Using Visual Communications to Create Partnerships

As our nation enters the severe economic downturn, there will be a greater need for creative use of public relations by both corporations and non-profit organizations. A new creative approach using photography and other visual communications, to team up these two players can be an essential partnership of both corporate and non-profit public relations.

It was by chance that my son, Alex, and I received tickets to the East-West Shrine Bowl football game in Houston this January past. A friend of my mother’s in Kansas gave a large donation to the Shriners and received the tickets. Not being close to the site of the game in Houston, she passed the tickets on to my mother knowing that I lived in Austin, and had a better chance of using them.

The tickets were for fantastic seats on the 40-yard line, ten rows up from the nation’s best college football talent.

Sitting in the sparsely filled University of Houston stadium waiting for the game to start, I was enthralled watching a seven or eight-year old bald-headed girl sitting a few rows in front run around the seats taking photos with her digital camera. It was obvious that she must have been the recipient of treatment by one of the noted Shrine Hospitals.

Sitting next to her dad, she would jump up run down the concrete steps close to where the players were practicing, shoot a photo and then run back up to her a dad and proudly show him what she shot.  This scene continued over and over again for a good 20 minutes before the game started.

As I looked around the stadium, I noticed more children, some in wheelchairs and others on crutches, were also armed with digital camera’s trying to get shots of their favorite college players, their families and their friends.

It wasn’t till a week later that I realized that there was an untapped public relations possibility in what I had witnessed at that Shine football game.

While watching the festivities of Barrack Obama becoming the 44th President of the United States, one could not help to notice the Kodak digital camera in Malia’s hand and the Filp Video in Sasha’s. Two events, two totally different type of children, but united with one purpose…taking photos.

As the newly elected president addressed the nation calling for a new spirit of volunteerism, it came to me that this would be a perfect partnership opportunity between corporations that have ties to the photographic industry and non-profit organizations that have seen their seed money continue to shrink in this economy.

A project like this could be adapted to children’s hospitals, school systems and volunteer programs. The project could be tailored for both local and national projects.   It could be partnered with corporations that have visual communication interests such as:  Fuji, Nikon, Canon, Kodak, Apple, Dell, Intel, HP or others.

A sample project could be something as simple as children in the devastated New Orleans school district capturing random acts of kindness in the community.

Having students photograph people who are helping others. Start with a core group of students.  Incorporate the photo project into a class requiring students to volunteer a predetermined amount of hours in their community.

With digital camera in hand, students would focus on people helping people.

Selected photos and the student photographers would be aired on local TV, featured in local galleries and the works could be used by the sponsoring companies in public relation and advertising campaigns, and auctioned off to benefit the needy. This program would indirectly teach students the importance of volunteering, community and self-worth.

No better example of letting the youth tell their own story comes from David Henderson’s book The Media Savvy Leader.

“When I began advising leaders of 4-H on a major and ongoing initiative to reshape the image and brand of that national youth development organization, I walked into an environment that had only known mission statements and slogans. 4-H, like many other such groups, had changed their mission statement so often and had come up with slogans so frequently that the general, nondescript words had lost all meaning, 4-H organization had spent hundreds of tens of thousands of dollars on research and consultants and branding experts, and all they ever ended up with were slogans.

The 4-H organization had previously spent a fortune on market research and advertising yet had never interviewed their number one and most important audience—the youth who belong to 4-H—to determine how they might describe the 4-H experience. Everything to that point had been from the perspective of adults, not youth. Grown-ups trying to figure out how to capture the attention of kids seldom works, as any parent knows.

I listened to the youth of 4-H, and they told me, “4-H is a community of young people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills.”

The youth had defined one of the strongest positioning messages I had ever heard, and they had used distinctive words from their perspective, not from the viewpoint of adults talking about “kids.”

The new positioning message said it all about America’s oldest youth-development organization, and it said it in clear and simple language. It was an appealing message upon which to build a strategic communications campaign. Most of all, the message centered, for the first time ever, on the value of 4-H to young people. Previous attempts at messages had centered around the organization, which at the end of the day, no one really cared about.

Before long the entire organization was using the positioning message. It spread like wildfire. A young 4-H girl stood at a podium before the Governor of Indiana and 300 people to dedicate remodeled 4-H buildings at the Indiana State Fair, and she began by saying, “4-H is a community of young people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills.”

Little did I realize as I was sitting in the stands of the University of Houston that warm January day, that I was watching the demise of an institution.   On April 9th, the Shriners hospitals, which have provided free care since before the Great Depression, are considering closing a quarter of their facilities as donations stagnate, costs increase and the charity’s endowment shrivels.

Officials at the Florida-based organization say it is siphoning $1 million a day from its endowment to balance the budget for 22 hospitals in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Meanwhile, they say, that fund has fallen to $5 billion from $8 billion in less than a year because of the sputtering stock market and a charitable giving slump that has hurt philanthropies nationwide. The fund has been declining since 2001. The group will vote this summer on the closures.

“Unless we do something, the clock is ticking and within five to seven years we’ll probably be out of the hospital business and not have any hospitals,” Ralph Semb, chief executive officer of Shriners Hospitals for Children, told The Associated Press.

The time has come for non-profits turn to a creative approach to public relations and  fundraising.   Maybe those that benefit, especially the children, should tell their own story using the tools that they know best…photographs.