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Inside Bay Area: San Mateo County Times

Recently, we were given the opportunity to create a series of advertisements for the San Jose Redevelopment Agency. These ads are displayed in the large wall-mounted light-boxes in San Jose Airport’s baggage terminals and cover each business district of San Jose, highlighting the unique experiences each district has to offer both visitors and residents of San Jose.

My favorite part of this assignment was to discover areas of San Jose I have never really explored personally. I’ve lived in San Jose for 10 years (some of those were as a student at SJSU) and it wasn’t until this year that I checked out the Lick Observatory in Alum Rock. I’d often wondered what that white building was on top of the mountain in the distance!

I think my experience touches on the importance of advertisements like these. While a primary goal is to inform and entice visitors who are picking up their luggage at baggage claim to learn about our diverse city, it lets those who already live here know about spots they may have overlooked. Now all of us can know the thrill of seeing something new, with a visitor’s eyes, and all it takes is a glance up from the baggage carousel.

Satellite Healthcare Dialysis Providers Field Large Contingent for National Kidney Foundation’s “Kidney Walk” in Silicon Valley

June 18, 2008—Mountain View, CA—With more than 80 walkers committed, Satellite Healthcare, Satellite Dialysis and Satellite WellBound employees, families and patients are pulling out all the stops to make the Silicon Valley Kidney Walk and Run a huge success.

With at least 700 walkers and runners expected at San Jose’s Cityview Plaza on Saturday for the annual fundraiser for the National Kidney Foundation, officials see a prime opportunity both to raise funds while raising awareness of kidney disease.

Chronic kidney disease affects more than 26 million Americans, with another 20 million having risk factors for developing the disease. “This is a great event,” said Dr. Norm Coplon, Satellite Healthcare’s Founder. “Not only do we raise a lot of money to fund kidney research, we also help to raise awareness of the disease. Everyone who walks or runs is doing something to fight the conditions that can lead to kidney failure. Exercise, healthy eating and watching your blood pressure and weight go a long way to insuring against falling prey to this disease.”

Satellite Healthcare, known for its innovative approaches to dialysis and treatment of chronic kidney disease, is the corporate sponsor of the Kidney Walk and Run’s Wellness Fair. The event takes place Saturday, June 21, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at Cityview Plaza (San Fernando between Market Street and Almaden Boulevard) in San Jose.

Suzette Zeidler, RN, Clinical Manager of Satellite Dialysis in East San Jose, has about 20 walkers and runners signed up. “We’ve generated a lot of enthusiasm here for the Kidney Walk,” she said. “We feel a real team spirit, especially now that we’re all doing our new employee wellness program, Embrace Your Health. We have our pedometers, and we’re keeping track of how far we walk every day, so this event will easily get us to our goal of 10,000 steps in a day.”

Betsey Hennessy, a dietician at Satellite WellBound in San Jose, has organized six of her colleagues to walk and run in the event. “We’ve also roped in our family members and friends, so this will be a good way to spend a nice, warm Saturday with a few hundred people who care about people with kidney disease. In our field, this is one cause that is clearly necessary and deserves our support.”

NKF walk participants and spectators will have the opportunity to check out their blood pressure and other risk factors for kidney disease at the Satellite Healthcare wellness booth. “We might be missing the fun of the walk by being at the booth,” said Jacqui Ploski, RN, BSN, clinical manager of WellBound in Milpitas, “but we’re walking the talk of the WellBound philosophy. When it comes to giving kidney care information and health assessments, our people are simply the best of the best.”

Potential walkers can sign up at http://tinyurl.com/5ebas8

About Satellite Healthcare

To learn more about Satellite Healthcare, Inc., please visit www.satellitehealth.com or contact the company directly at 1.800.476.5450.

A series of ads created for The Grand Hotel in Sunnyvale, California.
www.svgrandhotel.com

She asked if we did Web sites, which we do, and I referred her to the site we developed for FIRST 5 Santa Clara, www.first5kids.org. That site has won us several national and international awards, but more importantly, it has helped FIRST 5 build a larger and more active community of parents, caregivers and supporters. It enables its various constituencies to access information relevant to them, easily and even elegantly, with attractive graphics and clear, precise prose. And it appeals to people outside our geographic area because it is such a useful compendium of child-development research and information, presenting its offerings in audio and video files that inform even the most impatient or non-literary viewers.

Speaking with her about what we do made me realize, ever so belatedly, that PRx has always been in the business of building stronger communities. The difference is that now social networking has changed the paradigm from paper-based communications to online, 24/7, instant communications, and that people come together in virtual communities based on their interests—actually their passions—and seek to make a difference in the lives of their families and their community. Our specialty is linking corporations and for-profit entities with community-based, nonprofit groups to the mutual benefit of both.

So our work over the past 20 years with Second Harvest Food Bank has generated thousands of corporate supporters who provide volunteers, food and financial donations. The corporations benefit from their association with and good deeds for the Food Bank, and their employees feel better about their companies for being involved in significant, socially beneficial work. The Food Bank’s mission is advanced by the fuel—often literally, in the case of subsidized diesel fuel for the Food Bank’s many trucks—that companies and individuals make possible through food and financial donations as well as their volunteer efforts.

We seek to craft win-win-win solutions for our clients, whether they are Fortune 500 corporations or worthy NPOs. Now, those solutions increasingly have online components. Social networking—blogs, bulletin boards, online communities of like-minded individuals—makes a person’s or a company’s investment in a social cause more immediate and multi-faceted.

We like to think that we know all the ways people will band together and make “common cause” for a social issue, but we don’t, because people, in their infinite wisdom and creativity, will always invent initiatives that no PR agency could imagine. But what we do is create the platform, the medium for people to join in concerted action to make a difference in their community.

Of course, it’s not just online. It involves brochures, posters, direct mail campaigns, ads, contests, speaking engagements, personal contacts, consistent messaging and so on, all the elements of classic marketing communications.

This holistic communications mix is our comfort zone and expertise. So when a company is ready to step up to the plate and make a difference in the community, we can help, making the process easier, cheaper and more effective. When an NPO seeks a greater degree of community engagement and support, we can be the midwives for that transition.

This is a major difference between PRx and the many PR and communications companies we encounter in the marketplace. If you seek the best at what you need done in community or corporate relations, give us a call. We’ve been there, done that and also have some great ideas that have never seen the light of day. It all boils down to the fact that we care about where we live and what kind of society we are building. We all breathe the same air, and it might as well be clean and wholesome.

Sales pitch: let’s do some great things together.

Silicon Valley Public Relations Agency Wins International PR Award for Orchard Supply Hardware Corporate Social Responsibility Campaign

May 9, 2008—Dubai, United Arab Emirates—The International Public Relations Network (IPRN), a consortium of 45 agencies from 32 countries, awarded PRx Communication Strategists of San Jose, California, its Project of the Year Award. This award, IPRN’s highest honor, was conferred on PRx for a community relations campaign designed and executed for Orchard Supply Hardware’s 75th Anniversary.

Competing against campaigns mounted by agencies from Austria, Singapore, Spain, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Sweden and France, PRx won the 10th Annual Project of the Year Award for its Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) school gardens campaign. PRx created an experiential learning project for the hardware chain’s 86 stores, linking elementary schools throughout California with OSH stores and their employees. OSH gardening staff and horticulturists worked with thousands of parents and teachers to create school gardens to teach math, biology, chemistry and project management to more than 40,000 students in 2007.

Collaborating with the California Department of Education, PRx branded state curriculum guides and resources with the OSH 75th Anniversary logo and created an online application process for schools to apply for $1000 OSH store credits for gardening tools and supplies. More than 300 schools applied for the grants, and 86 schools were chosen to work with an OSH store near their campuses to create a garden and integrate the year’s gardening activities into the academic curriculum.

In a survey after the year-long project ended, 62% of the schools responded and reported that:

• More than 84% of the schools rated OSH’s support as “good to far more than expected”
• 94% of schools plan to continue their gardens
• 86% of schools have been able to leverage their OSH grant to secure other funding and support
• 40% of schools claimed measured gains in test scores
• 68% of schools rated the OSH Garden experience as outstanding, with another 24% rating it worthwhile

In other news,

• OSH was named “the leading pioneer in school gardens” by the CA Dep’t. of Education
• California First Lady Maria Shriver issued a statement of support and appreciation to OSH’s CEO Rob Lynch

“This campaign was both a labor of love and an experiment to learn how a company like OSH could make substantive improvements to early childhood education, giving elementary students, their parents and teachers the tools to put gardening into the academic mix,” said Rob Lynch, OSH CEO. “We’re known as the answer people for gardening and home improvement projects, so our staff’s involvement with the schools and their students enabled them to take their expertise out of the stores and into the community, making a real difference in thousands of kids’ lives. We’re enormously proud of this project, and we hope that other corporations will become more involved with schools and students, to leverage their contributions to learning and increase the return on investment we as citizens make through our taxes and volunteer activities.”

PRx is the only agency to have won two IPRN Project of the Year Awards. It previously won the award in 2002 for its 2001 Silicon Valley Technology and Homeland Security Summit and Expo. For more information, please see www.iprn.com and www.prxinc.com.

The International Public Relations Network was formed in 1995 to enable small and medium-sized PR consultancies to compete with multinational PR firms. Featuring global reach and local expertise, the network boasts 45 agencies in 32 countries, billing more than $50 million per year.

PRx founder and CEO Brenna Bolger said, “This award is a very important validation of how we help companies get not only news coverage but create productive relationships that help communities improve their services to their residents. We are very proud of our role in assisting our clients in being good corporate citizens, engaging them with important causes and creating grand initiatives that help both the community and our clients’ strategic marketing goals.” For more information, please see www.iprn.com and www.prxinc.com

Michael is an old friend of PRx. We’ve worked with him on projects for Applied Materials, Apple and other clients and promoted his book “Valley of the Heart’s Delight.” Last night, Mike spoke about his thesis that there were more than 300 million entrepreneurs in the US at this time. He linked broadband access to entrepreneurialism, saying that a high school dropout playing video games online made him an entrepreneur.

Clearly, he was waving the red cape in front of the bull. I asked what about the Rust Belt regions of Detroit and Pittsburgh? The people we see demonstrating there for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama don’t look very much like the sleek, hip venture capitalists who populate Sand Hill Road. They don’t look like the hordes of 1999 Harvard MBAs who migrated here to start Web sites for tweens or pet owners or people who wanted to buy unused concert tickets. Mike didn’t really answer my question, but he implied that broadband access would spur the creation of new companies and new business models.

OK, Mike. We love you and are happy for your investment acumen and your success at real estate speculation in Oregon. But this argument doesn’t hold water. Millions of Americans, especially in the middle of the country, not in Silicon Valley or in the biotech cradle of South San Francisco, have no idea of how to start a company or to envision a new way of delivering healthcare or booking vacations online.

Mike is eminently quotable, and his calling out the year 1969—which saw the creation of the Internet, the invention of the microprocessor and the first landing of a human on the moon—as a watershed year for transformation was both logical and appreciated by the crowd.

However, Mike neglected the underclasses in his assessment of the state of entrepreneurialism in the US. And the thesis that entrepreneurialism is a class thing didn’t even raise its ugly head in his talk. A 10th grade dropout in Alabama playing Grand Theft Auto IV is not producing anything, not making any new insights into how to shape the social fabric through technology or even seeing a new outlet for game addicts. The passivity of the majority of American technology consumers is a fact of life, and Mike Malone is one of the most gifted thinkers we have who can put that passivity into some social and economic context.

Mike, if broadband access can not automatically create 300 million entrepreneurs, how do we mobilize the energies, thoughts and aspirations of the millions of high school dropouts who think that playing games online or downloading songs is the epitome of Web usage?

One question that burned especially brightly for me during Mike’s talk was where are the entrepreneurs and creative thinkers who will come up with a solution to the healthcare crisis, where 47 million people in the US don’t have health insurance and many of them fall into bankruptcy because of a major illness or accident. Is there a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates who will make access to healthcare a common and affordable thing in the US? Is there a Facebook or Google out there that will ensure that every American can get the healthcare he or she needs at a price that is affordable?

We’ll see. Mike, thank you for your enthusiasm and optimistic view of the world. But don’t let your deep, daily experience of speaking with entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley color your assessment of what really happens in the fly-over states. Things are grimmer than they seem here in the West Coast Paradise. We’re the ones who set the pace and show the way, so Mike, how do we light a fire under millions of Web addicts who have little ambition and less motivation to make a lasting contribution to human aspirations?

Rising 321 meters above the Arabian Gulf, the Burj Al Arab is one of Dubai’s most recognizable landmarks. One must pass through a phalanx of greeters and discreetly armed security personnel to enter the lobby, said to be one of the highest open atriums (atria?) in the world. Two stories of cascading, choreographed dancing waterfalls are flanked by up and down escalators, and giant tropical fish tanks make up the interior walls. Everything seems shiny and golden, even the beautiful people with their big jewelry. Everywhere one looks, there are colors, primary and bold. In the Discovery documentary, the interior designer thought that after all the opulence and colorful expanses she used in the guest suites, the atrium should remain a restful white.

When His Highness the Sheikh entered for the first time, he looked up at the atrium and said, “More color!” So each floor’s ceiling is a different shade of blue, a mini-sky inside. Gabriel the Malay bellman escorted us to the exterior elevator that goes direct to the Al Muntaha restaurant 27 stories up. We watched the beach rapidly recede as we rose. Gabriel passed us off to the lovely Thai hostess, and we entered the restaurant through a tunnel that seemed to be lined with printed circuit boards that flashed and blinked in colored lights.

We were seated next to the window in the hammerhead shark nose of the building. Had the day not been so overcast and the sky filled with the perpetual dust from 24-hour construction, we might have had a great ocean view, but just watching the people surrounding us was sport enough.

We chose the prix fixe menu and a nice bottle of Argentine Malbec. I asked the sommelier to let Lord Choat taste the wine, and darn if that didn’t make everyone treat us like royalty. Of course, Jonathan is a lord only in my mind and in his attitude and bearing, but he could have been but for an accident of birth.

We discussed the vagaries of the PR business at length, and then turned to the hotel’s clientele, a mixture of large, Russian mafia-types accompanied by stunning young blondes, the normal Arab businessmen elegant in white robes and head scarves, followed by their black-robed women, only their eyes visible. There were a few obviously British types in the bar, and a whole contingent of couples and single men and women who didn’t look like any nationality at all, just rich and sophisticated.

Not to be outdone in sophistication and savoir faire, we rode the elevator down to the lobby and promptly went back up to the restaurant and down again, our own little Disneyland ride in the fastest, quietest, smoothest elevator I’ve ever experienced.

Gabriel the bellman remembered me by name (could it have been the 10 dirham tip for escorting us to the restaurant?) and insisted on giving us glossy brochures about the hotel, including a nifty shopping bag with the hotel’s logo. We walked out into the staggering heat and humidity, past the hotel’s many white Rolls Royce limousines, the Ferraris, Lamborghinis and custom Mercedes sports cars arranged like motorized jewels around the circular driveway, and back to the real world. Only another 20 hours in the air, and it’s home in exotic Sannazay.