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The Outreach and Communications Amateur Hour
August 12th, 2006I went to the communications and outreach meeting that Concordia held. It was disturbing.
We are shortly approaching the anniversary of the flood. In the meeting, we were asked to brainstorm on ideas outreach. Let’s define the problem, and start spit-balling. This is where the frustration the neighborhoods felt, is felt by me. You cannot tell me that we need to start with a blank sheet of paper. Bettie Hill was literally writing “Phone Banking” on a blank sheet of paper on an easel.
WWL-TV was there. Not to brainstorm, sadly. They were there to film the event for the evening news. The correspondent had to explain to Stephen Bingler, that there were ethical boundaries that prevented WWL from participating, now that they had been invited to cover the meeting, rather than contribute to it. Despite the fact that she wishes she could, she would have to be invited, and no, it was too late to change.
That was a glaring failure on the part of this krewe. It was a stunning admission.
It is now obvious that television to them means publicity for Concordia, and not outreach. Had they been in touch at all with local television during the UNOP carnival?
Concordia did not want television at the UNOP meetings. Concordia wants to control the process, as if it were a product launch.
Which it may well be.
The meeting was another display of the Concordia’s “Gosh, this is hard,” fig leaf. They have no idea what they are doing, and they have no shame in displaying their ignorance, despite the handsome sum they are being paid for their guidance in the process. Yet they have no guidance to offer. They best they can do, is beg for answers at every turn. They love to remind us that this is a unique catastrophe, and to our criticisms, they respond, well can you suggest anything better?
The answer to this tidbit of rhetoric, is always yes, but it’s too late by then. Without the easel with the big sheets of paper, how can they capture your idea? Gosh, this is hard.
That was the case with my recent article, For the Record, This Is Not An Election. In it, I offered a viable solution for voting. One that deserves a follow up. There are may viable solutions on offer over at Think New Orleans. Myself and other volunteers are following up on these daily.
There an an old software industry trick. It’s called Vaporware. Tell your use based something new and better is coming, gather user feedback, have press conferences, and while they wait they’ll make do with what we’ve got for them already.
By promising answers and not delivering, this process obstructs progress, it makes us wait until the official communications and outreach plan is released, doing without. Suffering.
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Comments 
[...] After attending a very distrubing meeting on Communications and Outreach, Forest Bradley-Wright wrote up a communications and outreach document that nobody can deny. He wrote it in Word. He emailed it to a long list of people. He invited them to ammend the document and return it to him. [...]
This is another reason that reconstruction of the city MUST be in local hands. It’s our city, we’ll rebuild it, and we won’t require photo ops for our advertisy campaign.
There were plenty of people that showed up, but a lot of them filed out before it was over. Myself included. There were people from Catholic Charities , the LRA, and ACORN. I’m sure they didn’t attend the meeting for the soft drinks. I’m sure that people really to want to succeed at outreach.
Which makes the process all the more stunning, in that it isn’t as if the neighborhoods and nonprofits were not interested in outreach. Quite the opposite.
It would seem that the first and most important part of Outreach and Communications would be just that. Outreach. Perhaps they should get in touch with Neighborhood Organizations and really make this a “Neighborhood driven” effort as they are fond of saying. There are a lot of buzz words being tossed out. Bottoms up, inclusive, diaspora, grassroots, but so far it seems to ring hollow.
Grassroots? All I ever hear about is their magical web site. Everything is going to be on the web site. You can watch 15 12 minute videos, in your web browser, and from that make a choice of planners. This is not how decisions are made.
This isn’t Star Search.
I’ve been so busy lately, this one was totally off the radar (any surprise). I’m know I’m just a stupid blogger (who gets 500 hits a day), and I host a measly community affairs program. Who would it serve to try to contact me about these things? But hey, when the “outreach” is a reach around, it’d get a little messy to have too many people involved, and when their “bottoms up” process is a moon presented to the actual neighborhood processes, anyone who spent much time studying it would go blind (hmm … that was pretty clever — I’ll have to use that).
Thinking about vaporware and Concordia … you know, I once quit a job one day after walking in the door. It was a fairly prominent local tech firm — a slap-crap-together-at-the-last-minute sweatshop. As I was talking to the owner about why I was quitting, there sitting on a desk devoid of any paper or other signs of work was a single book: Selling the Invisible.
The principle behind the book is that companies shouldn’t sell the steak — they should sell the sizzle. Companies should first emphasize a relationship with the consumer, rather than, necessarily, an actual product or proven results.
That seems to be Concordia’s approach. Fuck up, apologize, fuck up again, apologize some more, fuck up really badly, apologize profusely.
Concordia and Steven Bingler should be fired before it’s too late!