Paul Robbins Associates

Common Ground Episode 4: Tom Shaer

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:33:17 GMT

The Impossible Dream 1967 Red Sox inspire 9-year-old Agawam resident Tom Shaer to pursue career in broadcastings; his journey starts as an unauthorized visitor in the Fenway Park press box.

Common Ground Episode 3: Jazz Legend Avery Sharpe

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:32:01 GMT

Jazz legend Avery Sharpe’s journey from segregated Georgia to Massachusetts helps him find hope; he shares about performing his "I Am My Neighbor’s Keeper" project to jail inmates and in the church that was burned as a result of Obama’s election.

Common Ground Episode 2: Thom Pollard Part 2

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:28:13 GMT

Wilbraham native Thom Pollard reaches the Summit of Everest a witness to climbers who died on the ascent. Was it worth it?

Common Ground Episode 1: Thom Pollard

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 13:21:04 GMT

Common Ground with Paul Robbins & Dave Madsen's first episode features a Western Massachusetts native, Tom Pollard, a documentary filmmaker who shares his inspiring story about scaling Mount Everest and finding his purpose in life.

The Age of Scorched-Earth Politics, And Why American Democracy Will Survive

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 19:31:00 GMT

The recent passing of Senator and one-time presidential candidate Robert Dole reminded me just how far down the slippery slope we have travelled towards today’s scorched-earth politics.

In his heyday, Bob Dole was as tough, harsh and “partisan” as they come. After Dole won the 1988 Republican Iowa caucuses in a big upset of the presumptive favorite, Vice President George Bush, the Bush campaign launched a series of last-minute TV attack ads about Dole before the subsequent New Hampshire primary.

The Bush attack ads worked famously, as Bush won New Hampshire and the race for the Republican nomination was essentially over.

In a scene that would never happen today because it was so unscripted, Bush and Dole appeared remotely on the same TV screen on NBC right after Bush was declared winner in New Hampshire. Anchor Tom Brokaw asked Dole if there was anything he would like to say directly to Bush. In a moment that is seminal to political junkies , Dole said, “Yes, tell him to stop lying about my record.” Pretty normal stuff by today’s measure, but “mean” enough to cost Dole any shot of being taken seriously going forward.

The irony, of course, is that many eulogizing Dole after his recent passing spoke of his bipartisanship, his kindness and his love for the democratic process.

The attack on Dole worked so well for Bush that his team reprised the approach to dismantle the Democratic nominee for president, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, in the general election with the Willie Horton ad . At the time, Dukakis was polling nationally about 20% ahead of Bush. Willie Horton put a stop to that and Bush won the presidency. By today’s standards, as reprehensible as the ad is in race baiting, it almost seems tame.

Lessons were learned. One could make a case that the 1988 race was the opening round in what has become the scorched-earth approach to present day politics and media.

It was not lost on me that right around the time of Dole’s death, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in 2021 found the United States for the first time on the list of “backsliding” democracies .

For me, the correlation is too hard to ignore.

About a day after that report, I was working out in a local fitness club, and Fox News, sound off, was on the TV screen. A continuous loop of about five seconds of video of the thugs who robbed and smashed a Louis Vuitton retail store was running for about a minute (a lifetime on TV). Over and over played the heinous video with the title “Democrats Soft on Crime” on the screen, under the continuous loop of senseless violence. No doubt the piece did its job of enraging and dividing, satiating the audience. Just a normal segment on a normal news day in America 2021.

In the same dizzying news cycle were the reports of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the role elected officials played , from the Trump White House on down, to subvert the election. Having one party support the idea of nullifying an election and denying the results has not happened in our lifetime. This is big news. This is scary stuff.

How ironic that Trump’s supporters in Congress have been using Stop the Steal to disenfranchise voters as a means to raise political profiles and donations online, when that’s exactly what they are doing—still trying to steal an election. I am pretty sure what Bob Dole would say about that.

Trump’s brand, by his own definition, is about winning, and is the real motivation behind his relentless disinformation campaign to never admit the perpetual “winner” actually lost. It’s hard to believe this isn’t blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention, period. A part of me, I guess, still lives in Bob Dole’s America where you call out a liar.

It was a crushing blow for America’s most brash “winner” to lose on the largest stage of all. So, Trump began to communicate, over and over (while raising millions online by stoking this fantasy) like the Fox crime story, a narrative to enrage and manipulate his base.

A great primer on how to turn reality upside-down is the film Where’s My Roy Cohn about one of Trump’s mentors, the late Roy Cohn. There’s a surreal scene in the movie where 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace interviews Cohn and asks Cohn why in his politics Cohn so viciously attacks the gay community. Wallace goes on to tell Cohn it is common knowledge that Cohn is gay and has contracted the AIDS virus. Cohn seems to lean forward and attacks Wallace, accusing the media of making things up. Fake news. Cohn died from AIDS a week after that interview.

As Dorothy says to her dog Toto in the classic film, The Wizard of Oz, when arriving in the very bizarre land of Oz, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas (ironically, Dole’s beloved state) anymore.”

So how do these seemingly disparate pieces all seem to come together? And, can American democracy and pluralism survive?

This pattern of seek and destroy in our politics is part of the new normalization of division and discord that has frayed psyches and pulled America apart—and assured that the political base shows up at election time. It’s not just the right that is polluting the discourse. Barack Obama famously called out the “woke” left element of our society for being judgmental or “casting stones” when someone might use “the wrong verb.”

People may be getting tired of the nonsense. The collective psyches of Americans are fatigued. Holding up falsehoods is exhausting. Americans are starting to figure it out, and wacky conspiracies like QAnon are finally getting outed.

So, there is hope amid this toxic environment. America is a stitched-together tapestry of communities. We are a nation of laws. We always look for a better day and for our better angels. We are optimistic, a land where anything is possible.

Maybe that’s why a TV show like Ted Lasso and the character’s optimism is such a hit right now. We seem to be rejecting this new normal and have a desire to get back to the sense of community and decency that has always been the country’s strength.

Having just seen the Broadway version of my favorite movie (admitting that I didn’t read the book) To Kill a Mockingbird, I am reminded of my favorite scene in both the play and the movie. In the scene, Tom Robinson, wrongly accused of assaulting a white woman in the deep south, is in his jail cell. It’s late at night. His attorney Atticus Finch, played on Broadway by Jeff Daniels and in the movie by Gregory Peck, is sitting on the jailhouse steps. He’s there to protect Tom from an angry lynch mob that shows up to render retribution.

After the mob assembles and attempts to breach the jail, Finch’s young children, his son, Jem, and daughter Scout, the star and narrator of this classic American story, race to the scene. After a brief scuffle, Scout touches the heart of one of the men intent on hanging Tom Robinson.

Scout says, “Hey Mr. Cunningham” to one of the members of the mob who she knows and starts an innocent one-sided conversation with him. With his head down, Scout senses his embarrassment and says, “I sure meant no harm Mr. Cunningham…. I go to school with your boy Walter… tell him ‘hey.’” Mr. Cunningham raises his bowed head, touched by Scout’s humanity, and says to her, “No harm taken young lady… I’ll tell Walter you said hey…” and directs the mob to disassemble.

America will eventually disassemble the political mobs who have taken over its political discourse. We did it before.

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings based on the fantasy that the United State government was rife with communists. His chief legal counsel was Roy Cohn. McCarthyism eventually collapsed because it was founded on a lie. Roy Cohn lost his law license and was disbarred in New York state, where he lived, in 1986. Cohn died the same year.

America may be ready to be America again.

One People, One House: Out of despair can come hope for healing

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 18:49:49 GMT

Published in The Republican / MassLive

I’ve always been an optimistic person.

I look back on family photos when I was little, and I always see a trace of optimism in my eyes. Even in the photos of a scorchingly hot trip to Washington, D.C., with my parents, Rose and Carroll Robbins, and sisters, Carolyn, Chris and Jo in the summer of 1963, I see it.

But in the photos of a family with four young and overheated children, I see myself as happy.

I never felt the emotion of despair throughout my life. Ever.

Then, my mom died.

For those who knew my mom, she was a pretty amazing person – humble, the daughter of Polish immigrants who had settled in upstate New York, did not complete high school and, instead, went to work in the Polish market to help the family survive, loyal, devout in her faith in God, unwavering in her support for her children and grandchildren. I always saw in her eyes the optimism of the world, and she subtly lit up every room she entered.

Rose B. Robbins died in January of 2001. The morning of her funeral, where I was to deliver the eulogy for my beloved mom, I remember getting ready to go, and I stopped. I recall sitting on my bed and saying out loud, to myself, I can’t do it. I can’t go on. Despair. Fist time I ever felt that.

After a few minutes of reflection and telling myself my mom deserved my best effort, I gathered myself and headed to the funeral.

With the brutal and senseless killing of George Floyd, a lot of people felt betrayed and hopeless. Despair. I felt it, too.

In the early 1990s a Springfield police officer shot and killed Benjamin Schoolfield who was unarmed. The incident ripped apart our community. It wasn’t the first time our city came apart over race.

I am old enough to remember the “race riots” in Springfield in the early 1970s. Many don’t remember, but I do, the staggered dismissal times of my high school, Classical, and those of Commerce, Tech and Trade to avoid or minimize the violence in the streets. I remember seeing a story about it on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

I also remember that high school basketball, a possible trigger to more racial violence, was played for a season without any fans in the stands. It was a time many felt a profound sense of despair. I think that may be one of the reasons no one ever talks about those times in Springfield. It almost seems removed from our local lore.

The Schoolfield shooting was not a one-off. Springfield, if we are being honest, had labored in trying to achieve racial harmony for a long time. I was on the Springfield Chamber of Commerce Board at the time, and Paul Doherty was chair. With racial strife swirling about as a result of the Schoolfield shooting, and the rumor that CBS’ “60 Minutes” was possibly doing a story on race in Springfield, Paul asked if anyone had any ideas about bringing together the community.

Around that time, I had become involved in a grassroots movement of like-minded people who had formed Institutes for the Healing of Racism in a few localities around the United States. So I raised my hand and Paul, as a white male icon in the region, had the gravitas to start a process of racial healing.

A conference was held, the Institute for the Healing of Racism was established in Springfield, and sometime later the community came together for a retreat in the Berkshires on race, attended by Springfield’s mayor at the time, Michael Albano, and other leaders in our community. Harvard’s Roger Fisher and his Conflict Management Group even heard about the Springfield initiative and served as facilitators for the weekend retreat.

We were on a roll.

There was reason for great hope. The institute, with the provided curriculum from other communities, began to meet at Springfield Technical Community College, and attendees stayed after the weekly sessions were over, developing deeper bonds with those of a different hue to their skin.

So what happened? The bottom fell out. We were not able to sustain the effort with enough local support. Being ever the optimist I prayed another opportunity would come.

Over 20 years later that opportunity to do something meaningful to understand racism, how it hurts people and institutions and what we can do about it emerged again.

As part of the City2City Pioneer Valley group that traveled in 2012 to Grand Rapids, Michigan, we discovered their community’s Institute for the Healing of Racism embedded in the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce.

Recalling and reprising the leadership of Paul Doherty, John Davis, former business owner and director of the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, stepped into the breach, pulled me aside and said, “We’re doing this in Springfield.”

Thanks to John and other stalwarts like Erica Broman, Ray Berry, Steve Bradley, Ellen Freyman, Steve Huntley, Frank and Dora Robinson, our first director, Waleska Lugo DeJesus, and original board member and now interim director Vanessa Otero , the Healing Racism Institute of Pioneer Valley has become part of the local landscape in bringing our community together with the lofty goal to ultimately overcome racism.

It’s hard work, but none of us are giving up.

And just as I gathered myself to go to my mom’s funeral to tell her story, and to heal and to go on, we take the message from George’s Floyd’s death and go forward with a new sense of hope and affiliation.

We can do it. We can make the world as we envision it.

Paul Robbins, who grew up in Springfield, is the principal of Paul Robbins Associates Strategic Communications and co-founder of the Healing Racism Institute of Pioneer Valley .

Where We Are [Part II]

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 17:51:00 GMT

Election Interference, Trump, Social Media, Journalism and Fake NewsIn Spite of All the Noise and Division, There is Hope

The ocean. Waves. Big wave surfing.

I love these natural wonders. So on my Facebook feed one time, and I’m not sure how Facebook knew this to begin with—I received content of the monster waves that occur in the winter in Nazaré, Portugal .

They must know I love the ocean and I can’t get enough.

With the way Facebook works, if you click on something you like or are interested in—cat videos for instance— expect to get a lot of other cat videos. In my case, I love ocean surf, the power of big waves and surfers trying to negotiate them. So, no surprise, I get a lot of big wave videos and photos. I click on these on purpose, so that I can see more of them in my feed. Same thing with basketball and the Boston Celtics; I love basketball content.

So, if you read Part I of this blog entry, you should know where this is going.

To keep America paralyzed and in perpetual division, it is only logical that foreign (and even internal) adversaries would agitate to keep things just the way they are. National elections are now so close, that any interference, any variation can tilt the result.

So, if someone clicks on a phony news source or website, they will get loads of other phony “news” and the manipulation begins.

Now we know that flooding our devices, news sources and social media platforms with messaging and content designed to engage, even enrage you, has big consequences, not only for elections, but also for the democratic process.

It’s pretty clear that one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost was that her brain trust (and given the absence of a discernable strategy for Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, I use that term loosely) thought all they needed to do was get “their” voters out to the polls. In the postmortem book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the authors share that Clinton managers were pretty clear in their belief there was no need to persuade anybody else into Hillary’s camp.

Maybe Clinton’s strategists had not heard the term or experienced a “rainmaker” as described here in Part I. The “crooked Hillary” narrative created by her opponent and shared exponentially on social media (without any pushback by the Clinton campaign in the aforementioned battlegrounds) kept more than a few soft Clinton supporters home and away from the polls—the rainmaker on steroids.

In this new digital environment, facts have taken a beating. Some Trump supporters recall Obama’s administration as an economic disaster. To them, Trump created the stock market surge and the decline in unemployment. But the facts don’t back that up. Obama inherited a stock market with the Dow Jones at 7,949 and it closed on his last day in office at 19,827. When Obama swore the oath of office, unemployment was at 7.6%, and when he left office the rate was 4.7%.

The Affordable Care Act, under Obama, expanded coverage of preexisting conditions and Trump has worked to scuttle the law entirely (legislatively and in the courts), including that provision. So it was fascinating to see Donald Trump’s recent Tweet and related comments in his State of the Union Address that, thanks to him, he is the defender of covering preexisting conditions in health care.

But facts, it turns out, don’t really matter when it comes to the support of a candidate.

Politics, plus passion fueled by false information and narratives on social media, has either side’s base locked in to their position.

When candidate Donald Trump declared that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York and it wouldn’t matter to his most ardent supporters, experienced political consultants nodded their heads in agreement. Once the “base” of support is established, it generally doesn’t go anywhere, and supporters will find whatever logic they need to stay, even if it flies in the face of stark facts.

We saw this play out during revelations about Bill Clinton having an affair with Monica Lewinski. One might have expected that women’s rights groups would support Lewinski and be among the harshest critics of Bill Clinton. Didn’t happen. Clinton’s base was not moving away from him.

In the face of all of this, traditional journalism is confronting an existential threat. If a Facebook feed represents the primary or only source of “news” for millions, then we are all in trouble, and the tool will continue to be used with bogus content. Making matters worse is Facebook’s announcement that it will not check political content for accuracy.

Fact checking and “keeping them honest” has always been the role of an unfettered press in a nation founded under the principle of the rule of law. There is irony in that so much of this fact checking happens just as swiftly, through digital means and by traditional news outlets, as the offending inaccuracy. That’s good, and a reason for hope.

Traditional stalwarts like The New York Times and The Washington Post are seeing a spike in readership—and a lot of it is online growth. My late Dad, Carroll Robbins, had a long career in the newspaper business as editor of the Springfield Daily News, the Union News and The Republican, and would be cheered to learn that good, solid journalism—with multiple sources and primary source material— is still part of the landscape.

A mentor of mine a long time ago helped me learn that things can actually be getting worse and better at the same time. Old institutions decline or become irrelevant and are replaced by new ones that are more responsive. This can be hard to discern during times of upheaval. A book I recently read, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, is based on data that humanity is trending toward the positive (and that we have the tools to solve our most vexing problems).

In spite of all the current noise, our interdependence has never been more evident. We need each other. I think Americans, and all of humanity, will figure it out and get past this difficult period.

We watched Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burn in real time, and within hours, pledges of donations for the rebuilding began to pour in.

The wildfires in Australia brought firefighters from the United States and elsewhere to help battle the disaster .

A Swedish teenager launched an international environmental movement to address the warming of the globe and its impact on future generations .

Students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School organized #NeverAgain to engage elected officials around changing gun policy .

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s profound statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice” is something we can all believe in, no matter our political affiliation.

But in seeking justice and truth, in today’s digital landscape, it will require an abundance of caution before we click on “news” and share with our “friends.”

Where We Are/Where Are We? [Part I]

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 20:42:00 GMT

Election Interference, Trump, Social Media,

Journalism and Fake News

There was a recent report that more Americans are depressed than ever, dragged down by events that range from the current political instability, deep national divisions, global conflict, the intrusion of social media and the ever-present “breaking” and “fake” news.

There’s a lot going on.

We seem to have reached a tipping point. The fundamental values that have bound us together are frayed and the notion of “a more perfect union” seems like a fantasy.

So how did we get here? There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which I will get into later, but the most obvious, to me, is that we are more easily manipulated than I can ever remember.

Let’s use the most recent presidential election as ground zero for this different country and planet we now find ourselves living on.

When I started in the communications business, first hanging a shingle as a political consultant, I was amazed at how voters, over time, could be swayed toward or away from a candidate and a campaign. It generally took time and concentrated effort for a trend to emerge.

The term “negative campaign” had been around for a while, but the Willie Horton attack ad (paid for by a third party Political Action Committee when PACs were not yet on the public consciousness) on presidential candidate Michael Dukakis (the man who hired a young me to help organize in Western Massachusetts during his 1982 governor’s race) was a watershed moment. Watching it now, and while the racial overtone is raw and disturbing, with the ad’s premise that Dukakis is soft on crime, it feels almost tame by today’s standards. That’s how far down the slippery slope we have traveled.

What every political consultant and operative learned from “Willie Horton” was that driving up the negatives of the opponent, indeed, works like a charm. Dukakis had a 20-point lead prior to this and other related attacks, and as a result of this relentless assault, George H. W. Bush won by a comfortable margin. Lessons were learned.

I remember attending an American Association of Political Consultants conference in Washington DC and hearing the legendary Robert Squire (he, along with Springfield’s own Joseph Napolitan, are considered among the fathers of the modern political consulting business) explain how a negative campaign, he called it a “rainmaker,” could offer the pathway to victory.

Here’s how a rainmaker works. Candidates from the beginning of elections have always worried about rain or bad weather on election day. They and their campaign teams fret, with good reason, about softer supporters choosing to stay home to avoid inclement weather. Slight variations in turnout can make the difference between winning and losing.

Let’s say in the last presidential race a woman in suburban Detroit was leaning toward Hillary Clinton, is independent but generally supports Democrats in presidential elections. But this voter was not completely sold on Hillary. As election day draws near, along comes an attack on this woman’s Facebook page, in recorded phone calls and on TV on an issue near and dear to this voter. This woman and her family lost their home to foreclosure during the mortgage meltdown, and this voter has a strong and visceral opinion about the Wall Street banks that perpetrated the meltdown and the loss of her home. Any candidate connected to Wall Street in any way is a candidate who will have trouble winning this voter.

The messaging she is being bombarded with hits Clinton for accepting a $675,000 speaking fee from Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs (what were they thinking?). That’s a problem for the voter, and a problem for the Clinton campaign. While this particular voter really dislikes Donald Trump, she decides, based on the Wall Street linkage to Clinton, she will stay home, and out of the “rain.”

If this kind of scenario happened to affect around 10,000 voters in Michigan, which it did in 2016, the results can be stunning, and historic. Out of the 4.8 million votes cast in Michigan, 10,000 votes are almost statistically insignificant, except in the last presidential election they weren’t. Those 10,000 votes produced Trump’s margin over Clinton.

In Part II, I will get into just how targeted messaging through illegitimate news and related sites gets directly to you (spooky) and gets you to lean or even vote a certain way—or even stay home on election day, out of the rain.

So how does this have any relation to the Russian interference? If you are a foe of American democracy, you have a new tool, particularly with the rise of social media, to interfere and “make it rain,” among other things.

The Russians did not discriminate; they wreaked havoc throughout social media with bogus posts across the political spectrum that voters ate up as real, shared to their networks and friends multiplying the effect, and before you know it, “fake news” was real. A Trump rally and demonstration in Florida was conceived of and prompted by a social media boiler room in Russia, and it worked. There was also the guy who showed up with a gun to break up the child pornography ring that Hillary Clinton, according to this guy’s “news” feed, was operating out of a DC pizza shop . You cannot make this stuff up.

It bothers Trump and his supporters that this interference may have delegitimized his election to the highest office. But as Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, famously said, “Get over it.” Next time it might be the Republican who is victimized. And don’t think the Russians, or North Koreans, or Chinese or Iranians will stop messing with other federal, state and local elections. Remember, the goal is chaos and a degrading of democratic institutions.

It would be hard to argue on either side of the political aisle that what we have right now is anything but chaos with our institutions under assault.

As we gird for the next presidential election in a short few months, it would be good for the nation to learn the lessons from 2016. There is more at risk, and at stake, in the current cycle.

In Part II I will share more on this fake news/social media targeting, thoughts on journalism, which is experiencing an existential threat and how, at the same time, there really is hope.

Racism. A Way Forward: A perspective from two white males

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 19:06:00 GMT

I co-authored this column on racism and the work of the Healing Racism Institute of Pioneer Valley with John Davis, Trustee of the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation. It appeared on MassLive .

Race. Racism.

In the instant that you are reading those words, maybe half of readers have an immediate impulse to turn the page to find another article, or if reading this on your computer or mobile device there may be the urge to click or swipe, moving to another online item.

There are few words that evoke such a visceral reaction like those. Introduced into a conversation, there can be a palpable tension travelling up the spine. We have observed that most people try to avoid the topic. This is particularly true for white males. We know this from personal experience because we are both white males.

If religion or politics are conversation killers at a party, watch the reaction when race comes up. Toxic. Even though it remains America’s most challenging social issue, we are loath to engage. At the same time, it casts a long shadow—from education to the economy to public safety to the way our media reports the news. It is like an invisible gas surrounding us—aggravating wounds old and new, with any promise of resolution seemingly forever elusive.

In this piece we will avoid definitions—which tend to generate a lot of heat rather than shed light—leaving that for social scientists and pundits. We won’t even get into the now universal and scientific truth that there really aren’t races at all—just variations within the species, and one variable, and science tells us a small one at that, being skin tone.

Our perspective is that at the heart of racism is a deeply held notion, never openly articulated, that people of white skin are inherently superior to those of brown or black skin. Roseanne Barr’s recent comment about “apes” offers testimony of that. White people sometimes hint at it when they say “my people were able to raise themselves by their bootstraps… ” as if people of color don’t possess the same natural or inherent abilities. Both of us have heard some variation of this.

We learned in history, though this is not usually shared in history class, that at the very beginnings of our Republic the not-so-subtle notion of inherent superiority and inferiority was advanced. It was in the Federalist Papers, Federalist #54, the precursor to the Constitution, that assigned the human value of three-fifths to those in the Union with black skin and formerly slaves in determining a state’s total population for legislative representation.

The Pioneer Valley is no different in struggling with this issue. It may not surprise every reader to learn that the University of Michigan Population Studies ranked the Springfield metro area number one in the country in Hispanic-White segregation.

So, why do two white males like us, with all the requisite privileges we have, care about this issue? As we look at the many instances of racial profiling in the news, most recently the arrest of two African Americans in a Philadelphia Starbucks for just being persons of color, we see a nation still reluctant to engage on the issue of race.

We look around at the real divide and the systems and institutions we value, and realize something needs to change. So we have been doing something about it. A little over five years ago, a small group of people in the Valley started to meet, including the two of us, to begin a dialogue about what we might be able to do, even in a small way, to advance the notion of racial equity in our region.

Inspired by a City2City Pioneer Valley trip to Grand Rapids where we discovered the Healing Racism Institute embedded in the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, we embarked on a journey that led to the formation of the Healing Racism Institute of Pioneer Valley.

Our rationale and that of our cohorts was to reverse racism one person at a time. No government program or initiative will be able to wave a wand and eliminate racism, a condition that afflicts those who possess it and don’t realize it and those on the receiving end. Racism holds down our economy and marginalizes those who could advance themselves and our nation if we could only eradicate it from our conscious and sub-conscious thinking.

The group behind the Healing Racism Institute of Pioneer Valley has been working collaboratively with others. In many ways, it is the hardest work any of us have ever done, but we can report progress.

So far, over 700 people have participated in our signature two-day Healing Racism program . Over 200 organizations from businesses, nonprofits, education, law enforcement and media have participated.

While much of what is discussed and presented offers history and context about racism’s roots and how it has become institutionalized, much of what we do is about changing people’s hearts. Changing just one heart at a time is how, we believe, we can start the process of curing racism. It makes practical sense, too—making a company or organization better, and sending a message to its workers and leaders that there is no place for racism.

We are gratified that so many of our friends, colleagues, co-workers and associates have taken the brave step of immersing themselves in our two-day workshops. We are making progress in the Valley, but there is still a long way to go.

John Davis is a principal at Ventry Industries LLC and a Trustee of The Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation. Paul Robbins is principal and owner of Paul Robbins Associates Strategic Communications. Both are among the founders of the Healing Racism Institute of Pioneer Valley.

Marketing as Commodities

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 14:00:00 GMT

I’ve run and led several consultancies since I started my communications business under the Paul Robbins & Associates name when I first put out a shingle as a political and public relations consultant many years ago.

Later, I partnered in the ad agency business with Gerry FitzGerald at FitzGerald & Robbins in Springfield, Massachusetts, where we collectively served some well-known clients like Eastern States Exposition (The Big E), Jiffy Lube and Peter Pan Bus Lines. My line of work morphed from political campaigns to comprehensive communications work of every stripe.

Right under the masthead of FitzGerald & Robbins was the line “Advertising – Marketing – Public Relations.” As the world of communications continued to evolve, with technology changing everything, my own thinking started to evolve a little over 10 years ago about the role of a communications consultant or agency.

It occurred to me those three words under the F & R masthead was not the full or even accurate story of what an agency renders for its clients—those items represent commodities. This was also around the time I was reading one of my favorite authors, Thomas Friedman, and his The World is Flat . In the book he spoke of how almost everything in everyday life was becoming a commodity that could be produced cheaper somewhere else in the world. Even things like income tax preparation were being done in India, leaving accountants looking to provide a deeper and more strategic service to its clientele.

The commodity revolution was hitting the communications world with even more force around the same time. You could find, as we started to say around the time things started to change, “a guy in his basement” doing great video work, and stock photography and website tutorials became easily available on the web.

Another revolution that is upsetting the world order of the ad agency business, and circumventing them, is crowdsourcing , which allows companies or organizations to put a small cash prize out there on the web for the development of something like a new logo, often producing dozens of entries from designers around the world, many of them fabulous. Crowdsourcing allows for a diversity of approaches, rather than the sometimes-narrow view of a small design shop at a marketing agency. This is heresy for many in the marketing business, but it also represents the new, and a lot of times better, way of doing things where diversity of thought produces something inspired.

As creative director for a decade for The Big E , one of the largest state fairs in North America, I remember my first encounter with marketing commoditization. In “the old days” you would have to pay a pretty penny for a national quality voice-over talent for a radio or television campaign. In looking for a particular kind of voice for Big E TV and radio spots one year, we used an online voice-over source where you offer a small amount of copy from a script to be read by whoever responded. Voice-over talent from around the country would bid on the project, even negotiating down their price, just to win the job and create exposure for themselves. Great for us in keeping tabs on our production budget, but not so great for the voice talent out there trying to make a living.

So what are agencies to do? If they are to continue being relevant, they need to embrace that they are in the strategy business and that the commodities of communications are simply a means to a strategic end. In The World is Flat , Friedman suggests that the winners in the American economy will be those utilizing brain power, strategic brain power, and those orchestrating the commodities—like web designers, graphic artists, videographers, photographers—being guided by a strategist. More can be done with fewer people in a centralized place than ever before in history. Access to talent and creative collaborators outside of the confines of a traditional agency housed inside of four walls is not only the wave of the future, it is the future, and the present.

I offer a quick case study. In our work as communications consultant to the Reading Success by 4th Grade initiative in Springfield, our task is pretty direct— engage the public and parents of young children in picking up a book and reading it to their young children every day. This seems like a very simple idea—backed by a lot of brain research—but a pretty lofty and really hard-to-attain goal, nonetheless. In the old world, maybe an advertising campaign using traditional media to raise awareness would be a natural impulse.

After facilitating several focus groups with Springfield parents of young children to find how to engage them in early reading and about parenting, the idea of a traditional campaign was scrapped. Not surprisingly, the parents we spoke with indicated that the vehicle to use in reaching them was their own personal smartphone.

So, here’s where strategy meets commodity. If you think of media defined as commodities easily accessible to whatever audience you are trying to influence—TV, news shows, newspapers, online publications, smartphones—then you have to determine the most efficient method of reaching your target.

In the case of Reading Success by 4th Grade , the parents made it pretty clear—text me if you want to get a message to me. Thus 413families/familias was born. Knowing that messages about early reading could come off as preachy—we developed a more wide-ranging strategy to engage a number of community partners to be part of 413families, rendering content that is fun, enlightening and free to families struggling to pay bills while raising their children.

So, we engaged the Springfield Libraries, Springfield Museums, the YMCA, WGBY TV and their focus on children’s programming and Springfield Public Schools in partnering and providing content. We learned about best practices—no more than two or three texts per week— and chose a national vendor (the commodity) EZ Texting. We started in February of 2016 with the lofty goal of attracting 1,000 families to opt in by August of that year, and surpassed that. Today, we are approaching 3,000 families opted-in to the program.

The beauty of digital-based communications is that the analytics are readily available, and they don’t lie. With billions of ad dollars spent on TV, it is still hard to prove TV advertising works—though it does in spite of the huge amount of waste in broadcast advertising— as opposed to digital platforms that offer real-time data.

With 413families we know who opts in, who opts out (not very many), who opens our messages and when they open them. While it is still a moving target to quantify if more parents are reading to their children overall (we do know that through a lot of local work reading scores are on the rise for the targeted 3rd graders in Springfield), our 413families have shared that they are reading to their kids, what they are reading and when.

The moral of this story is that the successful “marketers” will have spent the time on developing a strategy informed by data and research and not on assembling a random collection of commodities to dangle in front of those we serve.

News in the Age of Twitter

Thu, 25 May 2017 15:55:00 GMT

For some time now, institutions overall have been grappling with a loss of power, even relevance. The rules of the road and the traditional top-down orientation in the world order of things have been turned upside down.

There’s no better example of this than the election of Donald Trump as president. Trump was dismissed by his own party, until winning the nomination, and then was given little chance of toppling Hillary Clinton. He didn’t take the usual pathway to the Oval Office through the halls of Congress or a governor’s mansion.

Trump effectively used Twitter in building an army of loyal voters, frequently circumventing the “filter” of the national press. In fact, his tweets became news on a daily basis—which he leveraged to get more exposure for his message than any of his opponents. Pretty simple, but until the rise of Twitter, no one had done that before.

There’s a lot more, it can be argued, that brought Trump to the White House, but the use of social media and avoiding the usual norms in running for the office tells us something bigger is going on around us.

While Trump’s White House staff may be wrestling with him for control of his smartphone and its capacity to tweet, his use of Twitter to launch broadsides almost always becomes instant news, with multiple days of panel discussion on cable news shows. Lots of politicians and others are taking notice.

This trend of speaking directly to an audience or constituency has been brewing in the digital age for some time. Crowdfunding, online fundraising, social movements now have direct and instant access to the people.

It was just a few years ago that Kony 2012, a documentary film produced by the organization Invisible Children and exposing Joseph Kony, the brutal warlord in Uganda, became, at the time, the most viral video ever shared through social media with over 100 million views. Many aspiring filmmakers would give their right arm to reach an audience that large. And while there is controversy about the film and the organization behind it, the point is well taken that a compelling message can make an impact at warp speed.

Another profound example of life in the digital and social media age, and as a response to the Trump presidency, was the 2017 Women’s March , a worldwide movement hatched by a woman in Hawaii on social media. It is regarded as the largest single-day protest in U. S. history and included protests on seven continents, even one in Antarctica. The protests were streamed live on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

So will social media outlets like Twitter become the new direct news source for the masses? Let’s hope not as tweets, in addition to connecting people in a flat world who were never before connected, have also become a sophisticated vehicle to promote an ideology or propaganda.

Let’s hope that in the next presidential election cycle all tweets from candidates will face, to use a Trumpian phrase, “extreme vetting.”

The good news is that journalism is still alive. After the harsh 2016 presidential election concluded and all sides in the aftermath flailed about “fake news,” The Washington Postreported business was so good in its traditional business of publishing a newspaper that it was hiring new on-the-ground reporters.

My Dad, the late Carroll Robbins, the former editor of both the Springfield Daily News and The Republican, who wasn’t alive when Twitter was born, would be cheered by that news.

Can Trump Win?

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:25:00 GMT

Can Trump Win?

This has been a year of a lot of hand-wringing for the elites, the insiders, the national press and, well, just about everybody, except the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” supporters of Donald Trump.

The prevailing and conventional political wisdom is that for a Republican to win the presidency, securing the usual strongholds in the south and Midwest, coupled with wins in Florida and Ohio bring victory in the Electoral College. This worked for George W. Bush twice when he eked out wins against Al Gore (maybe a full recount in Florida flips the 2000 election) and John Kerry (a high turnout in rural and suburban Ohio was the difference in 2004).

The Obama wins in 2008 and 2012 seemed to set the bar even higher for a Republican with Obama picking up formerly reliable red states—North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico… even usually really red Indiana.

So, the pundits have been suggesting that given this electoral map, the path for Trump is really difficult, if not impossible. Not so fast.

Even with Donald Trump’s high negatives with Hispanic voters and his seemingly everyday remarks that offend women voters, he is poised to reconfigure the electoral map and find a pathway to winning the White House.

So what’s so different in this cycle?

Well, first, Donald Trump is anything but your garden variety national Republican. Hillary Clinton would likely clobber a candidate from the Republican establishment, particularly one with a Washington pedigree, under the “old” model. In a somewhat perverse way, Trump may actually be saving the Republicans from a nasty Electoral College beating.

It doesn’t take a historian to recall that it was Democrat Bill Clinton, with support from establishment Republicans, who pushed for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trump correctly points out that Carrier and Ford Motors are just a couple of mammoth U. S. corporations fleeing to south of the border under the NAFTA flag. Right here in the Pioneer Valley, I remember Springfield Wire Corporation, a century-old company, just a couple of years ago pulling up stakes and moving manufacturing to, wait for it…. Mexico , at the urging of its largest customers in order to cut labor costs.

So, how did NAFTA work out for the American worker? Not so well.

Even minority voters will have to pause if asked the question “are you better off today than you were eight years ago” when the nation’s first African American president Barack Obama was elected. The African American community has been the hardest hit with the mandatory sentences for nonviolent crimes, another piece of landmark legislation promulgated by Bill Clinton and Republican cohorts.

Then there’s Iraq; Hillary Clinton joined the Republican chorus for the invasion. Trump says Iraq and other Middle East interventions, largely supported by both parties, have been disastrous—does anyone really disagree with that?

And, last time I checked, the Affordable Care Act, which has many great features, requires just about everybody to shell out more money for healthcare in the form of much higher deductibles, at a time when wages have been stagnant for the average family for over a decade.

At the same time, average Americans are still reeling about bailing out the “too big to fail” banks. It was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who had a big hand in deregulating Wall Street (part of his “triangulation” strategy to make Democrats more cozy with elements of the Republican constituency). It makes me wonder “what was she thinking?!” when we all learned Hillary took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street and the poster child for greed, Goldman Sachs, to share insights with those insiders that she now won’t share with the rest of us.

We are reminded that only two candidates haven’t taken contributions from Wall Street— Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

This legacy, which Hillary Clinton seems to be defending or upholding, pits her as the ultimate insider running against the ultimate outsider in Trump. Did I mention 2016 looks like an “outsider” year?

So if Trump holds on to the traditional Republican states (where else are they going to go?) and wins Florida and Ohio—polling indicates he’s in a dead heat in both—and formerly Democratic locks like Pennsylvania (Clinton’s comments to “put miners out of work” are sure to come back to haunt)… he wins.

With this as a backdrop, Hillary Clinton continues to run a campaign, and promote a message, that seems to say, “I’m the most capable at running the system”— when voters seem to be shouting they want a “rigged” system blown up. Clinton looks to be running a campaign that was designed for presumed opponent Jeb Bush. Oops.

If nothing else, this election cycle may produce a new formula for winning the presidency to respond to the uncertainty Americans feel. Someone should tell Hillary Clinton, who continues to frame her campaign around the idea of a third Obama or Bill Clinton term. It’s time for her to tear up the script, or Trump may just win.

See my conversation about the Trump phenomenon on WGBY's Connecting Point here .

Donald Trump and the Media Elites; Redefining Presidential Politics, Once Again

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 20:12:00 GMT

Whether Donald Trump speaks to your frustration with politics and Washington or, conversely, you worry he may not have the temperament to be the next president, one thing is clear—he’s turning presidential politics on its head. So, when is the last time a candidate upset conventional wisdom? Look no further than the campaign of our current president, Barack Obama.

A recurring theme in American politics overall, and particularly in presidential campaigns, is the emergence of a “new normal” each cycle. It wasn’t too long ago that candidates would gather on the steps of some columned, stately building and announce their intentions to run for office. More candidates today are announcing their candidacies via the Internet, on their campaign websites and on YouTube. This works, at least in the short term, in helping candidates control their message without interference of the press.

Just two elections ago, Barack Obama upset the natural political order by beating odds-on favorite Hillary Clinton. To a large degree he ran against her insider status, as a populist against the Washington establishment (where have we heard that recently?).

On the grassroots side, Obama used online donations to blow away the then- conventional wisdom that qualifying for federal matching funding was the way to go. Obama and his super bright digital team developed an email and cell phone database that, at the time, revolutionized fundraising and mobilized the campaign’s supporters.

When speculation was growing about who Obama would tap as his vice presidential running mate, voters had the opportunity to learn before anyone else (especially the media) by simply providing their cell phone number or email data to the Obama campaign. I remember the text message coming in— and the breathless media coverage of that text message—that Joe Biden had been tapped to be Veep. Wow, had things changed.

Obama’s team then used that enormous database to raise historic sums of campaign cash, three quarters of a billion dollars, much of it coming in small donations of $10 or less. The Obama model of fundraising and engagement is now the new normal, used by all of the presidential campaigns and has filtered down to campaigns on the state and local level as well.

So, how is Donald Trump redefining things this cycle? First, he is self-funding, at least in the primary season. He’s right when he says he’s not beholden to any of the typical corporate interests that are well represented by Super PACs.

Trump’s provocative language makes news—that’s not entirely new, but the way he is going about it is confounding the conventional wisdom. The cycle goes something like this, and it is entertaining to watch—he says something provocative, the press reacts in some form of surprise or horror; Trump gets talked about on the 24/7 news cycle; Trump calls in or appears on the Sunday or other news shows to double down on his comments, which rallies his followers, and probably nets a few more.

And “doubling down,” the antidote to political correctness, seems to be the new normal. Fellow candidates Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson are doubling down on dubious claims and it doesn’t seem to matter.

With so much disgust out there with the current political paralysis and the public’s low esteem for the media elites who seem to try to shape the narrative of a presidential campaign (the first Fox News debate comes to mind), Trump just reinforces he’s not part of the national dysfunction.

Despite the best attempts by the national media to frame Trump as a loose cannon, his core constituency in the Republican Party just digs in deeper when he says he is going to deport illegal immigrants or “bomb the hell out of ISIS.”

Then, there’s Twitter.

Donald Trump is using this no-cost platform to fire up his five million followers and, more important to him, make news that underscores his insurgency. He boasts about the huge crowds he is generating, says things like “Going to Ohio, home of one of the worst presidential candidates in history—Kasich” and “When you do your Christmas shopping remember how disloyal @Macy’s was to the subject of illegal immigration.”

It reminds me of the famous line in the 1976 movie Network, where the populace, urged on by an anchorman, are told to demonstrate their disdain for the status quo by opening up their windows and shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Take a look at the clip , close your eyes and you just might think you are listening to Donald Trump 2015.

At least in the movie, we know how it ended.

What’s Really Behind the Brian Williams Matter

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 19:04:00 GMT

Like most controversies, the Brian Williams matter—his embellishment of stories he covered for NBC Nightly News, his “mis-remembering” of events—has most people firmly on one side or the other.

For some, these were honest mistakes and Brian Williams deserves a pass. For others, his journalistic integrity is compromised and he should not be reinstated at Nightly News.

A mentor of mine once explained to me how it was important to distinguish, in a dialogue, between heat, which generates polarizing arguments that aren’t offered to identify a solution, and light, which at least has the capacity to shed some truth on an issue. Here’s an attempt to offer a perspective on the Brian Williams matter through the lens of the new media culture that has emerged in the digital age.

I think it was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show who said the problem for Brian Williams was he was providing content (an interesting storyline) in the era of “infotainment,” the merging of news with entertainment.

Ironic that Jon Stewart would cite this as an issue since The Daily Show aims to entertain and inform, which is good, but makes it vulnerable to the kind of story inflation that Brian Williams now regrets.

But Stewart is on to something— it is becoming more difficult all the time to distinguish truth from entertainment and, by extension, journalists from entertainers. If you are going to run for president, in fact if you are president, stopping by The Daily Show is as essential as talking about pork bellies during the Iowa caucus season.

Am I the only one who is offended by CNN, MSNBC and other on-air cable TV journalists appearing in the Netflix megahit House of Cards (in spite of the fact that I really love the show)? The fictional characters frequently appear with real-life journalists in telling the story of Frank Underwood’s Washington DC.

This blurring of the lines can lead to some absurdity.

In Game Change, the HBO film about the 2008 presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain, there’s a scene where the actor Woody Harrelson (Woody Harrelson!), playing the part of McCain campaign manger Steve Schmidt, is interviewed on CNN about McCain’s decision to include Sarah Palin on the ticket by the real Anderson Cooper… Anderson Cooper!

No one in journalism seems to have a problem with this—likely that they, and their bosses, know it is good for the CNN and NBC brands, and that the audience watching represents the critical 25-54 age demographic that advertisers covet.

The blurring of history with fiction may even have its roots in the great filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK. For those of you who remember the film, Stone liberally used historical facts, sprinkled with conspiratorial fantasy (the CIA killed Kennedy), but the film masterfully comes off as fact. I worry that anyone not alive during the assassination and the decade after when conspiracy theories were abundant, and later debunked, think the movie was actual history.

The new age of infotainment picked up steam a year later, in 1992, when then Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, at the time sagging in the polls, donned shades and played saxophone on the late night Arsenio Hall Show (way before Arsenio humbled himself on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice—talk about the blurring of reality). This was a radical departure back then for a candidate; now it is standard fare to see presidential candidates, and their media savvy advisors, feeling the need to be part of the late night entertainment circuit.

And during the McCain-Obama battle for the White House, there was comedian/actress Tina Fey right in the middle of the campaign, playing Sarah Palin on the iconic Saturday Night Live to rave reviews—prompting the real Sarah Palin to appear on the show. After all, voters would be watching.

So where does this leave us? In a really different world, slipping down the slippery slope of what is real and what isn’t. In the long run maybe it’s ok, as long as we are still able to distinguish between truth and fiction. Just ask Brian Williams.

Voters Beware: PACs May Be Developing a Farm System

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 19:10:00 GMT

With the campaign season now well behind us (big sigh from the television viewing public) some reflection is worthwhile—lest we forget when the next political season overwhelms our sensibilities. After living through the most recent election cycle, it is pretty clear… this isn’t quite your grandfather’s citizen-driven democracy anymore.

Voters have increasingly become familiar with Political Action Committees (PACs), and their newer offspring Super PACs (PACS on steroids). As anyone can attest who was upright and breathing, it was pretty impossible to escape the wall-to-wall political television ads this past fall.

What most Americans probably don’t realize is that PACs actually started out as a national reform after the Watergate scandal. Before Watergate, citizens could donate whatever amount they wanted—and Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) took full advantage. But even back then, in those “wild west” early days of modern political fundraising, corporate contributions to campaigns were illegal. Not anymore.

The Washington Post broke open the Watergate scandal and the young reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein famously coined the phrase “follow the money.” As the most recent election cycle revealed, it is getting harder all the time to follow the money.

With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowing that corporations are protected by the First Amendment and therefore can contribute unlimited amounts to PACs, there’s a lot more money to follow. But not so fast—the Super PACs don’t have to fully disclose their funders. So much for reform.

With so much money on the table it is harder all the time for regular folks to run for office. Tim Allen, a candidate for State Senate for whom we worked this past fall, certainly learned that in the 2014 Democratic Primary. The margin between his second-place finish and the winner was only a couple of hundred votes, but Allen was outspent by the winner in the race by more than $200,000.

The next thing to track will be the flow of PAC money into state elections on the local level—think of it as PACs using their financial muscle to build a farm system. Candidates elected to State Representative or State Senator with the help of PAC money are likely to stay aligned as they naturally percolate up through the system to congress or other higher offices.

The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance is one such organization working at the grassroots level that emerged in the most recent election. The group calls itself a non-partisan organization that is “advocating for fiscal responsibility,” which is certainly a noble and popular goal. However, MFA targeted only Democrats—20 in the Massachusetts House—with multiple mailings attacking their positions on everything from veterans’ services to immigration.

We worked with one of those candidates targeted by MFA, Representative Angelo Puppolo, in defending his record and going on the airwaves to present a positive message to combat the negative mailings. We are likely to see a lot more PAC money seeping into local races such as this one.

But, if you look close enough there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Voters polled on the influence of PAC money on campaigns are consistently saying they want reform. The Massachusetts Legislature is listening—in the last legislative session they passed a Super PAC disclosure bill requiring additional disclosure about the people behind the contributions to Super PACs and more real-time disclosure, bringing new transparency. An editorial in The Republican/MassLive even called this legislation “maybe the most important piece of legislation in the 188th session.”

So, with so much division in our political system, isn’t it fair to say we are getting the system that is being paid for? Let’s hope the reforms continue and we start to get the democracy we deserve… but I’m not holding my breath.

The Massachusetts Casino Wars

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 19:57:00 GMT

After what has felt like a decade-long process—starting with Governor Deval Patrick’s bold initiative to bring casinos to Massachusetts, followed by the passage of comprehensive gaming legislation, formation of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and passage, and failure, of local referenda on the issue—we find ourselves… back at the starting line. In the November election voters will decide (we think) the issue of whether casinos will exist in Massachusetts going forward.

What does this have to do with communications? It turns out— lots. It is always fascinating to observe how an issue emerges, how people begin to take a position on an issue and, as it morphs and gets vetted by the press and public, opinion begins to shift like beach sand.

This may be a case where a new variation of the philosophy “all politics is local” has been born. When the bill was passed, applicants scrambled for available land and receptive communities. With legislation clearing the way for the introduction of casinos in three regions of the Commonwealth, communications were aimed at voters only in those potential host communities. It didn’t matter that statewide polling consistently showed a large plurality in favor of casinos—that was simply unnecessary icing on the cake.

Then something unforeseen began to unfold. Even voters in communities with no proposed casino in their backyard started to pay attention to the daily buzz on casinos. How could they not? The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Springfield Republican, Boston Business Journal, just about every television news outlet and New England Cable News started reporting on the casino issue, just about every day.

A funny thing happens to people when they are exposed to a compelling story like this—they start to form, or change, their position. So let’s look at a couple of key things that have made this once runaway competition a horserace (sorry for the pun).

Casinos were proposed in areas that didn’t make a lot of sense to people—like the venerable Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield. The Big E is universally revered and in the 10 years I served as creative director for the fair, I learned just how woven into the fabric of our culture it is. Voters in West Springfield made that eminently clear by voting the casino down by a large margin.

As the communications agency for Northeast Realty, owner of the 152-acre tract of land in Palmer off the Mass Turnpike, I had a front row seat on Mohegan Sun’s plans for a casino there. Mohegan would have preferred there was no gaming in Massachusetts at all in order to protect their flagship casino in Connecticut, which has been suffering in recent years. But with legislation opening the door in a state from which they draw millions of customers, they ventured in.

Somehow, Mohegan took a consistent 20-point lead in polling over the past two years and lost a nail-biter—by less than one percentage point. Some of that was just bad communications or lack of communications. Mohegan presented its casino renderings—affectionately called by some opponents “the spaceship” because it looked like one and because it landed in front of voters with no input from the local community. Mohegan also promoted one of the traffic options being a five-lane access road— communicating this proudly on the front of mailers to residents living in a two-lane rural community. Not terribly smart.

Their quick exit to Boston and Suffolk Downs, before the Palmer referendum recount was even conducted, was revealing to many in the Commonwealth about the new casino culture—run fast to wherever the money is or could be.

In Boston, Ceasars was ruled ineligible, and subsequently sued the Gaming Commission, and, in the same region, Foxwoods was soundly defeated in Milford. These events didn’t just occur in the communities most interested. Lots of people were paying attention in surrounding communities and throughout the state.

In Springfield, MGM probably presented the most cogent narrative in the state—repairing and revitalizing a city and a neighborhood ravaged by the swath of the 2011 tornado. But even here, critics from neighboring communities were able to express their opposition for all to hear.

This all gave rise to local opposition groups, who started talking to one another and, poof— a ballot initiative was born.

And by now all of this behavior, good and bad, has led us to the statewide vote on casinos. Whatever the outcome, the people will prevail. Now it is up to the casino companies and their allies—such as labor and political leaders in affected communities like Springfield—to develop a singular coordinated message, because the people are, and have been, paying attention.

How to Communicate When Fundraising

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Fundraising is increasingly critical for nonprofit organizations and initiatives, particularly with public funding sources continuing to shrink. Digital giving is one of the new tools driving millions of dollars into organizations both established and new.

The Kony 2012 Invisible Children campaign, where close to 100 million people viewed a compelling YouTube video, pumped millions into a relatively unknown nonprofit, Invisible Children, aimed at ending the reign of terror of a Ugandan despot.

Crisis and natural disasters often result in a flow of donations. The outpouring of support for the victims of the cruel Boston Marathon bombing led to the establishment of the One Fund Boston, which since the spring of 2013 has raised over $64 million. The devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan ($247 million) and Hurricane Katrina ($5.3 billion) tapped the collective sense of humanity in funding recovery.

The compelling and human nature of all of these tragedies spoke to people at an emotional level, evoking donations.

What we can learn from these tragedies is that putting a human face on an initiative or organization is the most direct way to connect generosity with a cause.

We are increasingly living in a “storytelling” world where even television ads emote more than they inform about a product or service.

I had the opportunity over the past many months to observe and participate in three fundraising events that all utilized the unique power of storytelling.

A couple of years ago for their first ever fundraising event we produced a video for Friends of the Homeless in Springfield, “Rescue Me,” that allowed us to put that human face to homelessness. This year’s third annual event was keynoted by a heartfelt presentation by Charlie Knight, formerly homeless and now an advocate for ending homelessness. Over the three years that FOH has begun telling its story at these events their donations, above and beyond their regular solicitations, have noticeably begun to rise.

HAP Housing held its first-ever annual fundraising event this past spring. Using the instrument of video to tell three compelling stories—“Wally” Quinones surviving the June 2011 tornado, Derek Washington overcoming homelessness, gaining employment and raising his two sons, and Gladys Morales’ journey from life in a women’s shelter to homeownership— attendees reached into their pockets, netting the organization about $50,000.

This summer, the National Conference for Community and Justice held its annual dinner fundraiser at the Basketball Hall of Fame. This event, and one held in Hartford, serves as the primary fundraiser for the organization and this year raised nearly $90,000 through dinner tickets and sponsorships. But what was most impressive was the response by those in attendance to a poem read by four alumni of NCCJ’s signature youth program, Camp Anytown. The inspiring words about overcoming the bias and bigotry aimed at these young people raised an additional $25,000 for Camp Anytown scholarships that night, $10,000 more than the organization’s previous high.

In this increasingly digital age, it is comforting to know that the telling of a story continues to touch the human heart.

Marketing Ideas.... From Thin Air

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:10:00 GMT

There’s a funny television ad for AT&T with an adult sitting in what looks like a pre-K class, with kids, well, just being kids. In one of the ads the adult asks if saving money is better than not saving. “Yeah” say the assembled little ones, followed by what they would do with money they saved: “buy an island made of candy,” (love the “sand full of sugar” line) with water made out of soda. The punch line of the ad is “It’s not complicated…..saving is better…..switch to AT&T.”

When I look at ads or any memorable communications, like the AT&T spot, I marvel at how ideas seemingly come from thin air; at least, that’s what I’ve always told my kids about the creative process. Of course, they do come from thin air, but there’s a lot that happens before the moment of inspiration.

So, I’m sure there was a group brainstorming session by the creative team doing AT&T’s work. Most likely, someone had the idea of engaging kids in a classroom (kids are always a hit; pretty safe bet in advertising); and I remember liberally using children on TV and radio spots for The Big E, when I had the privilege to do the fair’s fall advertising. Maybe it was another person on the creative team that came up with the kind of adult who could facilitate the dialogue in the AT&T ad (most likely some comedic actor someone was familiar with). And the “it’s not complicated” analogy would come out of the dialogue because, after all, kids are not complicated. Bang—a campaign is born.

Sometimes, the answers for how to address a challenge are simple and right in front of you. Recently, we were engaged to develop and launch the Stay In School campaign in Springfield. Representatives of the sponsoring agencies, the Pioneer Valley United Way and Springfield Public Schools, brainstormed about what to call the initiative until, right there in thin air, the most obvious identity was chosen—Stay In School. It’s great when the name of any initiative is also the core message.

Our challenge was to make the initiative interesting visually. So after many visual renderings of the words Stay in School, the word “In,” which is the most important message, simply fell out of the sky, from thin air, and we built the campaign around it.

Bottom line—in marketing, sometimes “its not complicated.”

Good Marketing: It's About Results, Not Awards

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:52:00 GMT

Recently, we achieved recognition in the form of a Summit International Creative Award for a video we produced for Friends of the Homeless in Springfield. While it is nice to get the occasional recognition for creative work, too many in the communications industry fall in love with awards for their work instead of the results of that creativity.

At the end of the day, it can’t only look good—creative work and the execution of communications strategies have to have a successful outcome, whether it is a product, idea or cause.

Over the past year we have been involved in several successful outcomes in which communications played an important role.

In July of 2012 Springfield’s Read! Reading Success by 4th Grade initiative was one of 14 cities nationwide, out of over 120 in the running, to win the All-America City Award for Grade-Level Reading by the National Civic League. The work of Sally Fuller, project manager for the Davis Foundation-inspired early literacy effort, has engaged all elements of the community around the importance of reading proficiency.

The development of a brand identity for the Read! initiative, engagement of local media partners and creation of communications materials all played a role in the national recognition. So, too, has the increase from 36% proficiency in 2009 to 40% proficiency in 2012. There is much more to do in achieving the goal of 80% proficiency by 2016, but the needle is moving. Developing media materials in both English and Spanish, along with Spanish language media placements, have played, and will continue to play, a critical role in engaging the community.

This past fall, private sector allies of the Putnam Vocational Technical High School Machine Technology program worked with us to develop a communications strategy designed to increase the number of incoming students choosing the relatively new program.

We developed a video about the program featuring current Machine Tech students at Putnam, which was posted on YouTube and aired on local cable television. We also developed a companion print piece to encourage incoming freshmen to choose the program (and visit the YouTube posting), which trains students for the precision manufacturing field. With a goal of attracting 25 new students to the program, the communications effort paid off— with 35 freshman students selecting Machine Tech as their first choice and another 29 making it their second choice.

Also in the fall of 2012, a client of ours, the Springfield chapter of Rebuilding Together , was named National Affiliate of the Year, beating out Philadelphia for the honor. The tireless work of Executive Director Colleen Loveless and Program Manager Ethel Griffin, and the extensive rebuilding efforts in Springfield in the wake of the 2011 tornado, earned this affiliate much-deserved recognition. The Springfield affiliate’s strong ability to engage local press in extraordinary coverage of their rebuilding initiatives had much to do with them achieving “best in the nation” status.

Finally, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts launched Valley Gives , a first-ever online giving initiative on 12-12-12 designed to support Pioneer Valley nonprofits in a single 24-hour period. As part of the Valley Gives planning team, we witnessed how employing strategic media partnerships, and the tireless work of Project Manager Michael Kusek, were central to raising an astonishing $1.2 million in Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin Counties.

So, when choosing a communications agency or consultant, it is fair to ask them about what they’ve done lately. It’s even better to ask them about the bottom line results of their work.

Marketing to the Growing Hispanic Population

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 18:34:00 GMT

In previous posts we’ve talked about how being precise in executing a strategy pays off, particularly at a time when communications (like writing in the digital age) is becoming increasingly more complex.

So let’s just add another layer of complexity to the conversation. Marketing managers need to be conversant in an ever-expanding world of communications methods and techniques that include new and traditional media outlets and platforms. Reaching the growing Hispanic population offers a good case in point.

While social media and the web are connecting people like never before, including diverse populations, there is still a place for marketing aimed at a particular audience using traditional means.

Read! Reading Success by 4th Grade, an initiative of the Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation, offers a great illustration.

As the driving force behind the effort to increase reading proficiency among Springfield, Massachusetts public school students, Reading Success has engaged a wide range of community actors—early education centers, educators, public policy leaders, the faith community and others. Media partnerships with The Republican daily newspaper and its online affiliate MassLive and local broadcast affiliate abc40 WGGB television have spread the word about the initiative far and wide. But this is only part of the story.

With Springfield’s Hispanic population on the rise (its 8th grade population alone is nearly 60% Hispanic), reaching a bilingual community requires reaching people in English and in their native tongue. So, Reading Success has rendered its messaging materials in English and in Spanish, including free bookmarks distributed throughout the community that include parent tips about reading and engaging children in early literacy.

This year, Reading Success has begun airing radio spots on WSPR and WACM, Western New England’s leading Spanish speaking and programming broadcast radio stations. These spots in Spanish are designed to help parents and families identify the simple tools they can use to improve reading proficiency among their children—encouraging them to use these techniques in both English and in their native tongue.

At the same time, regular ad placements are appearing in the Spanish language weekly, El Pueblo Latino, also bringing these reading tips to parents in their native language.

Of course, there is much more to do, and focus group research conducted among Hispanic heads of household by the Davis Foundation found that parents, particularly moms, prefer to get messages or reading tips through their mobile devices.

Speaking to a wide audience through broadcast media, to a specific audience through ethnic-oriented media and to individuals on their cell phone and mobile device are all part of the new landscape of communications.

From the Cave to the Web: The Era of Strategic Writing

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 18:14:00 GMT

Since the beginning of language there has always been those good at expressing themselves; many of them probably became great writers. If you go back even further, someone in a cave with some talent was scrawling something on the wall that told a story.

Somehow, though, writers seem to have been the most underappreciated group within the realm of communications. Maybe not the great novelists or celebrity non-fiction authors, but just about every other writer could use a little love. Seinfeld was a hit show with a great ensemble cast, but the writing was really what made the show groundbreaking.

At the outset of my career, first as a political consultant and later as a partner in the advertising and public relations agency FitzGerald & Robbins, a press release, brochure copy, something pithy for a billboard or a thirty-second script for a television spot was the general range of creative writing for a client or project. Not any more.

Now, writers need to really think about the vehicle they are using to convey the words—particularly now in the digital age when these words appearing on your computer screen can be accessed anywhere around the world. Writing in the blogosphere, on a website or social media platform requires a different approach, in some ways an advanced form of writing.

For example, in writing this post, I am being mindful to include tags or “keywords” that might attract interest (see below). So, among the keywords in this piece are “writers,” “advertising,” and “public relations” that will percolate through Google or some other search engine and might entice a visitor—and, hence, an audience.

The same rules apply for those writing content (used to be called copy) for websites. The more keywords the better the chance of moving up the charts and attracting visitors.

This point hit home recently when a post for another blog that I author, the City2City Greater Springfield blog, had some keyword that attracted Tod Newcombe, author of the Urban Notebook blog at Governing Magazine. He stumbled upon the content in the City2City blog and wrote a story about how Springfield area leaders are visiting and learning from resurgent cities in the United States. Now, someone may stumble upon the Urban Notebook column from this posting.

What does this all mean? For the writers it means that yet another refinement in writing technique is required to attract the audience to their words.

So when writers are writing today, they need to do so more strategically. Writing has come a long way from those early scrawls on a wall in a cave.

Strategy Take

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 20:03:00 GMT

As we launch our new website and promote Paul Robbins Associates as a “strategic communications” agency, it begs the question, “What are strategic communications?"

When I started my career in communications, first as a political consultant in my mid 20s, I didn’t know I was getting into the strategy business. In fact, I really didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was fascinated by the idea that a campaign and the message created by a candidate, and more importantly by a consultant, could actually influence how someone would vote. At the time, I was intrigued by the idea (I still am) that a consultant ultimately has more than one vote.

I was fortunate at a young age to win, quite accidentally, several high-profile, long-shot political campaigns. I learned later, with more experience, about the dynamic of those campaigns and why they were successful.

When I launched FitzGerald & Robbins with Gerry FitzGerald, we promoted ourselves as an advertising, marketing and public relations agency. And when I started Paul Robbins Associates in 2005, we presented the new company as a marketing communications and public relations agency. All true, but not exactly what we do.

Advertising, marketing and public relations campaigns come about after a determination of the objectives and a well-conceived strategy to address them. In short, developing a newspaper or television ad represents the end product of a strategy. When an organization approaches us to develop some “advertising or marketing materials,” I always suggest we step back and determine who the audience is, what we want them to do (or not do) and build a communications plan from there. Advertising might be the last thing we suggest; instead, a public affairs program or targeted communications to a specific audience might be more appropriate.

Marketing, advertising and public relations materials have increasingly become commodities. One can develop a website from available online tools, even produce a television commercial sitting in front of a Mac. That’s not what we do here. We develop strategies that use some or many of these commodities, but the strategy always comes first.

In this blog I will highlight strategic approaches to communications that we ourselves are employing for a particular organization or executions from others that we admire and think we all can learn from.

So, welcome to our new website, and if you subscribe to Strategy Take, you will get email alerts when I post something new. We will write something only when we see something compelling -- we won’t be filling space just to hear ourselves think. And if you have insights on strategy and communications, feel free to reach out and share.