By Craig Kanaya

Newsletters, social media and other online tools are invaluable to keep your audience looped in and growing in a fast, cost-effective way. While these tools have changed the way we reach people, we should not forget the added value of one-on-one, on-the-ground outreach. Meeting and talking with your audience where they live, work and socialize is often the best way to communicate your message.

Whether you’re managing a statewide public information plan or outreach for a construction project in a city neighborhood, a comprehensive outreach plan looks at the big picture and involves all stakeholders, such as businesses, community groups and elected officials. One-on-one meetings help people associate a face to your project. The community will have someone to bring their concerns to and you’ll be able to track the pulse of the community and potentially identify fires and put them out before they escalate.

If you’ve driven around Seattle in the past year you have probably noticed a lot of major construction projects on city streets and highways. These projects impact hundreds of thousands of drivers a day and people who live and work near the construction. A fast way to educate them on the benefits of the project is an e-mail or website post, but to build relationships, communicate the benefits of the project, ease the impacts of construction and help residents be advocates for the project, talk to them where they work, live and socialize. This could include a presentation at a chamber of commerce, having coffee at a local business or hosting an information table at a fair or festival.

On-the-ground outreach also gives you the opportunity to reach new people outside of your target audience. When you meet with people, take the opportunity to ask if there’s anyone else you should talk to. This simple question may introduce you to a new community leader, organization or potential client. Also use the information from the meetings to help improve your outreach strategy.

On-the-ground outreach may take more time, but the payoff and relationships you build are worth the effort. The next time you’re in the community of a client, schedule a meeting with a community organization or have coffee with a community leader. You may just get the solution to a problem or find a new advocate.

Craig Kanaya is education communications manager at Strategies 360. 

By Molly Killien

I am absolutely guilty of wearing my heart on my sleeve; I have an opinion on
everything and I love to voice it. Poker face? Don’t have one; couldn’t if I tried.

So I’ve turned my natural enthusiasm toward my work, and if you’re a
professional advocate like me, or just passionate about an issue or a cause, you should as well, especially on social media.

One of our prominent clients at Strategies 360 is the Save Bristol Bay campaign, a project of Trout Unlimited dedicated to protecting one of the world’s most productive salmon fisheries.

Even though I’ve never caught a fish, I now talk about fishing, fishing boats, fish recipes, fish politics, fish videos and fish photos – daily. Also, my boyfriend is a Bristol Bay commercial fisherman. What was once a “work only” campaign has become a personal cause.

So I’ve chosen to wear Save Bristol Bay on my online/social media “sleeve.” How? Through my Facebook and Twitter profile picture.

Facebook profile picture with the PicBadge application

Through websites like www.PicBadge.com and www.twibbon.com you can upload your own image/logo to support a cause you support or find existing “buttons” or “banners” that will leave your social network with little doubt about what you support.

Sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account, follow the instructions and within a few minutes you will have a semi-customized brand on your profile picture.

Why is this impactful? By simply placing my PicBadge button on my profile photos, I’ve had friends and family ask me questions about the issue. I’ve become a champion for the cause and I’m able to educate my network about my passion.

The Save Bristol Bay campaign has been asking its following of nearly 26,000 folks to use PicBadge and spread the message of Save Bristol Bay – No Pebble Mine. Since the campaign started using PicBadge in February, more than 190 supporters have added the logo to their personal profile page. In addition, the campaign has held a Facebook contest urging the Facebook following to get creative with how they use the logo in their profile picture.

Audience participation + interactive engagement platform = social media and online success.

Molly Killien is the social media and marketing associate at Strategies 360.

By Chris Cervini

“It’s not about you. It’s about the client.”

That’s probably the most important advice a public relations professional can ever receive.

You see, too often our field attracts show-boaters who crave the bright lights and the cameras, but who fall down when it comes to understanding the details that go into getting the job done.

They fail to realize that the most important work usually occurs behind the scenes and that credit comes not from public accolades, but from a client who’s been guided out of a crisis and who truly understands the value of quality P.R. counseling.

This was one of the primary reasons I was proud to join Strategies 360 and open the company’s New Mexico office. To a person, we are a company focused first on defining the win for our clients and using the vast array of tactics at our disposal toward helping them achieve it. From cutting-edge social media campaigns to creative that moves you, our talented team knows how to tell our clients’ stories – both to the public and to the powerful.

This isn’t about us, it’s about making sure our clients know they have a steady partner standing behind them as they seek to put their best foot forward.

Some might say I’m way off base and that self-promotion is the best kind of promotion in this age of Jersey Shore and Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Well, I’m proud to say we’re not in the Snooki business – we’re in the business of discretion and of delivering honest, straightforward messages. The kind of stuff our clients can take to the bank.

I don’t know how it works in most other places, but here in New Mexico – and throughout the West – people appreciate a no-nonsense approach and getting the straight story.

Chris Cervini is vice president of New Mexico Operations for Strategies 360. 

By David Shurtleff

From the largest corporation to the smallest non-profit, it’s happened to all of us: you release what you consider to be an undeniably newsworthy story or idea, only to find out the next morning that no one picked it up.

In the olden days (read: 5 years ago), just sending out a well-crafted press release might have been acceptable. But in today’s media environment and beyond, that’s just no longer going to cut it.

Much has been made about the downfall of the mainstream media, but it’s important for your organization to understand its impact on you. Here’s the basic equation that we are all dealing with: More and More Stories + Fewer and Fewer Reporters = Less and Less (and Less) Coverage for You

Seems pretty hopeless, right? Well, it doesn’t have to be. While an entire book could likely be written on this very subject, here are just a few of the key ways to continue getting out your message despite the media drought.

Think Don Draper would settle for an e-mailed press release? Not a chance. He'd work the phones. (Photo courtesy of AMC.)

1) Get on the phone. When I was a reporter, it was common for me to receive 50 or more press releases a day. Which ones got covered? Usually the ones whose sender took the time to call and pitch me on. After all, if it’s that important, they’d be calling me on the phone, right?

2) Pitch fast and pitch smart. Reporters don’t mind getting phone calls, but you owe it to them to keep your story pitch as concise as possible. Practice and prepare the best way to describe your story, especially when dealing with shorter-form mediums like radio and television. Look, if you can’t tell them the story in less than 30 seconds, how the heck can they?

3) Small talk can turn into big things. Okay, okay…so the editor at the local station turned down your story idea…rather than hang up and get depressed, why not use the opportunity to at least get to know him/her better for next time? “Hey, well I appreciate you taking my call anyways. How are things going over at the newspaper, anyways? You guys doing okay?” Not only is it the fun, friendly and right thing to do, it also will help you in the long run to have some sort of relationship. You might even become good friends.

4) Don’t forget about the smaller media outlets.  Ask your communications team to perform an informal audit of what different smaller media venues there are across your state and region. While many of them don’t have huge staffs, most of these smaller papers and stations simply need the content. Offer to write them an op-ed on the subject, or volunteer an interview on their call-in radio show. Smaller, weekly newspapers may not have the readership of the New York Times, but they tend to be far more-trusted by their readers, and also (quite literally) have a longer shelf-life.

Above all else, don’t give up. Get creative and find new ways to approach earning media. Because no matter how much the media landscape changes in the coming years, people will always love a good story.

David Shurtleff is director of Alaska operations for Strategies 360.

By Paul Queary

My father spent three decades teaching writing to college freshmen. Among his many useful rules: You get 10 exclamation points for your whole life, so use them wisely.

Sadly, the promiscuous use of the exclamation point is on the rise. Maybe it’s the lasting influence of Schoolhouse Rock, or the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine dumps a guy for misusing the exclamation point. Social networking, with its spontaneous enthusiasm and, um, loose editorial standards, provides fertile ground. People routinely use it in business e-mail to convey urgency, or worse, artificial enthusiasm. It’s even sneaking into reports, presentations and other formal documents.

Stop. Exclamation points are for special occasions. Using them to convey urgency makes you sound 12. Using them to convey fake enthusiasm is, well, fake. Our communications team at Strategies 360 deletes them on sight, although we sometimes let the social media department get away with one because Molly Killien IS genuinely enthusiastic about everything.

Here’s the rule: Use the mark to express a high degree of surprise, incredulity or other strong emotion. AVOID OVERUSE. Use a comma after mild interjections. End mildly exclamatory sentences with a period.

That’s from the authoritative stylebook published by The Associated Press, my former employer and an organization with admirable restraint in these matters. The AP’s daily report is full of topics that inspire surprise, incredulity and strong emotion. And yet they do it without leaning on the crutch of the exclamation mark.

So here’s a challenge: Just stop. Use a comma or a period. If the sentence seems boring, rewrite it with some more zip. After a few weeks you’ll never miss it, and your readers will thank you.

Paul Queary is vice president for communications at Strategies 360. He still has some of his 10 exclamation points left.

By Tyler Chafee

As the 2012 presidential contest passes through yet another gestational phase toward its due date, political pundits and journalists are all offering their diagnosis of what ails or energizes the campaigns and the legion of outside groups and efforts that support those campaigns.

Among the topics is voter targeting, a science both interesting and a little bit scary.  The fact that campaigns can use databases of everything from truck leases to hunting licenses to “predict” not just whether you are a swing voter—but what kind of information will swing your vote—can leave a voter feeling a bit diminished and fatalistic.

Campaigns like to stoke this wizardly wonderment by pitching stories to reporters about how they have lured the best and brightest tech geniuses from Silicon Valley to craft codes and algorithms to data mine until they identify the prime targets for a campaign message.  See this Bloomberg piece for an example.  We imagine the senior campaign strategist swinging open a door and saying “Don’t be fooled by the kid over there in a ‘Hello Kitty’ fedora and the three-inch earlobe gauging, that genius is mixing the secret sauce!”  The reporter runs the story, people read it, and everyone is impressed.

NPR’s religion correspondent, Barbara Bradley Hagerty took a different approach on the efforts of United In Purpose , “… a nonprofit start-up company that uses data-mining to identify unregistered Christians.”  She began with the obligatory treatment of the use of new technology to build a database of 180 million records.  How they used a demographic scoring mechanism to identify someone as a “likely Christian” and then flagged if they were not registered to vote.

But Hagerty went a step further to see how this information is actually used, and her discovery holds a crucial lesson for journalists, campaign watchers, and campaign staffers alike.  She decided to shadow volunteers or “champions” who were using this data to go door-to-door to register voters.  One volunteer in Florida found the data to be completely false, giving him a list of people who were already registered to vote.  Another volunteer in Ohio got a valid list of unregistered Christians but was unable to convert a single person into a voter.

Those who have read Walt Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs probably understand where I’m headed.  Over the last 30 years there has been no shortage of technology and innovation.  But the true genius comes in making that innovation absurdly simple and incredibly user-friendly.  One passage in the biography talks about how a board member of Apple handed an iPad to an illiterate child in Mexico who had never operated a computer before.  The child turned it on and started opening and using applications in less than a minute.

Any billion-dollar campaign can lure software engineers, designers, and statisticians.  The real story (and the one that will make campaign PR flaks squirm) rests in whether or not that cool tool actually creates quantifiable new behavior among the people who cast ballots.  That synergy is the real secret sauce of the successful use of campaign technology.

Tyler Chafee is Strategies 360‘s senior vice president of Colorado operations and a veteran of many campaigns.

By Margi Hoffman

Remember math class in high school?  Like me, you probably took notes and tried to ace the tests, but had no interest in turning math into a career. I didn’t understand why mathematics was relevant or interesting.  I had no idea that it was the key to skills that would have led to doing things like building lunar robots, inventing fake artificial hearts, or programming iPhone apps.  It didn’t give me the same competitive juice as scoring goals for our lacrosse team. So eventually I stopped studying math.

My story is our problem.  Currently, there are two million jobs in the United States unfilled and over eighteen million unemployed Americans.  The jobs to be filled are in high technology and health care and the unemployed don’t have the education or training to fill them.

Growing up on a ranch teaches you that there is always a way to do something.  We just need to get a little creative.  That is exactly what For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology did in Oregon.

Working with companies like Boeing, Microsoft, Flir, Mentor Graphics, and others, FIRST and Strategies 360 have made great gains to get more science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) into our public schools.  FIRST establishes teams in participating schools, partnering industry mentors with students.  Every team has to build a robot to accomplish a specific task.  They also have to put together a business and marketing plan, which teaches kids to communicate their work to the world.

Each year the teams storm Portland’s Memorial Coliseum ready to compete, wearing crazy wigs and banging drums with enough excitement to power the future of our economy.  Of the 5,000 kids fortunate enough to participate in a FIRST team, 88 percent will pursue a four-year degree and 55 percent will pursue a degree in engineering or science.  They will have access to a $15 million scholarship fund and colleges drooling to matriculate a FIRST student.

Oregon kids gain a competitive advantage.  We start to close the education gap.

In the 2011 Session, amid deep budget cuts and a tough economy, S360 worked with the Legislature to establish a new public-private partnership to put a FIRST program in every high school.  With $150,000 in public funding, we granted 72 schools money and added 21 new high schools in remote areas like Umatilla, Vernonia, and Klamath Falls.

Industry is screaming for an American workforce they can hire, the kind that FIRST and Oregon are growing together.  This public-private partnership serves as the foundation we can build upon. More importantly, other states should replicate this model so the economy gets the workers it needs and our kids get the jobs they don’t yet know they want.

Senior Vice President Margi Hoffman runs Strategies 360′s Oregon operations.

By Jonathan Harris

Strategies 360 designer Cheryl Couris and I attended the Creative Mornings lecture series today. It’s just down the street from our office here in Seattle and this marks the 4^th  of these events held locally, but the series, run by AIGA, hosts other Creative Mornings lectures all over the world.

Today’s speaker was Scott Berkun, a polished public speaker, published author, and current team lead at WordPress.com. Our discussion was on the topic of Creative Hacks, which are interesting ways to encourage, maintain and assist creative problem solving.

As professionals, we go into these lectures already knowing much of what will be discussed, but simply being reminded of these activities and exercises can prove incredibly beneficial to our work, and our lives. Fortunately today’s lecture brought with it a myriad of fresh new ideas and Scott fielded some really great questions at the end of the session.

If you’re interested in learning more or would like to attend, check out http://www.creativemornings.com/ The lectures are organized by location so choose one that’s near you. They’re also filmed and available online shortly after.

Jonathan Harris is creative services director at Strategies 360. 

By Tyler Chafee

Colorado is making headlines today for delivering an upset victory to Rick Santorum in the GOP presidential nomination contest. Obviously, the result is a dramatic turn that will shift momentum away from Mitt Romney. But what really happened here in Colorado last night?

The answer lies in understanding important differences between a caucus and a primary election. In a primary, the state government holds an election with registered voters. Some primaries are “open,” in which voters of any party can participate, while some are “closed,” and only open to people registered with a political party.

Colorado State Map

Caucuses are very different. A caucus is run by a political party under state statute, not local government. In contrast to primaries, caucuses offer very limited access for eligible participants. The locations are not the same as regular polling precincts, and participants must arrive at the caucus meeting at a specific time. Most caucuses don’t allow proxy votes, so if you’re sick, have to work, or take care of the kids that night, you are out of luck. This is why caucus turnout is usually a small fraction of the turnout for a primary, and thus rewards the candidate with the most dedicated supporters.

Simply put, caucuses reward intensity and depth of support.  Primaries reward breadth and quantity of support. One isn’t necessarily “better” than the other; they offer us different pictures about the strength of a candidate.

In Colorado, Romney’s demographic profile seems very favorable: We’ve got a strong Mormon population, and Romney’s got roots in the west, as well as compatibility with among higher income and more educated voters. Plus, he won the state’s 2008 primary contest by more than 40 points.

But as Nate Silver points out in his New York Times blog post, the lower turnout of the Colorado caucus last night versus 2008 was a telling indicator. Colorado counties where Santorum was winning saw an elevated turnout, while counties where Romney was winning had lower participation.

Overall, the turnout last night in Colorado was 65,489, which is lower than the 70,229 turnout in 2008 (when the eventual nominee, John McCain garnered a weak 19% of the caucus vote), even though there was much more Republican campaigning in Colorado over the last few weeks than there was back in 2008. Some analysts cite snow on the ground as a possible factor that depressed turnout. But we’re accustomed to snow out here and it had stopped falling long before caucus meetings were called to order.

Speculation on the meaning of last night’s results will fill blogs over the next several days with talk about a Republican “enthusiasm gap,” analysis of which campaign has the stamina and funds to survive a lull in contests over the next few weeks, and of course how new “SuperPAC” money might be having an impact.

But Colorado’s caucus results simply mean that Rick Santorum had a higher intensity of support than Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul. And, that Romney’s support from elected officials and establishment elites proved no match for the fervor of a conservative base thirsty for a clear contrast to Obama.

Tyler Chafee is the Senior Vice President in charge of Colorado Operations for Strategies 360.  In his previous life, he is a veteran of two presidential campaigns and has the dubious distinction of organized caucus efforts for several campaigns.