Danika Kmetz, a great PR intern from Illinois State University (and President of her PRSSA chapter), has created two very fun videos with the best kind of testimonials possible. The first is from Hope, a camper at ASCCA’s Teen Week taking place this week on Lake Martin. The second is a mashup of clips from last week’s Adult Mentally Disabled camp.

There are many ideas at work behind these sites. The most important is to provide a look inside camp that will reach out to our campers, their parents and anyone that has yet to consider a therapeutic recreation opportunity.

You might be surprised that engaging people in comments and conversations isn’t as important here. Our clientele isn’t as ‘into’ the social media scene as those that read my blog, for instance. But, with the launch of our social network, ASCCA Friends, we’ve begun to see interaction that never took place in our blogs. ASCCA Friends is built upon the Ning platform.

Now, we are seeing parents and campers engaging in conversations. Just today, for instance, this comment was left by the mother of a camper:

Even though I don’t get to stay at camp with you guys, it’s my favorite place to visit. The 3 and 1/2 hour drive is totally worth it just to be greeted by all of the smiling faces of the staff and campers. Camp ASCCA must be the happiest place on earth. – Denise Brock, Fort Payne, AL

And then there is this one from today, by parent Terri Shaw:

My child is attending Camp ASCCA for the first time this week , July 14th thru July 18th. I have encouraged the camp because he needs time away from parents to make new friendships and to see other children with disabilities.

Now, I ask you. Can you beat this for engaging with your stakeholders?

You may notice, we do not take the ‘poor pitiful crippled child’ approach that so many nonprofits choose to follow. We have fun. We try to show you the reality of working with these children and adults. Again, we have fun. This is real life, folks.

I dare to say, the overall presentation on the sites is something that has not been done before, regarding people with disabilities. If you can show me some site that has done it, please point me to it. The only other ‘real life’ approach I know of is the BBC’s Ouch! Podcast. And, we were online before them. Realistically, in our environment, we couldn’t get away with their ‘very real’ approach, either.

Hey, if these two videos don’t make you smile … I fear there’s no hope for ya’.

Hope is one excited camper

Find more videos like this on ASCCA Friends

Why We Love Camp ASCCA!

Find more videos like this on ASCCA Friends

Allison was recently interviewed by Fred Hunter, Fox6 News in Birmingham, for their Absolutely Alabama series.

Allison shares how camp helped her over the years, trying anything new that she had her heart set upon doing. Since being a camper, Allison has gone on to earn a masters degree in counseling and served for almost 13 years in practice, before returning to Camp ASCCA.

I have to admit, I got a little tear thinking about Allison as a camper and now – the ASCCA PR director. It is a sweet story. She is the spokesperson for camp, and does a terrific job.

Watch the video now. (Click image below for a popup.) I have to say, Fred and the videographer/editor do terrific work. A great video. Thank you Fox6!

Now do you understand why I can’t help but talk about Camp ASCCA?

This video should help answer that question. Meet a guy that has a kind heart and long list of true friends. He makes you smile just seeing him.

Abner is one of our favorites at Camp ASCCA.

This week is a special one for camp. Throughout the year, we serve a lot of adults with mental disabilities. During the summer, there is one week where many of our regulars attend. Abner is a 10 year regular. This is his 10th Anniversary for attending Camp ASCCA.

All you have to do is watch the video and you’ll understand why so many said, “You’ve got to interview Abner!” His relationship with Nathan, our Head Male Counselor, will make you smile, too.

A little background. Abner is from Bainbridge, GA. He lives independently. Abner is likely as much of a favorite in Bainbridge as he is at Camp ASCCA. A playful and friendly guy, you’ll see that Abner has a kind heart. One comment touched me, in particular.

When I asked Abner what he liked about camp, he said he’d stay here 24/7. He then shares (I paraphrase), “But, you can’t do that. You have to let others have a chance to come here, too.” This is a guy that is remembered by everyone that meets him.

I’m so glad to be able to introduce you to Abner now. The “piggy-back ride” comment at the end is priceless.

Camp ASCCA has a new site! ASCCA Friends. It is our own personal social media network.
Looking for photos? Visit Camp ASCCA’s collection on Flickr! 15,000+ photos and growing every day!
How about Facebook? Did you know that Camp ASCCA is in Facebook? If you are too, please go on over and “Friend” Camp ASCCA and join the Camp ASCCA Facebook group, too.

This summer, we’ll be doing podcasts using Utterz. I’ll give them a prepaid phone they can carry with them to the activity areas. While taking photos and videos, they can also grab a quick audio interview easily embedded in the camp blog as well as the camp’s social network, ASCCA Friends.

It struck me that this is a very inexpensive way to add one more multimedia layer with fun interviews to the camp’s efforts. For instance, below you’ll see one of their first video offerings.

The idea behind the Utterz podcasts comes from a realization that the students have to manage their time. We’ve found that the time spent editing video, and creation of their converged news packages for media relations offerings to newspapers, limits the amount of time they have to do audio editing, too. I missed the podcasts and they had a pretty strong download history. So, using Utterz allows us to keep audio in the mix. We’ll give it a try and see how it goes. Maybe it will also drive some new traffic to the site.

Find more videos like this on ASCCA Friends

Jeremy joined in a panel with Amy Tenderich, from Diabetes Mine.

From his post, these three paragraphs – in particular – struck a cord.

When explaining social media, I use a Town Hall analogy. From a conversation with a friend, she wrote it out like this: Imagine a small New England town with a highly civically-active community. On a regular basis this tightly-knit community hosts Town Hall meetings to discuss current events, areas of concern, etc. Now imagine someone wholly unconnected to community coming in, raising a topic of concern and just leaving. Town Hall meeting members have every reason to be annoyed, incensed and even hostile.

Now take that Town Hall scenario, multiply it exponentially, and stick it online – where anyone and everyone can see it. The quaint little Town Hall is now a blog. And the outside, rude intruders are PR people – those that neither seem to care or understand the community, but are just following orders to get “ink” no matter what.

For healthcare, take that Town Hall scenario, and put it in the hospital ward. With some health blogs, you are either talking to the patient, or the patient’s relative.

In our work with Camp ASCCA, the patient is the camper and the patient’s relatives expands out to the entire family and that unique “family” one gains like physical therapists, doctors, nurses and many others while dealing with issues brought on by your disability. That family even involves donors and volunteers that make trips to Camp ASCCA possible for thousands each year. And, it even involves that area formerly known as B2B when dealing with vendors. Yes, we even address them in our social media strategy.

You just can’t talk with these audiences using a blast email or shotgun press release approach. After all, that’s talking “to” someone, isn’t it?

It is these communities of nonprofit and healthcare “family members” that may well match the blogosphere’s community aspects more than any other. They don’t want advertising. They don’t want to be pitched. What they want is to be a part of something and truly feel that they are making a difference.

I also see this as similar to what we encounter in fundraising. First rule: don’t be afraid to ask. What can they say? No? Well, it isn’t like I’ve never heard that before. But, you have to ask in the right way. And, there must be a relationship before you can ask. Well, if you want to have any hope of being successful.

On another front, Jeremy’s partner in the panel – Amy Tenderich – might be interested in something we’re going to start this coming week with the Southeaster Diabetes Education Services. They are going to begin blogging and video podcasting much the same way students have been doing it at Camp ASCCA’s Journal.

Both examples use blogs for stakeholder outreach – like the campers, counselors and parents of people with disabilities. For ASCCA, as an Easter Seals facility, we work with anyone and everyone to achieve the goal of providing services to people with disabilities. Examples of those services may be found in these posts

• Four-Wheeling :: It is a Realistic Recreation Activity for Spinal Cord Injury Patients and Campers
• USA’s Carmen Hughey :: Experiential Learning about Therapeutic Recreation at Camp ASCCA
• ASCCA’s Campus Is Both Therapeutic and Educational This Weekend
• Christine Geever Ziplines and Spreads Smiles during the 2007 Shepherd Spring Weekend

The best part about all of those posts is that they were created by students gaining experience and they involve multiple organizations and universities all doing one thing – making life a little bit better, and a little bit more fun, for people with disabilities.

The video below is one example. It comes from our intern, Cathy Cochran, from Sewanee. She’s doing some great work at Camp ASCCA. Cathy is only a sophomore. She has very little experience with video and production. Yet, look at what she’s done in only her first week.

I think this could be a really great summer for social media and Camp ASCCA.

ASCCA is going to run approximately 50,000 flyers a day, for three days, targeted at students from the following universities: University of Georgia, University of Florida, Troy State University, Montevallo, University of Alabama-Birmingham, University of North Alabama, University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) and Auburn University (Auburn).

This will give us over 150K impressions. Now, realistically, we’d like to run more – and target many more universities. But, the Facebook flyer program does have some limitations. I’ll discuss those. And, just so you’ll know, Camp ASCCA is not paying for this. A new tactic in our strategy of reaching students, I felt it best to cover this myself as a test. We’ll see how well it goes. The cost of this program equals about 1/2 of a week long campership. So, I thought it best to test the process, first. Still, that cost would be a small fraction of what we’d usually spend to advertise in college campus newspapers. More on that in a bit.

The image to your left is an example of one of the flyers. That is what students at UGA will see on Sunday through Tuesday when they log in to Facebook. It appears just below their lefthand menu. A nice placement, I think. Click the image and you’ll see all of our flyers. On Facebook, when students click the image, they are sent to a purpose built page on our site that offers greater detail. See ASCCA Public Relations Internships. In the future, I’d actually like to target the top 25 universities with PR programs. Maybe we will, still.

So, what are the limitations of the Facebook flyer program, as I see them? Well, currently you cannot target students beyond simply choosing a specific school, or schools. I find this a bit strange, since Facebook does have the demographic and lifestyle (interests) information of their audience. Ideally, I’d like to use that information to specifically target the students most likely to be interested in what ASCCA has to offer.

For instance, if we wanted to seek male counselors, I should be able to target a specific school, reach only males, and reach only those that have listed interests like: recreation, education, or even special education. Facebook is still relatively young and their flyers and advertising programs are still maturing. Right now, Facebook flyers are more of a broadcast tactic than a targeted one.

You might be wondering, “How effective is the Web for accomplishing ASCCA’s marketing and hiring needs?”

Today, Matt Rickman told me that he has yet to run a single ad in college newspapers during his counselor recruiting process for Summer ’07. That’s remarkable. Even more remarkable, Matt shared that he is ahead of his annual hiring targets. He would usually start college newspaper ads in April. This year, he may not run any of them. So, why is that? What is different this year?

Although we have sketchy data upon which to base this claim, so far the difference seems to be our Web site. Yep, apparently the site is accomplishing the goal of reaching potential counselors – just as we hoped it would. We’ll poll the counselors and program staff this summer to see exactly how many actually found us online.

I’ll report back in a week or so to let you know how our experiment with Facebook went this time around. For now, let me hear from you. What do you think about this tactic? Do you have any suggestions about other processes we may undertake to reach potential interns?

Did you know that Camp ASCCA is in Facebook? If you are too, please go on over and “Friend” Camp ASCCA. This way you may keep up with what we’re doing all the time. Join the Camp ASCCA Facebook group, too.

The blog by the parents has received 1,477 comments and the MSN message boards have 1,955 messages by 860 authors.

Will this eclipse the Terri Schiavo story, at least with regard to online social media discussion? Perhaps that’s not a fair comparison as the Schiavo story was a political story, after all. And, the Republicans no longer control Congress.

Ashley’s story has particularly galvanized the disability community. The reason for all of this may simply be because more media outlets have adopted social media tools on their Web sites. We’ll see.

For the past week, I’ve seen references to this story on TV and in the newspapers.

The parents have been overwhelmed by media attention. They started a blog to answer questions. So far, the one post has received 1477 comments. They are essentially handling crisis management through their blog. The post contains this statement to the media in that MSN blog. It actually comes off looking sort of like a social media news release.

(Note to members of the media and our web visitors: We are getting more emails and requests than we can possibly handle– more than 1500 in the 48 hrs since the LA Times story broke out. We want to attend to our lives and our kids as we should. This web site received more than a million hits and about 1000 comments were added in those 48 hrs! We truly appreciate the overwhelming support and the thoughtful comments we’ve been getting. Rest assured that we will read every one of your comments and they might be used in the future to help other families through a similar decision process.)

The long post in the blog features a key talking points list from the parent’s side of the controversy.

1. Ashley is doing well, healthy, happy, and lovingly cared for.
2. The “Ashley Treatment” is intended to improve our daughter’s quality of life and not to convenience her caregivers.
3. Providing our daughter with this treatment was an easy decision since the benefits by far outweigh the risk and short term discomfort associated with the surgery.
4. We wrote the article and published this web site to inform and help other families of “Pillow Angels” who might benefit from our experience.
5. With the overwhelming thoughtful support that we are receiving (90%+ of the comments and emails) we feel better than ever about what we did for Ashley, and we certainly do not feel defensive about it.
6. Please make sure to read the five emphasized paragraphs in the first two sections below, since they convey the essence of Ashley’s story.

Fox News had a pro/con debate on The Big Story. It is a called “Frozen in Time.” (Don’t know how long that link will stay active.) I know. It is Fox. But, the debate does show both sides of the issue.
Click the image below for a larger version. The parents have actually created a media release statement for the photos in their blog, too.

More about the blog: The parents have actually posted a quite lengthy explanation of their side of the story in their blog. It is located at MSN Spaces in the blog The “Ashley Treatment”, Towards a Better Quality of Life for “Pillow Angels”.

There is much more out there in the way of coverage. See Parents defend treatment to keep girl child-sized from CTV.ca (Canada). Also, here is the link to 276 different stories in Google News.

Let’s face it. This is a difficult story to address. I am willing to guess that – at Camp ASCCA, for instance – we would have staff, counselors, parents and campers with wildly differing views on the actions taken by the parents and doctors. Also, as medical science goes forward, these controversial treatments are likely to become more common.

The story is very emotionally charged. Here is an example of a small town newspaper site – in Beaufort, S.C., nowhere near Seattle – and the story spurred on 739 reads by visitors and 35 wildly differing comments (as of this writing).

I am not a medical ethicist, to be sure. I can see both sides and understand where their feelings and opinions are coming from on this story.

Several things interest me about the story. First, how the parents and news outlets are handling the story via social media tools. That Beaufort newspaper is hosted on the Drupal platform, for example. The story I linked to actually comes from a user’s blog – jedahetoca’s blog – not the newspaper’s staff. Many news sites have video from their newscasts addressing the story. Online news sites are filled with stories, if only the AP syndicated story. Opinions are all over the place.

Second, I do have experience working with people that have these sorts of disabilities. I know that they can have a comfortable life – even exciting life – without any of the treatments Ashley has received. I also try to put myself in the shoes of the parents (caregivers).

I don’t mean to waffle or ride the fence on this issue, I just don’t know how to feel. On the one hand, I remember a camper of mine at ASCCA, long ago. He had a feeding tube and was quite the active camper during the summer back in the 1980′s. However, he was ambulatory and high functioning. I also remember my first two campers who were encephalopathic. They were both in wheelchairs, profoundly retarded and also had epilepsy with gran mal seizures. However, they did not have feeding tubes. I took them horseback riding, swimming and canoeing, for example.

Then, I remember a camper who lived well into his fifties. His parents took care of him, with little help from anyone else, and he lived life in bed and on a stretcher. We took him tree climbing, horseback riding and canoeing, among many other activities. I kid you not.

So, how do you feel? Please click the “Comments” link below. Whether you’re interested in the social media / citizen journalism aspects of the story or the overall ethics of the treatment, I’d like to hear from you.

We all have memories from our college days. This trip is one of my favorite memories. Taking a busload of kids and adults to Disney World is unbelievable fun.

I went up to ASCCA the night before the trip and again the next morning for their departure. We have about five video interviews that I’ll post over at the the Camp ASCCA Journal in the coming days with those on the trip.

Barclay Bentley is also on the trip and he will be bringing back videos from their adventures. So, be on the lookout for those coming soon.

I know, if you’re like me, you wish you could have been on the trip. It is always fun.

We’re trying to create a simpler, cleaner navigation layout that helps you find what you’re looking for on the site.

Check out the new look.

What we want to provide is a simple way for anyone to quickly update the front page with the latest information. The new tools we’re using – widgets – should allow this to work. And, the people adding the information don’t have to know much / any HTML coding to add the information to the page.

The ASCCA site is now a collection of WordPress blog installments. This allows the staff to use the rather simple (to use, at least) software to update the site. And widgets allow them to place new information ‘almost’ anywhere they want it in the blog’s template.

The Oscar Dunn Environmental Center now has their own site, separate from the ASCCA site. This was done to differentiate the Dunn Center from ASCCA as we continue to bring in non-disabled groups to use that facility. Now the Dunn Center staff can put up their own videos and audio. We haven’t yet fully shown all the center has to offer. This new site will help them illustrate the beauty and diverse offerings in ASCCA’s new multi-million dollar facility.

It really is quite amazing. People are always stunned when they first drive into ASCCA. Then, to see this amazing wildlife, nature and conference facility right on the Lake Martin shoreline .. well, it gets their attention. God bless Rotary International. They made the Dunn Center a reality.

Give us your feed back. Check out the new front page and critique away. Thanks.

You have got to go follow this story.

Students at Gallaudet University are protesting. No, not just carrying signs and such. They have taken over College Hall on campus. It is the 1960′s in D.C.

The Washington Post (radio) has an interview with some of the students and faculty.

“Now with us this morning through their sign language interpreters (Emphasis is mine.) are LaToya Plummer, a student at Gallaudet University, and one of the faculty members, Dr. Jeff Lewis, who’s with us as well.”

Yep, a radio interview with interpreters. I’d love to have heard that one. The audio is actually there. I missed it. Seriously, this is a great story.

LaToya Plummer explained the reasons behind the protest. “Well, the protest is all about a flawed process for the selection of the next president. It’s not only that but the lack of leadership capabilities that we’ve seen in Dr. Fernandes over the last 11 years.” (Source)

One of the issues is audism. Haven’t heard that one before, have you?

What is audism? A simple definition would be that it is a negative or oppressive attitude towards deaf people by either deaf or hearing people and organizations, and a failure to accomodate them. People who have audist attutides (sic) are considered to be audists. For example, the refusal or failure to use sign language in the presence of a sign language-dependent person is considered audism. (Source)

The following excerpt kind of says it all with regard to how strongly the students feel about this issue:

Jane Fernandez is the president-designate of the University who is scheduled to take office in January. Protestors (sic) deny that they ever charged that Fernandez, who learned sign language in her twenties, is not, as some put it, “deaf enough.” (Emphasis is mine.) But they do say that Gallaudet is more than a school. It is a symbol of what deaf people can achieve and the president must be an advocate for all deaf people. The student protestors (sic) and many faculty members are angry that they were excluded from the selection process. (Source)

We need to follow this story and think about how you would handle it if you were the media relations person for Gallaudet. I truly wish I could be there. I even tried to chat with Erin Caldwell, who is in D.C., to see what news coverage is like up there. Erin, of course, was asleep. The nerve of that girl.

(Google Blog Search for Gallaudet and Technorati Search for Gallaudet)