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pameladlloydWednesday and Thursday I attended a couple of workshops which I learned about through the Pima County Public Library. Wednesday's topic was "Grantseeking Basics for Nonprofits" and was sponsored by the library. Thursday's was advertised as "Revenue Development/Marketing: What is branding and how do I accomplish this for my organization?" on the library website, but our handouts were titled, "BRANDING: Creativity and Building an Image for Your Organization;" it was sponsored by Youth Empowerment Services (YES) Network.
I signed up for the Grantseeking Basics course on the advice of several people in the community, including people who work in nonprofits who explained that they have difficulty finding writers with grant proposal writing experience. While the Grantseeking Basics class didn't cover proposal writing, it did serve as an introduction to the grantseeking process of which proposal writing is a part.
As I listened to the reference librarian leading the course, I couldn't help but tie the concepts she was explaining to real world examples. Much of my thinking was about the Baja Arizona Science Fiction Association (BASFA), which is the nonprofit organization [501(c)(7)] that puts on TusCon each year. The Guest of Honor for the con is usually someone who lives close enough that their travel expenses won't bankrupt the organization; with a small grant, could BASFA bring in authors from other regions of the country, or from even farther away? Are there other projects the con committee has rejected, because they didn't have the funds?
The class the following night, "BRANDING: Creativity and Building an Image for Your Organization," turned out to be the second of a two-part series. Plus, it had originally been scheduled for Wednesday evening, but when I called to register, the person I spoke to told me of the new time. What she forgot to mention, was that the room had also been changed. I showed up a bit early, so I wasn't concerned that no one was there, but sat down to wait. However, when no one had arrived by ten after, I figured the meeting had been cancelled and started to leave. As I was doing so, I noticed a group in another room, poked my head in, and YEAH!, there they were.
The speaker, Dr. Ed Ackerley, an Adjunct Instructor of Marketing and Media Arts at the University of Arizona, is a dynamic speaker. As I walked in and took my handout, the group was just filling in a short questionnaire on creativity. I'll resist the temptation to give you the entire list, as I don't have Dr. Ackerley's permission, but I think I can get away with sharing a couple of questions, just to give you the feel of them. "What color is today?" (My answer was, "sea green") and "How does the number '18' feel?" (Interestingly, the entire class seemed to attempt to address this as if "18" were a young person who's just reached the age of majority; my answer was "free & excited." We were also asked for our definitions of creativity and mine was "the ability to imagine new connections between images and words."
Having gotten his audience engaged, Dr. Ackerley moved into the lecture, giving us some terminology and discussing the minor differences between the Advertising Pyramid and the Creative Pyramid.* In the Advertising Pyramid, the foundation is awareness, which supports comprehension, conviction, desire, and action; the Creative Pyramid is very similar, with attention as the foundation, supporting interest, credibility, desire, and action.
One of the terms discussed was creativity, and Dr. Ackerley gave us a few definitions, the first of which he attributed to Voltaire, but which seems to be more correctly attributed to Arens: "combining two or more previously unconnected
objects or ideas into something new." In the process of searching for the source, I discovered this quote which is sometimes attributed to Voltaire, and sometimes to Edward de Bono, "originality is nothing but judicious limitation." (I leave figuring this out to my readers, with my apologies.) He also gave us the definition "creativity is the act of regularly solving problems, fashioning products, or defining new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting." The source was given as, "Gardner (1993, p. 35), but since we didn't have a bibliography, I'm left to guess at the author and work; a short search suggests that this is most likely a work by Howard Gardner, a noted researcher who studies creativity and one of the major contributors to the concept of "multiple intelligences."
I find it interesting that Gardner's definition is so specific about the results of the creative process, to the point that if his statement is taken at face value, any similar effort whose results do not become culturally accepted is not defined as creative, an idea I must take issue with. But, perhaps, had I come across this definition in context, I would discover that he was speaking toungue in cheek, as it were.
We discussed Katie Couric and how her personal experience of the loss of her husband and a colleague to colorectal cancer led her to start a campaign to bring greater public attention to this disease, which, if caught early, has a 90% cure rate, but which remains "the third most common cancer in both men and women and the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality in men and women in the United States," according to the National Cancer Institute's "A Snapshot of Colorectal Cancer.". Then, Dr. Ackerley asked us to break into small groups and work together to design ad posters that would convince him, a man nearing fifty, to get screened. We produced three very different posters, one of which addressed the squeamishness many people feel about getting a colonoscopy, one of which took an informational/authoritarian approach, and one of which made an emotional appeal designed to address our target audience of one, directly. (That last one was produced by my group, and we took full advantage of inside information that Dr. Ackerley has two young sons.)
Then, we watched a short video about three advertising teams that each worked to produce Public Service Announcements for the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance with the Entertainment Industry Foundation. It was fun being able to make the comparison between the process of the professional teams and ours', noting the similarity in our processes.
* The pyramids were from Contemporary Advertising
, by William Arens, 11th Edition, 2008. You can see the Advertising Pyramid he discussed on slide 19 of a PowerPoint presentation, Arens Contemporary Advertising 10e.
I signed up for the Grantseeking Basics course on the advice of several people in the community, including people who work in nonprofits who explained that they have difficulty finding writers with grant proposal writing experience. While the Grantseeking Basics class didn't cover proposal writing, it did serve as an introduction to the grantseeking process of which proposal writing is a part.
As I listened to the reference librarian leading the course, I couldn't help but tie the concepts she was explaining to real world examples. Much of my thinking was about the Baja Arizona Science Fiction Association (BASFA), which is the nonprofit organization [501(c)(7)] that puts on TusCon each year. The Guest of Honor for the con is usually someone who lives close enough that their travel expenses won't bankrupt the organization; with a small grant, could BASFA bring in authors from other regions of the country, or from even farther away? Are there other projects the con committee has rejected, because they didn't have the funds?
The class the following night, "BRANDING: Creativity and Building an Image for Your Organization," turned out to be the second of a two-part series. Plus, it had originally been scheduled for Wednesday evening, but when I called to register, the person I spoke to told me of the new time. What she forgot to mention, was that the room had also been changed. I showed up a bit early, so I wasn't concerned that no one was there, but sat down to wait. However, when no one had arrived by ten after, I figured the meeting had been cancelled and started to leave. As I was doing so, I noticed a group in another room, poked my head in, and YEAH!, there they were.
The speaker, Dr. Ed Ackerley, an Adjunct Instructor of Marketing and Media Arts at the University of Arizona, is a dynamic speaker. As I walked in and took my handout, the group was just filling in a short questionnaire on creativity. I'll resist the temptation to give you the entire list, as I don't have Dr. Ackerley's permission, but I think I can get away with sharing a couple of questions, just to give you the feel of them. "What color is today?" (My answer was, "sea green") and "How does the number '18' feel?" (Interestingly, the entire class seemed to attempt to address this as if "18" were a young person who's just reached the age of majority; my answer was "free & excited." We were also asked for our definitions of creativity and mine was "the ability to imagine new connections between images and words."
Having gotten his audience engaged, Dr. Ackerley moved into the lecture, giving us some terminology and discussing the minor differences between the Advertising Pyramid and the Creative Pyramid.* In the Advertising Pyramid, the foundation is awareness, which supports comprehension, conviction, desire, and action; the Creative Pyramid is very similar, with attention as the foundation, supporting interest, credibility, desire, and action.
One of the terms discussed was creativity, and Dr. Ackerley gave us a few definitions, the first of which he attributed to Voltaire, but which seems to be more correctly attributed to Arens: "combining two or more previously unconnected
objects or ideas into something new." In the process of searching for the source, I discovered this quote which is sometimes attributed to Voltaire, and sometimes to Edward de Bono, "originality is nothing but judicious limitation." (I leave figuring this out to my readers, with my apologies.) He also gave us the definition "creativity is the act of regularly solving problems, fashioning products, or defining new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting." The source was given as, "Gardner (1993, p. 35), but since we didn't have a bibliography, I'm left to guess at the author and work; a short search suggests that this is most likely a work by Howard Gardner, a noted researcher who studies creativity and one of the major contributors to the concept of "multiple intelligences."
I find it interesting that Gardner's definition is so specific about the results of the creative process, to the point that if his statement is taken at face value, any similar effort whose results do not become culturally accepted is not defined as creative, an idea I must take issue with. But, perhaps, had I come across this definition in context, I would discover that he was speaking toungue in cheek, as it were.
We discussed Katie Couric and how her personal experience of the loss of her husband and a colleague to colorectal cancer led her to start a campaign to bring greater public attention to this disease, which, if caught early, has a 90% cure rate, but which remains "the third most common cancer in both men and women and the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality in men and women in the United States," according to the National Cancer Institute's "A Snapshot of Colorectal Cancer.". Then, Dr. Ackerley asked us to break into small groups and work together to design ad posters that would convince him, a man nearing fifty, to get screened. We produced three very different posters, one of which addressed the squeamishness many people feel about getting a colonoscopy, one of which took an informational/authoritarian approach, and one of which made an emotional appeal designed to address our target audience of one, directly. (That last one was produced by my group, and we took full advantage of inside information that Dr. Ackerley has two young sons.)
Then, we watched a short video about three advertising teams that each worked to produce Public Service Announcements for the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance with the Entertainment Industry Foundation. It was fun being able to make the comparison between the process of the professional teams and ours', noting the similarity in our processes.
* The pyramids were from Contemporary Advertising
, by William Arens, 11th Edition, 2008. You can see the Advertising Pyramid he discussed on slide 19 of a PowerPoint presentation, Arens Contemporary Advertising 10e.
