When I was a child, my parents would constantly remind me of the importance of making a good first impression. Little did I know that they were laying the foundations for good networking habits! Regardless of which profession you are in, networking can enhance your career by helping you establish valuable professional relationships and increasing your visibility in the marketplace. Below are a few lessons I’ve learned over the years about building a wide-ranging network.

Be Engaged

You can’t build a network if you don’t engage with your community. Find ways to get in front of the individuals you are looking to connect with: join and attend events hosted by professional organizations or take part in talks hosted by your library or local colleges. Intentional networking is important, but don’t discount the connections you make every day in your personal life. Those friends you attend sporting events or exercise with can provide other valuable ways to expand your network.

Be Genuine

Authenticity is essential. Get to know people on a personal level so you can make real connections with them. Having a set of questions you are comfortable asking in any setting is helpful. They can be as simple as: “How was your weekend?,” “Have you read any good books or seen any good movies lately?,” and “What are your favorite restaurants in the area?”

Connect the Dots

When you are introducing one person to another, go beyond just saying names. Describe how you know the person you are introducing and be sure to describe the professional role each individual plays. For example: “John, I’d like you to meet my friend Amy. Amy and I went to college together and she is now leading an organization focused on childhood education. Amy, John is a real estate broker and we serve on a local board together. The two of you are both passionate about education and I’d love for you to share with each other your involvement.” A strong introduction can help connect the dots and strike up a meaningful conversation.

Follow Through

If there is someone you are looking to create a long term relationship with, follow up after your initial interaction. Send an email shortly after, and find ways to interact with them in the future. Ask them to coffee, invite them to a professional event, forward articles you think may be of interest to them.

Taking just a few minutes to think about your networking now can pay dividends for years to come. If you ensure that you put yourself in the right situations and are equipped with the right attitude towards networking, you can very quickly build a powerful network!

Jean Cecil Frick has built a career out of trusted relationships. She is a veteran of the private, public and non-profit sectors driven by helping individuals and organizations achieve their goals. Today, she serves as a senior strategic advisor at NP Strategy where she helps clients connect with the right people and get their message across to key audiences.

Originally posted in MidlandsBiz on April 4, 2019.

In July, I wrote about the natural conflict between legal and public relations. Legal wants to win a case or obtain a permit while limiting the liability of the client. In other words, protect and achieve whatever specific objective is at hand.

The public relations professional, on the other hand, has the broad objective of maintaining or improving reputation and the narrower objective of shaping a specific message.

The best client result comes when legal and public relations coordinate so that their respective objectives complement each other and increase the client’s chances of meeting its short- term and long-term objectives.

Coordination of legal and public relations starts with each party respecting the others’ strengths.

First – Public Relations. Public relations professionals are at heart, storytellers. People understand stories and public relations professionals often can help shape the message by telling a story. Legal positions are often just that – legal positions. Reducing a legal position to a story that stakeholders can understand will go a long way to achieving a client objective.

Now – Legal. Facts matter to lawyers. For that reason, lawyers spend a lot of time getting the facts and checking the facts. Public relations professionals should be just as concerned with the facts. A message plagued with incorrect facts will take a client backwards.

The good news is that if legal and public relations are working together, they can seamlessly communicate the client’s position and assure that the facts are correct. The stakeholders understand and support the client’s objective because it is communicated in a clear, simple, understandable and accurate way.

We formed NP Strategy as a subsidiary of Nexsen Pruet to better marry the unique strengths of legal and public relations to produce a better result for the client.

As a businessman, Leighton Lord has critical first‐hand experience in running a large business, managing people, and building consensus. Currently, Leighton is founder and Managing Director of Nexsen’s communications affiliate, NP Strategy, LLC. At the age of 42, he was elected Managing Partner of Nexsen Pruet, making him one of the youngest managing partners of a major law firm.

Originally posted in MidlandsBiz on March 8, 2019.

As the old folks would say, “’Memba film? That’s when the moving pictures MEANT something!” The days when artists would craft thoughtful, moving stories; capturing them on a medium that was delicate, expensive and fleeting. I’m thinking of Citizen Kane – Lawrence of Arabia – Metropolis! Singular accomplishments that even to this day, remind us just how powerful moving images can be.

Nowadays, anyone with a smart phone can be a filmmaker of some degree. That’s great for accessibility – it’s never been easier to breathe life into your creative visions! (We all know what that’s done to the definition of ‘acceptable level of quality,’ so I’ll save the snobbery.) But – I bet we can all do a little better even with minimal effort.

Working with clients, I’ve found it helpful to break down the core benefits of film and get back to the basics. Not only will it make your video more watchable, it’ll help you distill down what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Show us who you are

Imagine those old, gossamer close-ups from Casablanca. Like a photograph but more immediate, film is an intense conductor of emotional energy. So much about us is programmed into recognizing faces and expressions as a means of communication. The lesson – if you’re going to effectively communicate an idea, let me look you in the eye. You founded your company? Show me your face and tell me why. Don’t be a disembodied voice over a PowerPoint – or worse – a slideshow.

It’s about an Experience

Say you’re trying to recruit new employees, and would love to produce some testimonials. But maybe your operation isn’t quite as interesting as the cookie factory from Edward Scissorhands (SOMEONE had to be oiling Vincent Price’s robots, right?), so you park an employee in the canteen, put a cell phone camera in front of them and tell them to spill their beans. What’s produced is a four-minute monologue resembling a hostage video.  Remember: film has the power to take us somewhere unfamiliar. Take me into the life and experience of that employee – interacting with coworkers, family and enjoying a decent living.

It’s about a BRIEF Experience

Editing is its own category at the Academy Awards for a reason: with attention spans approaching goldfish levels, none but the most captive of audiences will hang around for your 10-minute yarn about… well, anything. As Rocky teaches us, you can do a lot with a brief montage. While professional editing comes with a professional price tag, we can ALL do a better job of trimming the fat from our content (myself included). In most, if not all cases, less is more. Keep it short – salient – and sweet.

In that spirit of brevity, I’ll leave you with the often-quoted words of Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, but will never forget how you made them feel.” Put another way: make a connection, share an experience, and get out before you become boring.

Taylor Kearns is a filmmaker at heart and a professional communicator by trade. Ever since he got his hands on the family camcorder as a child, he’s been using video and sound to tell stories. In college, he turned that love of moving pictures into a career in broadcast journalism. He went on to earn two regional Emmy awards for his work. With seven years’ experience as a photojournalist and reporter, Taylor sought out the feature stories he knew would resonate with viewers.

Originally published in Midlands Biz on February 26, 2019.

Consider this:
Who would the Beatles be without Ringo, John, Paul AND George?
How successful would Clemson have been this year without Dabo Swinney AND Trevor Lawrence?  (As a Gamecock, that sentence was painful for me to write.) My point: every successful group consists of diverse members with individual skills, quirks and characteristics. Without each of them, you wouldn’t have a complete team.

Joining NP Strategy more than three years ago was an incredibly exciting challenge; a new adventure that gave me the opportunity to help build a team from the ground up. Hiring team members is similar to assembling a puzzle – the goal being to find the pieces that fit together perfectly. That selection process is the key to success in any organization; you have to find your Ringo, John, Paul AND George to be successful and provide well-balanced services to your clients.

For example, in our organization we have the creative one, the smart one, the leader, the calm one, the go-getter, the one with great hair, and many more. We try to balance variety with compatibility. It’s tough to do correctly – you need a great leader with a sound judge of character, who is willing to make hard decisions, exemplify high performance standards and mentor along the way.

There are four pieces to assembling an award-winning group:

1)     Understand your organization’s values and how it works

You are in charge of assembling (and developing!) a group of people to spend hours, days and years together. Ensure everyone is committed to the same ideals and core values of your organization. If you are a group that crawls through the trenches together, every team member needs to be ready to get their hands dirty.

2)     Provide clearly defined roles

Roles and positions should be precise and communicated well. Each team member should understand their responsibilities and know how to meet them. Communicate expectations, and empower and expect your team members to exceed them. Setting goals allows you to measure success.

3)     Encourage learning

We all should learn something new every day, but supporting lifelong learning is a benefit that not all workplaces provide.  Encourage team members to take a trade course, learn a new skill or join a leadership organization. Any of these opportunities will keep your team members interested in learning more about what they do and keep them working hard for you and your organization.

4)     Recognize and reward achievements

Consistently provide positive feedback and offer incentives for success. This can be through professional development, gifts or bonuses.  We all thrive on being appreciated, so team members should understand their worth. Be creative with how you celebrate each other, as it’s scalable to any budget.

I’ve enjoyed helping build our team, but even greater joy comes from watching how our combined, varied skillsets work together to meet a new challenge each day. We’re not the Beatles, but together, I think we are a pretty good group.

Amanda Loveday, recently named Associate Director of NP Strategy, has a passion for meeting new people and building relationships. It is what has made her a powerhouse in politics and communications. A decade of experience taught her the importance of getting to know the community and how to interact with people, especially those with different personalities and backgrounds. Get in touch with Amanda at (803) 540-2190 or amanda@npstrat.com.

Stakeholder management is a crucial component of any long-term project, essential to understanding and engaging your stakeholders. But even with a solid foundation of information and a customized engagement plan, it can be difficult to keep the target audience engaged and in sync. Inevitably, you ask them for a lot: for input, for attention, for time, and a host of other things. All of this asking can lead to fatigue on both ends. The million dollar question for stakeholder management, then, is, “How can you keep stakeholders interested and responsive during long projects?” The answer lies in establishing the right kind of relationship: a reciprocal one.

Instead of approaching your stakeholders with a one-sided, “I ask, you give” mentality, first establish your flexibility and generosity; in a word, your humanity. Few behaviors set a more positive tone than giving. While it may sound paradoxical at first, you can greatly boost your chances of receiving ongoing cooperation from your stakeholders by establishing yourself as a ‘giver’.

Use the following principles to get the most out of your interactions with project stakeholders:

1) You always have something to give
It is impossible to come to a negotiating table empty-handed: we all bring a wealth of experiences and skills with us everywhere we go, meaning we always have something to offer. Think about your stakeholders’ needs and the language they use to frame them, then search your toolkit for a skill or experience that can address that need, taking care to present it in the language they introduced.

2) Your pattern of giving is not a transaction string
Our goal is to show shareholders that you are a person (and, of course, the kind of person they want to work with!), not to establish a tit-for-tat transaction string. To pull from the philosopher Martin Buber, the goal is to establish an I-thou relationship: one marked by the encounter of a person rather than the encounter of a concept. In an I-thou relationship, your stakeholders aren’t encountering a manager or a professional (both concepts), but are encountering you. The relationship we want to avoid is the I-it relationship, the relationship of objectification. Your stakeholders can feel empathy with a person, but not an object or concept.

3) Proportionality is not important
Building on principle #2, your giving does not need to be proportional to the asks you make of stakeholders. Again, because establishing a relationship is the goal, we’re not trying to match (and especially not bribe or indebt) our stakeholders; we’re simply making small gestures that establish us as real persons with whom they can work.

Devote time to understanding what your stakeholders find meaningful, and then reach into your skills and experiences to see what you can offer them. As the project progresses, they’ll be much more inclined to give when you ask, not because they “owe you”, but because of an established relationship built on authentic reciprocity.

Originally published in Midlands Biz on January 15, 2019.

Your dinner, your stitched up surgery site, your haircut.
Or…
A gracious waitress, a skilled physician, a dependable barber.

The only difference here is a matter of perspective.  As we begin a new year filled with new challenges and opportunities, it’s a good time to ask ourselves, “Are our eyes focused inward, or outward?” Whether it’s in business or in the home, our focus will set the course for our future. In a world of too many selfies and too much screen time, it’s important we maintain perspective.

I’m definitely not here to judge, for I’m guilty of checking my phone and thinking too much about “me” – my wants, my needs, MYself.  Instead, I’m here to challenge all of us to strive for a better, more externally focused year in 2019.  It won’t happen overnight, but if we want to have real, lasting impact, we need to make a conscious effort to take time to invest in the world around us.

What would this look like?

• In the rush of an overbooked schedule, can we give up 10 seconds to make eye contact with the cashier and ask about his or her day?
• Can we thank one more person – whether your spouse, the mail carrier or a teacher?
• Could we – and I’m really speaking to myself here – give space to the rushed driver and just allow him or her to merge instead of riding the bumper of the person in front of you? (It MAY be possible that by providing a little extra space on the roadway you won’t need the space on social media to vent about rude drivers…  Ahem, Heather!)

The logic applies to our professional world and businesses as well. Challenge yourself to put others first, and consider every client or customer worthy of extra care and investment. If you’re an overachiever, keep track of your progress and reflect on the impact you had when you offered a kind word or a few more minutes of help. I suspect you’ll deem the time well spent, and worth repeating. Human connection is, after all, at the heart of every business.

Our lives move so fast.  We face so many options. The world seems to point increasingly toward watching out for “#1,” but that narrow view can keep us from noticing a lot more: from the needs of our friends or family at home, to a new opportunity or new approach to an old problem at work.

A New Year can mean more than just the passage of time – depending on our perspective.  At this time next year, when you look back at your photos from 2019, what will you see?

The traditional definition of community engagement is “the facilitation of communication and exchange between an organization and community.” While that’s certainly true, that doesn’t really capture what community engagement can do for your organization.

To maximize impact, think of community engagement as a specialized form of messaging.

Community engagement places your company’s core values on display. The old adage “actions speak louder than words” rings true here, so before you begin a concerted community engagement initiative, it’s important to have a grip on five key components:

The end result: For what purpose are you engaging? What is the ultimate goal of your actions? Common examples include greater community visibility, improved public standing or an introduction to a new community. Establish ongoing metrics to track and determine your return on investment.

The audience: Which community are you trying to reach? With this consideration, be specific: are you trying to reach “all residents of the Southeast,” “all residents of the county in which you operate,” or perhaps an even more narrow niche? With today’s technology, your audience can be defined by much more than just location. You can select by education, income, background or other demographics.

The message: What message are you trying to send through your actions? What messages could you reasonably be interpreted to be sending? The same rule applies: be specific. When considering how other parties may interpret your message, be discerning as well: look at your proposed message from all angles, not only those angles you WANT to view.  Regardless of what you meant to say or what your intention is, if a message could be misinterpreted, it is hard to undo the damage once it is done. Looking at the language and presentation of your message from multiple personas helps create the desired result and reduce risk for your organization.

The method: What is your primary method for delivering your message? The scope of your options is vast. Are you holding town halls? Will you host charitable company outings? Identify what action or style of event suits your goal, audience and message. Sensitive consideration of each piece and every step of planning your community engagement effort pays off at the end.

The reinforcement: After your main push is complete, this last step ensures the longevity of your hard work. How are you going to reinforce the message? What communications are you going to employ, and through what channels are you going to distribute them? Options include to display these actions on your website, on social media, or working with the news media as a partner. Again, remember to look at this from multiple angles: community engagement is about your targeted audience, so don’t destroy your good work by badly publicizing your actions.

Whether a nonprofit, Fortune 500 company or family-run business – all successful organizations have strategic community engagement plans that incorporate the components above. NP Strategy works with organizations across the Carolinas and beyond to ensure their community engagement plans are effective, efficient and well executed.

Jean Cecil Frick is a veteran of the private, public and non-profit sectors driven by helping individuals and organizations achieve their goals. Prior to joining NP Strategy, Jean Cecil served as the CEO of a start-up web development firm. Under Jean Cecil’s leadership, the firm created high design, strategically planned and easily managed websites for businesses, non-profits and schools throughout the Carolinas.

A good research project is simple to describe, but difficult to implement. Most of that difficulty can be chalked up to the unprecedented speed at which information is now created, distributed, and contradicted. I conducted long-term research projects as an undergrad at the University of South Carolina, as a graduate student at Harvard, and while working at a think tank in Washington, D.C. Though the projects differed dramatically in subject and scope (from research papers on politics and religion, to finishing the second half of a book on federal spending on the arts), I encountered the same pitfall each time. This pitfall was too much information to ever sift through, yet, paradoxically, a constant temptation to expand my research scope.

We’re not built for exposure to a 24/7 rush of digital information, and constant exposure to a live screen (on a wall or in your hands) can make prolonged concentration on a single topic or question feel like an impossible task. This is particularly dangerous for researchers; for those of us accustomed to bouncing between tabs in our browsers or scrolling through feeds, it can be easy to leave questions only partially answered (we always intend to come back to them “later”). Like the heads of the hydra, every question half-answered breeds more questions; before you know it, your research project has descended into a chaotic mess.

The antidotes to chaos and complication in research are as simple as they are effective: You need 1) a clear question and 2) a willingness to adopt tunnel vision while you research. These principles allow you to make consistent progress, avoid irrelevant avenues, and ensure that your project ends with the one thing research must be able to deliver: answers.

1) Set your question

No productive research project can begin without a specific goal in mind. Research is question-driven, so before you crack a single book or consult a search engine, you must have a clear question in hand.

A clear question is written in simple language. We use jargon and lengthy responses to cover up gaps in our understanding, and simple questions expose these gaps. Exposing these gaps will keep you from wasting time on irrelevant or premature questions.  In research, a little humility goes a long way. Having the humility to separate that which you understand from that which you don’t at the outset of a project will lead to success.

2) Set your boundaries

A clear question provides clear boundaries for your project (after all, if you know where you are heading, you should also know where you shouldn’t go). You will, however, be tempted to expand your project’s scope, to move from what you need to know for the project into what you’d like to know. This temptation to expand can come about innocently enough (maybe from a conversation or a thought on a walk), but one thought leads inevitably to another, and all of the sudden, your search for an answer to a question has turned into a haphazard attempt at constructing a Theory of Everything.

Ok, so maybe it isn’t always that dramatic. But if you get off track, a harsh bit of reality can help steer you back: we research in order to generate answers, and there is no recognition of just your participation or effort. You need a question to get an answer, and you need an answer to keep your job! When your project gets lost in the weeds, rely on your simple, clear question and stick to the boundaries you set to get back on track.

Originally published in Midlands Biz on November 13, 2018.

As we approach the November elections, your inbox, social media feeds and internet browser are likely filled with messages from candidates looking for your vote. And they somehow seem to speak directly to you.

How does it work?

Think back to the last time you were shopping for a pair of shoes on a website, perhaps in the morning. Then, hours later, you go to a different website to search a completely different topic… and up pops those exact shoes from your morning search. This is by design; digital targeting is a powerful tool to reach specific stakeholder groups, regardless of whether you are trying to sell shoes, win votes, grow your brand or fundraise.

Utilizing analytics and technology to engage stakeholders, or audiences, begins with segmenting each audience and then analyzing the best delivery mechanisms for action and engagement. Targets can be segmented through geographic location, demographic traits, consumer data profiles, personal electronic identifiers and even individual matches such as a donor list.

With digital targeting, still images and/or videos are placed online in a cross-device approach.  You may see an ad in the morning on a news website, hear it on SiriusXM on the way to work, catch it on your Facebook feed during your lunch break and see it one more time when you are watching your favorite program on Hulu before going to bed.

When we’ve helped our clients use digital targeting, we’ve seen how you can be innovative with the content (photos/video) used in the ad AND who actually sees it.

How does this tactic work for business?

• A real estate firm only wants homeowners in a specific neighborhood to learn more about the real estate company
• A lawyer wants to offer legal services to a very specific type of client, with a niche or complicated need
• A small business owner trying to capture a larger audience by targeting people who have searched online for the specific type of business service
• A non-profit looking to raise its profile and/or reach a fundraising goal by targeting people in a certain income bracket or who may be interested in helping the same sector of people in need

So while you may suffer from political advertisement fatigue during each election cycle know that digital targeting works.  Consider how your company or organization can leverage this approach for future success. It all starts with a simple click of the mouse.

Amanda Loveday’s passion for meeting new people and building relationships is what has made her a powerhouse in politics and communications. A decade of experience taught her the importance of getting to know the community and how to interact with people, especially those with different personalities and backgrounds. Get in touch with Amanda at (803) 540-2190 or amanda@npstrat.com.

Originally published in Midlands Biz on October 30, 2018.

From cocktail receptions to conferences, events are rarely a walk in the park. There’s a mountain of detail that goes into executing an event – and even then, something will likely go awry.

But fear not!

Here are six ways to ease your burden and anxiety.

1. Need a Starting Point? Work Backward
You’ve set an event date – congratulations! Next, grab your calendar, and start counting backward from your event date to list your to-do items. Sending a save the date? You can send as early as you’d like, or around 6 weeks in advance. Drafting a program? Allow two or three weeks for designing and editing, and a minimum of one business week for printing.

2. Communicate Early & Often
Drafting multiple event messages in advance will help get information out as quickly as possible. Having an archive of graphics and content for social media posts (always include a graphic and link!) make it easy to hit send. Likewise, if you’d like to reach your target audience through your organization’s listserv, draft e-mail blasts in advance with the information available. You can fill in holes as speakers, sponsors or featured sessions are announced.

3. Make Deadlines Your Friend (Not the Enemy)
Just like your target audience (invitees), communicate with vendors as early as possible. As you collaborate with vendors, ask about their deadlines for final information such as headcount, seat numbers, audio/visual needs, and more.  Try to set an “internal” deadline at least one week before the vendor’s requested date. Then, set calendar reminders to keep you on track! It’s easy to let those deadlines creep up – or even slip by.

4. Huddle Your Team
Planning an event should not be a one-man-show. If you overload yourself with too many responsibilities, something will fall through the cracks.. You can’t be an expert in all things venue/technology/catering – so collaborate with vendors and/or peers that you trust. Bring all hands to the table for open lines of communication, ensuring everyone is working with the latest information toward the ultimate goal. And, don’t forget that your vendors may be clients or colleagues in the future.  Invest in these relationships!

5. “Thank You, Come Again!”
The event is complete. But wait… your job isn’t over. Follow up tactics are key to success. Consider drafting these ‘takeaways’ in advance of your event (you will thank yourself later!):

• Thank you notes for speakers, attendees or sponsors
• An event survey for attendees
• A press release for media
• Wrap-up social media posts
• A follow up meeting for your planning team to fine-tune future efforts.

6. Take Care of Yourself
On event day, you are the quarterback, in control of the day’s game plan and performance. Set yourself up for success by preparing yourself personally – plenty of sleep, comfortable shoes and lots of water. You’ll be busy greeting attendees and speakers, schmoozing stakeholders, and maybe addressing the audience. Resting up for your big day will allow you to finish well and hopefully even enjoy the event you’ve worked so hard on.

If you have questions, or find yourself overwhelmed, don’t hesitate to call an event planner to coach you through and provide the teammates you need for success.

See also: Event Management