Informed Opinions is seeking motivated and aligned workshop facilitators

Informed Opinions, a national, non-profit organization that’s amplifying women’s voices for a more democratic Canada, trains smart women to speak up in the media. 

For the past ten years, we’ve developed and refined workshops that successfully motivate and support women with subject matter expertise to become more effective and comfortable writing commentary and communicating in media interviews. We’ve supported more than 3500 women, many of whom have subsequently published op eds and/or been interviewed by influential print, online and broadcast news media. 

Workshop evaluations make clear that participants value the highly interactive nature of the sessions we deliver, which offer individual editing feedback to help them eliminate inaccessible language, get to the point more quickly and use concrete examples and visual analogies to increase audience engagement. 

Now Informed Opinions is seeking to recruit and train several additional facilitators who support our mission and have sufficiently flexible schedules to be available to deliver occasional workshops. In the interests of expanding our ability to support women from diverse backgrounds who are currently under-represented both in the news media as sources, and in our database of experts, we are explicitly seeking Black and Indigenous women, and women of colour with a strong combination of at least some of the following:

COMPETENCIES – The ability to:

  • Identify news hooks that relate to different areas of expertise, to help experts understand how their knowledge intersects with the news;
  • Write engaging and persuasive commentary on timely issues;
  • Develop concise, accessible and concrete key messages designed to convey important issues in a memorable way to a general audience;
  • Identify and share relevant anecdotes that help non-journalists better understand how news media operate, what editors, producers and reporters are looking for and how experts can more effectively communicate with them;
  • Edit others’ writing to make it more concise, accessible, concrete and compelling;
  • Engage and motivate workshop participants during both in-person and online sessions; 
  • Create a warm, open and authentic environment;
  • Acknowledge and address participant concerns related to backlash, trolling and online hate.

CREDENTIALS

  • Journalism degree and/or experience working in a newsroom or as a freelance journalist;
  • Experience as a source, developing and delivering key messages in the context of responding to media interview requests;
  • Published op eds or columns.

CONTEXT

Since its inception, Informed Opinions has relied on the revenues generated through its workshops to fund its free programming and advocacy work. These include:

  • Free resources on writing op eds and being effective in media interviews available on our website;
  • Our database of sources designed to make it easier for journalists to find knowledgeable women willing and able to provide analysis and insight;
  • The advocacy work we do with journalists to encourage them to work harder to reflect the diversity of Canada’s population, including women and non-binary people who are Indigenous, racialized, identify as Two Spirit and/or LGBTQQIA, living with a disability, adherents of a minority religion.

Although we are only able to offer occasional workshop delivery opportunities at this time, we provide supportive and valuable training from an extremely experienced facilitator, and our experience over the past ten years has shown that strong performing facilitators invariably create additional requests.

TRAINING & MATERIALS

The workshops we currently deliver have been honed over ten years, regularly updated and improved with feedback from thousands of participants. We will provide successful candidates with:

  • Training that covers our content and approach;
  • Relevant slide decks and handouts;
  • An FAQ document that addresses expected issues and concerns; 
  • Dry run coaching feedback;
  • Support in identifying and developing relevant anecdotes that allow facilitators to personalize the material and build audience engagement and trust.

Please send expressions of interest to info@informedopinions.org