SPIN Communications Strategist Rosi Reyes breaks down the meaning of strategic communications for clients.

The SPIN Project is dedicated to working with social justice organizations ready to deploy communications strategies for social change. We develop communications skills, infrastructure and leadership, leaving stronger organizations with the ability to amplify their work with messages that evolve from the grassroots.

Services

Communications Audits

As a first step to helping organizations realize their communications potential, the SPIN Project offers comprehensive communications assessments. The goal is to assess groups’ communications infrastructure and effectiveness in getting out their social justice messages. We examine communications infrastructure, messaging content and organizational capacity. The assessments can also help determine organizations’ readiness for broader communications strategies.

Communications Strategy Development

The SPIN Project helps organizations develop a comprehensive, proactive and professional approach to strategic communications. We review media coverage to date, assess strengths and weaknesses, review goals, brainstorm ideas, instruct on how to handle media relations, help develop targeted messages, critique media deliverable such as press releases and press kits, and ultimately assist in the creation of a comprehensive communications plan. SPIN also helps groups consider next steps to support implementation of their plan – including the possible retention of PR consultants, developing a communications department, or launching a coordinated communications campaign.

Skills Building and Leadership Development

The SPIN Project’s ability to develop community leaders into savvy communicators sets us apart from any other communications support available to nonprofits Our work to develop the communications skills and savvy of community leaders, through trainings, workshops and conferences, remain at the core of our capacity building services. It is a staple of our work to meet groups in the field and offer media skills-building workshops for staff, community leaders and board members of social change groups. Our commitment to cultivating communications leadership results in stronger organizations and media messages that truly evolves from the grassroots.

Communications Coaching

The SPIN Project regularly supports organizations with hands-on media skills and strategies in the form of on-the-spot coaching in support of day-to-day media efforts or communications campaigns. We provide regular coaching and strategizing on communications issues, opportunities and questions as they arise – in the form of email editing of press releases and op-eds, practicing pitch role plays via phone, and scheduled check-ins on communications plans.. We offer the opportunity for emerging communicators to receive feedback and advice on their media opportunity or challenge from someone they trust.

Organizational Communications Infrastructure

Working at the intersection of communications and organization development disciplines, the SPIN Project also supports organizations in developing comprehensive communications strategies – and capacities – to reach their many audiences and stakeholders. We believe that an integrated communications strategy can benefit an organization by linking membership, base building, fundraising, public education and program work throughout the organization. With careful planning and a realistic understanding of communications capacities, groups can deploy resources more effectively by highlighting synergies and shared opportunities in various programs and work areas throughout the organization. With this approach, organizations are positioned to be more proactive and strategic, rather than consistently reacting to the existing environment. We help groups assess and strengthen staffing, budgets, internal communications vehicles and communications essentials such as lists, databases, etc. We often support clients in the process of building a communications depart by assisting in the recruitment and screen of communications director candidates, and by helping to train that person once hired.

Campaign Support

In addition to strategizing on fieldwork with trainees, the SPIN Project has contributed to campaigns in an in-depth, ongoing capacity. SPIN will provide ongoing, advanced media consultation around political or cultural campaigns by “parachuting” a staff person into the field. A SPIN Project media professional will provide concrete skills on a real-time campaign with local activists and serve as a mentor to develop media capacity in existing campaign staff.

Peer Networking

SPIN Project events offer opportunities for activists – grassroots groups, communications practitioners, policy advocates, and academics - to connect with peers and colleagues across the social change spectrum. We provide a space for exchange of ideas and information via our events, listserv and e-newsletters, and we offer technical assistance to emerging local networks.

Key Programs

SPIN Academy

The annual SPIN Academy offers organizational leaders intensive, focused media training. The retreat brings together activists who want to aggressively move their agendas through strategic communications and public outreach. Attendees take their media activism skills to a higher level, thus making them more capable of capturing media attention.

The SPIN Academy has become one of our most popular programs, regularly receiving more applications than we can accommodate. The SPIN Academy hosts nearly seventy participants working on a wide range of issues, who benefit from five days of intensive work on strategic communications planning, with special attention paid to specific skills-building in areas such as framing, message creation, targeting, developing relationships with reporters, spokesperson skills, and others. In addition to the training, participants have the opportunity to network with each other and the more than thirty outside trainers and consultants on site for the event, furthering what has become an increasingly important goal of our work: the creation of a supportive community of leaders in the field of progressive communications.

Customized Communications Conferences

As a result of the success of the SPIN Academy, an increasing number of organizations are asking us to create customized conferences for their constituents. In 2001 we conducted a skills building conference for grantees of the Pew Charitable Trusts. In 2004 we completed a four-day training event for the Tides Foundation Bridging Economic Divide Program, which tailored the SPIN Academy model for organizers of color working on economic issues across the nation. We’ve also created local versions of the SPIN Academy for community-based organizations operating in New York City and Washington DC. In 2006, we’ll lead five versions of the SPIN Academy throughout the country. All of these customized conferences point to the success of our model and our work to replicate and carry that model to new constituencies. We believe this increased demand demonstrates that our services are relevant, useful and practical for our client organizations.

Speaking for Ourselves

Our specialized program to serve communities of color continues at the leading edge of our work. We believe that to combat institutional racism, we need to build the capacity of social justice groups to address racism by developing communications-savvy leaders and mentoring spokespeople of color who can represent their communities on all issues, especially the debates that impact them most. Armed with a critical analysis of racism in both mainstream and alternative media, and a means to disseminate the findings (via trainings and internet distribution systems), we can support leaders of color in more effective media work. This will help increase media representation of people of color and help ensure that the discourse that shapes our society includes the vital voices of communities of color.

Publications

SPIN Works!

SPIN Works! is an activist-friendly and extremely useful media guidebook produced by the SPIN Project. Comprising some 115 pages, the guidebook is full of tips, tactics and strategies designed to give grassroots organizers and people interested in positive social change basic and advanced skills for shaping public opinion on their issues through the press.

Loud and Clear in an Election Year

To assist groups mobilizing around elections and ballot initiatives, the SPIN Project created a user-friendly book to help non-profits use concrete, grassroots-friendly solutions and strategies to legally and effectively communicate values to voters. Loud and Clear in an Election Year was designed to offer strategies for organizations to use communications as a tool to advocate on behalf of their issues and their constituents. Drawing from the SPIN Project’s experience in the field and firsthand knowledge of the needs, challenges – and unique strengths – of community based groups, we have assembled a publication to provide the resources nonprofit organizations need to be heard, to shape public policy, and to become powerful players in community politics.

Winning Wages

In July 2003 we released a first-of-its-kind media toolkit and resource book focused specifically on living wage campaigns as a tool to shape public opinion on low-wage work and working families. The kit began with an analysis of various communications efforts of living wage campaigns and projects around the country, including framing and messaging of low-wage workers. We used the survey findings to create useful models, templates and strategy options based on successes in the field that can be customized for local efforts. The goals of the kit are to build capacity of grassroots groups to do more effective communications as a first stage of a more advanced national economic justice strategy, and to help build the economic justice movement through strategic communications leadership.

Words that Work: Messaging for Economic Justice

As a follow-up to our joint publication Winning Wages: A Media Kit for Successful Living Wage Strategies, Words that Work: Messaging for Economic Justice highlights some of the most successful economic justice campaigns in the country and shares campaign frames and messages in order to strengthen the communications infrastructure of organizations fighting for a just economy. This message handbook begins with an overview of the economic justice landscape, and examines the frames and messages of several case studies that go beyond living wage strategies to include state minimum wage campaigns, low-wage immigrant worker organizing strategies, community benefits agreements, anti-gentrification campaigns and the growing opposition to the “WalMarting” of America. Words That Work aims to help economic justice advocates leverage the power of the media to achieve their goals of a fair and equitable America.

Working with PR Consultants

Created in response to client demand, Working with PR Consultants is a primer designed to assist progressive non-profit organizations with their decision to hire and work with a PR consultant. The pamphlet includes tips on seeking out and contracting with the right consultant for your organization’s needs.

Train the Trainers Kit

Once someone has participated in the SPIN Project Academy or a training, they are eligible to receive our Train the Trainer Kit which contains tools, tips and resources to carry forward the skills of effective media work to his or her colleagues and constituents. It includes everything necessary to replicate the training: Presenter Tips, Logistics Checklist, Training Script, Training Materials (handouts and a CD of the training in Spanish and English), and Evaluation Forms.