Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the challenge of promoting Humanism in a society that seems either indifferent or outright hostile? It’s a common reaction. In May I conducted an IHEU webinar telesummit, with my wife Shannon Cherry, about how the media works and how Humanists can work the media. We had a couple of dozen participants from around the world for an excellent discussion that last almost 90 minutes. Almost an hour in, one participant had a problem. She wanted to know how Humanist groups could compete with religion in the media. “They have all the power and money to buy coverage. How can we compete with that?” When we asked her what news about her group she wanted covered in the media, she couldn’t say. She seemed so daunted by the challenge that she didn’t know where to start.

Or, to put it another way, she was freaked out by the elephant: she was facing something so huge, so unfamiliar, that she was overwhelmed. The challenge, for her and for IHEU, is how to eat that elephant, when it is so big and we are so small.

Let’s start by trying to get an outline of that elephant: let’s see the extent of the challenge we face in promoting Humanism.

First, we must identify the audiences IHEU needs to reach. Broadly speaking, we want to reach: the general public; Member Organizations (MOs) and individual supporters; potential members and supporters; opinion formers and policy makers; donors and potential donors; and journalists and writers.

Now let’s look at the communication channels available to IHEU: there’s the World Wide Web, email and ezines; this magazine, International Humanist News; press releases; the new social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; telesummits/webinars; conferences; mailings. And those are just the media controlled by IHEU itself.

It’s a big elephant! New communications technology has multiplied the means to get our message out. Yet the explosion of new opportunities can easily add to the sense of being overwhelmed. So we need to break it down into digestible parts. After all, the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Let’s look at some of the bites we have taken in the last year.

New media outreach
First of all, we have created materials for the media, in the form of an IHEU press kit, and distributed them to targeted journalists. We have also created a media room on the IHEU website, at www.iheu.org/media-kit. These resources provide journalists with all the basic information about IHEU in an easy-to-use format, plus ideas for possible stories.

We have also sent out press releases about IHEU activities and achievements. For example, thanks to press releases about the World Conference on Untouchability, IHEU representatives Babu Gogineni and Leo Igwe gave interviews to British and international radio stations that reached hundreds of millions of people.

Secondly, we have created an IHEU presence on major social media platforms, including MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter. IHEU news updates are also available via RSS and SMS. As well as providing new venues for social networking, social media allow news from IHEU to be shared more widely by our supporters.

Thirdly, we recently held IHEU’s first webinar/telesummit. This format enables people from around the world to come together to share a conference call and online presentation. It was open to all IHEU members and Humanist leaders for free; even the international phone call was free. More than two dozen participants explored how the media works – and how they could work the media. Many more have downloaded a recording of the session now available on the IHEU website. This format was very popular with the participants, and it offers IHEU the chance to overcome the tyranny of distance that limits any global organization. We no longer have to fly around the world for an international meeting of Humanist activists; we can now take part in an interactive meeting from the comfort of our own home or office.

Help us to help you
As a global organization, IHEU works to get international coverage of Humanist stories, and also more local coverage of our international activities. But we are also an organization of organizations. One of our key missions is to work with our one hundred MOs to get the Humanist message out more effectively.

IHEU has always encouraged local and national groups to use our news stories in their publications and websites. There is strong interest in foreign and global stories among Humanists, and the IHEU website provides a “one-stop-shop” for these stories, with an average of 10 to 20 new stories posted every month. But thanks to our syndication service, RSS, and our use of Twitter and other social media, you no longer have to check into the website to get the latest news stories. By signing up to our RSS feed, or Twitter or FaceBook, you will receive these stories as soon as they are posted. We encourage you to use these stories in your publications and website, but also to re-Tweet them or share them through your MySpace account.

IHEU not only posts its own stories at www.iheu.org, we also select news from our MOs that we feel deserves to be shared with a global audience. These can be in the form of press releases or stories. But we can’t post your news unless you send it to us, so please send your best stories to:

. We are currently working on an IHEU YouTube channel, so please share any video you have of Humanist happenings.

Finally, we need your input to create more webinar/telesummits. What topics would you like to learn more about from the IHEU? They can relate to media and public relations, like the first one (now available as a recording at: http://www.iheu.org/media-zero-media-hero-iheu-free-webinar-now-available-online-demand) or it could be another area of Humanist work, such as human rights or organizational development. Please send your requests to:

All the new technology and forms of media that can seem so overwhelming can also make it easier to work together. We need your participation to do that. Or to put it another way, it’s easier to eat an elephant if your friends join in.

Matt Cherry is IHEU International Representative, USA