At MWS, working with cause-driven organizations is one of our passions. In our experience, they face some special challenges in making sure their mission is both concisely formulated and diffused throughout their communications. The Firefly Sisterhood is one organization we’ve worked with to lay some important groundwork for this kind of mission execution.
 
The Firefly Sisterhood is a 501(c)3 nonprofit with a mission to foster one-to-one connections between women recently diagnosed with breast cancer and inspirational survivors. As a fledgling organization, Firefly worked with an agency to develop the organization’s message and brand identity. But they didn’t have the in-house resources to really bring those materials to life.
 
“One of the things that organizations struggle with is consistently using the right language to talk about what they do,” said Kris Newcomer, executive director of Firefly. This can be especially fraught for organizations that, like the Firefly Sisterhood, deal with difficult or sensitive issues.
 
But the challenge that Newcomer faced in integrating their brand is one that organizations of all sizes have to manage.
 
For larger organizations, it’s a matter of providing the communications team with the training and materials necessary to get everyone up to speed. Smaller organizations without a dedicated communications staff often benefit from more direct support.
 
Newcomer’s priority was to develop Firefly’s blog, along with other communications materials, in line with their new brand strategy. For the emergent organization, the blog was an important place to establish a trusted voice and demonstrate leadership in the cancer support community.
 
After reviewing Firefly’s brand strategy and discussing their goals with Kris and her team, MWS created a series of blog posts to help Firefly institute a publication schedule and to provide templates for a variety of approaches they could take for future posts.
 
From personal interviews and profiles, to researched pieces, to advice and how-to’s, our white-branded posts—often reposted by other local and national organizations—built out a voice that resonated with Firefly’s audience and drove traffic to their website.
 
One post that resonated with Kris and with the blog’s readers tackled the importance of language head-on. In a discussion on Firefly’s Facebook page, people had been chiming in with some strong opinions about their preference for (or aversion to) terms such as “survivor,” “victim,” and “battle” when it comes to the experience of having cancer. The debate inspired us to research and write a post about how the language that patients and caregivers use to talk about cancer has a serious impact on patients’ lives and health.
 
“I loved that post because it really spoke to the kind of care we were taking in developing our own vocabulary as an organization. It was a great example of how your work gave us a guide for how to present ourselves through our blog,” Kris reported.
 
This year to date Firefly has already served over 130 new clients, and they’re on track to triple the capacity they started with in 2014, in part by expanding their connections with women in a wider range of language and cultural communities. We’ve been thrilled to watch them grow and bring their remarkable mission to life for so many women.

As Molly Gage noted in her last post, one of the signature services we now offer at MWS is brand strategy integration. Yep, it’s a mouthful—but it’s really quite a simple concept. Here’s a closer look at what it means, and what it looks like in action.
 
Everyone knows how important it is to develop a solid brand. But often once a brand has been created or reimagined, it just…sits there. A new logo and list of key differentiators can only do so much, even if an organization has committed to a top-notch branding effort. Once the excitement of the branding process wears off, figuring out who communicates what (and when and how) in line with a new brand is challenging.
 
MWS supplies the crucial link between brand strategy and brand execution. We integrate your brand into your communications processes and materials, and we ensure that your team can communicate your brand effectively and efficiently, too.
 
When we work with clients who are looking for comprehensive brand strategy integration, the process typically has several steps:

1. Discovery. We meet with the client’s team to discuss in depth their goals and challenges. We review all existing brand materials and related communications or strategic planning documents.
2. Development and deliverables. We create and present a plan that includes a communications schedule and recommendations for publications as well as an extensive style guide. We can provide training materials or work directly with an organization’s in-house team to ensure that everyone is up to speed. Other deliverables may include updates to existing materials such as web copy and promotional materials, as well as draft content or templates for new materials.
3. Review. Six months after we present our deliverables, we’ll follow up with a review. This provides the opportunity to discuss continued pain points and solutions.
4. Continuing support. We provide ongoing support in various capacities, depending on the client’s needs, from communications management to content development and editing.

 
We’re passionate about helping organizations connect with their audience, and brand strategy integration is an excellent tool for accomplishing that goal. Questions about how it might work for you? Let us know!
 

It has been a week. A week in a month in a year for which not everyone wants to give thanks. But Jess and I are inviting the spirit of cooperation to a place at our Thanksgiving table (in the hopes that it will seep into the rest of our lives, too).
 
Cooperation seems easy, but it can be hard even for the best of friends. When Jess and I became colleagues, we saw right away (and over time) that we came to our tasks with different personalities, different ideas, and different strategies.
 
But we believed—and still believe—that we’re stronger together, so we have a vested interest in learning how to bend ourselves to our common goals. Below are five strategies that make working together work.

1. Communicate: It’s easy to assume your colleagues share your views—about big stuff, like what drives you and your commitment to the work—and small stuff, like what does (and doesn’t) belong on Facebook. Don’t assume. Instead, integrate twice-weekly check-ins with your team, and use an agenda to keep yourself on track.

2. Write Your Guide: Sure, it’s easy to make fun of a vision board. But you need to capture the spirit of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Work with your team on a manifesto, a position statement, or, yes, a vision board. Your guide is your…guide—it will determine the shape of your work.

3. State Your Goals: Don’t let business happen to you! Take control by taking an active role in driving growth. Committing to short- and long-term goals helps you and your team define success in specific and realizable terms. Bring those goals out at every turn to gauge your growth and remind your team how success can be achieved.

4. Keep a Team Calendar: A calendar may look like an isolating cage of to-dos, but it’s actually the easiest way to focus only on the one thing you need to complete right now. A team calendar can also help to clarify roles and responsibilities and ensure accountability. Teach yourself to rely on its wisdom.

5. Celebrate: A team that celebrates reaching small goals together will be a team that celebrates reaching bigger goals, too. In every calendar, make room to raise a glass to toast a team that works on working together.

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. We are thankful for you.

I was supposed to finish A Little Life, oh, three weeks ago? It’s a book club pick (er, my book club pick). But for so many reasons—summertime, small children, email and the internet’s siren song—I’m treading water at only a third of the way through (sorry, fellow book-clubbers, but it’s true).
 
Among the reasons I’ve been hanging out in the 300s is not a flagging interest. Not at all. I am so curious about these characters. And I am so, so curious to find out if the pages to come will bring forth implicitly promised revelations.
 
But curiosity does not necessarily compel action.
 
My attraction to the very long book has always been strong. When I was much, much younger, it was about the bragging rights (humble though they may be) of the big-book burden and (probably?) pride in completion. What gives me so much pleasure today is not just the world-inhabiting possibilities of the very long book, but its promise of stability.
 
Long books offer immersive escape, sure, but what I like about them is their there-ness. A very long book is big and bulky, and it follows me around—from the bedroom to the coffee table…to Florida—but it doesn’t really nag me (or at least not loudly) for attention.
 
Also, as long as a very long book has been started and not finished, its world is still spinning, its characters are still just about to do or say anything at all.
 
The only real downside to taking all the time in the world to finish a very long book is the fact that there are so many very long books left to be read (and the certain knowledge, thanks, Tim Urban, that I will never, ever be able to read them all). Well, that and the book club.

In an ideal world, every writer would have a top-notch editor who understands the needs of her project and the idiosyncrasies of her writing process. There’s no substitute for a trained editorial eye when it comes to realizing the full potential of a piece of writing—even (or maybe especially) those of us who are editors by trade value another editor’s insight on our own writing.

But we live in the real world. And the reality of tight budgets and tight timelines means that you can’t always get what you want. What you can always get, however, is yourself. It’s absolutely possible to be your own (cheap!) editor, if you know how to shift gears. Self-editing is not always easy—there’s a reason it’s called “killing your babies”—but it’s among the most useful skill sets for anyone who writes.
Try these tricks for wrangling your writing into top form.

1. Step away from the manuscript. Yes, you have been staring at it for too long. To successfully edit your own work, you need to see it from a different perspective, and nothing facilitates this more effectively than time. So go take a long walk or watch some cat videos before you try to edit.
2. Give yourself fresh eyes with a fresh format. As with stepping away, printing out a hard copy of the document in question is an important way to see it differently. While it may seem terribly twentieth-century, working from a print copy forces your brain to engage more deeply. Similarly, you’ll also notice things you wouldn’t otherwise by reading your work aloud—one of the oldest tricks in the editor’s book.
3. Think big-picture first. Fight the temptation to start rewording sentences or adding commas, at least for now. Start with a holistic review—that means looking at the organization of the entire piece to make sure it’s logical and complete. Creating a reverse outline is a great technique to this end.
4. Get to know your bad habits. We all lean on certain writerly crutches, and it’s important to recognize your own. Perhaps you overuse the passive voice, repeat the same transitional phrases, or write overly long sentences. Once you’ve identified your problem tendencies, it’s easy to spot and fix them. (We’ve got a post in the pipeline that focuses on this topic, so stay tuned for more!)
5. If you can say it in fewer words, DO. While the utility of academic jargon has long been a contentious topic, it’s always the case that more direct communication equals more clear (and therefore more effective) communication—even if you’re writing for an audience of specialists. Examine every sentence with an eye toward simplification. Your readers will thank you.