Get online professional development from IABC Advance

Speaker: Kirsten Major, Communications Strategist, Josh Walker Digital Strategy Over the past decade, starting with major players such as Slack, Yammer, and Salesforce, there has been a movement to adapt and offer social media engagement-style platforms for enterprise communications. With Covid, the trend has accelerated. With this comes an unspoken, fatal-flaw level problem. Today's employees want a whole-person approach to work life. They expect engagement, recognition, stimulation, even recreation. New comms tools and intranets meet those needs with social media-style elements that mirror online life outside of work. Social media is paid for by advertising. The longer users spend on the platform, the more money can be made. Social media sites are built to circumvent executive-level decision-making brain function and appeal to our more survival-level brain directives. Everything we know about social media and effective focus tells us that their use causes catastrophic wastes of time at work...so why are we bringing them into our workplaces? Read more

Speaker: Catherine Ducharme, Co-Founder, Fluency Leadership Massive disruption and pervasive uncertainty vaulted the communications role and contribution right on stage, under the brightest of lights, in 2020. Never before have communicators been so valuable to their organizations, earning new equity as connectors, trusted advisors, employee advocates and thoughtful communicators. It has handed us a once-in-a-career opportunity to leap from strategic advisor to influential business advisor. The question now is how do we sustain and maximize this opportunity?   To be fully expressed business leaders, we can’t simply focus on the craft of communications, instead we need to seize the broader opportunity of leadership and what it means to lead through this new distributed, tumultuous reality. It’s about time to embrace a new language of leadership and build a heightened sense of self-awareness, clarity, curiosity and empathy.   This session outlines the leadership fluencies required to grow into this new space and multiply our influence as business leaders. Read more

Speaker: Matisse Hamel-Nelis, Project Manager, Inclusive Workplaces, Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) Imagine if your business could reach millions of potential clients your competitors are missing, just by changing your outlook on the world? Fifteen percent of the population lives with some form of disability (sensory, motor, neurological or other). The UN calls them the world’s largest minority.  You’ve no doubt heard of companies being sued for inaccessible websites, but what about social media content? Or annual reports, strategic plans, podcasts and videos?  These are just some of the projects we work on as communicators, but how often do you think about accessibility when you're creating a post, producing a video, or sharing a PDF?   Attendees will learn:   About accessible content and why it’s so important How to understand the difference between accessible and inaccessible content The key steps involved in creating accessible Word documents, PDFs, and social media posts How to create accessible digital content Read more

Speaker: Cecilia Lui, Founder & Director, ILIA Connect In the era that is Covid-19, everyone has been pushed to the virtual space for their professional, personal and social needs.  Yet, engagement has been a top challenge reported for virtual communication throughout the pandemic. Whether we are part of the work-from-home culture with a daily need to show up for meetings and presentations, or that we crave social connections and regularly attend networking events, adapting our skills and optimizing our ability to communicate with equal or more effectiveness in the virtual world has become a critical skill we need to master.  In this session, we will learn the elements that help elevate our ability to step up and show up in the virtual world.  The speaker shares how her communications and cross-cultural work complements each other in helping us gain visibility and create impact in our virtual communication. Read more

Speaker: Caelan Huntress, Speaker, Author, Entrepreneur The present moment is what makes a live presentation matter. If you send a prerecorded video to someone, they can ignore you in favor of a thousand other things competing for their attention. But if you invite someone to play with you, collaboratively, right now in the present moment, you can make them forget every other distraction. By using the Power of Play, and inviting interaction from your attendees, your next virtual presentation will be engaging, exciting, and full of smiles. During this session, I will lead the audience through a series of ten interactive games that are designed to encourage contribution and connection among the attendees. I will also provide everyone a copy of my Zoom Host Checklist, full of games and exercises to keep an audience's attention. Read more

Speakers: Ngaire Crawford, Insights Director, Australia and New Zealand, Isentia and Philip Clark, Strategic Communications Manager, Sport New Zealand It's about time that the fair representation of women was a discussion no one needs to have. But we know that women are still underrepresented in a range of sectors, especially sport. The New Zealand government committed to improving the value and visibility of women in sport through a major strategy released released in 2018, this includes a major study into the way women are represented in sports media.   In this session Sport New Zealand and research partner Isentia talk through key elements of the strategy, and the research and evaluation designed to change current media behaviour, and what we've learned in the first 2 years of this work. This communications journey deals with strategy, influence, stakeholder management, using clear evidence and evaluation, and trying to make meaningful change with a particularly tricky audience - media! Read more