2009 CONTINUING-EDUCATION GUIDE
A Georgetown U. center teaches students to help charities communicate
Before moving to the United States from London two years ago, Jacqueline Sibanda had worked as a community-relations specialist for a British cellphone company, and was part of a team that negotiated with local residents wherever a new cellphone tower was planned. While she loved the corporate world, she yearned to use her communications skills for the greater good.
So last fall, Ms. Sibanda entered a master's program in public relations and corporate communications at the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University, in Washington.
She chose Georgetown over other programs because of its new Center for Social Impact Communication, which seeks to train communications experts who can help nonprofit groups, government agencies, or businesses with a commitment to social responsibility convey their missions effectively and ethically, says Denise Keyes, the center's director, who created it in the fall of 2007.
Student Consultants
The program's centerpiece is a two-semester "cause consulting" track, in which students are matched with nearby nonprofit clients — those too small to hire staff members to focus exclusively on communication.
Students work directly with nonprofit managers, using the skills they acquire in their more traditional graduate classes to create formal, practical communications plans on a pro bono basis.
The first cause-consulting program matched 14 students in teams of two with seven nonprofit organizations that had applied to participate in 2007-8.
A second class of 14, including Ms. Sibanda, just completed its consulting projects last month.
Created with seed money from the World Bank ($23,000) and the Harman Family Foundation, in Needham, Mass. ($5,000), the cause-consulting program will now be supported through Georgetown's regular program budget, said Ms. Keyes.
The importance of communications is often underappreciated by small, budget-strapped charities — and even by some larger ones with better resources, says Martha Schumacher, a fund-raising consultant in Washington.
"During these times, communication with donors and constituents is even more important than usual. It's shortsighted and counterintuitive to be cutting your marketing and communications," Ms. Schumacher says. Even simple things, she says, such as keeping a charity's Web site updated or putting together a letter to send to current supporters, are critical to reinforcing an organization's mission.
In the first semester, Ms. Keyes says, students meet with charity officials to discover the organization's most pressing communications challenges.
"Our students come, and they're not functioning as interns, they're truly being consultants: running trainings for the organization, helping them with their messaging, and creating their systems," she says.
The goal, she adds, is to establish a process that can be used by employees and volunteers to communicate appropriately with current donors, prospective supporters, and the general public.
Tailoring Language
Ms. Sibanda, who was born in Zimbabwe, was happy to work closely with an organization called the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, which has headquarters in Washington but operates exclusively along the Congo River in Congo — the only place in the world where bonobos, a close primate relative of humans, still live.
One thing she learned, Ms. Sibanda says, is that communications and fund raising are closely linked for a charity.
Without straying into the actual tasks of fund raising, Ms. Sibanda says, she was able to work with the charity's executives to create key messages and consistent language to address different audiences.
For example, she says, potential partners in the conservation and science communities are most interested to hear about the animal and environmental research emerging out of the charity's work in the field, but those details are not as important to potential donors, who are more likely to be drawn in by discussions of the organization's role in collaborating with local communities and preserving the rainforest.
In addition, Ms. Sibanda says, donors are attracted by the message that the Bonobo Conservation Initiative is a very small, efficient organization able to complete large projects through its good relationships on the ground. Much of her work crafting these specific ideas, she says, is now contained in a handbook that volunteers can use when the need arises for a press release or a letter to the group's largest donors.
Reaching Out
Georgetown's cause consultants are, of course, degree candidates for the master's in public relations and corporate communications, who also complete more customary courses in writing, research, and communications strategy, according to the program's stated requirements.
But Ms. Sibanda acknowledges that the chance to use communications skills in a mission-oriented context was the primary attraction of this particular graduate program.
Although the creation of an overall communications strategy is the major goal for the students to complete, they also try to leave charities with templates and other items that can make it easier to repeat common communications tasks.
Melissa McCabe, who will graduate from the program this month, worked with the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington, which produces an annual publication that promotes and publicizes local charities with annual budgets under $3-million.
In her first semester working with the organization, Ms. McCabe and her consulting partner, Shannon Kula, found that "the catalog was doing really well at what it set out to do," Ms. McCabe says.
Distributed to wealthy individuals in Greater Washington just before the end-of-the-year giving season, it was successful at highlighting the work of small, local nonprofit groups, Ms. McCabe says.
"But my partner and I concluded, if you really want to build relationships, you have to communicate more than one time a year," she says.
Ms. McCabe and Ms. Kula put together an outreach plan listing monthly opportunities to communicate with donors based on various calendar events — for example, an appeal to ask donors to support environmental charities on Earth Day.
To formalize the charity's media-outreach plan, Ms. McCabe and Ms. Kula compiled a comprehensive list of local and regional news-media resources, wrote several sample press releases, collected quotations and testimonials from the catalog's donors and partners, and investigated volunteer organizations, women's groups, and other potential partners that might help publicize the achievements of charities featured in the catalog.
While the focus was on increasing the reach of the organization over time, the student consultants did see some immediate results: The catalog received a mention on National Public Radio following one of the press releases, Ms. McCabe says.
Another small charity, the Urban Alliance Foundation, in Washington, received similarly focused help from Georgiana Morales, who graduated with her Georgetown master's degree in December and is now working part time in a public-relations company as she looks for a full-time position.
Crafting a Pitch
The Urban Alliance, a 13-year-old program with a $2-million budget, places low-income high-school seniors in paid internships. Currently the alliance operates solely in Washington and Baltimore, serving 400 young people each year in about 80 businesses, but the goal is to expand the program and serve 1,000 students a year in several cities, according to the organization's executive director, Veronica Nolan.
"The biggest communications challenge is that they need companies to know who they are and get involved" as employers for the students and as donors, Ms. Morales says.
She and her student partner, Kimberly Warfield, first crafted an "elevator pitch" for the alliance — a quick description of its mission — to keep all staff members "on message" when speaking with potential supporters.
The students also developed a news-media contact list and press-release templates, and ran a half-day training for the charity's staff on effective communications strategies.
Jee Pae, who became development director at the Urban Alliance just a month before the Georgetown students arrived, says she depends heavily on the binder of materials developed by Ms. Morales and Ms. Warfield to help her reach out to corporate employers and donors.
But more important, she says, their work helped her understand the value of communications as part of her job.
"Before that," she says, "I had no idea where to even start."