Updated on March 21, 2017
Posted on February 28, 2017
I am so excited to run a session at the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference on behalf of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Org. (ADAO), taking place in Washington, DC, March 23-25, 2017. I’ll be presenting on the opening day of the conference, Thursday, March 23.
During my 90-minute session, titled “Harnessing the Power of Digital Storytelling,” I’ll be sharing some of ADAO’s most successful strategies of leveraging personal stories into powerful tools for advocacy, education, and community building. I will be highlighting our incredibly rich collection of Share Your Stories as well as our strong social media network of sharers that boost our reach.
When I started ADAO in 2004, the internet — let alone social media — wasn’t where it is today. Now, more than 90% of the world is connected to the internet, and nearly half of all adults globally own a smartphone, keeping access to the information highway constantly at their fingertips. This shift has opened up a whole new world for nonprofits and has been fundamental in ADAO’s ability to do our work with sparse resources, both financial and human. Not only does technology create new, affordable access points information sharing, it also has allowed us to share our digital stories in multiple “languages,” including text, video, audio, and graphics. This has been key in reaching new audiences and humanizing our asbestos issue in particular, helping lawmakers and the public to see, hear, and feel the problem that remains abstract and distant to many.
As a special treat for attendees of my session, I’ll be running a real-time, interactive graphic campaign during my session, following the design of ADAO’s popular “6-Word Quote” Campaign. Attendees will submit a short quote about the conference, and as I’m presenting, team ADAO will turn the quotes into shareable graphics that folks can use to build buzz about their participation or presentation at #NTC17!
I look forward to focusing on these topics and more during my conference session, and I hope ADAO’s experience can help other nonprofits find the recipe for digital storytelling success the way we’ve been able to. Beyond that, I’m also looking forward to what looks like an inspiring lineup of sessions. I’ll be sure to share highlights from the conference on my social media channels, and you can follow along the with broader conference conversation by using the hashtag #NTC17. The session will be available for live stream, and we’ll share the access link via Twitter as soon as we have it.
Together — and with the help of technology — we make change happen!
Linda