The Art of Invitation

Posted by  admin —March 2, 2009
Filed in Creative Stuff

Thanks to Chris Corrigan for highlighting this 2 minute video by David Gershon talking about what it takes to take change to scale.

Chris comments on this video and leaves us all with an important question to consider …

“As an artful act of invitation, this is briliant.  How many of us outside the movie industry consider making trailers to gatherings?  Putting audio and video to work in this way is a fantastic way to get the message out, introduce people to ideas that will be bandied around at your gathering, and it becomes a great way to have people with blogs – like me! – link to your invitation.

How else are you pushing the boundaries of invitation?”

In response to Chris’ question, “Yes! I have been pushing the boundaries of the invitation”.

I have been using video to capture project lessons (instead of writing lengthy reports) … using cartoons/pictures to communicate complex ideas … using slideshows to market a training package that Viv McWaters and I have created.

So what? Well, since taking a ‘whole minded approach’ to communication, I have been more effectively communicating my ideas with others. Here is one example that had a great impact in Castlemaine last year. I couldn’t attend a community celebration where I project I was running was being handed over to the community. So, in adapting the ‘Paperworks’ technique by Lee and Sachi at Commoncraft, I threw together this little video which was palyed at the Theatre Royal to over 200 people. By some people’s accounts, this video was way more effective than me actually being there to talk.

Another great example of inviting others to be involved in a project is by Matt Moore at Engineers without Fears. Matt is inviting people to write their own story and submit it to a competition – here’s the blog post. Matt sends his invitation to a wide range of followers via Twitter and his blog. He makes the task of story writing incredibly interesting (almost Phoric-like Matt!) by inviting contributors to use a series of 5 randomly chosen images from Flickr. to be tNot only that, he involves 5 really interesting and well connected people to be a part of this photo process.

So now I’ll ask you the same question … How else are you pushing the boundaries of invitation?

cheers

Geoff

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