pitch. This is kind of a free space. We could also go back to the suggestion or topic earlier that I brought up of what if you don't have a dedicated comms person, we could talk about that a little bit. And I'll also open it up to the zoom
so this is a great structure to replicate throughout any of your communication materials. So like the landing page for the project, or any emails or your your READMEs your your wikis, so just cater it to the audience that is going to be visiting that platform. Oh, even meet up for the event for meetup meetings. Oh, I I'm grateful that this
description is something that like we could customize and share around oftentimes it's kind of like, just just kind of join us. We're coders and we'll see you there. But there's there's a more compelling way to make that. So if anybody has a really compelling one can share and then
others can adopt it.
I wanted to go through this exercise for my project that I've been working on as part of our code brigade. So bear with me, I promise it would be more polished. If I were pitching it in in real time. So a lot of people have stuff that's still good. They don't know what to do with. And there are a lot of people in need in our community. And a lot of nonprofits are looking for that stuff, but they have a hard time connecting with people who don't know they exist. So we created a website called reusable that connects people with still good stuff with nonprofit organizations, schools and churches that can put it to good use. And right now we're planning an in person event, where we'll bring together 10 of our charity partners for a one stop drop for people to bring their still good stuff to help get it in the hands of more people in the community.
It's pretty compelling. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Other thoughts, comments, pitches, questions.
All right. So if you might help developing a pitch, or if you would like your project to be featured on code for Americans blog, all of these examples that's a volunteer spotlight on them that have appeared throughout the presentation, are different brigades that have been featured on code for Americans blog, which can be really helpful if you want to use that as collateral to like send to funders or to send a new recruits. It can give you like an air of legitimacy to like have this piece to show that you have like reached a point where you're ready to invite new people into your project. If you would like to be one of those featured stories if you want help developing this pitch you can send your like half drafted thoughts and I'm happy to read them. m&s emails are both up here. And we would love to hear more from any of you. I think, why isn't this session we'll turn the rest of this time back over. I can leave this slide up if that's helpful if people want to be working on pitches as they go. Sorry, was your hand up? Did you have a comment? Nevermind. Okay, stretching. But we can leave this slide up if people want the rest of this time to start working on a pitch for people online. On the zoom. Hello. You're more than welcome to like type into the chat. or shoot me an email. And if you're here in the room, and you want to talk a little bit more about this pitch won't be around otherwise, great. Thank you all so much for sharing your Stories.
