2.1 Understanding Organization Priorities

The projects that your professor and partner have put together are designed to directly address partners’ priorities. In addition, they are tailored to this course based on the sorts of genres and writing tasks you (and, if applicable, your writing team) can tackle in the project time frame. Knowing the whole scope of the project can feel overwhelming at first, and sometimes our partners  may hesitate to share prior work from students because they don’t want to shape your perception of the tasks at hand. For this reason, it might be stressful when you have a project outline and an assigned partner organization but aren’t clear about the best way forward. At this stage, before jumping into a project proposal and/or communicating with the partner, your first step should be to familiarize yourself with organization priorities based on available materials. Be sure you’ve considered and reviewed as appropriate the following:

• Your partner organization’s website
  • Focus on the mission, vision, and strategic plans, if available
• Your partner organization’s social media presence
• Instructor provided materials (e.g. prior teams’ work on a project)
• Assigned readings about specific social issues related to the organization’s mission

Also recognize that the work of this project is a small component of multiple major initiatives running concurrently within the organization. Partners expect you to have read existing and public resources to establish a baseline understanding of the organization’s ongoing efforts. Therefore, part of your project is research focused; even though some of the content you learn and research may not appear in your final deliverables, they inform the final product you propose to the partner.

Each organization has a specific orientation toward a social issue. Understanding the organization’s position and priorities about relevant social issues will help you determine effective approaches to the project. Sometimes, this information is clearly articulated in the organization’s mission, and sometimes it’s something you begin to understand after reviewing their web presence and other introductory materials, such as a YouTube video, for instance. Recognizing when and why organizations are transparent about their positionality and orientation towards social issues will help you leverage your skills and abilities to successfully complete your project.

Whether or not you agree with the organization’s position on an issue, you bring skills and abilities to bear in the form of genre development, audience awareness, and technical writing skills that can support your partner organization’s capacity-building efforts. A learning component of the project is to better understand how technical and professional communication circulate in our society to produce or ameliorate social issues. Therefore, we recognize that the project you are interested in may not be associated with a partner you are able or willing to work with. After conducting some research, if you feel you will be unable to support the efforts of the organization due to a personal principled stance on a social issue, please contact your professor for another placement. (Don’t be surprised if you are asked to compose a technical or professional genre, like a memo, to express your concerns and needs!) You may feel ambivalent about an organization’s presence and work, which is okay; in this instance, we encourage you to continue with the project. If you have a negative response to the organization’s work before you begin your project, however, it would be best to identify a nonprofit organization that has a mission more resonant with your principles.

Orienting your efforts to support existing initiatives and future goals is the first step to ensure you don’t duplicate ongoing work by organization staff, other teams, or volunteers. Your instructor’s established relationship with the organization will inform their guidance on materials and research recommendations; if you are ever stuck and aren’t sure where to look for background information about the organization, provide your instructor with a synthesis of the research you’ve already conducted so they can provide you with new avenues for research.

As you orient yourself toward the research, writing, and development tasks ahead, consider the following reflection questions to position yourself in relation to the project:

• Are the mission, vision, and strategic plan of the organization easy to find? If not, what are some reasons this may be the case?
• When conducting your research on the organization, did you find other similar organizations? How is this org different or unique?
• What social issue does this partner organization address? How?
  • Do you believe this approach is effective? If not, consider further research and/or asking questions to further your understanding about efficacy.
• What further information do you need to begin work on the project?