Nikki Enfield, newly minted Senior Strategist, here.

I just wanted to take a moment to let you know how excited I am to be joining my friends at Englin Consulting!  I met Shayna and Stephen when I hired them to lead my former organization’s (Democratic GAIN) communications strategy.  I have worked with them for the past year while they helped me rebuild our website, launch a communications newsletter, and decide what to talk to our members about.

As someone who believes strongly in the value of strategy leading tactics and information driving change, I was impressed with the Englin team’s emphasis on data, information and strategic use of tools to reach our goals.  There was no “well, Org X did this successfully, so we should just copy them…” malarky.  There was just an honest, thoughtful, results-driven approach to success.

I’m honored to join this dynamic team and put my decade of experience building grassroots programs and fundraising operations for campaigns and organizations to use on behalf of our current (and future!) clients.

We’re not in violation of any policy or rule, and we do, in fact, pay for books. No digital piracy or rule-skirting here. (The official Amazon policy is here: Can I share content with other Kindles?) And now we’re in the NYT being accused of stealing content, and I’m getting emails accusing of being a scofflaw, happily stealing books, and tweets calling for my prosecution.

Yikes.

So what did I do wrong? Many things, and as a communications pro I should have known better. The greatest hits of my missteps:

1) I talked to a reporter as if he were a friend. He’s a friend of a friend, which is how I was connected to him – but he’s still a reporter first. Since I was just chatting with a friend, I didn’t pay attention to what his angle might be.

2) I didn’t insist on understanding the exact nature of the story. The reporter told me he was writing a story about the “renaissance of reading” and how e-books are contributing to that. If you’ve read the article, you know that’s not quite it, but it was on me to make sure I knew what he was going for. Shame on me for failing to do that.

3) I talked to the reporter for a long time, and didn’t confirm what he was planning to quote. Again, it’s his job to get me talking and my job to say only what I would want to see in print. He did his job, I didn’t do mine.

So there we go. Just goes to show we all make mistakes. Feel free to share yours in the comments (or send me an email if it’s too embarrassing… shayna@englin.net)

Nikki brings over a decade of experience building grassroots programs and fundraising operations for campaigns and organizations.  Under her leadership, Democratic GAIN completely overhauled their website, held dozens of networking events and Career Fairs, simplified and added even more value to their membership process, and recruited a new and fully engaged Board of Directors.

She’ll hit the ground running with new client engagements over the coming weeks.  Send her a welcome note at nikki@englin.net!