Collaboration is widely understood to be a strategic option for grantmakers looking to leverage resources and maximize impact.  But as Tade Aina, program director of the Higher Education and Libraries program at the Carnegie Corporation of New York makes clear in this interview, funders who come to complex social challenges with predetermined answers would probably do well to go it alone.

Maybe I’m a sucker for a good metaphor, but I was moved by Tade’s grasp of the “zenlike” approach that foundation program officers need to adopt when trying to advance a collaborative effort. For Tade, grantmakers shouldn’t be gatekeepers; they should be “platforms” for the sharing and dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and values. Inherent in that assessment is a profound respect for differences in organizational culture and a frank acknowledgment of the deeply entrenched nature of so many of the social challenges that confront us today.

To read the rest of the post, go to PND.

Highlights: Chris Kabel on Successful Foundation-Grantee Relationships from PhilanthroMedia on Vimeo.

Chris Kabel, program officer at the Northwest Health Foundation, is one of the high-performing program officers profiled in the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s research report, “Working with Grantees: Keys to Success and Five Program Officers Who Exemplify Them.” Through this research, CEP identified four keys to strong funder-grantee relationships. In this conversation with PhilanthroMedia, Kabel discusses these keys, focusing his approach to forming and strengthening relationships with the organizations his foundation funds.

We’re all familiar with the expression “fighting words,” but even I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the verbal exchange that occurred when Communications Network contributor Susan Herr, and producer of our ongoing series of video chats, sat down to talk with our much-loved anti-jargon campaigner, Tony Proscio.

Admittedly it was a smart interview technique, and her tongue appears early on in the video to be planted somewhat firmly against her cheek. But if you’re not listening carefully, or you get momentarily distracted when she says it, you might miss the disclaimer that this was done all in good fun.

Still, in good fun or not, in all the years I’ve known Proscio, and have had the pleasure of seeing him eviscerate the use of use muddy, obscure and downright silly phrases in writing and speaking about foundation and nonprofit work, I’ve never seen him asked to argue his point against someone claiming that jargon can be useful.

If you watch the video, I think you’ll agree, that he succeeds in making a mockery of Herr’s mocking arguments.

And what do our two veterans of the video combat have to say about their experiences?

Here’s Tony:

When Susan asked me if I’d be willing to join her in a diavlog on the merits of jargon, I was pretty sure I’d heard every defense of philanthropic techno-speak there was. I’d heard “there simply is no substitute for capacity”! I’d heard “jargon is the only way to keep things brief!” I’d heard “I don’t have time to spend hours thinking up clever new expressions!”

But I have to admit, Susan hit me with a new one. It’s around 19:00 in the video, and it opens the jargon debate to whole new panoramas of psychoanalysis. (Hint: it has to do with the tingly feeling that goes up your leg every time you hear yourself say infrastructure.) Until this conversation, I never realized that low self-esteem was such a problem in our business. How did I miss this?

Seriously, this was a fun conversation, highly unlikely to send you back to your analyst’s sofa. It might — I’m not promising anything, just maybe-could-possibly-might — take some of the thrill out of the sound of metrics as it rolls dulcetly off your tongue. And if so, … well I’ll call it a good day’s work.

(And for those of you who are about to flame poor Bruce — or worse, flame me — for allowing a salacious reference to tingly legs on this family-type blog, calm down. It’s just an innocent paraphrase from Chris Matthews. Honest.)

And from Susan, comes this contrite response:

As one simultaneously enchanted with new media and creative language, I’m perhaps more susceptible than most to the sins of “jargon.” But Father Tony’s gentle guidance helped me see the error of my ways. Now I know my quest to communicate the wonder of God’s world must include short words, boring words too.

Like I said, I think this video succeeds in helping us continue to make the case we need to be diligent in our in our jargon-reducing efforts — which is why we also invite you to check out our jargon finder. Yet, if for some reason you suddenly begin musing aloud that jargon is good, let us know so we can yank this video asap.

Now…if you have the capacity for it, go to the video.

If you could have developed it before the web, it’s not native. Kindle, for instance, won’t make the grade because it simply disseminates the printed word in new ways. Video doesn’t make the grade because you could have watched it on TV. Fuggedabout downloadable PDF’s.

Made more obvious by the advent of the iPad, new digital approaches are daily emerging for those of us advancing ideas that matter. These include interactivity that enables users to customize how they view your data. The most cutting-edge include live data feeds coupled with vibrant data visualization.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has been creating native digital content for years through its annual Kids Count survey. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has developed a wealth of interactive maps that enable viewers to slice and dice information about the magnitude of the nursing shortage, the progression of the obesity epidemic and other healthcare-related issues. The Wallace Foundation has developed a cost-calculator that enables youth development advocates to understand youth development program expense variables based on the Foundation’s extensive data collection on the topic.

As I discussed with Jeff, who recently founded the Center for Digital Information, some of the most robust examples are coming from news organizations. One we discussed is an
interactive graph from the New York Times which showed the most popular World Cup players based on a live data feed demonstrating how many times their names were mentioned on Face Book each day. (You can find other great examples of native digital content — some with topics even more important than soccer — by checking Jeff out on Twitter (@jeffcdi).

If you are like me, once you begin to fall in love with this type of approach, you want to learn how to make it your own. These days that usually means some sort of platform or template that you can hire a brainy juvenile to program for you. Google Public Data Explorer let’s you create interactive graphs from public data but doesn’t appear (yet) to let you do the same with your own. While the data sets from which it lets you create interactive charts are severely limited, that’s bound to change fast. If you are advancing messages about the impact of philanthropy or working to increase the transparency of your foundations grantmaking, you would do well to check out The Foundation Center’s Philanthropy In/sight service that lets you create your own interactive maps from the Center’s data base.

As you might sense, I am geeked about digital content. Please let me know about examples you are working on so I can share them more broadly through the Communications Network.

Recently we had the chance to implement this approach — I call it Conference Engagement 2.0 — with our very first corporate client: Working Mother Media (WMM) and Diversity Best Practices (DBP.) WMM produces a wide-array on conferences including the one we covered called Network and Affinity Leadership Conference.

In the day before the conference, I co-taught a half-day “Social Media Engagement” Workshop with Jennifer Brown, CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting. Workshop participants — who came from major corporations like Toyota and Dayton Hudson — then gained hands-on experience capturing more than 100 interviews the following day. One of the resulting video summaries was finished and ready for its premier at the closing plenary. (Don’t expect to learn what affinity groups are or do from this video — it is intended for audiences already acquainted with the purpose of affinity groups in corporate America.)

Based on the success of this effort at NALC, PhilanthroMedia is developing a partnership with Jennifer Brown Consulting to focus these services in conferences dealing with workforce leadership and diversity issues.

I expect to see a great deal of growth in this cost-effective approach to both expanding conference engagement and crowdsourcing conference content. Here’s why…

Old School: Experts are those who spoke behind podiums or sat on panels. Conference Engagement 2.0: The collective wisdom of conference attendees far exceeds that of designated presenters.

Old School: Attendees pay for the privilege of hearing experts. Conference Engagement 2.0: Attendees are eager for opportunities to position themselves as experts.

Old School: Writers, photographers and videographers are paid to create content. Conference Engagement 2.0: Conference attendees are willing to pay for opportunities to hone their new media skills and the privilege of creating content that is broadly distributed.

Old School: There is little reason to check back with the organizers website until next year. Conference Engagement 2.0: Content captured during the conference drives traffic to the organizers website for viral content that can be shared attendees to extend learnings.

Old School: Competition for sponsor dollars is tough. Conference Engagement 2.0: Sponsors are more demanding than ever – including opportunities to be positioned next to compelling and credible content and conversations.

If this sort of approach seems of interest for your next conference, let’s engage!

Maybe it hasn’t always been that way.  Maybe our members were selected for their positions precisely because of they demonstrated an openness to change — since change is the one constant in today’s communication landscape.  Or maybe the rate of change has given more of us permission to admit what we don’t know, to seek guidance from brethren who might, to celebrate each small victory we see our peers achieve.

Changes in the larger media landscape are clearly beyond our control.   What is within our control — and what Teresa Detrich of The Lumina Foundation reminded me in a recent diavlog — is our commitment to advancing communications innovation over the long haul.  Senior execs may not grasp the imperative to align communications and program strategy as quickly as we would like, but they will.  And as they do, philanthropy’s impact will grow.

We need gatherings like the upcoming Communications Network conference in Los Angeles in order to help one another keep this faith.  We just produced a short video that makes our collective appeal more than apparent because it features video interviews captured by our Gorilla Engagement Team at last year’s Network conference as well as clips from diavlogs with several of our members.

I come from a Southern Baptist tradition where everyone is encouraged to bring at least one person with them to Vacation Bible School.  If you feel moved, forward this video to someone you know who might need a little encouragement.  Lord knows we are all in this together…

Originally published on The Communications Network blog.

That’s why PhilanthroMedia has spent the past year pioneering what we call Conference Engagement 2.0. Our best test case occurred over the summer and fall of 2009, when the Communications Network engaged us to implement an effort that would increase engagement among attendees at its annual conference, held October 14-16 at the Ford Foundation in NYC.

The goals were to provide: a.) Hands-on experience with Conference 2.0 technologies/approaches that would enable members to better understand how to promote interactivity at their own gatherings. b.) Opportunities for Squad members to interact with their fellow conference attendees, and to network in a productive way. c.) Content that could be used to continue dialogue after the conference was concluded, as well as to involve those who were unable to attend this sold-out gathering.

The experiment was widely lauded as a success and we have since launched components of this approach with OSI-Baltimore and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Want to know how we did it and what we learned? Check out the resources and evaluation materials which the Communications Network has made available here.

Over the past six months, Bruce has given me the honor of interviewing some of his best and brightest on the intersection between communications and foundation impact. The format we implemented – known as a “diavlog” – was pioneered by bloggingheads.tv, and it’s version is featured each week on the New York Time’s video home page.  (Our home-brewed version couples Skype with split-screen recording to create a talk show format for the web.)

At a half-hour each, the conversations are way too long for this sound-bite world, right?  That’s true unless you accept, as we do, that the best stuff emerges only in the context of exploration and dialogue. (Don’t worry, we will be distilling nuggets and themes from across the conversations in the coming months.)

Here are a few of the a-ha moments I have gained through these conversations:

• Teresa Detrich, electronic media specialist for the Lumina Foundation, tells me in an upcoming episode that one of the reasons Lumina has moved so aggressively to implement social media is because “if you want to work with innovators, you have to live where they do.”
• Mark Sedway and Cheryl Heller both told me, when pressed to describe explaining what foundations have to gain from effective use of social media, “It’s about relationships, stupid!”  The days when foundations could give away money and call it a day are long gone.  Now we actually have to listen to one another, find common ground, and move together.
• Phil Buchanan spoke convincingly about the need for the charitable sector to simultaneously communicate two messages: 1.) What we do is good, and 2.) We must always work to make it better.
• Albert Ruesga, president of the New Orleans Foundation (GNOF), tells me in an upcoming episode why GNOF named its blog “Second Line Blog.”   In New Orleans, it is the Second Line which follows behind a traditional funeral march, celebrating life rather than mourning death.  From my perspective, foundation communications have been all too often deadly dull, institutional, funereal.  I want PhilanthroMedia to be part of that Second Line which sings and celebrates in truly human voices.

Before co-founding IssueLab, Gabriela spent ten years working as an online strategist and web designer for nonprofit organizations. She received her M.A. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2006, with an emphasis in Organizational Sociology and her B.A. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994.

Running time of this episode is 30 minutes. To view selected sections, use the guide below to forward to the time indicated:

• What is IssueLab and what’s in it for me? (00:35-02:35)
• What is the specific purpose of social policy research and what are the implications for communicators? (02:35-5:26)
• What are gaps between talking and walking the work of research dissemination? (5:27-12:00)
• Inserting the communications perspective earlier in the research definition process. (12:00-16:00)
• What are the top three things that characterize research worth disseminating? (16:00-24:50)
• What is open licensing of our research and why is it important? (24:50-30:29)

In addition to serving as President for the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Buchanan was named to the Nonprofit Times 2007 and 2008 “Power and Influence Top 50” list. He holds an MBA from Harvard University and received his undergraduate degree in Government from Wesleyan University.

Running time of this episode is 29 minutes. To view selected sections, use the guide below to forward to the time indicated:

Center for Effective Philanthropy – Right Place, Right Time (0:00-1:20)

“Philanthropy is under attack.” Hyperbole? (1:20-7:46)

Who is attacking from inside the gates? (3:24-5:00)

What is motivating these attacks? )7:47-12:56)

How can effectively deliver simultaneous the message that the nonprofit sector is good but that it needs to be better? (13:42-18:38)

Why should I have to speak to what philanthropy as a whole is doing v. my own organization’s efforts? (18:39-22:41)

Why is it time to start violating “communication commandments?” (22:42-26:07)