Workshop > Blogging with WordPress to Win Friends, Find Fans and Persuade People to Support Your Nonprofit Organization
Learn to successfully plan, design, launch, maintain and promote a blog for your nonprofit organization on WordPress.com. Attendees will learn how to use Themes, Plugins, Widgets, and basic HTML to design a blog that matches your website and helps recruit new e-newsletter subscribers, online donors, and supporters on Facebook, Twitter and social media networks. From basic to advanced, this workshop explores the WordPress interface and toolset. Attendees learn how to insert select and insert images and videos into blog posts, monitor statistics on visitors and comments, and create an editorial content system that enables you to assign, track and monitor upcoming blog posts from multiple authors. Blogging best practices in terms of post frequency, length, tone, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are also covered in detail. Read more 
Learn to Blog Your News Releases Workshop, November 30, 2011
Learn to publish a WordPress blog and write news releases (and other news items) and optimize them for search engines to attract the attention of reporters, browsers, bloggers and online journalists. Publishing a blog is no longer an option for successful organizations especially if they want to attract the attention of reporters, bloggers and online journalists. Done well, in a planned and organized way, a blog can result in thousands of dollars of free media publicity in addition to informing your volunteers, donors, sponsors and board members on a regular basis. While this workshop focuses primarily on how nonprofit organizations can use a blog to generate media attention, the principles can also be applied to any business or individual to promote a product, service or special event. Read more
Strategic Social Media Communications Workshop for Entrepreneurs and Citizen Journalists October 15, 2011
Social media offers the latest and greatest tools available to artists, authors, entrepreneurs, citizen journalists and nonprofit community organizations. Why? It offers a revolutionary means to connect directly with customers, prospects, donors, employees, volunteers, the media and to influence public perceptions, for competing with “the big guys”, for establishing thought leadership, for augmenting traditional marketing campaigns and for search engine marketing. To achieve these results, it takes knowledge and planning. Read more
Journalism Schools in Alberta Invite News and Work from NonProfit Organizations
Alberta’s largest cities boast a solid roster of journalism schools. Their roots date back to when Walter Cronkite dominated the broadcast world and Rolling Stone was just a newcomer on the newsstands. Since the 1960s, Edmonton’s Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) and Calgary’s SAIT Polytechnic (SAIT) have offered two-year journalism diplomas that deliver fast-track, hands-on education. “We’re trying to get students work-ready,” said Willem Sijpheer, journalism chair at SAIT. “We do simulate a lot of the industry practices. The students seem to be more successful doing it this way. They like…living it, rather than just doing it out of a book.” SAIT has a program that lets students specialize in print and online journalism or photojournalism. Read more
Strategic Media Communications Workshop for Citizen Journalists, Artists, Authors & Community Organizations, October 12, 13 & 15, 2011
Strategic media communications is becoming increasingly essential for bloggers and other citizen journalists. There are too many media outlets and many more communication tools to choose from to make effective use of any of them without a strategic media communications plan. Last year, Sun Media launched their UR portal and invited readers to submit stories, photos and videos. At about the same time, CTV Edmonton launched their MyNews portal and iNews (CHQT Radio) their iReporter feature and weekly newspapers like the St. Albert Gazette soon followed suit. On September 29, 2011, the Edmonton Journal is launching their online community newsroom. They are designing the project to make it as easy as possible for readers to contribute newsworthy stories, photos and videos on the special area on the www.edmontonjournal.com website. They are hoping that the initiative will be effective in artracting bloggers and citizen journalists to write, shoot and publish their own news and that this news will be of interest to their readers an, of course, to their advertisers. In other words, they hope to make money. This is as it should be. They are piloting the project and if successful they plan to roll it out to other Postmedia properties across Canada. Chalk another up first up for Edmonton. Read more
Linkedin for NonProfit Organizations Workshop in Edmonton on September 15, 2011
On September 15, I gave two workshops to twenty three non profit organizations in Edmonton on the topic of LinkedIn sponsored by the Edmonton Chamber of Voluntary Organizations. The purpose of the workshop was to demonstrate how feature rich LinkedIn is for nonprofit community organizations. The questions focused around such things as how to determine if LinkedIn, or any other social networking tool, is the best vehicle for them to engage their audiences, and whether the user should set up a profile for themselves or a company profile for their organization. We agreed that in order to select the best social networking tool amongst the many freely available, the organization needed to first develop a marketing and communications plan which would help them identify the demographic, psychographic and technographic profile of their ideal audiences, set the objectives and guide the activities.
Learn to Write for the Web in MacEwan’s Writing Works Program on October 14, 2011
Are you capturing the attention of your web site audience? Every day, we face information overload, and web site users become more selective about what information is important to them. In this workshop, learn to write web copy that will keep visitors reading and navigating through your site. Also, discover the differences between writing for print and writing for the web, how web site design supports your web copy, and how to write content that will maximize search engine rankings and increase traffic to your site. $154, noncredit
WRIT 0209-OP01
Fri, Oct 14, 2011
9:30 am – 4:30 pm
Instructor: Angela Wiens
See more and register by calling Theresa Agnew, Program Director at 780-497-5366
Learn to Write Humour: The Business of Funny in MacEwan’s Writing Works Program, November 1 to 29, 2011
Learn the basics of using humour to write comedic non-fiction and short stories. Your writing will come alive when you learn—from a professional comedian—how to tap your sense of humour to write for pleasure, profit, or publication. You will be invited to share some of your own comedic short stories or essays with the class. $174, noncredit.
WRIT 0136-OP01
5 Tues, Nov 1 – 29, 2011
6:30 pm – 9 pm
Instructor: Barbara North
For more information and to register call Theresa Agnew, Program Director for MacEwan’s Writing Works Program at 780-497-5366. Please tell her you saw the posting here.
Build Your Own Joomla! or WordPress Website Workshop Online
If you’re a creative writer with an eye to publication, you need a website. If you’re a business owner, with products and services to sell, you need a website. If you’re the communications department for your nonprofit organization, you need a website. But why? Where do you start? And more importantly how much time and money will it take to build or rebuild your own website? To be present on the web is to be archived on the web where your content is searchable, accessible, shareable and more durable than any article or ad in newspapers, magazines or on television or radio. If you, your company or your organization aren’t discovered online, you don’t exist. If you’re already online and your website hasn’t been updated in the last couple of years, it won’t be ranked highly by the search engines and you don’t exist. In the new rules of marketing and personal branding, if you don’t have your own website or blog, you don’t exist. Read more
Blogging for Business With Pleasure Workshop | June 29 | Edmonton
Blogging has been part of the media landscape for over a decade. From personal journals to big corporate marketing, the medium has matured to become a central role in communications. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful tool in their digital toolbox. Done well, blogging can bring a myriad of benefits to businesses of any size, writers, entrepreneurs and nonprofit community organizations. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blogger is a thorough understanding of the technology and the various blogging options and extensions available. See more and register for the workshop.
Pitch Your Story to the Media Workshop | April 20 | Edmonton
This workshop presents a step-by-step roadmap on how to successfully pitch your great story idea to the media over the phone in 30 seconds or in 300 words by email. You’ll be able to follow up with a warm call instead of a cold one. You’ll also learn how to pitch your story idea to browsers, bloggers and online journalists which is where you’ll get the most buzz for your brand. Best of all, you’ll leave the workshop at least 10 great ideas and with a list of the top 10 reporters, editors and online journalists most likely be to be interested in your story. See more and register.
Savvy Social Media Relations Workshop | May 25 | Edmonton
Whether you’re a team of one or a team of many, social media is now an essential communications tool. In today’s social media world, every customer is a reporter and every employee is a potential marketer. Social media offers individuals and organizations an unrivalled opportunity to speak directly to the people most likely to be interested in what you have to say. They also make it easy to conduct market research and track awareness of your issue, product or service. The challenge is that with so many social media tools to choose from, how do you choose the right tools? And with limited time to work with, where do you start? See more and register.
Marilyn
Jones is a corporate and social media advocate for individuals, small businesses
and nonprofit organizations in Alberta. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada and is the proprietor of RiverCity Productions. You can contact her
by phone at 780-695-5675 or by email at marilyn@mediamag.ca.