Final week

This week is the final week of the spring semester. I have a project to revise, a research paper to finish writing, and a final exam I have until May 6th to take. I've already signed up for the summer session:

~ Marketing for Nonprofits

~ Program Planning

~ Self-Exploration Through Creative Writing (online through Prescott College)

Originally, I was only going to take two courses (because I remember what happened when I tried three), but I picked up a Grants course that didn't really require me to submit work (just be part of the discussion), so I think during that time I found a balance. I hope I'll be able to keep that balance when the session starts in June.

5 Tools for Overwhelmed Nonprofit Marketers

I've attended a couple of Kivi Leroux Miller's webinars during the course of my degree program and have found them to be really helpful. I try to read her blog when I can and have signed up for her newsletters. I received one today that was interesting. I am nowhere being a good marketer, but I'd like to think that these tools will give me a nice head start (and she was even kind enough to provide examples).

1. The Marketing Bank

The single place where you keep all of your marketing stuff -- like the stuff that you are frequently asked to give to others--like your logos, or your boilerplate text, or the latest stats on this or that. Lots of different kinds of files belong in your marketing bank.

 

2. The Editorial Calendar

Help you see the content you need to create over the next several days, week, and months, depending on how you use them. You can create them by channel (e.g., a calendar for your newsletter and another for Facebook), by audience (e.g., how we'll communicate with parents this month, versus communicating with teachers), or by program (e.g., so you see how different programs are included throughout your communications channels). She created a few samples here.

3. Editorial and Design Style Guides

An editorial style sheet is a chart you fill out showing how you will use, format, and spell certain words. It can also include rules about abbreviations, capitalization, acronyms, and anything else related to how words, numbers, and punctuation appear in your publications. A graphic design style guide puts in writing all the various decisions you've made about how things should look both in print and online.

What goes in a editorial style guide.

What goes in your graphic design style guide.

 

4. A Personal System for Keeping Track of Everything

  This very helpful blog post provides ways to keep track of your busy schedule.

 

5. Affordable, Convenient Skill Building

Learn from others. Kivi says, "We are very lucky in the nonprofit marketing and fundraising world to have a very robust, open community of nonprofits, consultants and vendors who share lots of great stories, case studies, and best practices with each other. You need to make time to learn from them, and to use that to build your own skills." Makes sense. 

I plan to buy her book, The Nonprofit Marketing Guide, because I know that, starting out, I'll be doing a lot of this marketing stuff myself. I think this will be a good guide. No pun intended.

Month of the Military Child Recognition Day

Arizona Operation Military Kids in partnership with the Arizona National Guard Family Programs presents…


MONTH OF THE MILITARY CHILD RECOGNITION DAY
Saturday, April 9th 11:00am – 4:00pm


This event is for the whole Family and includes a picnic-style lunch, an AZNG VIP welcome, plus interactive activity stations hosted by various military and community partners.

Events include a rock wall, static educational displays, ball toss, F-16 simulator, fire truck, crafts & much, much more!

Join us as we salute our Military Youth and their Families!

This event is FREE! Pre-registration required. Visit www.jointsupportservices.org for registration information
This event is open to all current Military Families　
All Branches - Active Duty, Guard and Reserves
--------------------------
I volunteered for the morning shift, 9-12, for this event today and nearly froze. My. Butt. Off. The weather was supposed to warm!

What we got was cold and rain. There were supposed to be more vendors there, and an Apache helicopter was supposed to land there, but some of the vendors bailed (due to the weather) and the 'copter couldn't get clearance to leave its location. Which kinda sucked. I would've enjoyed seeing that.

The Phoenix Suns Gorilla was supposed to show up, as was Howler, the Phoenix Coyotes mascot, but I don't know if they showed. A slightly paunchy Spiderman was there, too, which I thought I was hilarious.

I was in the registration area, so at least we were covered, and we put together a lot of good bags for the kids: journals, stickers, suckers, canteens, caribiners, pens, pencils, pins, hats, CDs...tons of stuff. And they had some goodies to raffle off, too. Including Build A Bear animals! Too cute. I hope more people came in the afternoon and signed up for that raffle because there was A LOT of cool stuff.

When I got home, I stood underneath a hot shower for 15 mins to get warm. I'm so glad I wore a turtleneck, sweatshirt and coat. I even had gloves on and I was still cold! I felt sorry for other people who showed up in just short sleeve shirts and hoodies. One college kid showed up in long basketball shorts! Definitely not warm clothing. Crazy, it's like these people don't check the weather before leaving the house.

Still I had fun participating. A few people from my job were there on the same shift as me and I got a chance to meet other people from different organizations as well as people who came out to support family service members. Pretty cool

Not this, but that...

The great thing about this grant class I'm taking is that we don't have to actually submit homework. We can if we want feedback, but it's not required. Which is good because it kinda takes the pressure off me. In assignment #4, we learned about Goals and Objectives. I threw mine up in the Discussion area to get feedback:

Goal #1 – To increase literacy and writing skills.

·         Objective 1.1 – To offer free writing workshops focusing on various genres.

·         Objective 1.2 – To show students how many professions require good writing skills.

·         Objective 1.3 – To provide free access to writing and tutoring labs.

Goal #2 – To increase the number of youth accepted to post-secondary institutions.

·         Objective 2.1 – To conduct free series of college preparation workshops.

·         Objective 2.2 – To partner with Arizona colleges to provide informational clinics.

·         Objective 2.3 – To equip students with necessary academic skills.

Goal #3 – To provide youth with a positive role model.

·         Objective 3.1 – To foster mentorship between students and creative professionals.

·         Objective 3.2 – To recruit local professionals in the writing field for a period of five months.

·         Objective 3.3 – To give students one-on-one attention and let them know their work is value.

Per my instructors, B&J

Celise, all these are activities, not objectives. Think about what will change as a result of  these activities and quantify these changes to come up with objectives, e.g.

The writing skills of 70% students who participate in XXXX will improve as measured by XXXXX.

Well, crap. Good to know. At this rate, I'm still debating on whether my organization's target audience should just focus on teens or the community in general. I change my mind every couple of days it seems like, so I guess I have time to think about it.

And definitely revise.