Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Robert French | infOpinions?, MarcomBlog, and PRblogs.org
EDITORS’ CHOICE | Blogging for Non-Profit Groups

UPDATE: Camp ASCCA has a new site with a variety of social media platforms like: blogs (here’s another one), photo galleries, a wiki (behind a firewall), and photo/video sharing communities at Flickr, Google Video and YouTube. There is also an Alumni Forum. The whole site has only just launched (early Feb. 2006) and is now growing. Feedback is appreciated.

During the 2005 Summer semester, my students created a campaign for Camp ASCCA / Easter Seals incorporating blogging and RSS feeds / media tracking into their marketing and media relations plans. This article explores the experiences of the students gained from creating the online resources and the questions the camp faces as they try to launch the ideas online.

Background of Camp ASCCA

Alabama’s Special Camp for Children and Adults

I have worked at, and volunteered for, Camp ASCCA and Easter Seals during several periods of my life. When I began "PR blogging" it took 9 months for me to write my first post about past experiences there. Why? I was worried about controlling my fervor for the organization. I also worried that my target audience, my students, were already weary of my tales about camp PR experiences. For Camp ASCCA, unlike blogging, I am an evangelist. I admit that I may be myopic in my views. This worries me as we try to design and implement strategies on their behalf. Unlike some who write about the use of blogs in PR, I fear that my views may tarnish the way I discuss its programs. All things need prespective and I want to make sure my perspective is not skewed. I am a fervent believer. Is that a good thing? Maybe not.

Now, the camp wishes to expand their marketing activities and capitalize on Web delivery and conversations. How viable is this goal? What are the prospects for reaching these publics?

A high proportion of the camp’s consumers come from lower to lower-middle income families. The vast majority of the campers are able to attend only through the benefit of scholarships (camperships). These families do not necessarily have Internet access.

Camp ASCCA has something to say

Social service agencies have a special resource that, properly expressed, can be quite valuable to enhancing their public persona and "selling" their services. Yes, I do mean selling. Non-profits are businesses, too. The resource is the stories of the services they provide. These stories manifest themselves in many ways. They emanate from the campers (consumers), parents (customers), volunteers (civic service groups), donors (contributors of money, gifts-in-kind, services and time), counselors (front line customer service providers), support staff (food services, facility maintenance) and program staff (recreators providing activities from horseback riding to high adventure to skiing and more). These are stories that need to be told. In the past, ASCCA relied upon print media, video, speakers bureaus and other traditional marketing channels.

What models exist for the camp to emulate?

Another camp I am familiar with (a for profit business) is now involved in online communication. Camp Mac has instituted a password protected portal. Internally, which you can’t see, they have a form of blogging where campers and parents may converse during their child’s extended stay at the camp.

This is an excellent addition which appeals to parents. The students also wish to incorporate such a tactic for Camp ASCCA. Think about this for a moment. It is hard enough for a parent to send their child away from home for a week, but how do you think the parent of a special needs child faces the prospect? These parents, in my experience, have a heightened "protection" sense towards their children. Many of ASCCA’s campers have medication, appliance and therapy issues that (sometimes) only the parents feel they know how to adequately handle for the child. A method for daily communication may help ease those concerns for parents. Further, the process may be expanded to allow daily interaction / updates with the camp’s medical staff.

Student Created Tactics and Strategies

Having no budget, the students utilized opensource blogging software (WordPress) and opensource RSS aggregation tools (Feed on Feeds, Yahoo! News, Technorati, PubSub, Bloglines and others).

First, to show the client how online media and blog monitoring may reveal conversations of interest, the students set up a Feed on Feeds aggregator to show one hosted option the client could own and maintain themselves. Then, they went to the RSS sources above and created numerous searches. Those RSS feeds were loaded into Feed on Feeds to illustrate the process. A long list of keywords and phrases was created to provide examples of the different types of publications and conversations already occuring online about disabililty, specific disabilities served by the camp, other facilities, personal insights of living with disabilities and more.

Then the students launched a blog and populated it with a few posts and several tutorials to explain the blogging process.

The simple tutorials covered Feed on Feeds, Inserting Pictures, Making a Page in the Blog, Posting in the Blog, Manage Tab, Post Moderation, Presentation Tab, Links Tab, SEO and Inserting Pictures in Photo Gallery. Their clients, the staff of Camp ASCCA, were somewhat familiar with blogs, but had not engaged in blogging themselves.

In their final project, the students presented ideas about who should be doing the blogging, how frequently posts should go up, timetables to equally share the responsibilities among all staff and a process for moderating and editing the submitted posts. Interns will be used by the camp to edit the posts and create appropriate multimedia / image supplements for each post. The whole process is supervised by the camp’s director of marketing communications.

Beyond the stories of client services, the blog will further be used to highlight other facility uses. Like most camps, there is a lot of down time between sessions serving people with disabilities. So, ASCCA supplements their ongoing costs by hosting retreats and conferences ranging from churches and student groups to corporations and family reunions. Having those groups use the facilities, if only at cost, helps the camp divert more funds from their donations to direct services for people with disabilities.

The blog - or blogs, the camp may launch two - will be narrowly targeted and contain pre-buttal / re-buttal posts to help drive adoption (registration for camp and use of the facility as a retreat destination).

The retreat function is referred to as "reverse mainstreaming" where able-bodied individuals are exposed to a facility purposefully designed for wheelchairs, walkers and other appliances. Camp’s sleeping facilitiess, for example, feature extra-wide doors, wide open bathrooms, sinks and more. The camp can sleep up to 400 people in air-conditioned cabins. They also offer miles of paved paths throught the main complex and out into the forest on nature trails. Saying these things to people is one thing. Showing them is another. The blogs may help drive visitors to the camp. That is the ultimate ’sales’ tool. Once someones sees this multimillion dollar facility located out in the forest on 230 wooded acres with 1.5 miles of Lake Martin shoreline, they are likely loyal supporters in the future.

Issues to address before proceeding

Before launching the blogs, Camp ASCCA will have to answer a lot of questions. Among the issues the camp has to resolve are (a) should campers be involved in the blogging activities, (b) what staff should be writing in the blog, (c) what board members should be writing in the blog, (d) are comments going to be turned on and (e) should they be moderated.

If campers are given access to the blog, do you really want to trust your brand to the whims of a teenager’s writings about their camp experiences? What if a camper writes in and claims to have had a bad experience? What if an angry parent writes in to express dissatisfaction with services? There are many, many more questions to consider.

Outcomes

For the students, this was but one of three client projects they undertook during the semester. The others were actually more involved and served our state’s largest government agency and a city school system. The benefits of these experiential learning activities were numerous.

Students left with strong portfolio material. They gained practical application experience with new media technology. Their end products were adopted (and are being launched by) all three clients.

Full disclosure: I worked for Alabama Easter Seals / Camp ASCCA for almost 10 years in the 1980’s and early ’90s. After that point I served on their Advisory Board and have also done consultanting work for the organization. I have every possibility of doing paid consulting work for them in the future, too. Simply put - I am biased toward the organization. Their mission and purpose is one that I endorse and support. Think of a lion and her cubs.

About the author

Robert French is a lecturer/IT advisor at Auburn University in Alabama. His background is in NGO public relations for social service agencies, event management for two major universities, broadcast (radio/television), production and student affairs development work including media relations. He has taught every course offered in public relations in the department and most of the courses offered in mass communication. Auburn University’s Department of Communication and Journalism adopted CMS (beyond the usual WebCT application) in upper level public relations courses starting in 2003.

{tags: prblogweek, pr, public+relations, RSS, transparency, blogging, non-profit}