We offer a regular rotation of these seminars online. These are intended for busy nonprofit staff who don't have the time to travel to a workshop, but who want to learn to apply strategic communication lessons to their work. Our packages tend to be tightly focused on a particular professional field and our seminars deliver lessons that can be immediately applied within a particular professional's field of authority. These live, online seminars are designed to teach immediate practical lessons, while still remaining grounded in clear principles.

In addition to the live seminar, there are usually a number of optional products and services available, such as eBooks and consulting sessions.
 

Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar - You're making a living. You're even making a difference. But is it the difference you want to make? This workshop asks the hard questions that need to be asked about the work we settle for, about the difference we're actually making, and about the legacy we leave behind. (more)

Delivering Online Seminars: A Sustainable Model for Engagement of Staff, Volunteers, and Donors - The Internet has helped civil society organizations transcend geographical boundaries like never before. One of the demands of our new reach is the need to make presentations and host seminars without paying for everyone to be in the same room. At the same time, the Internet is replacing expensive remote conferencing tools with cheaper, generic systems that nonprofits can afford. While nothing entirely replaces face to face meetings for building trust and connection, online seminars are a increasingly powerful vehicle for management, training, organizing, and relationship building with our stakeholders - allies, staff, volunteers, and donors. (more)

Email Newsletter Marketing - The core practice of the "Email Savvy" organization is the successful use of an email newsletter. Blasting email out the door is easy, but creating newsletters that actually work, in the context of a flow of communication that genuinely engages people, that can actually be much harder. It's become especially true in today's world of spam-inundated mailboxes. This series will help you develop and maintain a newsletter marketing model that avoids common pitfalls, implements best practices, and moves you in the direction of continual improvement of your systems for engaging your stakeholders. (more)

Email Newsletter Reinvention & Improvement - Email newsletters have become a mainstream practice in much of civil society. But very few of these newsletters have reached their full potential as tools for building and leveraging relationships with donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders. Many are impaired by common mistakes and most don't achieve clearly defined objectives. This seminar, despite being online, will offer collaborative, hands-on analysis of your newsletter, leveraging the insights of both students and instructors. This seminar is right for you if you're looking for practical improvements to your newsletter and a framework for continued betterment. (more)

Frictionless Fundraising - The Internet has the potential to bring the art and science of fundraising back into balance, restore the confidence and trust of donors, and deeply enhance the relationships our organizations have with our stakeholders. Or it can be yet another way to alienate our supporters and disempower our fundraising professionals. The Frictionless Fundraising workshop will help you avoid the easy pitfalls and set you on a path of success. (more)

The Golden Goose: Building Trust Online with Donors, Activists, and the Media - Trust is the great productive force of civil society, a force that you turn into money, action, and attention of all kinds. Trust is the difference between a one time donation and lifelong financial commitment, between tossing your news release and calling you whenever a story breaks, between considering your petition and calling a hundred friends on behalf of your cause. Today, it's easier than ever to both build and destroy the trust of your stakeholders. Building trust - the "goose that lays the golden egg" - is a critical practice that is frequently undermined by the mechanics of email and web communication. (more)

How to Write a Book in One Year: Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop - If you have a book you want to write -- and many creative people do -- most often the biggest barrier to completing it is not a lack of ideas or even a lack of craft. It's a perceived lack of time. Writing is an exercise in discipline. The Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop addresses that issue by teaching a writing discipline that works. (more)

Less is More: Personal Empowerment in the Age of Information Overload - The age of information overload has been with us for some time. Neil Postman's famous 1990 speech on Informing Ourselves to Death was neither the beginning nor the end of the era. But among people who want to make the world a better place, more is at stake today than ever before. Too many people are paralyzed, distracted, interrupted, or stressed. At the same time, the opportunities for personal empowerment in regard to information are greater than ever. (more)

Light a Fire: Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits - Whether it goes by the name Viral Marketing, Network Marketing, Social Marketing, Flipping the Funnel, or even old school Community Organizing, activists and fundraisers are understandably excited about the power that networks have to carry their message for them. It's not enough to imitate commercial successes. Rather, civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the elements of trust, passion and community that are the ingredients of successful social marketing. (more)

The Modern Nonprofit Web Site: Strategies, Patterns, and Tools - We all know now that the modern nonprofit web site is not simply an online brochure, but knowing what it is not only gets us started. Maybe that will help us avoid spending our limited budgets on pretty online boondoggles, but we still need a proactive vision. We still need to know what works. These seminars will give you that answer and more. (more)

Nonprofit Blogging Strategies: Leveraging the Best of Old and New Channels - It's easy to start a weblog. It's harder to have it be of strategic value. To most people, even the words "blogging" and "weblog" don't sound strategic. Blogging's conflicting reputation as either the future of journalism on the one hand or personal gossip rag on the other makes it hard to see where it fits in our communication plans. Weblogs are overhyped but underused. This workshop is right for you if you're looking for the middle path, if you need sensible ways to promote blogging in your organization, if you want to make sure that your blogging efforts are successful. (more)

Nonprofit Knowledge Management - Knowledge Management is an overused phrase with a dubious lineage, often connoting a software centric solution of some kind. But underneath the phrase is a powerful concept: that there are opportunities for learning in the new information and communication networks. This series will help you find those opportunities, keep you from taking expensive wrong turns, and give you guidance for high impact knowledge management initiatives. (more)

Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills - The field of nonprofit technology consulting has grown and evolved enormously in the last few years. One of the essential tensions in the field is the sense that technology consultants, in order to do their job responsibly, have to become communication and management consultants as well. As nonprofits get more sophisticated and the technology develops to address mission critical needs, this tension is only getting worse. These seminars will address that tension head on, by identifying appropriate roles in the consulting process and by helping technology consultants ground their work in the communication needs of the organizations they serve.(more)

Nonprofit Technology Planning and Implementation - The last few years of technological change have brought nonprofit leaders enormous opportunities and challenges and that pace of change shows no sign of slowing. The potential to make the same mistakes over and over continues to be an issue for many organizations. Nonprofit leaders rarely have the time for conferences or workshops outside their issue areas. These seminars on Nonprofits & Technology will provide you with solid tools and guidelines targeted at your role as a decision maker. (more)

Online Community Organizing: Proven Techniques for Building Power, Leadership, and Connection - Although organizations have mostly failed to tap its potential, the Internet is one of the greatest community organizing tools of all time. Unfortunately, most nonprofit online community efforts seem to follow the anemic suggestion that stakeholders "talk amongst themselves". We can do much better than that. Indeed, the power of old school community organizing combined with new media has the potential to utterly revolutionize our work and our impact. (more)

Online Marketing Reinvention & Improvement: A Hands-On Workshop for Your Online Marketing Programs - For most nonprofits, online marketing development has been driven by a series of hype cycles, leading organizations to turn their attention to a series of semi-connected activities, such as websites, ecommerce, email newsletters and campaigns, viral messaging, online community, and social networking. The result is often a mix of strong and weak programs and a meager planning and evaluation framework. Many groups can benefit from an organized process for improving (and sometimes even reinventing) their online marketing programs. (more)

Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks - Boundaries are shifting. Resources are expanding. Responsibilities are changing. The opening up of our organizations to the influence of the networks that we're a part of is transforming fundraising, volunteer management, education, and advocacy. But what does this mean specifically? How does it affect staff responsibilities, hiring, communication and management policies, compensation? (more)

Scaling Up Listening: Powerful Online Relationship Building - Listening is the most effective persuasive strategy in existence. Nothing builds trust, loyalty, commitment, and action like feeling heard. We live in a society of unaccountable government and corporate power, where people's everyday experience is akin to talking to a telephone company's customer "service" department. In this context, civil society organizations can be a breath of fresh air. The Internet represents an opportunity for scaling up listening to our stakeholders that we haven't seen since the intimate life of villages. In so doing, our organizations will raise more money, mobilize more volunteers, and build vastly greater capacity to pursue our missions. (more)

Trust: Building a Renewable Base of Funding, Volunteers, and Leadership - We live in a time when people are hungry for the truth. A combination of forces, including the inhuman scale of many institutions, the breakdown of community ties, and the promising transparency of new media, have come together to give simple honesty a truly compelling power. Authenticity is an untapped resource of extraordinary proportions. Civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity. Authenticity leads to trust and trust is the essential currency of our relationships with our stakeholders. Research confirms this: Time and again, surveys shows that we are the most trusted sector, above both business and government. Whether it's in art or advocacy or education or healing or any other cause, we are at our best when we are authentic. And yet, we can get as caught up in the layers of obfuscation and avoidance as anyone. In our day to day work, we let anxiety become institutionalized and keep us from the power that the truth has to motivate, to teach, and to calm. With a focus on civil society, this series of seminars will address three key practices of authentic organizations: learning to fail faster and thus learn faster; embracing abundance over scarcity and thereby making peace with time; and being brave enough to make space for the truth in our relationships with stakeholders, staff, and ourselves. The context throughout will be on the practical results of such practices in the areas of greater funding, broader enrollment, and more effective leadership. (more)

Website Reinvention & Improvement - Across large swaths of civil society, even in parts of the developing world, websites are the public face of an organization. The Web is a powerful medium that often disappoints, if only because its potential is so great. Very few websites do what they could to build and leverage relationships with donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders. Many are impaired by common mistakes and most don't achieve clearly defined objectives. (more)