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Towne Group earns nine EMMY nominations

Towne Group’s Media teams are once again well represented in the EMMY award nominations by the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). Hearty congratulations to all the nominated individuals (as well as to all the Towne Group professionals behind the scenes).

This year’s nominations acknowledged Towne Group’s work for two of our keystone clients: The Pentagon Channel (5 nominations) and the Radio and TV Production Office at the Defense Media Activity (4 nominations), both of which are headquartered at Ft. Meade. Here’s a roster of the primary productions honored, their EMMY categories and the Towne Group team members nominated:

+  Military Segment: “Ronda Hartzel” … A Naval Officer fights cancer with optimism. Alicia Brown, Yvonne McGee and Steve Greisiger. See this moving and inspiring story below...

 

+  Military Program/Special: “Close Combat” … An eight week series on military combative training.  Linda Hernandez, Brigitte Lyles and Les DePhillips.

+  Military Program/Special:  “RECON – Future Soldier” … A documentary exploring advanced research for the next generation of war fighters and peace keepers. Joe Braband and Sean Root.

+ Public Current Affairs:  “Operation Oliver” … Veterans take on a stressed neighborhood in East Baltimore. Terese Schlachter, Ali Jaafar and Steve Greisiger.

+  Interstitial: “Kiss” … Band members talk about their troop support program. David Silverstein, Terry Turner and Arik Dashevsky.

+ Community/Public Service: “Cents” … A PSA campaign promoting features of the post 9/11 GI Bill. Lee Whitman and Jason Stoughton.

+  Writer – Short Form: “Chicken Knows Best” … An educational PSA campaign promoting vaccinations. Jason Stoughton.

The winners will be announced and awards presented on June 16 at the Newseum in Washington.

(You can see all of these productions, and more,  at Towne Group’s YouTube Channel.) …Charlie Towne

Kudos to George Pittman, Volunteer of the Year

Howard County’s Association of Community Services is once again honoring local individuals and teams who devote themselves to volunteering and/or selflessly serving our community as employees of local public-spirited organizations. This year marks the 37^th year the Audrey Robbins Humanitarian Awards have been presented. Towne Group is honored to belong to ACS and particularly proud to sponsor the Association’s Volunteer of the Year award, which this year goes to George Pittman of the Howard County Public Schools.

Congratulations, George. Your tireless spirit and dedication to others are what make Howard County a great place to live and raise our families.

The other winners are equally deserving and I want to give them each a shout out…

+  Donna Michener (Bridgeway Community Church Community Cupboard) -- Employee of the Year

+  Cold Weather Shelter (Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center) – Volunteer Team of the Year

+  Maryland Access Point (Howard County Office on Aging) – Employee Team of the Year

ASC has produced this charming video to showcase the winners.

 

If you want to honor these admirable individuals and teams in person, come to the award luncheon on June 20th. There’s still time to sign on as a sponsor of the luncheon… go here to do so. You have until June 8 to secure your tickets for the event. Let’s turn out in force to pay homage to these deserving people.  AnneTowne

 

Don't ignore two valuable human assets in managing your non-profit

Non-profit leaders are facing a vastly changed world today. Thanks to the Internet and social media, among other factors, managers have to plan strategies and react to changing developments much faster than in the more contemplative, slow-moving era of, say, 1999. And even as strategic demands and our range of responsibilities in the social service  sector have seemed to accelerate,  budgets for many of us have seemed to shrink just as quickly.

But there’s expert help readily available, and it’s free. Virtually all organizations have access to these resources but, ironically, all too few use them to maximum advantage in our altered business environment. If you’re familiar with my work for non-profit organizations, you may be able to guess where I’m going here--our Boards of Advisors and our very talented and  enthusiastic volunteers.  My advice: be sure to make ample use of the skills and know-how of both these contingents to help you tackle the rapidly emerging challenges of 21^st century non-profit governance. They can be highly productive, experienced, and willing extensions of your salaried team. 

An effective board today has to be more than the Hollywood cliché of  well-coiffed and well heeled “rainmakers”. It makes perfect sense to recruit for contemporary business and strategic savvy. The same goes for the volunteers you attract to your mission. You surely have an energetic and eager contingent of volunteers; if you don’t, then get moving and recruit them. Get to know them and you will quickly see that many are highly skilled in professional disciplines that match up well with your challenges. So draw on this collective know-how, which likely extends into areas of cultural or demographic sophistication that will help you not only in fundraising, a still essential focus, but also in membership development and direct mission performance.        ...Anne Towne

Towne Group Media produces holiday broadcast messages from Congress to our troops worldwide

We’re especially proud of the work our PSA production team has done in creating short holiday greetings to our troops from more than a hundred Members of Congress. Shot under the auspices of the Radio and TV Production Office of the Department of Defense, the spots—along with similar messages from 60+ Senators and a dozen state governors--will be broadcast over more than 1000 outlets worldwide (and at sea) that serve our deployed soldiers, sailors, and their families.

All of us at Towne Group—in both the Media and Management divisions of the company—would like to add our best wishes and Seasons Greetings for all our troops and their loved ones at home and abroad.

Our heartfelt thanks for your dedication and service to our nation.   ...  Anne and Charlie Towne

CAC of Howard Co. honored with humanitarian award

Towne Group is very proud to congratulate the Community Action Council (CAC), which last week was awarded the county’s first-ever Human Rights Award. The Baltimore Sun ran an extended feature about the award and CAC director Bita Dayhoff. You can read the story here; Bita is pictured below with Howard County Executive Ken Ullman.

Among the CAC’s 2011 accomplishments: serving 16,000 individuals through its extensive Food Bank programs, supplying utility assistance to 4600 households, and preventing more than 400 evictions. You might also be interested to know that the CAC was recently named by the Sun as one of Baltimore’s “Best Workplaces”.

As a Board Member of the Community Action Council, I’m especially gratified by this well-deserved recognition of Bita and all the members of her team. Thank you, Bita.  ...Anne Towne

Maggie Dore advises the Secretary of the Air Force’s senior staff on TV story placement

Towne Group Senior Producer Maggie Dore spent the afternoon of October 20 sharing her media knowhow with senior Air Force Public Affairs leadership. The venue: a workshop panel mounted by the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF).

The topic of the day: what the Air Force team can do to help professional journalists and producers uncover and develop stories about AF activities and topics of interest. “The overriding key to success,“ Maggie told the senior Air Force leaders, ”is fostering confidence and a relationship of trust with the media decision makers who can take your story ideas to a wider audience.”

Maggie is well qualified as a source of story placement savvy and media industry insights. A former  network news producer for CBS, Fox News and Bloomberg Television, she has been a mainstay at Towne Group Media  since the beginning of our work for the Pentagon Channel in 2002.

The most important take-away that Maggie shared?  “If you want a story covered, provide good stills or video, or make it easy for news crews to come take their own.  Good pictures drive television stories.”

Towne Group and the DMA facility dedication at Ft. Meade

Towne Group principals Anne and Charlie Towne took part last Thursday morning in the formal dedication of the new Defense Media Activity (DMA) headquarters at Ft. Meade, MD. The DMA facility will serve as operations center for the Pentagon Channel and the American Forces Network, and the new home base for our broadcast professionals--now numbering more than fifty--who have supported the Pentagon Channel since 2002.

Pictured l. to r.: Anne Towne, Charlie Towne, and Gene Brink, Director of News and Content for the Pentagon Channel.

he new DMA headquarters, which consolidates most of the media operations of the Department of Defense, is the largest facility of its kind on the East coast. The building was dedicated by DMA Acting Director Melvin Russell, who praised the uniformed military, government civilian and contract professionals who work every day to create news, information and entertainment of interest to the men and women of the US military and their families worldwide.

Mr. Russell also pointed out that the work of the DMA continues a long tradition reaching back to 1861 and the Civil War, when Union soldiers in Missouri decided to print a newspaper about their activities. They called the newspaper Stars and Stripes.

All of us at Towne Group are singularly proud to carry on this 150-year tradition.  Charlie Towne

Strategic planning when deadlines loom: not advisable, but sometimes unavoidable

 
In the consulting business we’re often faced with tight deadlines. In a recent case Towne Group Management was asked by a client to complete a strategic plan in about a month—six weeks at the outside. We weren’t surprised to hear that updating the organization’s existing plan had been on the agenda for about a year but that other priorities had intervened. This is a familiar scenario in the resource-tight environment of non-profit organizations today. The other pressure factor in this case was just as familiar to us. The deadline for a revised plan was suddenly looming large, because it was a condition for continued support by a funding agency.

Our team was glad to be able to help, and we dove right into the project. After a review of the existing plan and the progress to date on its revision, we decided that a stakeholder survey made sense. We needed to assemble an instrument quickly. It would need to be brief, easily executed,  and able to yield substantive, revealing information when compared to the organization’s previous—and much more ambitious and exhaustive—survey conducted five years before. Thank goodness for the “new wave” of PC-based, self-compiling survey tools. Suffice it to say the tool we used was invaluable. [I’ll have more to say on the topic of surveys in a future post].

Our next step: assembling Board and staff leadership for an intense four-hour planning session. There we reviewed our survey findings; revisited and updated the organization’s previous SWOT analysis; discussed the tangible accomplishments of the last half-decade; and planned a leadership retreat where we could knock out the nuts-and-bolts details of a strategic  plan for the next three years. 

Armed with its new plan, the client can (must) now attend to the obligatory follow-up activities attendant on top-level strategy: annual implementation plans complete with resources, timelines, and performance measures.  And there’s at least one more thing on this organization’s agenda: scheduling the next strategic planning exercise well in advance, avoiding the last-minute “fire drill”.   Anne Towne

A little planning dissolves limitations and barriers

I just returned from a wonderful and rewarding trip to Alaska with my 80-year-old mom. Because Mom has mobility issues, we planned carefully to ensure that we would encounter only minimal limitations because of her condition.  For one thing, we decided to use a wheelchair and to take advantage of every available provision for disabled assistance along the way. We studied maps and tour routes in advance to ensure we knew what was in store for us on the ground.

 It was a new way of travelling for Mom and me both, and our small portion of preparation paid off in a big way. Because of our preparation, we knew how to get that little bit of extra help we could call on all along the way. We were able to bypass the long lines and longer waits that frustrated fully “able” folks, using wheelchair-accessible shortcuts to our accommodations, and generally discovering new ways of doing things that eased us through what could have been bedeviling barriers to our full and equal enjoyment of the trip. Our Alaska adventure stands out as one of my favorite vacations ever.

Later, as our friends asked about the trip, it got me to thinking… what made our vacation so satisfying was the upfront time Mom and I  devoted to advance planning. Our experience reinforced what I often tell Towne Group Management’s clients and the non-profit community at large: a little planning will take you a long way. Regular, scheduled attention to your objectives—themselves clearly articulated in another planning process—will expose and help you surmount operational barriers in your path. You should make this preparation a standard management habit and do it regularly—at staff meetings, Board meetings, and even custom training and development session for your team.

Put this in practice and the little bumps and detours along the way won’t throw you off course. You’ll be ready to adapt and adjust. And, as in our mother-daughter trip to Alaska, things will go a lot smoother than you thought possible.   Anne Towne

Update: Towne Group completes its Pentagon Channel relocation

       Towne Group Media has completed the long-anticipated move of its Pentagon Channel operations from Alexandria, Virginia to Fort Meade in Maryland. If you’re familiar with other Ft. Meade relocations under the Defense Department’s BRAC program, you’ll have some inkling of the complexity and implications of the move.

      Our actual physical relocation was the relatively easy part, compared with the many months of groundwork our team of 55 did to get ready for the move. This preparation included a good deal of planning for how to manage the cutover from Virginia to Maryland-based operations with no interruption in service for our 25 million military households around the world. We managed the final run-up to that moment pretty well, basically running two teams in parallel—one, back in Virginia, operating on the air as usual, while the other, some fifty miles away, was training and performing innumerable dry runs. When the moment came to “flip the switch”, it came off without a hitch.

     Still, it’s important to remember that our move entailed much more than a physical and logistical relocation. The people of Towne Group Media are our success-drivers; their experience and skills make The Pentagon Channel what it is. Many of them are Northern Virginia residents, and active members of their communities. Many have families and kids in school. It would be naïve of our leadership team not to expect major impacts on their lives outside the Pentagon Channel studios.

     We devoted the year leading up to the move, communicating about our Ft. Meade destination and its surrounding residential communities, as well as discussing the commuting conditions and options they would face. Our Pentagon Channel working environment has always been relatively flexible within the time-sensitive broadcast constraints of our work. Today, we’re taking pains to encourage even more workplace flexibility wherever this is possible. So far this approach has helped ease the transition.   Charlie Towne