Ten years ago, I worked at a corporate PR firm. My first week there, my boss taught me two very important lessons that I call upon every day as I produce and write annual reports, videos, articles, communications plans, stories: Never start from scratch, because you don’t have the time and repurpose any and everything you do.

Instead of starting from scratch, she encouraged me to scan the environment and see what’s already been done that I can build on or adapt. And then the next step is to adapt and re-purpose the fruits of that work!

I not only consider the content I create for repurposing, I also listen for ideas that I can adapt to a piece that I’m working on.

For example, I was recently at a fundraising dinner and my CEO spoke about what had moved her the most at a recent conference we had held for our community. She told a story about a woman she’d met years ago – an employee at a grant partner organization. The woman’s personal transformation resulted in her becoming a powerful and eloquent leader at another organization that has made incredible gains on behalf of farm workers in California’s Central Valley.

This inspiring story helped to demonstrate the ability of our organization to identify and cultivate leaders who have gone on to have a tremendous ripple effect in their communities. And it showed the way the work personally touched my CEO. The story became an important part of a direct mail letter this spring.

Another great place to repurpose content is in your organization’s blog. I’ve found that many organizations are reluctant to start blogs because they don’t know how they will generate content. I launched a blog for the Women’s Foundation of California this spring, and I base content creation upon repurposing the incredible information that I come across in the course of a week.

Before the blog, this was information and anecdotes shared when people sat together and ate lunch, or short emails that rarely went further than staff in-boxes. Many of us come across information that can be easily re-purposed for blog content. Examples include:

* success stories shared by grantees or the beneficiaries of your organization
* responses that you write to emails seeking information about your work or an issue
* podcasts that other people do (you can link to ones that are related to your issues)
* photos you take at events that can become brief photo blogs
* quick videos in which you ask a question and get an answer (see previous blog post about using video)

It’s also important to share the workload and engage others. We have a couple of regular contributors who write blog posts every other week. Another staff member created simple short videos featuring two public policy fellows who are working on upcoming legislation. And don’t forget to create an editorial calendar with key dates so that you can see what’s on the horizon for your organization and your constituents. That will inspire story ideas too.

I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve come to realize that these ideas – never start from scratch and repurpose everything you do – are actually ways of exercising creativity. Many great inventions are inspired by, or modifications of, something that already exists.

In his book, Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Michael Michalko uses the acronym SCAMPER to help people remember 9 different things you can do with an idea to create a new idea:

- Substitute
- Combine it with something else
- Adapt
- Magnify or add to it; modify it or change it in some fashion
- Put to other use
- Eliminate something from it
- Rearrange or Reverse  it

Try repurposing an idea this week and see what you can create – and the time you save!

- Marcus Samuelsson, New York Chef (Aquavit)

(Happy Monday! Today’s post is from Sande Smith, our communications expert.)

One of my favorite quotes by Martin Luther King says anyone can be great, because any of us can serve.

He reminds us that you don’t have to be incredibly bright or skilled, “you don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. . . you only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

Growing up, I knew incredibly generous Black women who embodied that meaning of greatness. One of them was my grandmother, who in her 60’s, adopted the 5-year old daughter of a friend.

Hit by a car, the young girl was paralyzed from the waist down. My grandmother’s friend said that she couldn’t do it – she couldn’t take care of her own daughter. So my grandmother did it. For the next 25 years, my grandmother raised her, provided for her, and helped her to grow into an independent woman who would choose a partner and raise two children of her own.

I was reminded of the greatness of the unsung heroines and heroes who commit their lives to service when I listened to the Oakland-born Malaak Compton Rock (at the recent Madam CJ Walker Luncheon) describe her story and personal journey from the time she was a young girl watching her mother engage with social causes. Her mother, Gayle Fleming, included the young Malaak in her activities, whether that be attending a rally, meeting with a nonprofit, or door-to-door canvassing for a political candidate.

Commitment to serving others became integral to Malaak’s life, personal mission and employment, and she went on to work for the US Fund for UNICEF, then started her own organizations: Styleworks, providing image consulting to women moving from welfare to work and then Journey for Change: Empowering Youth Through Global Service, which takes NY teens (many of whom have never left NY before) to South Africa to meet and learn from their young counterparts.

Of Journey for Change, Malaak says, “Ultimately we want them to return to the US encompassing a greater sense of understanding for their blessings, to dream big, and to challenge themselves to become the best young people they can be.”

Malaak’s new book, If It Takes a Village, Build One: How I Found Meaning Through a Life of Service, and 100+ Ways You Can Too, is a rallying call for action, engagement and service. The book blends personal stories from ordinary people who’ve gotten involved with causes that touch their hearts with how-to tips on choosing organizations to support – whether through donations, volunteering, or promotions.

She also talks about how to start your own organization, how to reach out to and engage celebrities, and ultimately how each of us can tap our passions in order to improve our communities and ultimately, the world.

This message of whole-hearted engagement is one that those of us who communicate and fundraise on behalf of good causes simply can’t afford to miss. We can’t afford to think only in terms of raising donations for our organizations, because while money is important, it’s not enough.

We need to make sure that we’re inspiring and moving people to get involved by tapping into their passions, encouraging them to make connections between what they care about personally and what they see going on in the world outside of themselves.

To realize a better world, we have to encourage all of us to realize our greatness, our unlimited capacity to serve with love and grace.

You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Happy Monday! Today’s post is from Sande Smith, our communications expert.)

For the past week, I’ve been thinking about the critical importance of sharing our perspectives, experiences and solutions to the problems we see.

By our, I mean the people who are passionate about bringing more empathy, equity and exuberance to the world!

These thoughts were catalyzed last Sunday, when I attended a workshop on writing op-eds that was led by Katie Orenstein and Katharine Mieszkowski. Wow! Talk about passionate.

Orenstein is passionate about changing a basic inequity: Women’s voices and perspectives were not appearing in the op-ed pages, a major forum for influencing public debate and public policy. Op-ed pages of leading newspapers such as the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post are read by congress members and their aides, corporate CEO’s, journalists, philanthropists, donors, influencers in all sectors, and yes, even President Obama.

And why are women’s voices missing? At a minimum because women weren’t submitting op-eds! According to the Washington Post, out of 10 submissions, only 1 is written by a woman.

Incensed by this knowledge, Orenstein tried to get someone to start a program to train women in writing and submitting op-eds. When that failed, she started it herself. Now 2 years old, the Op-Ed Project has trained thousands of women, and seen many of the graduates successfully publish op-eds in news outlets across the country.

On Sunday, I was amazed by the women in the room. They were exceedingly accomplished in their professions, as well as passionate about using their knowledge to make a difference in the world.

Yet, when Orenstein asked us to consider any area of our life and then finish the statement, “My name is ____and I’m an expert in ____ because ___”, many of the women found it difficult to answer.

I want to restate that Orenstein emphasized that we didn’t have to give an example from our professional lives. For example, we could say something like, “Hi, my name is Sande and I’m an expert on making frittatas because I’ve made hundreds of frittatas with ingredients such as artichoke hearts, bacon, and gruyere, and when my friends eat them, they ooh and ah, compliment me, and then ask for seconds.”

Orenstein said that women in the US often find it hard to finish the statement of expertise because they haven’t learned how to provide the evidence that establishes their authority to speak on a topic.

Yet, we can’t successfully write and publish op-eds about the issues we care about unless we develop and present ourselves as credible experts. So what are some of the elements that establish our credibility?

• personal experience
• statistics
• anecdotes
• expert quotes (keeping in mind which experts will be credible to your audience)
• testimonials
• history
• legal precedence
• logic
• trends (three of something makes a trend)
• university and other academic credits
• authoring a book
• awards
• results you’ve achieved

And please don’t think that personal experience is less worthy than the other items on the list. In fact, the opposite is true. Personal experience often trumps all else!

I left the workshop excited about finishing my own op-ed (see basic op-ed structure here), but also determined to take more seriously the expertise that I’ve already developed and the importance of sharing it. What about you?

p.s. The picture above is a Wordle, created by playing with the words from my bio. Make your own at wordle.net.

- Buckminster Fuller

(Happy Monday! Today’s post is from Sande Smith, our communications expert.)

I finally found it – my new apartment in San Francisco. In a little bit more than a month, I saw 40 apartments!

When it came down to the final two, I was stuck trying to decide between an apartment with lots of sun, bay windows and French doors or one with arched doorways, 1,000 square feet and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I chose the view.

At first my choice felt frivolous, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. First of all, every time I look out the window, I stop and I breathe, deeply. The view literally compels me to expand my sights – to look out beyond what’s right in front of me.

And it resonates with a goal that I’d set two years ago, when I took a 3-day class on facilitative leadership presented by the Interaction Institute for Social Change.  Facilitative Leadership calls upon leaders to be “servant leaders” who involve others in the process of change and continuous improvement that our organizations and communities require.

In preparation for the class, we were asked to think about the seven practices of facilitative leadership and then decide which one we wanted to focus on during the three days.

1. Share an Inspiring Vision
2. Focus on Results, Process and Relationship
3. Seek Maximum Appropriate Involvement
4. Design Pathways to Action
5. Facilitate Agreement
6. Coach for Performance
7. Celebrate Accomplishment

It was hard to choose, because who doesn’t want to be great at everything? But I decided that I wanted to improve my ability to convey a clear and compelling vision, closely followed by designing a pathway to action.

Why? Because I have spent much of my career being the one who does what needs to be done, rather than leading a team that carries out the work. As I’ve grown, and increased my area of responsibility, it’s become clear that not only is it impossible to do it all myself, but the outcome is vastly improved when a team of people skilled at working together produces the work.

I wanted to learn how to be the kind of leader that brings out the best in the team and in myself, while also deeply enjoying the process. After setting my focus on learning how to imagine and articulate a clear and compelling vision, the three days of the workshop proved to be just the beginning.

Everywhere I turned, I saw examples of how to do it. I saw it when a colleague insisted that we do regular presentations to staff about the work of our communications team. I saw it in Obama’s campaign, which not only included inspiring articulation of a vision of unity and hope, but was accompanied by a social media campaign that gave people the tools they needed to run their OWN campaigns on behalf of the candidate. And I saw it in fundraising letters that do a good job of describing both the problem and a vision for how the world will be different.

We will not be able to transform the world if we don’t become very good at stopping, taking a breath, and giving ourselves space to widen our sights. We must imagine, describe and co-create our vision of the world that all of our fundraising and advocacy is trying to create. Research shows that people work with greater commitment and excitement when they are guided by a vision and feel their efforts can make a difference.

Can YOU see it?