Free Flowing Thoughts

A Different Approach to the Month of the Military Child

April is the Month of the Military Child, a very active time for MCEC as you can imagine.  Our typical PR activities this time of year include reaching out to a media roster we keep in touch with to remind them of the importance of this month and activities MCEC pursues on behalf of military children.  Sometimes this resulted in nice articles, sometimes not.  But we do it anyway because we want to build awareness of the cause.

This year we did something different.  We solicited art in the form of poems, stories and drawings representing the life of the military family.  Who better to tell their story?  We posted these submissions on our blog site, YouTube channel, Facebook group, and promoted with our Twitter feed. 

Our goal during the Month of the Military Child has always been to share the joys, challenges and opportunities to support the children of our military families.  Redirecting our efforts toward social media and less focus on traditional PR is helping us accomplish our mission more effectively.

Read more of these powerful submissions here:

I’m proud to be a military child because of everything it has taught me. I’ve gone through millions of goodbyes, welcomes, tears, laughs, and smiles.  I’ve been a military child since the day I was born. It’s my first nature and a title I live by.  My father is a Colonel  in the United States Army and one can’t begin to understand the feelings I have towards that title and job my hero holds.  My father has given up everything for my family and me to live in this free land. We have crossed oceans with him supporting his every decision.  Every child knows in their heart that their loved ones would give up their world, life, and family just to know that your safety, freedom, and peace is in their hands.

Putting the public back in PR

We are wrapping up our 2008 marketing plan review for MCEC, and starting the 2009 plan.  Although we will increase our PR spend significantly, the increased funding will target families and teachers of military children instead of reporters and editors.  With our baseline from last year will continue to reach out to the traditional media,  but our major efforts will target the mere mortals of the world directly. 

Increasingly these audience are relying less on traditional media, and more on each other.  They join Facebook groups where see discussions happening on how to help a child adjust to a recent move.  Our organization can has resources that can help, we need to be where these families are asking the questions.  We see teachers with their own blogs talking about what works in the classroom, we need to be engaged on those conversations finding the good ideas we can share with others. 

Over time, I suspect more and more of our efforts will shift from producing volumes of printed material we have today and more toward engaging our constituents directly online.  It's cheaper, it's more effective, and it's the first place people go today for information.

3 Completely Self-Interested Reasons to Volunteer

Yes, there are plenty of compelling moral and spiritual reasons to give financially and volunteer with a non-profit or social cause.  

This post is not about those things. It is entirely focused on the self-interested aspects of giving of your time.  In fact, this is a shameless appeal for more involvement from our most talented marketers and leaders...the kind of people who read this blog.  

There are thousands of outstanding non-profit organizations, none of them have the resources they need to accomplish their goal.  They all need your money, but what they really need is your time.  Not simply a casual 1/2 day with a group from work but a long-term commitment to dig in and make an impact. Making that kind of commitment is a sacrifice, and beyond being a calling, here is why you should start tomorrow.    

1) Build experience in areas you do not get use often at work.    At a non-profit you will be working with much smaller teams than your day job, which means you will be hands on with the work and able to take some risks.  If you make a mistake in the process, it will not show up in your performance review, or impact your pay--and you will learn along the way.  If your day job does not let you drive social media marketing, find a non-profit that needs to expand in this space and jump in.  If you are developer who wants to learn more about an emerging technology, find an organization and volunteer to build or update their Web site.  Many experts in the areas you want to learn more about will give you free advice to help a good cause.  Listen, experiment, and learn.  

2) Meet some interesting and connected people.  The people who show up to work at a non-profit are driven and focused on a cause larger than themselves.  They are wonderful people, and you will enjoy working alongside them.  As you work closer with the board of directors and major donors you will frequently interact with highly talented business and government leaders.  Often fascinating people, they are also priceless mentors and connectors.  These are unique opportunities to interact with people you would normally just read about in the media or watch from a distance.

3) Add something interesting to your resume.  I interview a lot of people for jobs who have very few achievements they can talk about outside of work.  When I meet someone who has taken on responsibilities in non-profits they tend have more interesting stories to tell.  That makes them unique memorable.  The more they have taken on and achieved outside of work, the more they come across as driven, results-oriented people with initiative.  

Five years ago I volunteered to read some essays for children from military families who wanted to go to Space Camp.  It was intended to be a one time thing, but then one of them made me cry.  After that I was hooked.  Today my involvement with the organization is closer to a second job, but it is the most rewarding work I do.  

There are unlimited options to choose from, ranging from non-profit organizations of large global scope, to smaller teams looking to make an important impact just in your local area.  Pick one and jump in.  

High Hopes For New Military Child Program

Today we started recruiting students from military families to share their stories online.  Post is live on our new blog, www.VoiceForTheMilitaryChild.org, Twitter, and posted across several Facebook groups targeted to military families. 

Thinking these stories will be a great way for people outside the military community to better understand the challenges and opportunities of military families.

The magic of the book Made To Stick in 10 easy minutes

The Made To Stick blog is a great companion to their book, which remains my favorite book on communications.  This particular post give you a nutshell version of their approach to taking a key message and making it 'sticky.'  It starts with a bunch of interesting statistics on the mission, then this challenge:

"Give yourself this mission: To boil it all down. No one is going to read all these stats, and even if they do, they won’t remember them. They certainly won’t be moved to action by them. So how can you get people *excited* about “girl investment”? Imagine that you’ve got 2 minutes of the audience’s attention to make your case. How would you translate the data into something simple, emotional, specific? (By the way, just by thinking about this, you’re already ahead of the game — most social enterprises I’ve worked with would have simply published the PDF and declared victory…)"

It's too easy to get lost in the numbers and forget the emotion and the cause that will cause people to act.  This holds true at for companies as much as non-profits.  A brand that engages emotion is infinitely more powerful than a brand that is only rational. 

Why I Volunteer With Military Child Education Coalition

Throughout the conference we have been taking short videos of board members and volunteers about their experiences with MCEC. Mine is below, and you can watch all of them at YouTube.com/MilitaryChild

MCEC Chairman talks about why supporting military children is so important (v-log)

When I was invited to join the board of Military Child Education Coalition.  It was an overwhelming honor.  There are not many opportunities to work up close with a leader like General Tom Schwartz.  He is inspiring and tough, and brings out the best in people.  We filmed the clip below at the conference this week.  He talks about how the organization was founded 10 years ago and why the work we do matters.

Military Child embraces social media tools to reach our audience

This week we launched a new Web site for our organization at www.militarychild.org.  It's a massive improvement over our old site which was launched ~5 years ago and only lightly updated since.  There is a lot of work still to do on on the new site, I certainly welcome your ideas and input.  The greatest addition was building the site based on a content management system (CMS) that enables us to make changes instantly without having to contract out the work.  We were able to make several changes from the conference floor today.  This technology used to be very expensive, but today there are free open source solutions which have the same functionality as systems that were once $1M+. 

The core web site is important, but it is only one part of our overall online marketing plan.  We also launched an organization blog, www.VoiceForTheMilitaryChild.org which will cover many topics important for military families.  Each of our board members and staff will be posting, and we will include bloggers outside our organization who have something important to bring forward related to military children. 

We have also setup groups on Facebook for MCEC and one of our programs specifically targeted to teens, Student2Student.  This is an important step in bringing the online conversation to where our core audiences are already talking.  You can also follow our updates on Twitter and watch MCEC TV on our YouTube channel. 

Later this week we are going to announce another major part of our online marketing plan which I believe is very unique and will be a key part to getting out our message.

Military Child Student to Student Programs In The News

I recently took on public relations along with the rest of marketing for Military Child.  So I'm watching press on the organization much more closely than I was before.  Our PR firm, Powell Tate has a great team working with us headed by Brian Wommack..  If an organization has to prioritize marketing budget take care of PR first.  It's the most cost effective way to get out the message.  We need to look at increasing ours soon. 

Great article appeared in Stars and Stripes about our Student to Student program.  It basically creates welcoming committees of other students when a new child from a military family arrives at school.    We have hundreds of these students volunteering in schools all around the world.

Is your board ready to add fundraising to board member responsibilities?

Military Child is making an important transition to funding our mission with more donations and grants than service contracts.  While we do not plan to do less contract work, it is a key part of how we accomplish our mission, we no longer want this to be the main source of funding.  This is largely because contracted studies and services could be reduced or eliminated at any time and overnight our organization would find itself without funding to make a difference.

We are learning it's a lot easier to make this transition on PowerPoint than in reality.  Our board began largely as a "working board" where each of our 20 members have responsibility for a particular initiative or general topic.  When we joined there was not expectation of fundraising and the reality some people are better/more comfortable with this than others.

BoardSource has a revealing 10 question quiz on the readiness of your board to make fundraising a key responsibility.

http://www.boardsource.org/Spotlight.asp?ID=14.336