Capacity Building Programs

In addition to public service campaigns, Ad Council has a proven reputation for leveraging community resources to increase the core management capacities of Rochester’s nonprofit community. In 2011 alone, the Ad Council worked directly with more than 180 nonprofit organizations in Upstate New York, providing a variety of strategic marketing and communications services. We’ve developed a series of programs designed to address specific strategic planning and communications challenges faced by nonprofits, including:

Academy – This professional training program provides a series of interactive and informative sessions on a variety of critical topics, from fundraising to market research.

Brand Development Workshops – Utilizing a full-day retreat format preceded by a market research effort, this program results in consensus on an organizational brand framework.

Certificate in Strategic Nonprofit Leadership – This unique 16-week certificate program, offered through a partnership of the Ad Council of Rochester and Roberts Wesleyan College, is tailored to develop the careers, expertise and service capabilities of current and emerging leaders in nonprofit organizations.

Communications Audits – This comprehensive review of an organization’s communication programs yields recommendations for immediate and long-term changes to enhance effectiveness and efficiency.

Communications Planning – This program works with a nonprofit to collaboratively develop a formal, written communications plan, tailored to the needs and resources of the group.

Customer Touchpoint Workshops– This program takes a systematic approach to aligning your customers’ experiences – all of them – with what you want them to believe about your brand.

Nonprofit Workshops – These longer-form training programs delve deeper into a particular topic, utilizing expert presenters and interactive components to build your marketing skills and confidence.

On-Site Training – Through our staff and industry relationships, we can develop an on-site training program tailored to a topic of particular need for an organization.

Strategic Planning – A strategic growth plan is lacking for many nonprofit organizations, large and small. Rarer still is the strategic plan that is concise in its language and regularly used by both staff and board as part of the management of the organization.

Strategic Roundtables – This half-day “think tank” provides a forum where a volunteer team of marketing and communications professionals helps a nonprofit with a particular challenge or opportunity.

Community Impact Campaigns

In partnership with collaborations made up of nonprofits from around the community, our community impact campaigns leverage hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributed resources to develop multi-year public service campaigns to address topics and issues of critical importance to the community. In every case, we work with our collaborative partners to develop measurable objectives that demonstrate meaningful progress toward important community goals. For example:

• The Water Education Collaborative has been featured in over a quarter million dollars in local advertising and H2OHero.org has had an average of 1,100 unique visitors per month since February of 2008!
• The Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning noted a 65% decrease in the incidence of childhood lead poisoning since the multi-media public service campaign was launched in 2002, and a decrease in the number of children with blood lead levels above the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) level of concern, from 1,234 in 2002 to 426 in 2007.

Learn more about current Ad Council Community Impact projects.