Tag Archives: competition

When mega-news strikes

You’ve got an event or major announcement planned for today. You’ve had the blog and the tweets and the Facebook status updates and the press release all ready to go for many days. You were ready to start posting at 9 a.m., and have a schedule for messages for the rest of the day.

And then – mega-news strikes. Not just big news – MEGA-news. that kind of HUGE event that pushes everything else off the news cycle for HOURS. Even days. That people will talk about for years to come: “Where were you when you heard about such-and-such?”

And you know that absolutely no one is going to read your messages, no one is going to retweet you, no press people are going to call you, and, perhaps, no one is going to attend your event.

What to do?

A lot of you are facing this today. I’m seeing some of nonprofits trying to insert their important announcements amid the endless messages relating to Osama bin Ladan. They probably know it’s a lost cause, but they did all this planning, they hate for it to go to waste…

What should you do with your event or major announcement when mega-news strikes?

It depends…

If your announcement was meant to generate press coverage, retweets, signups, etc., consider pushing the announcement a day or two later, even for a week, if at all possible. If that’s not possible, then revamp your schedule to include a reminder blitz in two or three days, and push your event signup deadlines as late as possible.

Do not cancel your event unless you are absolutely sure no one is going to show up or that the press is absolutely NOT going to cover your announcement.

And consider this: your event might actually be a gathering that people are needing, particularly if the mega-news is tragic. Consider what happened to Knowbility in 2001:

Knowbility is a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas, and their signature event is the Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR), where volunteer teams of Web designers and developers with nonprofit organizations get together and build new Web sites (or enhance existing ones) to make them more accessible for people with disabilities and/or using assistive technologies. The teams meet the nonprofits they will work with mid week, spend an evening together, and then the web-building day is two or three days later, on a Saturday – all the teams come together in one place and go crazy with the one-day web-buildling. You’ve heard of barn-raisings? This is a web-raising! But in 2001, the day the teams were supposed to meet the nonprofits they were matched with was — the evening of September 12. The day before, on September 11, there was talk of canceling AIR. But someone said, “No, let’s do it. Maybe people will need this.” And so the events were held, as scheduled. And attendance was not only excellent, but the event evauations were filled with comments about how grateful people were to have had the opportunity to do something at a time when they were filling quite helpless. The event became one of the most special Knowbility ever held.

If you go ahead with your event in the midst of a mega-news event, be ready for the mega-news to come up and be discussed at your event. You may need to provide some time for that to happen. But it’s also okay to say, at some point, “Okay, let’s focus for the next hour on the reason we are here today…”

Volunteer online & make web sites accessible!

Knowbility is hosting a terrific online event, AIR Interactive, that gives online volunteers a chance to either

    1. create an accessible website for a musician or arts web site of your choice and submit the URL by March 5th.

OR 

  1.  choose from these sites and critique the accessibility features and redesign one page for accessibility. Submit by March 5th.

AIR-Interactive participants help ensure that as arts go online, rich cultural experiences can be enjoyed by everyone – including people with disabilities.

Online volunteers need to register and then access online tutorials. There are two call-in conferences for participants to receive live consultations.

“We are accumulating some fabulous prizes including round trip for two from Southwest Airlines, SXSW passes for 2012 and more.”

Knowbility is a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas with a mission to ensure barrier-free IT – supporting the independence of people with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology. It’s traditional Accessibility Internet Rallies (AIR) are onsite web design competitions to benefit local nonprofit organizations and schools by providing them with free, professionally designed ACCESSIBLE websites. In these events, of professional web developers learn skills to create accessible web content and then use those new skills to create accessible websites for local community groups. The result: dozens of professionally designed, accessible websites are donated to nonprofit groups and hosted for free for one year.

The AIR Interactive event allows anyone with Internet access to participate! It’s a great example of virtual volunteering!