In the Spotlight
A look at innovative communications
practices
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Want Your Ideas to Get Noticed?
Be Audacious!
If you were to look up “audacious”
on Dictionary.com,
you’ll find: “extremely original . .highly inventive: an audacious vision
of the city's bright future.”
That definition perfectly describes the Open Society Institute-Baltimore blog:
Audacious
Ideas. Started in September
2007, the weekly blog features a mix of voices drawn from all walks of Baltimore
life. Each week’s topic aims to stimulate a discussion about “what can be done
to promote opportunity, achievement, health, and prosperity in our city.”
 The
blog is central to OSI-Baltimore’s mission, which is to improve life in the
city, according to Debra Rubino, Director of Strategic Communications. Published
every Monday, the blog has a faithful following of about 500 readers, she adds.
Postings are diverse: a proposal to use television to teach literacy; a preview
of a program to hold weekly fall festivals along city streets; a suggestion to
open martial arts schools in the city’s troubled spots; a call to businesses and
faith communities to aggressively take responsibility for ensuring the positive
development of African American males; a listing of steps to ensure everyone
votes.
The guest bloggers are equally diverse: a novelist, a federal judge in Maryland,
a community volunteer, the CEO of the city’s schools, nonprofit leaders, an
artist, and a radio talk show host, among others.
To build a regular audience of online readers, the foundation sends out weekly
alerts to an e-mail list every time a new article is posted. The blog has gotten
helpful visibility from the Baltimore Sun,
which so far has reprinted five postings on its op-ed pages.
Rubino, who conceived of the blog, is responsible for identifying and inviting
authors to write between 250 to 500-word postings. Her instructions to the
writers are to “keep it very simple and short.” And, of course, to be
“audacious.”
“We hear all the time from people throughout Baltimore that they read the blog—in
fact an OSI staff member told me his graduate professor mentions it in every
class,” she adds. “People say they look forward to being surprised by what’s
discussed each week.”
In addition to helping to achieve the goal to “stimulate ideas and discussion
about solutions to difficult problems in Baltimore,” the blog creates awareness
of the work of OSI-Baltimore, which started 10 years ago as a field office of
the Open Society Institute. OSI-Baltimore is now engaged in finding additional
investors to fund its work so creating more awareness is an equally important
goal. It now focuses exclusively on four initiative areas: tackling drug
addiction, helping youth succeed, reducing the social and economic costs of
incarceration, and the Baltimore Community Fellowships.
For more information, contact
Debra Rubino.
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