Welcome to Cornerstones!

If you’ve ever read Alice In Wonderland, you’ll remember the scene when Alice is sitting by a river feeling rather bored when she sees a smartly dressed white rabbit rushing past toting a watch and fretting about being late. Intrigued, of course, she follows said rabbit down not just any rabbit hole and lands in a hallway lined with doors. The doors are all locked, but she finds a key on a table practically begging her to use it. She finds a door behind a curtain which opens with the key. The door, however, is much too small for her to fit through. Thus begins Alice’s experimentations with eating and drinking various substances that cause spontaneous shrinkage and growth, which in turn lead her on many bizarre encounters with a mouse, a dodo, a lizard named Bill, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, a Fish-Footman, a Frog-Footman, a Duchess and her baby (which, naturally, transforms into a pig), a Cheshire Cat, angry Queens, docile Kings, a Mock Turtle and a Gryphon...but I digress.

It is that journey Alice embarks upon at the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s spectacular literary nonsense that seems to serve as a perfectly appropriate analogy for the journey an organization like Orton embarks upon when launching a blog. We’ve been drawn in by the restless white rabbit of the social media revolution. At first it may appear that the doors along this curious digital hallway in which we’ve landed are all locked and labelled with looming, out-sized questions: Who are we as bloggers, new to this miraculous and mysterious world of uber-networking? How do we attract an audience and keep their attention? Then once we have it, how do we continually engage our audience in open dialogue about critical issues in planning? What’s more, how do we inspire real, replicable change now, so that communities stop dying and start reclaiming themselves and gaining traction?

But look! I see a key on a little glass table, and a curtain covering a door leading to an enchanting garden. Sure, we may be too large to fit through the door, or we may forget to grab the key off the table before taking a swig from the bottle that shrinks us down to size. And another day we might take a bite of the wrong cake and find ourselves crammed in like sardines, an arm sticking out a window, a foot up the chimney. In short, we’ve yet to figure out just how to navigate in this new communications landscape. (Hopefully, my tears of confusion won’t flood the Orton hallways!) But, like Alice—who begins to suspect partway into her transformative journey that she is not the same person that she was before—we as an organization will begin to sense a considerable change in the way we engage with other organizations, partners, practitioners, the media, communities...and with you! This very instant!

(C’mon, take the bait. I promise you won’t triple in size.)