PR & Outreach

Here are some great new outreach pieces that members of our Central Texas Team created recently. Please use them to tell your networks and colleagues about NCDD Austin! There is a piece geared towards general audiences, and one geared towards practitioners.

Please also feel free to send people - as an attachment or link - the one-page flyer that’s up at http://www.thataway.org/files/Austin_Flyer_print.pdf. (more…)

Over the summer I’m going to create a couple sets of banners we all can use to publicize the conference. Here’s my first. A homage to the famous sign. Simply use the url provided below the image to add the image to a webpage or html email. If you can, have the image link to http://www.thataway.org/events or include this link in the text near the image.

Leaderboard Size:

(http://www.thataway.org/ncdd/conf/ncdd2008728.jpg)

NCDD Sidebar Size:

(http://www.thataway.org/ncdd/conf/ncdd2008250.jpg)

Half Banner Size:

(http://www.thataway.org/ncdd/conf/ncdd2008234.jpg)

Below are a bunch of different email “templates” you can use to help get the word out about the conference. Just pick the one that works best for the person, group, listserv, etc. you’re reaching out to, copy it (control-C or apple-C) and paste it into your email program (control-V or apple-V).

If your email program allows it, feel free to also paste the pictures at the bottom of the page into your message. And certainly use one of these pictures and/or the NCDD logo in blog posts, e-newsletters, print newsletters, etc.

Also - a bunch of other ideas for getting the word out about the conference, like distributing postcards and Moo cards, are posted at www.thataway.org/events/?p=67. And a banner and two smaller images for the conference are posted at www.thataway.org/events/?p=143.
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We can really use the help of all planning team members, NCDD members and others in getting the word out about the 2008 NCDD conference.

Here are some things you can do to help:

1. Distribute conference postcards. Email NCDD’s Office Manager, Joy Garman (), if you’re willing to distribute some NCDD conference postcards - especially if you’re going to be attending a conference or other gathering of people interested in communication, governance, activism, or conflict resolution in the next few months.
2. Hand out ultra-cool “MiniMoo” cards. Also let Joy know if you’re willing to distribute some tiny (but very cool) Moo cards with pictures from past conferences on one side and the basic conference details on the other. These are about half the size of your business cards so you might find it easy to just keep some with your own cards and hand them out to people you meet who might be interested.
3. Email your networks and colleagues. Send an email out to your contacts and networks about the conference, the call for workshops, etc. You can find a bunch of great email templates of various lengths at www.thataway.org/events/?p=140. Add a personal invitation or testimony if possible to personalize your message a bit.
4. Announce NCDD Austin in your organization’s newsletter, e-newsletter, website, etc. Use one of the templates if you’d like. If possible, include the banner or two smaller images Andy created for the conference. If you’d rather include the NCDD logo, you can grab it from www.thataway.org/sitewide/logos/ncdd_smlogo.jpg.
5. Add a blurb about the conference below your email signature. A sentence about NCDD Austin below your name in your emails can go a long way in raising awareness of the event! Sandy has this under her signature: Mark your calendar: NCDD’s 4th National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation is set for Austin, Texas, October 3-5, 2008. Watch our 5-minute video at www.thataway.org/8bc723 to see why you should join us in Austin! Details at www.thataway.org/events
6. Share some hand-outs. Share this one-page Conference Handout with colleagues, at conferences, etc. If you want, print the one-page NCDD Fact Sheet on the other side of the paper so people can learn about some of the other things we offer. You may choose to send this doc to your colleagues and networks via email as well (but please include a nice description of the conference in the body of the email). Also, let us know what you think of these two one-page handouts. Clicking on the links above send you to a page where you can download the handouts AND add comments. Help us reach people better by sharing your feedback with us. (more…)

I just wanted to take a second to encourage all planning team members to subscribe to the NCDD Events blog through Feedburner - and RSS feed service that allows people to receive blog posts in their email inbox. We love this service because it’s great for those who are less tech savvy, like many of our members.

To subscribe to the feed via email, click on the following link and add your email address. After verifying your subscription by clicking on a link in an email Feedburner will send you, you will receive all the announcements that appear in the NCDD Conference blog in your inbox (no more than one/day).
www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1387827

For those who have not worked with RSS feeds before, RSS stands for “really simple syndication” or “rich site summary” and provides a way to send out information from a website automatically instead of relying on people to come to a website to get that information. Its a handy way to keep up with a blog, especially since you can have the blog posts come right into your email. Here’s a decent explanation of feeds and RSS.

If you already use RSS feeds, you may not be interested in receiving the blog posts in your inbox. Instead, you can go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ncddevents (the feed’s “address”) and subscribe to the feed whatever way you prefer.

And for future reference, one of the boxes in the left sidebar of the whole Events section allows you to do this stuff, too.

Susan Clark and Jacob Hess are working to make the Austin conference more balanced in terms of political ideology. They are also looking for ways to facilitate and highlight liberal-conservative dialogue at the conference. Given our (not great) track record for attracting conservatives to past conferences, we are asking the greater D&D community to help us think of new ways to involve and identify conservatives who are committed to public engagement and conflict transformation.

Here are some of Susan and Jacob’s ideas…

• Identify and make visible dialogue projects that include conservative leadership – and/or explicit bi-partisan leadership.
• Plan a plenary session at the conference that provides a forum to address increasing polarization in the media and the need for dialogue between people with traditionally “liberal” and “conservatives” views.
• Identify and reach out to specific conservatives who are or could be interested in the work of NCDD.

One workshop idea is to use evaluation findings from the liberal/conservative dialogue course at the University of Illinois as a stepping off point for a discussion of how to “frame” dialogue in a way that avoids inadvertent cues that would turn off conservatives. And we thought you might enjoy reading this student’s quote about the class:

“Before this class, I went through the logic of conservatives and would think, “They have to be crazy!” From this experience, it’s great to know half of the world is not nuts. You don’t get this on TV—they’re goofy on both sides there. But from this class, I better understand now the conservative logic; I may not agree, but it makes more sense.”

Please share your suggestions on specific projects to highlight (in workshops, or as something to receive an NCDD award) and/or practitioners or community leaders who should be invited to the conference. We’d especially like to know aout dialogue projects that have conservative leadership - and/or explicit bi-partisan leadership. Plus we welcome any other suggestions you have on this issue.

Progressives seem to “get” dialogue and deliberation more than conservatives do, and our conference participants definitely tend to lean to the left. We want make NCDD a more welcoming network/conference for conservatives not only because their perspectives will make our gatherings richer, but also because we need to learn how to appeal to more people if D&D are ever to spread to the mainstream.

Conference planning team members Susan Clark and Jacob Hess have taken on this challenge, and here are some notes from their first conversation on December 28, 2007…

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