Fight Famine in Niger – You Will Save So Many Children’s Lives


By Betsy Raymond Stevenson, posted August 10, 2010

I have never used RS Snapshot for fundraising, but am making an exception this week.  Please share this post so that it will be seen by as many people as possible. Thank you.

Nicholas Kristoff ran a post in ‘On the Ground,’, his New York Times blog, by Shawn Baker, a director for Hellen Keller International, who has lived and worked in Africa for 25 years, nine of them in one of the world’s poorest countries, Niger.  You can read that post here. Baker and Kristoff are sounding an alarm about the onset of  a severe famine throughout that country. Niger is north of Nigeria, bordering the Sahara desert.  There is so much suffering in the world calling for our attention that Niger is easy to overlook.

My personal stake in asking you to give now, while so many lives can still be saved, comes from a mere week spent in Niger during my Pfizer Global Fellowship in 2004. That week was spent interviewing staff, volunteers and beneficiaries of  local not-for-profits teaching AIDS prevention skills to their fellow Haussa and Tuareg tribe members.  In my experience, nothing makes a crisis real like knowing individuals who are affected.  I can’t bear the thought of what  is about to happen to the people I met and the people they care so much about.

My goal in this post is to introduce you to some of these people.  Following is an article based on my interviews with Hed Tamat and three video snipits of their troupe  (taken accidentally!) when I was accompanying them to a village where they would give an AIDS awareness musical theater show.  Read on …

Excellent commentary on business and the web


By Betsy Raymond Stevenson, posted July 16, 2010

“Twitter, Twitter Little Stars” in Bloomberg Businessweek, by Felix Gillette — as customers make or break brands online, companies rush to hire social media directors….and figure out what they do

“On Language, the Web is at War with Itself” on NPR, by Linton Weeks

Selling PR to R&D


By Betsy Raymond Stevenson, posted June 28, 2010

Who else has had to convince a skeptical PhD or MD that, without a compelling personal story, media outreach won’t be effective? If you have ever felt that your first task in a presentation was to demonstrate that you don’t wear mouse ears at work, this post is for you.

To be fair, Research and Development management is right to be cautious about how they reach out to reporters. The list of what they cannot talk about is long. And, when they can talk, they must keep in mind the regulations around pre-approval promotion.  PR firms that know their way through the ever increasing restrictions around product promotion and new product launches, are often unfamiliar with pipeline communication regulations.

In media interview training, I advise researchers to find analogies for their work to make it easier to understand. I use the same approach to explain the importance of storytelling to researchers. This is almost always a tough sell. To be effective a researcher must base his or her opinion on data.  Not on emotion or wishful thinking.  Storytelling can look  frivolous, at best, at worst like pandering.

Here is the analogy I use to explain the role of storytelling to researchers.  If it looks helpful to you, feel free to use it and please share here how you would improve or expand on it.

Authentic, compelling personal stories may not be as hard to discover as a new therapy, but they take research.

Read on …
RSHC copyright © 2009