Shorebank hiring communications supervisor

Shore Bank is the country's oldest and largest community & environmental bank and serves 12 Chicago communities as well as Detroit & Cleveland.

We are now seeking a Communications Supervisor for our office at 7054 S. Jeffery in Chicago. This position will be responsible for drafting and authoring corporate communications and marketing vehicles in a wide variety of mediums (written, oral, electronic) and conveying ShoreBank’s brand and message. The Communications Supervisor will maintain and update the content of information on the holding company and bank’s websites. In addition, the Communications Supervisor will write, edit and assist with the development and maintenance of the ShoreBank Intranet site. Will assist with the design and implementation of an internal communications program and strategy, and assist the entire marketing department in shared projects or special assignments. The Communications Supervisor will manage internal and external third party relationships and provide communications counsel and coaching as needed to employees.

Qualifications include a B.S. in Journalism or equivalent work experience, although a graduate degree is preferred. Four to six years experience with an agency, nonprofit or corporation. Demonstrated proficiency in website technology, graphics packages (i.e. Photoshop), Desktop publishing packages and Microsoft Office Suite.

ShoreBank offers career advancement opportunities, work & family balance, competitive salaries, a diverse workplace, business casual dress, and an attractive flexible benefits package that includes medical & dental, vision, tuition reimbursement and a 401(k) plan.

Interested candidates should submit resume to: elsa_luna@sbk.com

Listservs to join; Woods Fund News

Just a perfunctory moan about the need to keep this up to date. Sorry readers--if you're out there!

I just joined the listserv of TechSoup, whose motto is "Technology served the way nonprofits need it." It's pretty geeky, but -- free stuff!

Most people seem to know about TechSoup and its parent, CompuMentor--because they get their free software this way. I can't believe I ever worked at a nonprofit that paid for Microsoft Office or Adobe PageMaker--since they are available as donations at TechSoup. But the San Francisco nonprofit also has a lot of useful information on how to use and think about technology.

I wouldn't write about any email list that only makes the dinner spectrum of spinach; this one is more like a steak. That is to say, it's good and solid. If you like to eat (or read blogs in this case to stretch a metaphor) you'll love it. It's not dessert, though. For that, I read I Want Media, a simple list of news-related headlines that mostly describes how the Internet is, allegedly, rolling over the gray old newspaper-TV-industrial complex. I like to tell myself that this has some relevance to my job, but the truth is it's just as much fun as going to the aquarium to watch feeding time at the shark tank. A slightly more sober daily treatment of media business news and media policy is compiled--right here in Chicago-- by Kevin Taglang of the Benton Foundation.

I suppose that nonprofit tech (the subject of a lot of nonprofit oriented blogs out there) is slightly higher on the list of organizations' priorities than communications but perhaps not too much. We're looking forward to having Marnie Webb from TechSoup at our conference June 7-8, 2006 on the Columbia College Chicago campus, by the way.

On an unrelated note: big changes at Woods Fund of Chicago. Effective March 8, Ricardo Millette has left the position of president and Deborah Harrington, formerly vice president, has been appointed interim president, effective immediately. Many people appreciated Ricardo as a foundation executive who showed up at community meetings; among Deborah's other work she recently has been leading the foundation's South Side Capacity Building initiative. Phillip Thomas of Woods, meanwhile, has gone to Chicago Community Trust as senior program officer. We're hoping he will be our person at the Trust!

Stories from Delivering on the Pitch

This morning Keith Hartenbarger, former CLTV and Trib Corp staffer, is leading a workshop on how to work with television and radio for our nonprofit communicators.

I've been thinking that by our very nature of being nonprofit communicators we're always behind the scenes--and since we're not at for-profits are groups are not always that high-profile, either. Well, I'm going to change that. Here's a few stories of the folks at our sessions and what they're working on.

Government counts, too. Here's Eileen Sotak's story--and picture!

She is an enforcement supervisor with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she has worked for 28 years but is just now taking on media work. "We really don't have a media person as such, so a lot of members of management get involved with media outreach," she said. What htey do, she says, is "the investigation, mediation, settlement, and or litigation of employment discrimination."


We might work with her on repositioning the agency or finding some new words of fewer syllables to explain it--particularly because she says their media goals include, of course as for many of us, getting their success stories out to the media but also making sure businesses know what they should and shouldn't do, and programs the agency has available to help them. They also want people who have been discriminated against to know that there is a governemt entity they can go to.