The Urgency of Inspiration – Finding Content Advocates

As an undergraduate student at Clemson University, I majored in Mathematics and worked on a minor in Art and Architectural History. It appealed to my desire to blend my creative pursuits with my interests in mathematical proportions. One of the artists we studied was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He was a religious painter, one that many times spoke to my soul, especially inside a public institution like Clemson.

In the mail today was a package that made me think back to my undergraduate days…and even challenged me to connect with my work today as a communicator.

Every quarter I receive a small book called Christian Reflection, A Series In Faith and Ethics from Baylor University’s Institute for Faith and Learning. It is packed full of good reading material that really helps me stretch and broaden my perspective.

This quarter, Caravaggio’s Inspiration of St. Matthew, the altar piece inside the Contarelli Chapel in Rome, Italy, was on the front cover. I flipped through the book and found a short article by Heidi Hornik titled, The Urgency of Inspiration. As I read this article…I began to think.

As you look at the painting…read this final excerpt from the short article:

“Caravaggio conveys urgency in Matthew, who is not seated as a scribe deep in thought, but is rushing back to the table to write down the inspiration from God via the angel. Matthew becomes an example of the faithful reader of Scripture: captured by the immediacy of the experience and intent on remembering that moment of inspiration.”

Let’s unpack that a bit…let’s dive into a few of those phrases in the paragraph above and reflect.

“rushing back to the table to write down the inspiration”

“captured by the immediacy of the experience and intent on remembering that moment of inspiration”

Have you found those moments of inspiration? Do you find yourself running back to write down something that is on the tip of your mind. During those moments of inspiration, epiphanies…do you run to write them down, record those thoughts, craft that inspiration and bring it to a reality?

Finding Inspiration Inside the Organization
One of the biggest areas large organizations struggle…time and bandwidth, especially when it comes to their communication initiatives. Time to find the stories, time to document those sharable moments, time to manage the people to share those stories. Time is and can be a bummer for many communications practitioners who are trying to share rich stories from inside their organization.

Sitting in a meeting with a hospital, time feels overwhelming…time to find, tell, share, and engage rich stories for a rich, broader social experience. Time can get in the way of inspiration…maybe?

Solving The Inspirational Bottleneck
We have been working with lots of hospitals to help with this inspirational bottleneck. We have been working with groups to implement our Content Advocate Program, we call it CAP. We help groups find content advocates inside the organization, those with rich with inspirational experiences, all with a desire to create and share. They all have rich talents ranging from writing, drawing, photography, video, animation…content creation that tells the story from inside the organization.

Our goal is to help find these content advocates, identify these voices, and channel their talents using rich social tools. But before we can begin, we have to engage the organization to shift in thinking. We have to help them think about content buckets, not marketing initiatives. We have to connect inspiration with content that connects with the organizations’ audiences.

Content creation can be fun and time consuming. So…you have to find those Matthew’s inside the organization that are rushing to tell a story. Sometimes you have to provide the space and the technology to unleash their skills.