communication department

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By Garret Romaine, Associate Fellow, Willamette Valley Chapter, and Rachel Houghton, Member, Nominating Committee, and Senior Member, Willamette Valley Chapter

In our January Tieline article, we outlined the steps to take to create a community publicity plan (including premeeting planning, team building and goal setting, and staying organized) and some recommended items to prepare (a publicity contact list, sample press releases and templates, photos of community officers, a generic publicity plan for a community meeting, and a list of community activities requiring publicity).

Now that you’ve done the groundwork for your publicity plan, it’s time to plug all your information into a publicity plan document and put your plan into action.

Publicity Plan

At a minimum, your publicity plan document should include the following information:

Goals. These should be as specific as possible to create measurable objectives.

Objectives. Include one to three objectives per goal, and make sure each objective is measurable.

A plan and timetable for the current year. Create a table with the following information:

• Meeting and event dates
• Dates to target for marketing each meeting or event
• Marketing strategies (press releases, e-mail or Web site announcements, and so on)
• Audience (members, media, colleges, etc.)

Your publicity manager should be the driver of the plan, but it takes a team effort to publicize effectively. The program, SIG, and event managers are the most important people in this effort. They need to make this information available to all parties in plenty of time. A lot of media outlets have a three-week lead time, so it is important to know the dates for the publications or venues you are targeting.

You can see an example of an effective public relations plan on the STC Web site.

Press Releases

Press releases are an important part of any public relations effort. The intent is to convey information succinctly and concisely, with minimal extraneous text. This is key to holding the audience’s attention.

Your press release document should include the following:

• Chapter, SIG, or other community logo
• Contact information of the publicity person (including name, phone number, and e-mail address)
• Attention-grabbing headline
• Date and location (city, month, day, year)
• Information to be released about event or meeting
• Information about STC and the community you are in

This is where having an updated list of publicity contacts comes in handy. If your list is not updated, this is a great chance to recruit a volunteer. Make sure you don’t forget about online business and meeting calendars; while you may not be able to fax or e-mail contacts at these Web sites, having your information updated regularly for meetings and events is a good idea.

Don’t forget to follow up on your press releases. Recruit volunteers who receive the target publications to cut out or photocopy listings and/or mentions, and send these to the publicity manager. Doing this on a regular basis also makes it much easier to put together your entry for the public relations competition. You should also ask your meeting or event attendees to identify where they are hearing about your activities. These numbers can show where your publicity is most effective, and help set objectives for the future if you are not getting the response you intended (see the “Publicity Plan” section). You can see examples of press releases for both print and e-mail on the STC Web site.

Media-Tracking Report

The media-tracking report works hand in hand with the press releases and your list of publicity contacts. Once you’ve identified your list of contacts, generate a report with the following information:

• Date of communication and date sent
• Publication venue (e-mail, program, Web site, newspaper, newsletter, etc.)
• Topic (meetings, special events, workshops, calendar)
• Circulation (this makes the numbers you collect from your members mean that much more)

This report will make documenting your efforts for the public relations competition much easier. If you’ve gotten into the practice of tracking everything publicity related, it’s a snap to write enthusiastically about the measurable benefits you’ve received because you’ve got a plan in place. You can see an example of a media-tracking report on the STC Web site.

Publicity Contact List

As previously mentioned, your publicity contact list is the cornerstone of your publicity effort. Without this information, you have a haphazard communications strategy. If you’ve got a list already, you’re ahead of the game. Just make sure it’s current (a good time to update the list is when the office of publicity/event manager is transferred). If you don’t already have a list, create one with the following information:

• Media outlets (all local and semilocal newspaper and television stations)
• Professional organizations: American Society of Indexers (ASI), American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), and the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), to name a few
• Online business meeting/event calendars
• Other chapters or communities in your region

You should have an e-mail address, a phone number, and a contact name for each contact on your list.

All examples were generously provided by Aiessa Moyna, former publicity manager of the Phoenix Chapter STC. You can also see the templates at the STC Web site.

Annual Business Meeting at Conference

The STC Annual Business Meeting will be held Monday, May 14, from 6:00–7:00 PM in Ballroom A of the Minneapolis Convention Center. STC members who have paid their dues in full may vote at the business meeting.

Leadership Day: An Important Resource for Incoming Leaders

Leadership Day is Sunday, May 13, at STC’s 54th Annual Conference. See below for a detailed schedule of the day’s events. Chapters and SIGs should strongly encourage their incoming presidents and managers to participate in Leadership Day. All event activities will provide leaders with valuable information that they can use in their planning for the year ahead.

If you haven’t already done so, be sure to send the name of your community, the names of those community leaders who will attend Leadership Day, and their member numbers to Elaine Gilliam or fax it to +1 (703) 522-2075.

The Leadership Community Resource (LCR) will be launched during this event. The LCR is STC’s new structure for providing support and guidance to communities. It contains self-support components, as well as expert volunteer guidance on a plethora of topics, formal coaching and mentoring in specific leadership areas, and support for communities in crisis. Come learn about the LCR!

Leadership Day Schedule

The Leadership Day activities on Sunday, May 13, focus on subjects of interest to STC leaders at the chapter, SIG, and Society levels. If you are an STC leader or interested in becoming one, consider attending these activities. Activities will begin in Ballroom B of the Minneapolis Convention Center at 8:30 AM.

Current List of Progression Speakers:

• Community Newsletters: Douglas Dow
• Community Treasurer: E. C. Eklund
• Volunteer Recruitment: Carolyn Kelley Klinger and Judith Herr
• Planning Chapter Programs and Educational Events: Nicky Bleiel
• Public Relations: George Slaughter
• Managing a Society Project Long Distance: Mark Clifford
• Why Community Success Isn’t Enough: Becoming a Society-level Leader: Suzanna Laurent
• Tools for Collaborating Virtually for Communities: Char James-Tanny and Karen Mardahl
• Society-level Marketing/What the Society Does for Communities: STC Staff—Mary Kabza
• Society-level Educational Activities: Providing Virtual Education for the Society, SIGs, and Chapters: Jane Smith, Linda Gallagher, and STC Staff—Lloyd Tucker

Planned Topics:

• STC’s Community Strategy
• Skills for Society-level and Experienced Leaders
• Community Web Site Development
• Community Recognition and Awards
• Managing People Long Distance
• STC Leadership as a Career Opportunity
• Saying Yes and No: Managing Volunteer Commitments and Your Life

Ramius Software Provides Dynamic Conference Experience

New features planned for this year’s conference in Minneapolis—including Institutes, or conferences-within-a-conference—continue STC’s tradition of educational excellence by offering in-depth explorations of hot topics in technical communication. As part of these new features, the Ramius Corporation of Ottawa, Canada, has joined with STC to extend and deepen the conference experience beyond the few days that attendees gather in Minneapolis.

A leading developer of online community systems for virtual collaboration and knowledge sharing, Ramius will offer complimentary use of its flagship software, CommunityZero, a powerful Web-based tool for creating virtual communities. Attendees who register for the Sharing Corporate Knowledge Institute will be able to use CommunityZero to network, share information, view session files, and communicate with the presenter and other participants—thirty days before and after the conference!

CommunityZero is 100 percent Web-based and features a full suite of collaborative tools that will enable participants to discuss Institute sessions and build on the knowledge they gather at the conference. Presenters also plan to use CommunityZero’s polling feature to solicit registrants’ input, which will help shape the discussions in Minneapolis.

More than 1.5 million users worldwide recognize the value of CommunityZero’s extensive capabilities, including:

• a consistent, easy-to-use interface
• powerful search capabilities
• integrated RSS feeds
• streamlined document management with check-in/check-out version tracking
• content submission via e-mail
• easy-to-use permissions capabilities
• Web-based database tool

The Sharing Corporate Knowledge Institute—organized by Michael Hughes, an STC Associate Fellow and award-winning author on knowledge management—will feature sessions on knowledge harvesting, maximizing the business value of your intranet through design standards, case studies in knowledge-driven design, and pattern language as a knowledge tool.

For more information about Ramius and CommunityZero, visit the Ramius Web site. To register for STC’s 54th Annual Conference, go to the conference Web site. The Institutes are included in the conference registration fee (US$795 for members).

Open Jam 2007

Musically inclined technical communicators won’t want to miss the sixth annual Open Jam at STC’s 54th Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. All STC singers and musicians are welcome to showcase their talents at this informal gathering, to be held at 8 PM on Monday, May 14. (Check the conference Program for the location.) Music lovers are welcome to cheer on their STC peers as they enjoy the show. For more information, watch the STC conference Web site.

Next Year’s Conference: Call for Proposals

STC’s 55th Annual Conference will take place June 1–4, 2008, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The conference call for proposals (and an accompanying application form) will be posted on the STC Web site by the end of August 2007.

Marketing Your Community’s Activities within STC

Interested in letting fellow STC members know about an upcoming chapter or SIG event? Consider submitting your information for inclusion in STC’s publications or online events calendar.

Please send as much information about the conference or event as possible to intercom@stc.org. Include the date and location; the name, phone, and e-mail address of a contact person; a related Web address; and a sentence or two about the theme or content. Be aware that the deadlines for each publication vary, as noted below.

• Intercom. The “F.Y.I.” section promotes events of interest to technical communicators. To ensure timely publication in Intercom, submit event or conference information three months prior to the issue in which you want it to appear. For example, if your regional conference is scheduled for December, you’ll probably want details to appear in Intercom no later than November, which means that you must submit information by August 1.
• News & Notes. This is STC’s monthly e-newsletter, sent to all members. Please submit all pertinent information two months prior to the issue in which you want it to appear. For example, if your live Web seminar is scheduled for November, information should be submitted by September 1.
• Tieline. Submit information two months prior to the issue in which you want it to appear.
• STC’s related events page. This section of the STC site provides information about upcoming events and ongoing opportunities for technical communicators. Submit information one month before your event.
  

Society Events

April 11, 2007 LIVE WEB SEMINAR

Kevin A. Siegel will present an STC live Web seminar, “Creating Interactive CBTs with Captivate®—in Half the Time,” from 1 to 2:30 PM Eastern Time. Participants will learn how to maximize the potential of Macromedia Captivate®, a powerful tool for creating software simulations, and how to create hybrid computer-based training systems (CBTs) that will cut development time by 50 percent. For more information or to register for the seminar, please visit the STC Web site.

April 11, 2007 LIVE WEB SEMINAR

Dr. Sivasailam Thiagarajan will present a live Web seminar, “Learning with Thiagi,” from 1 to 2:30 PM Eastern Time. The seminar, produced by the Instructional Design and Learning (IDL) SIG, will address a set of proven principles and procedures that increase and improve interactive training—easily and affordably. For more information or to register, please visit the SIG Web site.

April 12–13, 2007 CONFERENCE

The Manitoba Chapter STC and Red River College will hold their fourth annual technical communication conference, “Technology and Teamwork,” at the Red River College Princess Street campus. For more information, please contact Leslie McKendry-Smith or visit the chapter Web site.

April 14, 2007 CONFERENCE

The Birmingham Chapter STC will host a partial-day workshop for business writers from 9 AM–3 PM in Birmingham, Alabama. Sessions include "Revising and 'Perfecting' the Document in a Fast-Paced Environment";"Persuasion: It’s Not Enough to Be Right"; "Amplification: It’s Not Enough to Provide the Data"; and "Organization: Being Organized Is Not Enough." For more information on the topics, speakers, and registration, please contact Sara Beth Scudder or visit the chapter Web site.

April 18–20, 2007 CONFERENCE

The TransAlpine Chapter STC will host its spring 2007 conference at the corporate center of Zurich Financial Services in Zurich, Switzerland. For more information, please contact Nancy Gelman or visit the chapter Web site.

April 24–26, 2007 CONFERENCE

The Southwestern Ontario Chapter STC will host its spring 2007 workshop at the Hilton Garden Inn in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. Sarah O’Keefe will guide those new to XML as well as those already using it in their authoring environment through the XML challenge. For more information, please e-mail education@stc-soc.org or visit the chapter Web site.

May 2, 2007 LIVE WEB SEMINAR

Whitney Quesenbery will host an STC live Web seminar, “Choosing the Right Usability Technique (To Answer the Right Question),” from 1 to 2:30 PM Eastern Time. This seminar will review options for usability evaluations and examine how they can be used most effectively. For more information or to register for the seminar, please visit the STC Web site.

May 12–16, 2007 CONFERENCE

The Technical Communication Summit—STC’s 54th Annual Conference will be held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Preconference workshops will begin on May 12. For more information, please visit the STC Web site.

June 4, 2007 CONFERENCE

The Israel Chapter STC, which will celebrate forty years as a chapter—and as the oldest STC chapter outside of North America—will hold its semi-annual convention, “The Proactive Technical Communicator: Multiple Disciplines, Multiple Perspectives,” at the Daniel Hotel, Herzliya, Israel. For more information, please e-mail convention@stc-israel.org.il or visit the chapter Web site.

Send announcements of your community or regional events to the Tieline editor.

By Lauren Womack, Public Relations Manager, Lone Star Community

Hi, Lauren Womack coming to you live from the Lone Star Community STC with some tips and observations that I hope you can use to add to your own public relations (PR) efforts. As you know, getting the word out—loud and proud—benefits you, your member community, and STC at large.

Finding Focus

For me, the key to getting really excited about our PR efforts was finding my focus, and I came to that focus gradually and organically. As a result of my total greenness when first stepping into a STC leadership role, I initially had a very local focus instead of a national one. As I’ve become slightly more adept, I still think locally and act . . . locally. It’s the right approach for me—and, I think, our council—to serve our community first.

Additionally, when I was invited (and gratefully accepted) to take over as PR manager three years ago, the Dallas Fort-Worth (DFW) area was just beginning to recover from the telecom bust. In fact, I had just gotten my first job back in our field after being outside it for about a year, so I knew exactly what it was like to need a job and keenly remembered the aimless anxiety and low-level desperation accompanying my sometimes seemingly fruitless search.

Those two factors led me to the focus of my PR role: getting our members jobs and promoting the Lone Star community as a way to do this. Furthermore, because not every job is a dream job—or even a good job—I wanted our members to have choices. Having a job is a necessity; being able to choose a great job is truly a bonus.

Lone Star’s Job Bank

Happily, not only does the Lone Star community have a job bank (in existence since 1982!), it is also available to every Internet browser and provides free posting. Free is an easy sell. So, by increasing recruiter awareness of it (and STC in the process), I strive to increase the number of jobs in our job bank, and, as a result, the number of jobs technical communicators can choose from. Because all technical communicators can access the job bank, I hope any nonmembers using it will start to consider the value that networking through STC might offer them.

The approach I developed is three pronged. First, as recruiters contact me about jobs, I always respond with a polite “no thank you” e-mail and an invitation to post the job to our bank. I’ve come up with a generic e-mail that lets recruiters know:

. . . if you are seeking a large pool of qualified applicants, please consider posting your relevant jobs on the Society for Technical Communication Lone Star Community’s job page. You will reach technical communication professionals (writers, editors, trainers, information specialists and architects, and business analysts) in the entire DFW area and it’s free.

I’ve shared my generic e-mail with the council and asked that we all start using this approach. The benefit of this e-mail is two fold. We have seen postings to our job bank in direct response to the information shared, and I have developed friendly relationships with several area recruiters. They’re grateful for the tip and tend to remember me for having given it. (Volunteering for your council, as you know, really is a great way to network.)

Second, with the help of Paul Holland from the Web site committee, I have expanded on this with an e-postcard project. What started out as an idea to mail physical postcards to all members, asking them to help their community by referring recruiters to STC, eventually grew into a virtual postcard mailed out quarterly to a database of over 140 recruiters (and growing!).

Third, I use the time-honored networking method. At every community meeting I attend, I introduce myself to at least one new face and ask, “Where do you work? Are you looking for a job?” As is probably the case in other STC communities, many new people come to the meetings specifically to network, and it is our privilege and duty as council members to welcome and help them. If I find a member or visitor looking for work, I copy that person on any new jobs that come my way until he or she finds employment. Of course, I still invite recruiters to post to the job bank.

Please note that, in order to be sure I continue to get requests from recruiters, I keep my résumé updated on several job boards. Again, this helps me get to know area recruiters, should I need them; it keeps me cognizant of the number and types of jobs available, and from which companies; and it allows me to continue personally promoting the job bank. And, who knows—maybe a job will come along that is so all-out perfect for me, I will be tempted!

Press Releases

As you might have guessed, getting our members jobs has become not just the focus of my PR effort, but its passionate pursuit. However, there are a couple other things we do of which I am also proud. With the help of this year’s excellently organized first vice president Susie Lynn Fox, I now schedule our press releases so other committees can recycle them—whether for e-mail announcements, meeting announcements, meeting programs, Web sites, or our award-winning newsletter, Technically Write, to name a few.

I also always think about the distribution list. Of course we have e-mail addresses for various departments at the area newspapers, but this year’s scholarship PR effort led me to add area schools’ technical writing departments and newspapers to the list. Thinking of smaller newspapers led me to include smaller, local area magazines. Of course, I always personally copy friends and colleagues on releases regarding upcoming meetings. You’d be surprised how many of your friends would like to attend a meeting and catch up with you at the same time!

Putting Ideas on the Back Burner

One last thing—what do you do when you have a great idea and can’t get necessary committees on your council to help out? Put it on the back burner. I’ve found you really can’t make anyone do anything. Chances are it will still be a good idea when the next council is in place with some new faces and fresh blood. Try floating it again and see what happens!

Don’t be discouraged if you can’t get a great idea implemented the first time you try, and don’t waste too much time on it the first time. Keep thinking about it and refining your pitch! That’s not a bad plan for all your PR efforts.

Contact Lauren Womack for a copy of the generic e-mail or to see what the recruiter e-card looks like.

By Garret Romaine, Associate Fellow, Willamette Valley Chapter, and Member, Public Relations Committee

Editor’s note: This is the first article in a two-part series on generating publicity for your community. An upcoming issue of Tieline will feature the second article in the series, which will contain links to helpful templates and documents that may help your community in its publicity efforts.

To be truly effective in generating publicity for the year, virtual and geographic community leaders need to roll up their sleeves and dig in early. What you need is a plan. Even if your leadership team takes the summer off, there are things you can do early in your tenure that will organize your publicity effort and make sure it works smoothly.

One way to get a head start (or a jump start) on your planning is to take advantage of the STC public relations competition. Designed to promote excellence in the way we communicate to the outside world, the PR competition is full of guidelines for best practices. Check out the “Rules for the STC Public Relations Competition” (available in PDF format from the STC Web site) to get an idea of the questions you should be able to answer with a good plan. For example, can you state your goals, objectives, and timetable for a specific event or service?

Putting together a publicity plan can be very simple. If so, what are the priorities and who will be responsible for each one? Or, your plan may be quite complex as you weave together press releases, personality profiles, and interview schedules. Either way, the best advice is to start by making a plan. This article outlines how to draft a plan that will serve you well.

Premeeting Planning

The first thing to do is to start developing ideas for your publicity planning meeting. Decide on a central location and pick a date that is at least a couple of weeks away. It is important to get attendance nailed down early. Creating a publicity plan is a great team-building exercise, so make sure you have the right team there. For example, you could just start with a lunch and pull together some of the top officers who will be involved. Or, you could sponsor a potluck dinner and meet at someone’s house. If worse comes to worst, carve out a forty-five-minute block of time after the next chapter council or program meeting.

Depending on the size of your chapter, you might have your publicity chairperson, someone from the Web team, your vice president, and perhaps your competition manager at your first meeting. Add in the past president and you’ve got a powerful working group that can help line up the year.

To prepare for such a meeting, the organizer could start with a simple Word or Excel document that highlights known events. Compiling a list of dates that require publicity will start framing the scale of the task. But the calendar dates are only half the problem. Some tasks require an up-front effort that may not have been completed recently. That’s why a face-to-face meeting is so helpful—the president can quickly assess the strength of the resources available and delegate tasks that help assess abilities.

In order to create a publicity plan, a chapter must be reasonably organized. Larger chapters should have a chapter handbook that describes in detail the responsibilities of each officeholder and manager. Smaller chapters may combine duties, leaving a smaller pool of talent to call on, but often the volunteers are more committed and wear multiple hats. Either way, if these roles aren’t well understood, organizing a publicity plan may be difficult, so make sure participants know what is expected from their volunteer time before they attend your team-building session. That involves requiring RSVPs and then calling each interested party.

A second premeeting activity to conduct before the planning session is a quick inventory of your publicity tools. Here’s a starter list:

1. An updated list of publicity contacts, (and, for extra credit, a notation of when they were last contacted)
2. Templates for press releases and announcements
3. Photographs of all current chapter officers (or at least the chapter president) in both color and black-and-white

A “nice-to-have” item would be a summary from the most recent publicity committee chair, documenting the activities and results undertaken. Barring that, a quick e-mail exchange or phone conversation would at least let the chapter president know how good, or bad, the current situation is.

Team Building and Goal Setting

Your goal for the first team-building exercise is to set the big picture: who is doing what, by when. You should identify a series of initial tasks, set names beside those tasks, and schedule follow-up meetings to reconvene.

We all know how life can intrude on volunteer organizations; for example, the energetic new committee chair could get transferred to a distant city. Think about contingencies and backups, but don’t get too bogged down in planning minutia. Set the general themes and then stay flexible.

For example, these steps might be a good start:

1. Update (or create) the PR contacts list by contacting each member of the list personally and introducing the chapter and the chapter schedule; also, mention that the chapter president is available for interviews (PR committee chair)
2. Collect sample press releases and make sure your template is up to date (PR committee member)
3. Organize a photo shoot of the chapter officers; digital is fine, but make sure you get both color and black-and-white images if possible (first vice president)
4. Develop a generic publicity plan for a chapter meeting, emphasizing the subject, the speaker, his or her qualifications, the venue, etc. Identify how to circulate the information, who needs it, and how soon it is needed (PR committee chair)
5. Identify a priority list of chapter activities that require publicity, including competitions, nationally known speakers, workshops, new officers, etc. (chapter president)

Armed with these five tasks and job descriptions for the meeting participants, and energized by good leadership, your publicity team should be able to draft a publicity plan that will build a solid foundation for the year ahead. Circulate the draft electronically, gather feedback, contact an interested STC director or other national officer, and you should be able to start getting some buzz going.

Organization Helps in the Long Run

If just reading this has made your head swim with ideas for things you should have already accomplished, don’t despair. Getting your planning activities going will start to pay off as soon as you begin. Getting organized with templates, names, and dates will help you in the long run, and help those who come after you.

If you want to really jump-start your planning activities, consider making the public relations competition traveling exhibit a part of your annual schedule. Show it off at the same time you exhibit the winners of the international or newsletter competition, but, either way, try to institutionalize the event so that every year your chapter sees “best practices” in the field of public relations planning. When you toss in a little long-term planning with all the short-term work you do, you can really make a difference.