Goodbye 2009, Hello New Year!

As we say goodbye to 2009 - and breathe in a sigh of relief for making through this tough year - Spitfire Strategies would like to take a moment to thank all of our clients for weathering this year with us and wish you all a healthy and successful 2010.

We started the year with a major victory as our partners successfully established SCHIP as a politically popular, bipartisan success story, ultimately delivering the measure to President Obama for reauthorization. On the heels of this victory, we also saw signage of the Credit Card Act of 2009 - putting in place tougher standards to protect consumers from financial risk.

Not every success story involved the White House. Spitfire also helped more than one hundred organizations build stronger communications strategies through our executive training program, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation training program and tailored trainings for grantees of the Packard, Hewlett and Gates Foundations, among others.

From helping the Centers for Disease Control support communities in their efforts to promote healthy lifestyle choices to building a strategy to clean up Pennsylvania's waterways to communicating about the need for more sustainable fisheries practices to improving access to quality health care for immigrants, Spitfire Strategies is proud of all of our clients and the many accomplishments they made this year.

We look forward to continuing to help nonprofits and foundations use strong communications to fight the good fight in the year ahead. This issue of Spitfire Sparks features a variety of tips for making 2010 your best communications year yet. We look forward to joining you in the trenches - and to sharing many more successes with you in the New Year.

Wishing you all a happy holiday season.

The Spitfire Team

What's Inside

Good to Great - Five Resolutions to Jump Start the New Year

Coming Soon - Be a Better Communicator in 2010

Great Minds - The Narrative Approach

Spitfire Recommends - Understanding Behavior to Shape It

Reach Out and Influence Someone - Pitching to Print Outlets 101 

Good to Great - Smart Strategies for Success

Five Resolutions to Jump Start the New

Year

by Monisha Som, Account Executive

Whether it’s eating better, sleeping more or spending less – the personal resolutions we make at the start of each year are usually as easy to break as they are to make. As 2009 comes to a close, consider skipping the traditional vows and instead making a resolution for your organization that will continue to pay off long after another year is through.

Here are Spitfire’s top five organizational resolutions for keeping your communications efforts on track in 2010.

Do your homework: Before you start communicating, find out what your audience is ready to listen to. Where should you look? Google is still a good standby, but another interesting resource is Issue Lab. A virtual warehouse of nonprofit research, Issue Lab publishes reports and research from a wide variety of sources specifically for nonprofits. What can research tell you? One recent study that can offer foundations in particular important insights is High Expectations, High Opportunity, a new report from the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative. Report findings are based off of a survey of ‘engaged Americans’ to find out what they think about the work and effectiveness of foundations.  

Mark your calendar: Don’t let opportunity sneak up on you and leave you scrambling – or worse, pass you by completely. Start the year by making a calendar of all major events happening in 2010 – internally and externally – that bring potential communications hooks. Your organization’s anniversary, the release of the President’s budget and relevant national holidays are good places to start. Get your staff, board members and other stakeholders involved to make your calendar as comprehensive as possible. You don’t have to seize every potential opportunity, but starting the year by knowing when important dates are coming up will enable you to be prepared and leverage those that can best support your agenda.

Give yourself an audit: The beginning of the year is an excellent time to review your materials to ensure that they are still in-line with your organizational brand and goals. Review your Web site, one-pagers, brochures and other promotional materials and ask yourself: Does the content reflect the organization’s current goals? Does it speak to the right audience target? Are the content and language appropriate for that audience? Are there stories that are still relevant? Do all the materials reflect a consistent look? If the answer to any of these key questions is no, it’s time to update your materials.

Invest in those Kodak moments: You’ve heard the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words – it’s also worth it to secure those pictures now so you are not scrambling for visuals later. Consider investing in images to punch up your brochure, one-pager, Web site and PowerPoint presentations. iStockphoto and Getty Images are just two sites that offer thousands of photos at a wide range of prices. Another option is to invest time, rather than money – think about taking photos at all of your major events in the coming year to build up an image library of your own. Remember: images for print should be at least 300 DPI. And if you are taking photos yourself, talk to your legal department about setting up appropriate policies for use.

Boost up the hope: No one could argue that this hasn’t been a tough year. But how are people going to take the actions you want them to if they’re curled up in the fetal position? As you begin planning communications for the New Year, shed the melancholy and start with a fresh outlook for your organization – and communications that underscore your hope for success. Make sure your audiences, including your staff, know how committed your organization is to making this year the best one yet. Check out the Activation Point for pointers on how to turn up the volume hope and get your year started off right.

Coming Soon - Opportunities of Note

Be a Better Communicator in 2010

by Kim Johnson, Senior Account Executive

Our resolution for 2010: impact positive social change by creating more strategic communicators than ever before. Spitfire’s new webinar series is open to anyone in the nonprofit community looking to reach program, policy or behavior change goals through smarter communications. Here’s a sample of what we have planned.

Smart Chart 3.0: Does Rocket Science sometimes sound easier than developing your organization’s communications plan? If so, this webinar is for you. During this one-hour, interactive session, you’ll be introduced to the Smart Chart 3.0, Spitfire’s easy-to-use communications planning tool.

•January 19, 10am PT/1pm ET

Writing for Results: The Swiss Army Knife of collateral materials, a well-written one-pager can be an informational device, a persuasive tool, a cheat sheet and a calling card all rolled into one. This one-hour interactive webinar is chocked full of useful tips for building an effective one-pager that looks good and delivers a powerful message punch.

•February 2, 10am PT/1pm ET

Audience Targeting & Messaging: If crafting clear, compelling messages seems impossible, help is on the way! This one-hour session will help you strategically identify the audiences most important to your efforts and introduce you to Spitfire’s message box, a simple, intuitive tool designed to help you create the strong, concise messages you need to drive your audiences toward your goals.

•February 23, 10am PT/1pm ET

Internal Communications: A key to getting external audiences on board is to start by making sure everyone inside your organization is on message. This one-hour Webinar will provide you with useful checklists and helpful tips for improving internal communications to create a bigger external impact.

•March 2, 10am PT/1pm ET

Register to participate by clicking here. Or, for more information, contact Adam Rankin at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or (202) 293-6200, ext. 222. 

Great Minds - Ideas to Make You Think

The Narrative Approach

by Lucy Cox-Chapman, Junior Account Executive

In a good novel, each chapter moves the story forward, while incorporating previous chapters to create complexity and depth. This layering effect slowly alters the reader’s perspective as she absorbs the messages the author is communicating. Often it’s called constructing a narrative – or the storyline. How does this relate to strategic communications? Believe it or not, we can learn a lot from John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison. Your organization can be the author of your issue, building a narrative to communicate the messages you want.

The power of the narrative approach comes from its flexible yet progressive structure. To figure out if the narrative approach is a good strategic choice for your organization or issue, answer these three questions:

1. Where is the conversation now, and where do you want it to go? Figure out the arc of your storyline, and then the chapters that will form your narrative

2. Are there indicators of progress? The narrative approach works best when you can first point to others making progress, then point to your organization/campaign/state making progress, and finally when you can all celebrate and reinforce successes to maintain and continue your progress.

3. Are there enough spokespeople who can credibly carry your messages? Make sure your storyline isn’t too narrow and that there is something for everyone.

After you answer those three questions, it’s time to add chapters to your narrative and put it into practice. Each chapter should contain a unique message while building on the previous chapter and setting up what comes next. This way, you can use multiple chapters, or just one, to advance the conversation around your issue. Whether your organization is attempting to change policy, behavior or values, the narrative approach offers a powerful way to influence the debate about your issue.

To see how Spitfire put it into practice to change the conversation around children’s health care coverage, read our case study.

Spitfire Recommends - Latest and Greatest Tools and Resources

Understanding Behavior to Shape It

by Kristen Grimm, President

Ever wish everyone made decisions as logically as you do? It turns out they do. According to Duke University Professor of Behavioral Economics Dan Ariely, the majority of people make decisions equally irrationally. So how can we learn about the decision-making process and hope to influence it if it’s random? The good news is that while our decisions may be irrational, they aren’t actually random. In his book and accompanying blog Predictably Irrational, Ariely opens a window into the ways we make decisions and the factors that affect those choices – from why we procrastinate to why having many options can be worse than having none. The most directly relevant chapter for social change organizations is Chapter Four: The Cost of Social Norms. Here, Ariely discusses why people are often more apt to take action for free than if they are offered modest payment.

Reach Out and Influence Someone - Tips to Spread Your Message

Pitching to Print Outlets 101

by Erin Campbell, Vice President

With newspapers all around the country downsizing staff, organizations that are trying to get coverage in print publications are experiencing even more competition to get coverage from a smaller pool of reporters. That makes it more important than ever to be strategic and creative when pitching to print outlets.

Here are a few tips to help make your pitch stand out:

Know your audience: In addition to finding reporters in media databases, it’s important to track the work of the reporter you are targeting, gauge his or her interests and note the stories he or she has done recently. Also, be mindful when pitching local or regional outlets and make sure your pitch has a direct tie to that area. Now more than ever, local papers rely on national wires for national stories and local reporters are only interested in covering issues that have a direct tie to their region. For example, a recent effort we undertook at Spitfire to help a client gain the support of key legislators made sure to localize pitches to talk about each particular policymaker’s role in the effort so reporters could clearly see a local angle in the context of a larger national effort.

Tie pitch to existing media hook: To maximize the impact of your message, think about the media cycle and tie your pitch to an issue you know reporters will already be writing about. Spitfire recently worked with a client to help push for credit card reform legislation in Congress. In order to maximize coverage, the client unveiled important data related to the legislation on the same day as it was being considered in committee. By doing this they were able to get their important research included in a wide range of stories that were being written about the legislation and likely to be read by the target audience they wanted to influence.

Strong delivery will make or break your pitch: Whether you’re pitching the reporter by phone, or following up on an email pitch, consider your timing – especially with print reporters. Avoid calling a reporter in the late afternoon when he or she is likely to be on deadline unless you have news that warrants a late-breaking story. Keep your initial pitch short so you can get the key facts out to them right away but be prepared to talk to them in more detail about your issue. Plan and practice your pitch and deliver it with confidence so the reporter can see the importance of your issue clearly.