Masterclasses

This year, Connecting Up will be holding two masterclasses with keynote speakers, Allen Gunn and Nancy Schwartz. Don't miss your opportunity to spend time with respected professionals in their field as they work closely with you on ways to unleash the power of your nonprofit.

If you would like to attend one of the masterclasses, simply add the option when registering for the conference. You can also register for the masterclass separately to the conference.

Take Control of Your Online Destiny - Allen Gunn

New platforms and channels come online every day, promising to help not-for-profits to better magnify their message and engage their target audiences. But it is challenging to maintain a coherent set of tools, services, and accounts that support organisational needs while also focusing on mission and sustaining compelling messaging.

This workshop will explain concrete methods for managing and sustaining online presence and vitality, with a focus on processes that outlive the tools they aim to support.

The first half of the workshop will focus on public-facing aspects of online effectiveness, including:

• Audience analysis: understanding who your site is for and how to deliver the value that generates return visits and richer engagement.
• Coordinating your online channels: establishing simple processes for managing the proliferation of online tools in a coherent fashion that maximises reach across networks.
• Listening for feedback and measuring reach: learning to treat outbound communications as the start of engagement cycles, and using “dashboard” tools to track reach and other message propagation and drive follow-on engagement.

Hands-on breakout sessions will enable participants to apply learnings and create real-world resources they can apply after the training.

The second half of the workshop will focus on business processes that make the difference between sustainable and unsustainable technology adoption:

• Methodologies for designing web and technology strategies that save time, money and stress
• How to properly establish and manage your organisation's online identity
• Holistic approaches to mapping and sustaining your data universe

Questions will be welcome and encouraged throughout the day, and the overall goal will be to let participants leave with new skills and knowledge for taking control of their online destiny.

The Bullseye Marketing Plan Workshop: How to Craft a Plan that Moves People to Act Now - Nancy Schwartz

When Nancy Schwartz, nonprofit marketing expert and blogger at GettingAttention.org, first started to think about how to help Australian nonprofits strengthen their marketing impact, marketing planning was at the top of her list.

She believes strongly that the right marketing plan serves as the foundation of your daily marketing work, and is the most reliable way to make practical, realistic and strategic decisions in prioritizing marketing opportunities, saving you time, effort and anguish. Most importantly, you’ll find that a clear and comprehensive marketing plan is the straightest path to messaging that motivates your target audiences to act now. These advantages are absolutely crucial in this time of decreased budgets and increased competition.

Now Nancy has found a way to help you create this crucial blueprint to work from, just in time… Please join her for this special opportunity to master your 2011 marketing challenges and immerse yourself for three and one-half hours in this intensive, limited-enrollment master workshop. You’ll learn to:

• Strip away the muddle messages and impossible to-do lists that diminish your marketing impact.
• Use the key components of an effective nonprofit marketing plan.
• Fine-tune your organizational and marketing goals.
• Pinpoint the target audiences you need to reach to meet your marketing goals, and the segments within each audience that share important characteristics.
• Understand your real target audiences--Only by getting to know what matters to your target audiences, will you connect.
• Develop a profile (a persona) of a representative member of one of your target audience segments.

But that’s not all. You’ll have the opportunity to complete three steps critical to the success of any marketing plan with hands-on planning exercises that will give you a jump start. You’ll:

• Define an effective call to action—You’ll learn to craft a productive and practical call to action.
• Outline the benefits for your target audiences—what they’ll get by acting--and what barriers may stand in their way.
• Craft a powerful elevator pitch—the 60-seconds-or-less message that you use more than any other to reach new prospects or strengthen relationships with existing members and supporters.

You’ll exit the workshop with:

• An outline of a focused, practical marketing plan that will work for your association or charity–one that you understand, have partially completed and are fully capable of building out and bringing to life.
• A clear understanding of whom you’re reaching out to.
• The messages that will motivate them to act now.
• The skills to develop breakthrough messaging for specific programs, products and services.