While I was at Back on My Feet, something I was proud of completing was, with the great help of a colleague, a company style guide.

A style guide should be a fundamental piece of documentation that goes a long way to creating an institutional memory. If everything imploded, a style guide would help you rebuild your organization — with workflow being more explicitly enumerated in staff manuals.

As your organization grows, it’s easy to wake up and find a lot of disparate, disconnected pieces that you’ll need to assemble again. Take hold and  keep connected the work you do for a tighter, more inspired and successful campaign.

In looking at other guides and finding value in ours, there are a few items that I think every style guide should include:

• Branding: Take control of how employees describe, share and employ reference and mention of your organization.
  • What is your organization’s name and its appropriate shorthand?
  • What is your organization’s logo and its acceptable varieties?
  • List the colors in your logo and the palate of colors from your website and other materials.
• Language: You don’t want your staff sounding like robots, but getting everyone on the same page can help create an effective culture in talking about your mission.
  • What is your mission statement and acceptable shorthand?
  • (i.e. At Back on My Feet, staff took issue with reporters describing us as a ‘homeless running club,’ so we needed to combat that with something nearly as short but more descriptive. With all parties, we came to “a running-based program to combat homelessness.”)
  • What are basic responses to common questions that staff can use? Save your staff time with quick, canned responses to common questions.
• Marketing: Keep materials around marketing, invitations, one-pagers and the like similar.
  • What are the major events your organization hosts or is involved in and how do you market them?
  • What are the fundamentals musts and basic look
• Style: The broader, specific expectations that fit into all three of the above categories.
  • What are the fonts you use?
  • Is your basic grammar and usage AP style? Or something else?
  • Are there organization-specific words or phrases that should used or portrayed in a specific way?
• Anything else you have basic, staff-wide rules around.

Last year, I left a position at a homeless advocacy nonprofit and returned to the journalism startup I helped launch. After sharing last month some of the member interviews I collected while working at Back on My Feet, I realized there were other lessons I wanted to share.

I worked for Back on My Feet for less than a year and while there, I wasn’t deep into our programming work, but rather promoting the organization by way of sharing member stories, using social media, managing our website and even working with traditional media contacts. You know, and growing staff interest in content creation, most notably video, like these 15 best examples.

But, you can rest assured that I tried to learn as much as I could with my time there about the social services work and agencies on which our mission and some of my colleagues focused. I was blessed with serving a role that let me meet, speak and share with more of our members than most any of our staff, outside those serving direct care.

I encouraged our staff to use our blog as a way to share homelessness news, and I myself curated weekly news roundups on the subject. I also picked the brains of anyone I came in contact with in or outside ‘the system’ as it is often called.

Given all that, I thought I might share just some of what comes to mind as take aways and lessons from the world of homelessness, particularly in Philadelphia.

I’ll say that while my role with Back on My Feet was national and I took a great interest in homelessness conversations broadly, I naturally saw these challenges through the prism of Philadelphia, where the organization and I were based. I’ll also underscore what I already said: I am in no way a seasoned social services expert, but rather someone who worked with such an organization took great personal interest and curiosity in the field..

On homelessness generally:

• You don’t know someone, even if you know some of their most intimate experiences — I promised myself very quickly that I wouldn’t act like I knew any of the members with whom I shared a few conversations. There is something tricky about the emotions involved when someone tells you their most personal thoughts, speaks about their most personal experiences. You feel like you know them, and I watched people get confused. I tried to always remind myself that I didn’t really know any of our members. I knew their names and became friendly with some, friendly like you do with anyone you share a handful of conversations, and some even treated me by sharing their stories, but that, I’m afraid, is the end of it. I often knew their stories — the five minute summation of what brought them to where they were — but I didn’t know many of them well.
• I met men who were institutionalized. Men who, I felt in my very limited experienced with them, were scared to move out or move on. Men who had become accustomed to receiving, as they say in the system, ‘three hots and a cot.’ You get used to that, and, for some, it’s hard to move on because you risk so much.
• The loss of jobs is the single biggest cause for the growth of homelessness in the past half century — Today we talk a lot in the industry about the shortage of affordable housing, but I feel like that is more of an effect than a cause. This from the second in an impactful four part series of hunger from the Philadelphia Inquirer: “In the district and nearby areas [of the first congressional district], 300,000 jobs disappeared between 1950 and 1980, helping to create a lost world of generations of un- or underemployed people…” Updated: A former colleague wanted to clarify that jobs today is not the only answer he finds many individuals that he works with struggle to keep the job, due to lack of adequate education and training, so continuing education and requisite motivation/inspiration may be a bigger issue to date, though the cycle broke with jobs.
• Program opportunities are varied – Homeless facilities, street cafes, emergency housing, religious missions, recovery homes, transitional housing, subsidized housing,
• Rapid rehousing is the biggest conversation happening in homelessness right now — When academics talk about the root problem of homelessness, we circle around (a) education (b) jobs (c) affordable housing. There are entire degrees here that I won’t begin to touch, but there is a big movement to date that focuses on offering housing first to people looking to get out of homelessness. It is still controversial.
• Financial impact isn’t a consideration for long-term change — Social services groups, in my opinion, have failed to adequately expose the cost to government in acute, chronic and family homelessness. Some are trying, like Philly’s Project H.O.M.E., which released this report [PDF].
• The first national strategy on combating homelessness landing in 2010 — We are still new to these big conversations.
• Guys on the street busking for money are just one part of homelessness — Census numbers for homelessness are controversial, as by nature, the numbers are fluid and nomadic and changing. People leave cities, neighborhoods, move in with friends and relatives, get month-to-month flop houses and then hit the streets again. As noted below, there are dozens of different types of housing facilities, so while permanent housing is usually the gauge for homelessness, what is permanent anyway? People on the street asking for money vary wildly, from those new to the system and down on their luck, to hustlers, to drug and alcohol abusers, to those with clinical physical and mental difficulties making it difficult to serve in facilities. After a year with Back on My Feet, while walking in Center City, I bump into our members from time to time — guys with jobs, those without them — and they are not who even I normally associate with homelessness.

Below, watch Antonio LaBoy, one of our Philadelphia members, with whom I spoke to several times, once at length and on video.

On addiction and recovery: (as noted above, not all of our members experienced addiction, but nearly three quarters of our members did, so there were lots of lessons there)

• Someone’s first try at addiction recovery will probably fail. But you have to try the first time to get to the second and the third and the fourth time. Somewhere down that path, that person might actually, deeply want to come clean for themselves and, by then, it might actually stick. These are messy, messy affairs.
• Lots of cliches are overused in this space because they’re so damn accurate. See below.
• You have to hit rock bottom – The people who succeed in the Back on My Feet program have had their moment of clarity and are often already moving forward when they connect with us. If a member is in the program for any reason other than themselves — for family, for sneakers, even for God — it doesn’t seem to end so well.
• You will be lied to today — This was something a friend of mine from our programming staff would say to me. We talked a lot about finding the line of supporting members we came to care about and facing the reality of the pressures in their lives, from addiction to friends to family to work to money to the rest, that pushed honesty down in the priority list.
• Every person is a new person — The stories came to get redundant, but then there were those with totally different stories. I needed to remind myself to not get caught up in stereotypes: for every few members who grew up in bad neighborhoods, dropped out of school, got into selling drugs, then using drugs, then found themselves without another choice but recovery, there was a functioning school teacher or the guy from the suburbs.
• Recovery is never over — You keep counting those days and saying those prayers. You’re not ever recovered. You’re recovering, in recovery or, as an alumnus of our program once told me, “trying to remember everyday why I’m not doing those things anymore, even two years later.”
• Addiction can come about in many forms — Like drugs and alcohol and work and physical abuse, as one of our Boston members taught me, as you can see below.

On the social services industry and those who work in it:

• Social service staff have to draw and maintain firm boundaries and lines, which often intersect, cross and conflict with the hopes, dreams and lives of people, real, living, breathing human beings.

From left: Back on My Feet Media Director Christopher Wink; New Jerusalem Member David Bayo; Ridge Shelter Member Lavon Norwood; Philadelphia Executive Director Sera Snyder; at back Henry A. Davidsen custom tailoring founder Brian Lipstein, who donated the suits many of our members are wearing; in front, motivational speaker Warren McDonald; New Jerusalem Member Merald Archie; Outley House Member Derrick Hopkins and RWA Member Felix Berrios at a Philadelphia Business Clubs of America meeting at the Union League on July 23, 2010.

On Philadelphia’s homelessness services:

• There is a vibrant and varied social services community in Philadelphia. Lots of groups, lots of interest, lots of politics, lots of perspective.
• Ridge Avenue Shelter, at Broad and Ridge near Fairmount, is the single male intake facility and because of that, the city’s largest facility. Because of all of that, Ridge is being closed this year. In a movement also seen in schools, we’re moving toward smaller, more targeted facilities.
• Resources for Human Development, which manages Ridge, and Public Health Management Corporation are two of the biggest players — These Philly based companies contract out with the city to manage many of the facilities and do other related work. For example, RHD prints One Step Away, a street newspaper, written, edited, published and sold by people experiencing homelessness.
• Project H.O.M.E is the most respected and varied big-name program — The magnus opus of Sister Mary Scullion. You aren’t a real player in this community if you don’t know Sister Mary, and your organization isn’t real if it isn’t partnering with Project H.O.M.E. That said, all of the better known programs, like Project H.O.M.E., are always called into question for being better at PR than deep impact. It’s a regular debate.
• “Philadelphia’s shelter system makes beggars out of hustlers,” another member told me, noting that compared to other cities he had been, one could get more comfortable here. [Note: one person's take]
• Don’t give change on the streets — It sounds so cruel. So, really, it shouldn’t necessarily be a rule, but just an understanding. It’s not a free card to not care, it’s recognizing that the issue is so complex that change just gets lost for so many reasons. So, sure, give change when the moment feels right, but understand that (A) there are free, obligation-free meals given nearly every time of day in Philadelphia and (B) you probably could have a bigger impact by volunteering your time or giving your money to an existing organization that has a mission of combating homelessness.
• Keeping in mind the controversy noted above, there are an estimated 7,600 homeless people in Philadelphia at any given time.
• Every group of people, including those experiencing homelessness, has hardworking people and people trying to get over on the system. I felt my most liberal of co-workers were too trusting and the few too jaded were too judgmental. Both had their reasons. I met and came to know men and women who were truly trying to make good, but I also came to know members who felt entitled and angry. They, too, had their reasons, but often that entitlement and anger affected wrongly those who deserved it least.
• Download the 2009 Philadelphia Street Sheet here [PDF], which includes a list of provided meals throughout the city. You can also find a list of meals provided throughout the city here.
• Homelessness services listed here.
• There are legends of Philadelphia’s homeless community — There’s the Chicken Man and Adam, the soccer player who signs $15 checks to homeless people every Monday after.
• Those seeking help often tended to be older — Our Back on My Feet members were more regularly at least 40, and other homelessness groups had similar stories, as a lot of young people crash with others and are still ‘in the lifestyle,’ to use a phrase of our members. That said, young adults are a growing part of homelessness in this economy.
• There is a hotline to call — And weather requirements encourage the city to use it. Outreach Hotline at 215-232-1984

Short, compelling videos of interest travel well on the web.

That means video can take your brand, organization, mission, message or call to action with it. I served my media director role with Back on My Feet for less than a year, but I’m proud of moving the staff to more frequent video creation for those reasons and to give our members — people experiencing homelessness — a platform to share their stories.

Looking back, though I shared other metrics from my time there, I realized I never shared the best of what I thought was some meaningful video for just a start.

So, below, that’s what I do, highlight 15 of the best videos we created during my tenure as media director, clamoring on email that “everything is content!”

A Boston member of the month Jackie Kenyon talking about her path:

There were also some great write ups, like this one of a Boston member grappling with serious weight issues.

We highlighted new members each month, like Tyrone Collins in Philadelphia not long before I left.

One of the first member interviews we did on video was with Stacy Stone at Brotherhood Mission in Philadelphia:

One of the more powerful member speeches was from a Boston volunteer talking about her own past with addiction, one of physical and emotional abuse.

We took to tracking progress and interest of our members, by introducing them early in the process and planning on checking in later, as we did below with some new Chicago members.

We highlighted our corporate partners, like the Hauptman Wellness Center and, as seen below, tailor Henry A. Davidsen, which donated suits for our members.

Baltimore member Charlie Tiller was interviewed for the Baltimore Bash.

I grabbed video of Philadelphia alumni Eddie Smith speaking at the 2010 Bash.

I interviewed Philadelphia alumnus Kenny Herder at least a half dozen times.

We interviewed our volunteers, especially before they tried to run 100 miles straight in our 20in24 ultra-marathaon.

Philadelphia Member Antonio LaBoy spoke poignantly about losing a son and that affect on addiction. Below is one of several videos:

During the Boston chapter launch, Philadelphia alumnus Kevin Brown brought down the house with his emotional, honest story.

Video played a role in many ways other than member stories.

We amplified and archived what we shared at smaller events, like when our founder Anne Mahlum spoke at the National Press Club in Washington D.C..

We introduced our audience to our organization, like celebrating our staff running the Chicago Marathon or, as seen below, the tradition of staff signing a wall in our office.

We were able to share the many, many TV news stories, like D.C. member Chris Hatton, who returned from serious jail time to work for stability.

We used existing video to connect our running-crazed base, like with these great commercials.

Video also enabled us to share amazing opportunities our members had. I can’t embed the video and I can’t lay claim to having anything to do with this, but one of our Baltimore members and a Vietnam veteran spoke before a Congressional sub-committee on Veteran homelessness.

We offered a multimedia dimension to our events, like this Bash introduction video.

The devotion to video has continued. Recently I noticed that the staff made sure to record the Dallas chapter launch kickoff speaker, and Charlie Tiller made the organization proud.

And the second part

Simply put, we build audiences.

At the beginning of December, I left another role and promised greater details on what I would doing. Here’s a start.

In the past few weeks, I’ve chosen a payroll services company, applied for tax status, requested a business operating license, closed an existing account and otherwise finalized the incorporation of a new business, of which I am now a full-time employee, answering early a resolution of mine.

Technically Media Inc. is a media services consultancy with three founders: Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and myself.

And, while I could get you lost in the details, all you really need to know that at its simplest form, we build audiences online.

What that means:

• We work with nonprofits, businesses, organizations and existing media companies to create workflow, review management, platform and promotion for using content to grow an audience online.
• Build an audience and turn them into supporters, donors, customers, and clients.
• This is a journalism conversation — We think the future of news and information dissemination will involve mission-orientated nonprofits and other organizations.

Examples of this work:

• Technically Philly — Technically Media publishes this technology news site that first brought the three of us together. (Previous to our recent incorporation, TM was a general partnership.)
• The National Constitution Center — Before Christmas, we launched Constitution Daily, a blog platform through which the major Philadelphia-based museum and event space will grow its reputation with meaningful content related to its mission. We will continue working with the NCC in 2011.
• Back on My Feet — In my role with this nonprofit, I created its media department, including helping to launch a platform and create workflow and content for a blog that drives audience around its members, organization and mission.
• Philadelphia Sports Daily — We launched the basic platform, workflow and technology behind the region’s fastest growing comprehensive sports news site. We are still offering services and direction.
• Circulation — On our TM website, we’re playing with content and editorial experimentation on a blog. See the landing page of the former version of this site here.

Get in touch if you want to hear more.

I’ll be writing plenty more on this site about the content strategy movement happening across the country and our particular interest in editorial strategy.

Click to enlarge.

Today is my final day serving as the Media Director of homeless advocacy nonprofit Back on My Feet, after first joining in mid-January 2010.

Social media is just one of five major areas of responsibility, as I noted in my resignation notice here, so much of the growth and direction came in the first three months of my time here.

So, there is much more I could have done in this space, but I wanted to debrief specifically on this area of my work:

At the beginning of February:

• 758 Facebook friends, regularly updated, comments and messages growing
• 1,700 Facebook members across three groups: Philly, Baltimore and D.C. (Details here.)
• 610 Twitter followers, 185 overall tweets, dozens of running conversations
• 15,187 email addresses in our Constant Contact database for monthly newsletters

At the beginning of December:

• 1,720 Facebook friends on an account that still needs to be fully transitioned out of use.
• 2,600 Facebook Likes (631 national; 421 Philly; 351 Baltimore; 446 D.C.; 507 Boston; 231 Chicago; also pages for four 2011 expansion cities)
• 1,225 Twitter followers, 1,371 tweets, 93 listed
• 50,325 email addresses in our Constant Contact database for monthly newsletters, including chapter specific lists.

Return on Investment: (’cause you better be sure use of social media makes sense for you and it might not)

• Our social media strategy ties integrally into our mission as an organization. We use Twitter and Facebook to focus primarily on building an online community of support, through consistency and conversation.
• We use Youtube, Picasa and our blog to more richly tell the stories of our members, our volunteers and the work we all do together.
• Our blog and social media became a central point for conversation, promotion, discovery and networking. We now have dozens of examples of race leaders, donors, fundraisers and supporters who found our organization because of our conversation.
• We have testimonials speaking to the power of our sharing our member stories helped connect them to our organization’s mission.
• In competing with four other nonprofits, including Livestrong, to divvy up $25,000 as part of the Almond Breeze Taste Challenge according to votes, Back on My Feet received nearly 30 percent of response or $8,000.
• In a similar voting contest, Back on My Feet won the top prize of $5,000 in the Stonyfield Blogging Barnstorming contest.

Pull media, like social networks are incredibly powerful, but the power of the push media of email hasn’t much waned.

Nonprofits, companies and organizations still rely on its ability to land in the inboxes of busy readers, consumers and supporters. Since announcing that I’m leaving Back on My Feet, I’ve taken a bit deeper a look at the metrics behind the monthly newsletter and blasts that remains a large part of our outreach efforts.

I was proud of some progress we worked to make with our use of email marketing during my time there, though I didn’t find the time to spend nearly as much time focusing on further development as I would have liked (by offering beta tests and such).

More importantly, there are a dozen take aways, some of which may seem intuitive, that I can now comfortably call lessons:

• Subject lines should ideally be between 5-10 words, preferably with a call to action — Give people an easily recognized reason to open your blast and do it in fewer than 30 or 40 characters.
• I pushed for our blasts to be sent 10 a.m. on Tuesdays, or as near to it as possible, for similar sentiment as this. — Timing is nearly everything (We sent our national blast the first Tuesday of every month), and consistency helps.
• A bigger newsletter contact number comes in conflict with a more engaged audience — The moment you start adding users on your own (which comes breaks any sense of opt-in marketing) or otherwise coercing user acquisition, your open and click-thru rates fall.
• Smaller, more targeted lists are opened more often — I started establishing city-specific lists and those blasts were better opened and had more clicks
• Almost no one will ever complain about not getting enough emails from you — Despite what your staff might try to tell you, it’s true, so stick to a monthly regular newsletter and perhaps the occasional blast. If you want to send out more often, start collecting more targeted lists for those other reasons.
• Give good content, not just organization or promotional updates — If people can feel good or learn something from your newsletter,  it’ll surely get better traction. In our case, we pushed for sharing a member story in each of our monthly newsletters and often other related content to boot.
• Fewer exclamation points — Good God, fewer exclamation points.
• We use Constant Contact, which offers enough flexibility and metrics to allow additional growth. It has survey options to better segment contacts, which I never had the time to explore.

Compare this November newsletter here and one from before I arrived, a December 2009 newsletter here.

It's a roundup: Cowboys and pickup trucks push the herd of buffalo across Lame Johnny Road during Monday morning's Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park on Monday. (Kristina Barker/Journal staff)

This fall, I started doing something on the Back on My Feet blog that should probably be the first step of every community news site ever: a weekly aggregated roundup of existing news on homelessness.

It’s something I advocate to any content creator in which I am involved.

A primary rule of anyone with mission today is to share content related to that mission, as you probably can pretty easily beat bigger media on issues relevant to your work.

But the specific virtue of a simple roundup can be profound. It follows any number of rules of the web today.

• Do what you do best and link to the rest — You probably aren’t yet a content creator, so link to those who are. It’s only in the past year or so, that we’ve seen most progressive news outlets following this long-held logic.
• Cover greater ground — There are more content creators today, not fewer, so don’t duplicate that work, just push your audience to those already doing it.
• Build your own audience — Beyond PR or updates on your organization, build an audience of people who care about your work and they probably are the ones most likely to support you in other ways.
• Learn — Educating yourself and your staff of issues around your mission is never a bad thing, so curating that conversation is a fine start.
• Own your niche — Most importantly, you want to be able to tell your audience that anything that falls into your coverage area (or mission) can be found on your site or blog. You won’t cover or break it all, so push to those who have.

At Technically Philly, we run some sort of roundup every day of the week: events on Mondays, venture capital on Tuesdays, startups on Wednesdays, Comcast on Thursdays and general links of community interest on Fridays.

So this is an obvious starter for nonprofits, niche news sites and bigger players. Own your niche.

An emblematic photo of a portion of my work with Back on My Feet, as taken early in the morning of the second day of the third annual Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 race event, having coordinated an intervivew of Philadelphia chapter Executive Director Sera Snyder and Fox 29. For the 20in24, every major outlet in the region covered the event.

I am leaving my role as Media Director for Back on My Feet, the running-based program to combat homelessness.

I tendered my resignation last Thursday, Nov. 11 and our staff was alerted Monday. My last day will be Friday, Dec. 3, so I’ve offered a full three weeks to help the transition process at an organization with a mission that has come to mean a great deal to me since joining in January.

I’ll be sharing in greater detail here what exactly I will be doing, but, in short, I am taking a full-time opportunity with the media company I helped launch by way of starting in February 2009 technology news site Technically Philly.

Yes, things have been going well there since.

While there are lot of reasons why this is the right move for me, most simply:

1. I have completed a great deal of what I wanted to do at Back on My Feet, and this is a good time for a relatively smooth transition
2. My heart is with journalism, publishing, covering communities and all the conversations therein.

I will also be sharing here more reflections and takeaways from my year working for Back on My Feet, but, for now, I would like to quickly highlight how proud I am of the work I have accomplished in my short time there.

I want to thank the organization, its staff and founder Anne Mahlum for giving me the opportunity to come on to a startup and create from scratch a direction, mission and purpose for its media outreach.

I served five basic roles that were meant to circle my mission of growing awareness of the organization, all of which were mine, as I was a one-man department:

1. Traditional Media — relationship building, outreach, followup and organization of coverage by legacy media.
2. Social Media — Our conversation, push and interaction with social networks and their related communities.
3. Content and publishing — Our newsletters, email correspondence and managing our blog, which I launched, as noted below.
4. Website project management and IT — Managing our website, our relationship with our partner development company O3 World and other basic, related IT questions from staff.
5. Branding — Overseeing, approving and, at times, designing branding, marketing and event materials.

At the highest level, I feel as though I have established best practices and direction for my department and will offer easy-to-transition roles that still have direction and growth possibilities, all of which fits neatly into what I first pledged to do during my initial interview for this position.

I am so proud of these accomplishments for less than a year’s worth of work considering they span disciplines, which include, among many others, the following:

• Finalized an initial draft of a Media Department manual, detailing the responsibilities and goals of the work I’ve done in nearly 5,000 words and on 12 pages. This is the strongest asset I’ve offered to create institutional memory in my work. One of my favorite words: sustainability.
• Finalized an initial draft of an organization style guide — With the help of a colleague, that serves as the basis for our language, colors, logos and other branding basics. This started a conversation around using specific fonts, precise colors, branding and language.
• Launched and created staff work flow for a blog platform that, in fewer than six months of public operation, receives more than 10,000 page views and is on pace to surpass in 2011 our established website in daily traffic.
• Shared at least one member story a week for the near entirety of the blog’s existence and came to know the names and abbreviated stories of dozens of our members. In addition to sharing news around the issue of homelessness, I have set expectations that our blog will be a place for thought-provoking discourse and to find news about our mission, supplemented by organizational updates.
• Grew and matured our national monthly newsletter presence, in addition to training staff and creating systems for regularity, blasts and chapter independence.
• Prepared for, launched and created staff work flow for chapter-specific email lists and monthly blasts to grow independence of each individual city. When I first came on, we had one big pot of contacts, but I recognized the need and value of beginning to break out lists by geography.
• Designed draft national marketing materials that can be expanded upon and serve as the basis of such documents in the future. It’s nearly a dozen pages and, even if it’s a knock off of some pro bono work a designer did for one of our chapters, I am proud of the look. Download a copy here [PDF].
• Created spreadsheet of media contacts across all of our chapters and other national outlets that can further be developed in a concerted, targeted effort. Again, another step to maturing our media department.
• Developed a true conversation in our primary social media channels of Twitter and Facebook, the latter of which has also been delegated to newly-trained staff and represents an area that still warrants growth and attention. We started from nearly zero, so we went a long way, but there’s plenty more to do.
• Conceived of a direction for the utility of our existing website, developed the relationship with web development partner O3 World and helped move forward the possibilities.We’re planning to more than double in size next year, so some real forward-thinking was required.
• Wrote an organization profile that was anthologized by a major publisher in ‘the Ultimate Runner.’
• Created an initial version of a press kit to offer to media contacts to create base level knowledge about our organization. Find it here.
• Worked to manage expectations around traditional media coverage, which was no small feat for an organization that was on CNN, ABC World News and NBC Nightly News within its first two years. I pushed for us to focus on big, interesting stories and succeeded when we pushed, like, as depicted above, all major TV, newspaper and radio outlets in Philadelphia covered the third annual Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 race event in July.
• Pushed for Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 Race Event branding — While we still call our major fundraising event “the 4th Annual Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 Relay Challenge, Lone Ranger Ultra Marathon, Midnight Madness Run & Pajama Loop,” I helped pushed into our lexicon the remarkably apparent necessity of a shorthand.
• Created organization shorthand — We were sensitive to being just a ‘homeless running club,’ which is what some newspaper writers had taken to calling us. I noted that we needed to offer a more descriptive nut to offer journalists. It required lots of approval and remains less universally accepted than I liked but, with the great help of a colleague: Back on My Feet is a “running-based program to combat homelessness.”
• Interfaced regularly with nearly each of our 30 staff members — I tried my best to fight bureaucracy and increase my dialogue with staff so I knew what interested them and what hurt or helped the work they did.

After my first asset analysis joining Back on My Feet in January, it was beyond the pale of question that we needed a camera that could get our organization content — photos and video — up and moving quickly.

I was looking for a camera that was the following:

• More durable than the personal camera I had, enjoyed but kept having it fail on me
• Better lens for clearer video zoom and photo quality
• No more than $500 and preferably nearer to $200

Upon some research and inquiries, I recommended we spend more than $300 on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20. Complimentary CNet review here.

It was more expensive, has a somewhat awkward lens cap (which is conveniently not displayed  in the above photo) because of its extension zoom and is altogether quite a bit bulkier than most we looked at (if not all), but it had everything I was looking for and that 10X zoom available during video mode was a big sell and something I continue to rave about today.

Since that, two of our chapters have had the popular Flip cameras donated, costing around $100. As Tech Crunch has consistently exclaimed after each of the Flip models, while it is a powerful, inexpensive tool, it really isn’t the best choice for anyone determined to put together regular content.

• It doesn’t shoot quality photos
• Its audio and video quality isn’t HD quality
• Zoom functionality is limited
• While more durable, its functionality wasn’t as versatile or helpful as the similarly priced cheaper point-and-click I personally had

I found the most important difference between the far higher quality (and more expensive) Sony Cyber-shot and the newest Flip during our last two Back on My Feet chapter launch breakfasts.

I attended our Boston launch in May and used the Sony to shoot video of alumnus Kevin Brown speak, as you can seen below.

In September, another staff member was in Chicago for that launch using the Flip and shot video in similar light, from a nearer distance and with similar background noise. As you can see below, it is simply less audible.

So take that as the clearest lesson.

If you want only video content, plenty of it and will be doing close-range shoots in quiet surroundings, the Flip is really very valuable. Otherwise you want to look elsewhere, and if photos and video are important and will be something you’ll do often, I’d strongly recommend the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20, which I remain very happy with.

View from the 45th floor of the Comcast Center, before the start of Refresh Philly

I rounded up the rear with a presentation on volunteering with Back on My Feet as part of a four-part event on ‘Fitness for Geeks’ on Monday.

It was another installment of Refresh Philly, the monthly speaker series for the region’s technologists and creative community members. I graced the podium after Randy Schmidt, co-creator of Lose It or Lose It, Robert Jolly, a triathlete and creative director at web development firm Happy Cog and Kristen Faughnan, Philly’s Dailymile ambassador.

More than a year ago, I was on hand for Philadelphia CTO Allan Frank’s unveiling of a ‘Digital Philadelphia’ plan at Refresh and last November, I led a panel there on the future of local politics and the web.

My third visit to Refresh was as much a treat as the rest.

On Monday, I was there on behalf of the homeless advocacy nonprofit for which I handle media and our web presence, pitching the idea that our creative approach to homelessness and community of running is perfect for a group of creative web people looking for a physical outlet.

Nearly 50 people were on hand at the 45th floor of the Comcast Center, with its beautiful northerly views. I think my presentation went well, especially the telling of some member stories. See my presentation and notes below.

Notes:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. What is Back on My Feet?
4. Why is this relevant?
5. What are some member stories?
6. How can you get involved?