CNPE's Destination:Excellence 2018

The Center for Nonprofit Excellence (CNPE) is an organization that helps nonprofit leaders and organizations become the best version of themselves, through consultation, events, and other professional development activities. Last Friday, May 18, we were honored to host the Center for Nonprofit Excellence Destination:Excellence 2018 class for a day of learning. Destination:Excellence is CNPE’s flagship program for Executive Directors, CEOs, or Senior Leadership.

Marketing, PR, and Communications were the themes of the day, so what better place to host than our office? Every time we host a class, I’m thrilled that we built in classroom space to our offices.

We began the day with a Branding workshop, taking the class through enough of our process to help them understand the value of Brand Strategy. Kelly led the class through one of the branding exercises we lead for our clients, called a “Semantic Differential”. If you’re interested in our branding work, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Our next session was “Effective Components of Marketing,” which showcases how we view all of our tools and tactics to best serve organizational goals. Highlights included:

• Marketing your story
• The Marketing Funnel
• The Digital Ecosystem (and how we perceive its usefulness)
• How to keep your brand fresh

After lunch, Ben Wilson took the class through “Social Media: Tools and Approach,” which was a huge hit, and took us way over our allotted time. No problem, because the class learned quite a bit, and had insights of their own to share. Ben’s highlights included:

• What VIA sees in social
• Social strategy
• Measuring value
• Making it work
• Reporting
• Advanced “stuff”

The VIA Studians were able to take a break when Hannah Nitzken from CNPE took the state to drop wisdom on Public Relations. Nonprofits always have a story to tell, and Hannah led the class with humor and wisdom.

Closing out the day, our own Johanna Boone gave the pros and cons of “Working with an Agency.” Nonprofits have their own unique challenges, but since we have proven success in that space, we were able to share our experience before sending the class home, hopefully with lots to think about for the next fiscal year!

If you lead or support a nonprofit, we would enthusiastically recommend that you get in touch with CNPE. Become a member and find a program that fits your time and budget. From personal experience, their passion and expertise will help your organization survive and thrive! If you didn’t know, last year we helped refresh CNPE’s brand and built a new website for them including a member portal.

Hopefully our love of nonprofits and support of their missions shines in our work. If you’d like to have a class, meetup, something something in our office, it never hurts to ask. ? We’re also happy to speak or present at your next event. Let us know what subject matter is most useful to you!