Own the Room–Some great presentation advice

flickr/constantly-Jair

Lots of us tend to underestimate the potential ROI from a great presentation. If we absolutely have to do one, we default to PowerPoint and spend as little time as possible in development and preparation. Other communications tactics we’re working on are considered much higher priority.

Yet, most of us know that face-to-face communication is the top rung on the ladder when it comes to effectiveness. Mobile is awesome, but human beings still like to communicate in person. Think about that the next time you (reluctantly?) agree to make a presentation. Spend as much time as you need to ensure the desired effect. And, of course, the first step to that end is knowing what that desired effect is—ah yes, back to strategy. Set a goal for your presentation, just like you do with other tactics, so you’ll have some way to recognize whether you’ve succeeded.

I’m going to share some great advice from a new book called Own the Room, written by three experts on business presentations. It’s packed with good sense about strategy and useful how-to’s, but I’m going to focus on one aspect of the book—openings.

The best way to lose your audience in the crucial first 60 seconds of a presentation is to use a traditional, polite but dull opening aimed at everybody (and nobody). You know the kind: “Good morning. I’m Patricia Smith from the blah-blah organization. I’m delighted to be here this morning, and grateful to have this opportunity to talk to you about…..”

Everyone’s already looking at email on their phones or twittering that another lifeless speech has begun. Your opening has to get the audiences’ attention, and interest them enough in what you’re saying so they’ll stay tuned. As the authors point out, our brains are wired to pay attention to novelty and surprise–so use that knowledge. Be unpredictable—skip the tedious introductions and shake things up a little. Engage your listeners from the minute you open your mouth.

Here are three suggestions from the book about how to just that.

Ask a counterintuitive question

People may believe they know the right answer, but you then show them what the real truth is in a way that starts to frame the rest of your talk. The example given in the book is: “China has a history of disregarding copyrights. Of all the products whose copyrights are infringed where do you think the most violations are found?” Most people say movies or CDs. But you point out: “The number one copyright infringement in China involves Prozac.” From this opening you can move into the theme of your talk (trade, legal issues, depression, etc.) knowing you’ve gotten your audiences’ attention through surprise.

Make an attention getting statement

The example given is “Attractive people are more persuasive than average-looking people. How does this affect your business?” Again, from this opening you can segue into ways to level the playing field, aspects of persuasive speaking, etc. But you’ve gotten everyone to start thinking about how they fit into the attractiveness spectrum, and that engages them in your real topic.

Tell a personal story

Use the first few minutes to tell the audience something surprising or novel about yourself. Demonstrate why you’re passionate about your topic through a personal anecdote. Make it riveting, and full of visual details that help them see what you’re describing. People far prefer to hear a story rather than a lecture. Usually, we also find such stories more believable and memorable.

When using each of these techniques, the authors urge that you tailor your presentation to your audience. Generic openings don’t connect with anyone. To do that, you need to provide personal experiences, stories, concepts, or ideas in enough detail to make them interesting and relevant to listeners’ own experiences. Signal immediately that you know your audiences’ needs and expectations.

They also suggest that you reveal your personal values. Become a human being to your listeners, not just a speaker. (If that means revealing a small weakness they can identify with, go ahead.) Give them a window to your thoughts and feelings. If listeners feel like they know you, they are more likely to believe you.

And finally, the book encourages you to present your point of view on the subject. This helps your audience quickly understand your intention, context, and passion. The authors recommend that you picture your listeners with remote controls in their hands. Your job in the first few minutes is to keep them from flipping channels. Examples of a few great (and instructive) openings are included in the book.

Developing and preparing for a presentation—including one for a videoconference or YouTube—is a great opportunity to put all your communications wisdom to work. This book can help, as can many other books, blogs, and websites. Take the time to learn all you can about how to do good presentations. Your audiences will thank you!

CC photo credit: constantly-Jair

Own the Room is by David Booth, Deborah Shames, and Peter Desberg. I received a complimentary copy.

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Free tool of the week: VoiceThread for nonprofits

flickr/ //amy//

When I first found out about VoiceThread a while back, it struck me as something that foundations and nonprofits could make good use of. It’s a cool way to capture people’s engagement with a topic and image—to weave the threads of their voices into the story being  told.

A VoiceThread is a multimedia slideshow of photos, video, or documents that allows people to easily leave comments and join the conversation. Visually, it’s a slideshow screen surrounded by a mosaic of little avatars of all the people who comment on the image. When you click on the avatar you hear them or see what they’ve written or drawn. People can comment in five simple ways: by telephone, by computer microphone, by web cam, by writing text, or by drawing.

Once you’ve created the central slideshow story—you can invite people to view it and comment on it. Thus the conversation grows.

Wondering how you might use this free tool?

• How about getting your donors to add their voices to a story about a common cause they all support, telling why they support it?
• How about showcasing your grantees’ work by asking them to add their comments to a VoiceThread story you create about an issue they’re working on?
• How about showing how real living human beings are affected by the work you do? Ask them to add comments to a VoiceThread about how one of your programs has helped them.
• Honoring someone special? Create a VoiceThread testimonial to them including all the voice of people whose lives they’ve touched
• Trying to build a social movement? Here’s a very visual way to start—tell your VoiceThread story and ask supporters to add their supportive comments. Watch the little avatars multiply!

These ideas should help you get started thinking about ways you might incorporate VoiceThread into your website, social media platforms, emails to help achieve strategic communication goals.  It’s very easy to share—embeddable, emailable, etc.

Now, for a little introduction from the Voicethreads folks. And here’s a great step-by-step how-to slideshow, and an example of how educators are using VoiceThread to carry out conversations with students. It’s a very versatile tool…as you’ll see as you browse through the collection of existing VoiceThreads; everything from podcasting tutorials to art exhibitions to children’s voices about what’s happening in Darfur.

As usual, I played around with this free tool—just enough to create a very simple 1-slide central story about the issue of homeless teens. When you get to the page, just click on the lone avatar for the ABCD Foundation to hear the story. (I pretended I was a foundation interested in highlighting the work of its grantees working on that issue.) You’re going to have to IMAGINE other little avatars surrounding it—each from a grantee talking about the impact of their work with homeless teens. (It would be terrific to have some of those voices be the teens themselves.)

There are a few different pricing levels beyond what you can get for free (3 min. maximums on recordings, max. of 50 comments, etc.). But, even the Pro account, which gives you the most creative freedom is only $60 per year.

I see a lot of potential of this tool for the nonprofit sector–and not just for educators. Nothing is more fascinating to us than other people–what they think, what they say and do, what they support. VoiceThread is a unique way to combine your organization’s voice with the voices of your supporters or beneficiaries. It makes for richer, more inclusive, more credible storytelling. Plus—it’s pretty darn easy to use! Try it.

CC photo credit: //amy//

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Webinars for Nonprofits: Getting Started

flickr/TechSoup for Libraries

By now, most of us have participated in a webinar, but it’s one thing to participate and another to produce one. So, here’s  a quick guide to getting started in webinar production for nonprofits.

In light of current budget blues, traveling to a conference or workshop isn’t always possible anymore for your key audiences. Webinars can help your organization tighten its belt by helping share its knowledge and best practices without incurring travel costs for your staff or participants.

The first big step in deciding whether to do a webinar is completing your strategic communications plan. Your goals and strategies always determine your tactics and channels, not vice versa. So, don’t start by deciding you want to do a webinar and then coming up with an idea of what it might be about.

However, if—as part of your overall plan—you find your organization needs to communicate with a particular, far-flung audience in a fairly in-depth way (for example, to convey information or to explain a process) it might be worth considering a webinar.

Webinars don’t lend themselves to every topic, so keep that in mind. If eye contact or body language is important to your topic, you may want to look at another medium. Likewise, if you need more than an hour and a half to cover the subject, think about a series of shorter webinars or use another tool. Attention spans are challenged by webinars that last more the 90 minutes. Also, for small audiences within a short geographic distance (including internal audiences), face-to-face meetings may build stronger relationships than a webinar. Weigh all the pros and cons before you decide.

Anyone who’s taken a webinar knows they’re not all created equal. Some falter because of technical problems, inadequate planning, or poor presentors. Good webinars may look seamless and easy to do, but they’re the ones that have taken the most time to plan and carry out well.

Here are a few great resources to make sure that—if your nonprofit  chooses to conduct a webinar—it’s a raving success.

• First, look over these two wonderful articles from TechSoup on how to plan and how to conduct an effective webinar.
• You’ll also need to understand the range of available tools—here’s a list by Idealware that spells out what capabilities you can have in webinars, and reviews some of the webinar products you can use, including prices (scroll down to the section called Online Seminar Tools).
• And finally, HubSpot’s 10 best practices for webinars.

You nonprofits and foundations who already have experience  at conducting webinars—please share your experiences and add any advice you have below!

CC photo credit: TechSoup for Libraries

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Social math: Yes…data can tell stories too

flickr/fragmented

For a long time, nonprofits and foundations have tried to use data to drive social change–with varying degrees of success. But lately, they’ve caught onto stories as a more influential and memorable communication medium. Many nonprofits are proficient storytellers these days, but few extend that expertise to data-sharing.

In part, stories work because they help people connect new information to what they already know. By relating the unfamiliar to the familiar, we can figure out the relevance and meaning of all the new information that bombards us every day.

The same principle applies to data. We need to create meaning by relating the unfamiliar to the familiar. Piling on raw numbers may prove a point to statisticians, but others need more context to understand the meaning of data.

Social math is a simple way to make data easier to grasp by relating it to things that we already understand. It’s a way of presenting numbers in a real-life, familiar context that helps people see the story behind them. Here are a few examples, some taken from “Making Numbers Count” by Sightline Institute.

• One less coal plant is like cutting 40% of Washington’s vehicle emissions. That amounts to all the cars and trucks in Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane plus the 25 next largest cities in the state, combined.
• Community residents near a gasoline refinery noted that the plant emits 6 tons of pollutants per day—that’s 25 balloons full of toxic pollution for each school child in town.
• Most people in Africa support their entire families on the equivalent of what Americans spend on pet food.
• In 1991, enough alcohol was consumed by college students to fill 3,500 Olympic-size swimming pools, about one on every campus in the United States. The overall amount spent on alcohol per student exceeded the dollars spent on books and was far greater than the combined amount of fellowships and scholarships provided to students.
• The tobacco industry spends more money promoting smoking in a week than the entire federal government spends on preventing smoking in a year. (Sometimes you can skip the number altogether!)

Finding these kinds of analogies for your statistics takes a little time, but it makes your communications much more effective. Think creatively about how you can capture the scale of things by comparing them to things of a more familiar size. It’s especially effective if those familiar things are chosen to help emphasize your point. In the above example, it’s very effective to tie the amount of pollution directly to the children in a community, a particularly vulnerable population, and to an image of innocence—balloons.

The Internet makes this kind of research much easier. Two interesting sites that just might help are: WolframAlpha for comparisons of units of measure, and the EarthClock and other Poodwaddle clocks for global issues.

Two important points. First, use social math with care. You have to be able to defend the way you’re using any data, so make sure all your numbers and comparisons are accurate. Second, don’t overuse this technique. Less is more. Often, one piece of data conveyed through social math is more memorable and persuasive than six pieces of data.

For those of you interested in learning more about the subtleties of using social math, read Frameworks Institute’s valuable ezine on the topic.

CC photo credit: fragmented

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Free tool of the week: Fun, informative, powerful Google maps

We’ve all heard a lot about the capabilities of Google Maps, but that may not translate into our regular use of this great tool. I fell into that category myself before I sat down for a half-hour and just played. I decided to create a map of  East Lake Street in Minneapolis, which has benefited from recent community development projects. View the map at Midtown Renaissance: East Lake Street Comes Alive in a larger format.

To save time, I limited myself to five projects—but I could have gone on to produce a denser, more layered story of community development in this area.

Once you get on the larger map, click on:

• the red line (Lake Street) to see a linked PDF
• the green line (a bike path) to see an embedded youtube video
• the yellow rectangle to see embedded photos and text, and
• the blue square to see embedded photos, text, hyperlinks, and video.

The orange rectangle is another CDC project, where I wanted to show you that you can put a small photo directly on the map. Note also the P parking graphic; there are lots of these little graphics, like the biker on the green line, to choose from.

In short, all you have to do to create a map is go to Google Maps, quickly create an account profile, click on My Maps, and then Create New Map. Add a map title and description. You can choose the simpler street view format or the 3-D satellite view (in above photo) format to work in from the icons in the upper right hand corner. Zone in on the area you’re interested in and start using the placemarker and draw shapes tools in the upper left hand corner.

Using the placemarker tool, you can either choose one of Google’s icons or insert a url to create your own (that’s how I got the photo directly onto the map). If you use one of google’s placemarker icons, that creates a little popup window where you can title the place, add text, photos, and even embed videos. To embed photos in the popup window, click the little colored photo icon on the menu at the top of the window. To embed a video, click on “edit html” in the popup window and place the embed code from your video in the text box. Then click OK and Done (in the left hand column). That takes you out of the edit mode, so you can view your work like someone else will view it. If you’d rather learn this all from a video, here’s a good one.

You can also use the draw shapes tool (looks like a zigzag line) to create colored shapes and lines that overlay your map. I did this for the green bike route, the red street, the orange development area, and the yellow and blue buildings. A popup window automatically is created for these shapes, so you don’t have to use a placemarker.

There are a ton of uses for these maps in the nonprofit world—not just to locate your building for visitors. Think about creating neighborhood histories, identifying where specific resources or programs are located, tracking project progress on the ground, developing neighborhood asset maps, conveying complex demographic and community information, etc. (Environmental groups and others may want to also explore Google Earth Outreach for nonprofits. Here are some case studies for that tool.)

You can share these maps through emails, hyperlinks, and embedding. If you have any remaining doubts about the power of these free tools or need further inspiration, look at the Crisis in Darfur maps created by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

How has your nonprofit used Google maps creatively? Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Please do!

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Free tool of the week: Glogster for interactive posters you can share

This week I’m back on the trail of online storytelling tools for nonprofits and foundations. In past weeks, I’ve reviewed Yodio, Animoto, and Prezi. This week it’s Glogster.

Glogster lets you create interactive “posters” using various bits of pre-made and user-generated content—video, photos, music, text, graphics, etc. You can use this service and save/publish your glogs without registering, which is handy. And, it’s fun to use!

If you look at Glogster’s homepage (above), you might think this is a self-expression tool for teens. It’s that, and much more I think. In a matter of about 15 minutes, I whipped up two super-simple cause posters about the need for youth development opportunities. They’re no award winners, but I got a sense for how powerful these posters might be if you spent more time and thought on them. I didn’t even explore the music aspect, but that could be a nice effect. Just click twice on the images to go to the full sized glogs. (Note: The one on the right has an embedded Youtube video.) For a better idea of the range of this tool, check out new glogs featured on the Glogster site.

The creative process is simple, but you do have to download videos, music, and photos before you can place them on your glog.

Sharing glogs is pretty easy, too. You can send them by email; bookmark them; and embed them on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, WordPress, and other social media sites.

This could be a great way for nonprofits to create unique, engaging visuals for special event announcements, fund-raising appeals, donor thank yous, or even cause or educational messages. (NOTE: If you’re going to create a glog without professional design guidance, it might be a good idea to review my Design Eye-Q post from a few weeks back.)

Hope you find glogging as promising as I do!

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Guest post: It’s your nonprofit’s anniversary? Who cares…

Rick Schwartz

Another great guest post by Rick Schwartz.

In late 2007, I was invited  to talk to a community foundation that was going to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2008.

Coincidentally, 2007 was my own 25th wedding anniversary, and that was the basis of my perhaps controversial opening question to the community foundation’s board: “Who cares?”

Think about it. A couple celebrates a landmark anniversary. Of course it should be meaningful to them. It offers all kinds of opportunities for reflection and renewal. But why do we expect other people to care? However warm your family, however close your friends, anniversaries have a very weak gravitational pull as you move outside the hot inner core.

Apply that reality to your nonprofit, too. Who really cares that your organization is having an anniversary? Your staff? Your board? Your clients? Your funders? Your grantees (if you’re a grantmaker)? What is it exactly they should feel so excited about?

Yet many nonprofits assume that a fancy-numbered anniversary will somehow magically: 1) finally make them as famous as they deserve to be, and 2) bring in lots of money.

Actually, it’s worth a try

Despite my cynical approach, the community foundation decided it would forge ahead with a 25th anniversary celebration with me as their for the following 14 months. I think it was because I told them that their anniversary did, in fact, mean a great deal to certain key people in its fascinating mix of urban and rural, tiny and larger, poor and wealthier towns.

We just had to tell those people what that importance was. An anniversary year would be a good start. We could use the occasion to: distinguish the organization from every other organization, and bring inside circles of people closer. It’s also a perfect time to reinvigorate staff and board with the meaning and mission of the organization. I promise you, your organization will change in the course of the year.

Everyone’s anniversary means something different

So, I’m a donor to your organization. Why should I be excited about your anniversary?

The community foundation used its anniversary to tell key people four important messages: proof of permanence, legacy, achievement, and gratitude.

• We made it! Twenty-five years ago, our founders had a dream of people creating a permanent endowment for the region. Today, $30 million later, it could declare victory, for everyone’s good!
• Your ‘investments’ have made a difference. At the 25-year mark, we can look back and count the successes: programs launched, scholarships granted, land protected, children’s services created, etc.
• You are a part of history! Stop and take a breath. This is no longer a two- or three-year project, but the first 25 years of history of what will become an even greater institution.
• Thank you! Have we had a chance to thank all of you who actually planted the seeds? Can one ever say ‘thank you’ enough

What does your nonprofit’s anniversary mean?

Nine basic activities that made the difference

For the community foundation, here are what turned out to be the nine most important elements of the year. The first five prepared the soil:

• The board and staff agreed to be ice cold clear and realistic about our goals for the year.
• Every item we planned was judged and designed for its direct relevance to the goals. Lots of great ideas were proposed; lots were discarded if the link couldn’t be made.
• We developed a no-surprises budget that even Ed, the CFO, could comfortably live with
• Everyone agreed to and embraced the answers for “It’s your anniversary. So what?”Every public mention of the anniversary included the “so what?” answers.

The other four key elements were specific to this organization; your activities may be different.

• The foundation held two lovely gatherings. The first one was at the beginning of the year for key donors and funders, former board members, and committee members. Attendees were thanked for their essential roles in the organization. They were given the official “reasons” for the anniversary and were given the first look at the schedule of activities. Finally, as “insiders,” they were encouraged to be ambassadors during this celebratory year. The second gathering was in the fall. Invitations went to the above group of insiders, but also to people more loosely connected to the foundation, grantees, and just about everyone of influence in the state.    The program and the setting were choreographed to answer the “So what?” question, but entertainingly.
• With appropriate fanfare, the foundation gave an anniversary “gift to the community” that brilliantly represented why the foundation is such a unique organization. In this case, it was a $1.5 million gift to the local public library system.
• The foundation created an award-winning annual report. The two-part publication is pretty spectacular (you can see it online) but the process of creating it was almost as important. The CEO and others interviewed people who had started the foundation as a dream and a promise 25 years earlier. In doing so, the report honored people who had drifted, perhaps, from the fold, and reminded them they were welcome. Their stories were heartfelt and respectful.
• We requested, and received, editorial meetings with the daily press. The parties and the annual report brought the foundation’s existing circles closer. The gift to the community and the media work introduced the foundation to a wider public.

Sure, we had some great outcomes, but the best are yet to come

Was all the effort worth it? Some measures are quantitative:

• A 57% increase in contributions from the previous year, despite a horrendous economy
• Major turnouts at both events
• The Gold award for the annual report from the Council on Foundations (yay!)
• Governor Jodi Redl declared a “Community Foundation of Southeastern Connecticut Day”
• Congratulatory editorials.

The anniversary year has passed. Now it’s up to the community foundation to keep that spirit of celebration alive by continuing its good work.

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Nonprofit storytelling—beware of impact stories that don’t link to public policy

flickr/armadillo444

You can’t swing a cat these days (I never would) without hitting a storytelling workshop for nonprofits. It’s kind of the new silver bullet for conveying organizational impact.

I’m a big fan of stories, but I’m a little concerned about the approach the nonprofit sector seems to be taking.

What concerns me is the drive to tell episodic stories of individual success without tying them into a larger thematic policy context. Making an emotional connection is essential, but it’s not enough.

Very few of these impact stories reveal underlying causes, or assign responsibility for those causes to policymakers and the citizens who vote for them. This tends to reinforce the dominant American frame of individual rather than societal responsibility for the solution of social problems—a frame that the media has helped create and perpetuate.

By telling stories about their impact on individual lives, nonprofits and foundations may be shooting themselves in the foot with that silver bullet. Such storytelling can garner dollars and support (no small thing, I realize), but it doesn’t necessarily lead to social change. Nonprofits have to get more intentional about using impact stories to achieve both their short-term survival goals and their long-term social change goals.

Often, annual reports, newsletters, web sites, or videos that string together emotionally evocative stories about how a nonprofit has helped a few of its beneficiaries are fashioned for fund-raising. They pluck heartstrings, but don’t connect those people’s situations to the larger context of public decision making. In fact, they can leave readers and viewers with the impression that solutions to social problems are up to individuals and nonprofits, rather than to the public.

For instance, a nonprofit tells a moving impact story about a troubled youth who’s turned her life around. The nonprofit may get a temporary boost from that, but the story does nothing to show the larger context that led to her troubles or to explain how citizens acting together can eliminate the obstacles she faced. It’s all about her success at bettering herself and the organization’s role in those efforts. There’s no societal accountability built in.

Without tying stories of individuals to our collective responsibility for the policies and systems that have shaped their lives—we’re unintentionally reinforcing the notion that their troubles were their own doing. At the same time, we’re preventing audience members from making the connection between themselves and the people in the story. They may feel momentary sympathy and admiration for the story’s protagonist, but they are still just consumers of the story, not participants in it. We need to help citizens understand they play an influential role in any story about social issues.

The news media are notorious for gobbling up episodic stories about individuals. Media relations experts may tell you that’s the way to get headlines, but it’s not the way to change society. Most news stories strip away context to a point where the goal is provoking a superficial emotional response, certainly not empowering citizens to take action against injustice.

Here are a few broad-stroke examples of how news (and advertising) use individual responsibility frames in their storytelling.

1. Though study after study shows that public policies and systems are a huge influence in the American obesity problem, public discussion about this issue still focuses on dieting and self-restraint as the solution. If someone’s overweight—it’s their own fault and their responsibility to change.
2. In the environmental realm, much more attention is paid to how we should each change our individual behavior than to how we can collectively make big  policy changes that would have much deeper impact.
3. In health care, the emphasis is on individuals making sure they get tested for disease rather than targeting the causes of those diseases through public policy change.

The last thing the nonprofit sector should be doing is feeding the media episodic stories—that’s counterproductive to its long-term goals for social change. It’s easy to jump on the impact storytelling bandwagon—especially when you’re hard pressed for funding. But think carefully about the real story you’re trying to tell. Don’t let it just be about one person’s struggle or one family’s success or one neighborhood’s make-over. Ensure citizens understand their role in righting wrongs and exactly what actions they need to take.

One way is to tell the individual’s story first—grabbing the reader’s attention—then concisely explain who’s responsible for creating these conditions, what the potential solutions are, and how the public can drive toward those solutions. Weave in a compelling statistic or two—appeal to both sides of the brain.

Please read this recent interview with Shanto Iyengar, director of the Political Communication Lab at Stanford University and the author of Is Anyone Responsible, on the difference between episodic and thematic stories and how they influence citizen understanding of public issues. Remember his remarks when you’re writing web copy, news releases, video scripts, and anything else where you feature stories.

I’m going to be covering other aspects of issue framing for nonprofits and foundations in future posts.

CC photo credit: armadillo444

Free tool of the week: Yodio melds narration and images

In the next few weeks, I’m hoping to give you the low-down on some free online media that combine slides, photos, voice-overs, graphics, and/or music. I think they have interesting potential applications for nonprofits. But first, I want to try them!

This week I tackled Yodio, which allows you to synchronize voice-over (that you phone in) with a series of photos into a narrated slide show. It’s like a podcast with images. They say it’s simple and quick—and once you learn it it is. But it took me about 3 hours to create the Yodio below—from gathering and uploading pictures to writing and recording a script. If I had to do it again, it would probably take half that time.

I wanted to give you an example of what media like this might be able to do for nonprofits. (The Yodio gallery doesn’t have any nonprofit examples.) So, I put together a fake 2-minute lobbying spot for a clean water and land referendum that was passed last fall in Minnesota. Other uses for media like this might include: key takeaways from a research report, announcing a new project, impact interviews with beneficiaries of your organization, brief testimonials from donors, a virtual tour of a new facility, a teaser for an issue campaign, even introducing your staff.

I like Yodio, but I think it’s going to get even better as they introduce new features (which I hope are still free). As with most media like this, there’s a good free level of membership and a better paid level of membership. I used the free membership.

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1) Right now, you have to record the audio track for each photo separately—kind of laborious, but they have an option once you’re on the phone that lets you can record many of these tracks in one call. Just stay on the line after you’re through with your first track, and they’ll give you an option to record another one right away.

2) There are various options for transitioning from one slide to another—I just chose dissolve, but I think if this were for real, I would have tinkered with that. Some of these dissolves are great—others are clunky and draw attention to themselves.

3) Name each track that you record—this text will scroll as the slide is displayed. It’s another way to reinforce your message.

4) You’ll notice there’s a time lag between when my voice stops and the end of the track—it doesn’t make it easy to transition to another slide in mid-sentence. Yodio tells me that I could have used the phone key prompt (#1) to end  the recording right when I stopped speaking rather than waiting for the audio prompt. I think that would have solved this problem. Live and learn.

5) When you’re recording over the phone, use the very best phone you’ve got. And try to keep it at the same distance throughout the whole recording, while using the same volume whenever you speak. You’ll notice there are a few distracting modulation changes in my piece—that’s because I recorded a couple of the tracks at a different time than I did the rest. Record all at once to avoid this.

All you experienced Yodio users, any other tips for folks?

(By the way, I mailed Ana from New Mexico the free Cass Wheeler book.)

Free tool of the week: Jargon-Busters

I’m guilty of it too—using hackneyed phrases that have no meaning any more, and letting insider jargon creep into my writing.

Part of the problem is the speed of production these days. We don’t take the time needed to be precise with language, to think about the best, most straightforward way to say what we want to say. It’s so easy to fall back on stale expressions and terminology not well understood beyond the bounds of our field.

Here are two quick free ways for noprofits and foundations to check their writing for these enemies of communication. These tools should be right up there with spellcheck and readability tests in your final editing process.

First we have HubSpot’s new Gobbledygook Grader. Just cut and paste your copy, provide your email, click Grade Content, and you immediately get feedback telling you exactly which words are gobbledygook. It also tells you the readability level of your writing. (Note: the email report feature for this tool seems to work only for press releases. Hat tip to Jamila!)

Then there’s the Communications Network’s Jargon Finder–a list of jargon especially related to the nonprofit sector. You have to comb through your writing yourself to spot these. Not that hard really, and well worth the effort.

Now, go forth and un-gobbledygook!