Five questions with Trudy Schroeder, keynote speaker
1. What is the 140-character version of your talk at Going Barefoot?
Thriving and surviving as a cause driven organization: What are the secret ingredients that make organizations thrive? In a world of razzle-dazzle solutions, thriving organizations achieve success with simple tools.
2. When it comes to marketing the WSO, what is the most helpful tool in your arsenal and why?
The most useful tool in marketing the WSO is the ability to find ways to have people experience a WSO concert. There are many ways to pool people or go to people, even though it means lugging a 70 person orchestra and all their instruments around the province. This last December our route to having many new people attend a WSO concert was to present the film Home Alone in a digitally remastered version with the orchestral score of the film performed live by the orchestra.
3. What do you see as the biggest opportunity for cause-driven organizations to grow and thrive in the coming years?
People are looking for meaning and connection to other people. Cause-driven organizations attract bright, idealistic, positive, dedicated, and genuinely good people to work on achieving the objective of the organization. If the cause is compelling and enduring, and our ability to communicate the value of the cause is good, we will continue to be able to attract good people to work together to accomplish the mission of the organization.
4. What is your advice for any nonprofit communicator right now who is making decisions about how to best allocate resources for 2016?
There are such limitations on our time and so few resources to spend on reaching people to join together to make important changes in our world. We cannot do everything that we would like to do to get the message out, so we need to think very carefully about the ways we can best get information to the people we need to reach. First of all, we need to be sure that we know who we are trying to reach. There will usually be some parts of that list we know how to contact, and there will be other parts of the list in which we have to consider our cause and the constellation of characteristics that will allow us to identify and reach people who will have the greatest potential interest in our messages. That is where we spend our resources.
5. What gets you up every morning to do your job?
I love the complexity and variety of my job. I have realized that I am happy that my job is hard and that the challenges are never completely solved. The goals of the organization are very much in alignment with my values, and there is great satisfaction for me in making progress on those goals.
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