The Traveling Trainers: Madeline Stanionis and Sharon Adam

The following conversation with traveling trainers Madeline Stanionis and Sharon Adam offers a unique and amusing insight into how two experienced trainers go from city to city, meet new people, and present their material over and over. Their tongue-in-cheek approach should appeal to any nonprofit staff person who has attended a workshop and wondered how a trainer can have so much energy and focus. The lessons they share are helpful to any nonprofit staff member who trains others, or to any staff members who are considering training programs.

Tell us about your traveling workshops. What is it like to run one?

Madeline:

Sharon and I have joked about getting tour t-shirts like you would buy when seeing a rock concert. It's actually a pretty apt analogy. Similar factors come into play: unpredictable elements like setting and weather can truly make a difference; the audience really feeds and inspires our delivery; and it's always a challenge to keep the show fresh while on the road. I have to admit, I do want to greet each new group with something like: "Hello New York City! Are you ready to ROCK?"

Sharon:

Our San Francisco area audience gets a lot out of our workshops. But like any ambitious rock star, sometimes you have to leave the city and make sure the message is getting out there beyond the cities. E-mail and the Web easily overcome geographical distances, but in order to teach about online giving, it helps to have a face in the conversation and it helps to give people the opportunity to gather locally and learn and talk about online tools and practices. At some point in all our work, we all have to take some time to leave our desks and engage in conversation about what we do and why, and the workshops are my opportunity to do that with others in the nonprofit community.

How do you make the workshop content relevant to the city you're in?

Madeline: With any workshop, I take a look at the attending organizations' Web sites prior to the workshop (doesn't everyone do that?), and then I mention my findings and comments throughout the workshop. So it's relevant to the particular attendees already. But I also have a couple of other "local" tricks:

• I read the local newspaper and alternative weekly newspaper to get a sense of the hot issues in town, and then I try to bring them up in the context of my workshop. For example, "Activating your constituents via e-mail about urgent/topical issues" is a common topic in the workshop. To make it relevant to a local issue, I might use the example that you could be providing e-mailed insights to your list about the open space controversy.
• I get to know and appreciate their city, and I bring it up. I might say something like, "I'm really enjoying your summer storms here! I know that you probably get tired of it, but it's so refreshing to a California girl like me." It’s a little cheesy, I know. But it seems to break the ice, and makes my presentation seem a little less canned.

How do participants vary from city to city? Do you change the style of your workshop to accommodate regional differences?

Madeline:

Audiences vary from workshop to workshop, let alone from coast to coast, and we've certainly seen our share of geographic differences. Let's face it, what plays in San Francisco might not work in Pittsburgh because of geographical style differences. And it certainly can be an initial hurdle. But I also believe that delivering good content, being sincere, reading your audience, and adjusting as you go will help overcome those differences. In fact, one of my clients attended our Boston workshop earlier this year and confided in me after the event that she'd been a little worried that my in-your-face style might offend what she called "button-down New England types," but we managed to meet in the middle style-wise.

Sharon:

You learn really quickly from participants' reactions what their learning style is. We have a set curriculum for the workshops. But like any good teachers, we've learned (and continue to learn) how to read each audience and really get a feel for how they learn best, be it from PowerPoint presentations and printouts, from anecdotes, from case studies, or from open discussion. Every group is different in how it digests information, and in terms of what the participants hope to get out of the workshop. We try to be sensitive to that, and check in regularly throughout the day to make sure that everyone is getting what he or she wants out of the workshop.

What is an ideal size for a workshop?

Sharon: We've held workshops for groups of 20 and for groups of 80, and both have been successful in different ways. I think the key is to make sure that the workshop invites the involvement of the participants, and, surprisingly, we've found that this can happen with a small or large group. We generally aim for workshops of 50 participants, as everyone benefits from an exchange of the wealth of experience in the room, and 50 people is still small enough for us to give personal attention to each participant over the course of the day.

How do you decide what to include in your workshop?

Madeline:

I do a very bad thing. After all the materials are printed and the handouts are all ready to go, I change my presentation. Mostly it's because I want to make it relevant to that particular group of participants. But it makes participants crazy when they're trying to follow along, so I have vowed not to do it anymore.

Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest, I base my entire workshop curriculum on what I know from working with clients on a day-to-day basis. Nothing that I deliver is theoretical or academic. It's the real thing, with lots of real examples and discussion of issues that I know most organizations face every day.

Sharon:

It's always easiest to take on tasks when there's a set task list and order of things to do, and an established way of doing them. The Internet and e-mail are still new enough and intangible enough to complicate that simplicity, but we work really hard to break down the wealth of information about online fundraising into task lists and option lists for our participants. It's not easy -- fundraising never is -- but we do what we can to simplify the process and hopefully make it interesting and exciting. Our hope is to take the fear out of the "great unknown" of possibilities and get nonprofits to take advantage of all the opportunities that the Web and e-mail have to offer.

What's the worst thing about running a workshop?

Madeline:

You’ve got 50 people from 50 organizations with 50 different perspectives, you’ve never met any of them before, and you barely know their city. In the face of those odds, it’s a big challenge to connect with each attendee and deliver enough useful information so that they can walk away with tangible to-do lists -- but without overwhelming them.

Sharon:

The thing that gets to me the most is the room temperature in each venue; no matter how much control you have over the air conditioning, it's always too hot or too cold for us or our participants. This follows Madeline's note that negotiating what's right for 50 different people is always a challenge. I tend to be a perfectionist, and I'm forced to let go of this a little when organizing and giving these workshops because you can only plan 75% of the details, and then the rest just has to come together the day of the event. And it always does, but it is always a challenge.

What do you most like about doing a workshop tour?

Madeline:

I love the traveling workshop tour. I get to see some cities I wouldn't visit otherwise, and learn from and (I hope) help organizations that are doing good work. It's cool, and I feel lucky to do it.

Sharon:

The workshops are the best part of my job. E-mail and the Web are such obvious mediums for nonprofit networking and communicating. It's always so rewarding to get e-mails from participant groups after the workshops that make me think, "Hey, look, they're putting what we taught into practice."

Oh, and Madeline, I hereby commit in writing to getting tour t-shirts made for our workshops this fall. Rock on.