Do No Harm
By Edith Asibey and Bruce Trachtenberg
In what can only be described as a cautionary tale for people involved in public interest communications, a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine describes how the push to encourage women to be screened for breast cancer has done a great job raising awareness about the disease but little to save lives.
You Talkin’ To Me? (VIDEO)
For the second installment in our Science of Communication speaker series, co-sponsored by the Communications Network and Spitfire Strategies, Harvard behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan proved why when he talks, you should listen.
Mullainathan, whose work touches on how people’s brains process messages, has a sobering message for those of us whose jobs depend on getting people to listen, pay attention and–most important of all–act on what they’re hearing.
5 Tips So Your Messages Succeed
(A version of this post originally appeared on the Message House blog.)
Guest Post: Marc Fest
Whether you draft news releases for a living, or are trying to persuade a cop to not give you a speeding ticket — all of us always send messages. Here are five ways to make them more effective.
What Our New Mission Means for You (VIDEO)
Guest Post: Rebecca Arno
In her recent post about the survey results from last October’s Fall Conference, Minna Jung, our vice chair, mentioned that I was planning to share some additional insights about the Communications Network’s revised mission and strategy that we previewed in Seattle and subsequently discussed on our blog.
Last week, I sat down with long-time Network contributor, Susan Herr, principal of Trigger Creative, to talk about our new mission. Because of comments and questions we heard during and since Seattle, we decided to record two separate conversations.
Once Upon A Time: Civic Journalism Revisited
Guest Post: Mitch Hurst
The idea of “civic journalism” instigated one of the more provocative debates within the mostly collegial world of institutional philanthropy back in the early to mid-‘90s. On one side you had program directors and officers, and maybe a few foundation CEOs, who wanted to poke around to identify ways that foundations could partner with media to infuse their news coverage with some social conscience.
On the other side you had the fourth estate-loving purists who were aghast at the idea of foundations pushing their weight around the newsrooms of America’s finest broadsheets. This camp included many former journalists who had transitioned to the PR departments of private foundations and viewed even those roles as being primarily journalistic.
