Who is Fearless Future?

Fearless Future is a consulting collaborative that specializes in social marketing and design. We are artists, designers, educators and strategic thinkers who are committed to collaborating with non-profits and businesses that work towards the public good. We are passionate about bringing great design, smart marketing and incredible insight to organizations that make the world a better place for all of us.

Workshops

Fearless Future builds custom workshops for every client. Mary Evangeliste will work with you to uncover which topics will be most helpful to explore. The whole FF crew then looks over your assessment data to determine what is working best and what areas need some help. These two elements are brought together to create a personalized workshop that is ideal for your staff development day or other training opportunities.

In addition to made-to-order workshops, we also conduct a few that we have found to be universally useful:

Can Libraries be sold as Soap?

This workshop brings research psychologist G.D Weibe’s ideas to libraries and is based on his important question, “Can Brotherhood be sold as Soap?” In Weibe’s ground-breaking work, he analyzed whether established marketing techniques could be used to promote social change; he demonstrated that they could. For the past sixty years, marketing practitioners and scholars have been refining these ideas. In 1971, marketing professors Kotler and Zaltman coined the term “social marketing” to refer to these strategies and techniques.

Fearless Future is deeply committed to bringing social marketing’s successful strategies and techniques to libraries and all non-profits. At the core of these seminars is our commitment to offering sessions that are engaging, practical, entertaining, and of course, educational. We constantly update our workshops with analyses of new social marketing campaigns and new activities so that participants come out of it with the beginnings of a campaign. Depending on the length of the workshop, participants are guided through four to nine proven strategies successfully used in social marketing campaigns. Fearless Future helps participants integrate and apply social marketing ideas to their home organizations.

This workshop can be a half day or full day event with active participation.
We have done this workshop in California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Arizona. We have done it as a whole day, 3 hour, and 1 hour interactive workshop.

Selling your Library without selling out

An online adaptation of “Can Libraries be sold as Soap,” we worked hard to transfer our face-to-face workshops to an online environment. Our face-to-face workshops are known to be fun, lively, and collaborative events where participants are constantly talking and bouncing ideas off one another. To duplicate this experience online, we include short lectures, great visuals and lots of opportunity for student interaction.

• Short lectures: We don’t want to bore participants with long lectures so we keep them short and sweet.
• Visuals: Even short lectures can be boring, so we add life to our slides with engaging and thought-provoking images of the marketing campaigns to which we refer.
• Student interactions: We pepper our hourly workshops with multiple opportunities for students to chime in and show examples of their own work.

This is set up to be four two-hour sessions with homework in between.

Growing marketing from within

Sometimes the largest stumbling block to creating a great marketing campaign in libraries and in non-profits is how the rest of the staff feels about marketing. Do they still think of marketing as slick, evil and kinda of repulsive? This workshop helps groups explore their personal feelings about marketing. It teaches participants how to craft an elevator talk, how to make the organizations’ marketing their own. This workshop does not demand that organization use the latest in social media marketing like facebook, twitter etc. it explain why an organization would want to use these tools to broaden its communications to its audiences.

This workshop was done in West Virginia. It was conducted as a three hour interactive workshop.

Marketing with Integrity

We know that we love what we do. We know that we change people’s lives every day. But how can we take this passion and integrity and turn it into great marketing? How can we communicate our value to others? This interactive workshop will explore how to transform what you already do well into amazing marketing for your library. We will work together to create elevator talks for each participant. We will also explore why we should care about social marketing. All you need is your love of the user and to investigate and explore marketing and make it your own.

This workshop was done in Pennsylvania. It was conducted as a three hour interactive workshop.

Become Market Ready!

Libraries and non profits now understand the importance of articulating value deliberately and consistently; some call this marketing. Prepare for marketing to your audience by sharing the why, how and when with your organization. This workshop will focus on making your institution “market ready.” Before your organization spends time and money on marketing, attend this workshop and discover the proven tools needed for staff buy in. Learn how to create and conduct a publication audit and open forums for the entire staff. Find out how to develop style sheets and templates that will bring professional consistency to your marketing.

This workshop was conducted in DC. It was run as a two hour interactive workshop.