MAKING CONNECTIONS

Today’s hot offering is the
successor to networking

By SHARON ALMIRALL
Photography KIMBERLY DAWN

Shaping a business and social landscape where women can connect with those they’d like to meet is a hot area for a new breed of networking experts called “connectors.” It’s like touching a fire starter to a sparkler on the Fourth of July — beautiful explosions happen immediately.

Moving slightly away from the term “networking,” which is, in current thinking, yesterday’s term, these connectors are putting people together with a mission that involves making the world a better place, according to the new connectors.

Like gourmet cooks dreaming up a delicious dish to be served to a distinguished guest list, these connectors have hand picked the ingredients to be offered to their guests. Just as they carefully craft the menu and service they provide to their guests, connectors prefer the term connecting over networking, though they do tip their hats to their predecessors in networking.

While giving credit to earlier forms of networking, they also talk about creating social capital, a core concept in business and organizational development that discusses relationships and how they contribute to the overall success of the organization as well as the individual. The value of networks has been explored for the past four decades by academics and students of organizational development. Examples of social capital include fraternal organizations, churches, amateur sports leagues and other groups where individuals contribute to the greater good of the organization through volunteer work and giving time to the group.

In this article we introduce four women who have built very individualized businesses based on the idea of connecting. They create membership and contact lists for their members and contacts largely through electronic mail, using the Internet both to market their Web sites and correspond with their members. But they also bring people together for faceto- face meetings that can be business-oriented or social connecting.

ERIKA HANSON BROWN
www.mystellarconnections.com
A student of networking since childhood, Hanson Brown says she learned the art and science of making connections — and keeping them — from her mother, Rhoda Pratt Hanson, the “queen of networking.”

“Mom would get up at 3 or 4 in the morning to keep in touch with her connections by writing letters,” Hanson
Brown recalls. “Her advice to me was never forget your connections. She was such an inspiration to me,” Hanson Brown says of her mother, a woman who took her to the Brown Palace Hotel to meet Gen. Dwight Eisenhower so that she could have her picture taken with him.

“Thanks to my mom, we operated at a very high level,” boasts Hanson Brown of her mother, who used the tools of her day — pen, ink and note cards. “Her whole deal was travel, and she said to make friends in every city. She wanted me to go to Paris and experience that city, so I did by becoming an au pair and living near the Eiffel Tower. My mother always said that you can make it happen.”

With this background, it’s no wonder Hanson Brown is passionate, excited to the nth degree, about connecting people. In her day-to-day life, she creates events that are attractive to women and then introduces them to each other. At present, she is connecting the two daughters of two women who are both members of Stellar Connections, Hanson Brown’s “magical networking at work” business. The daughters will both be students at East High School, and a tea party she is arranging will give them the opportunity to meet each other and become acquainted away from the madding crowd of a busy high school hallway.

Hanson Brown is also connecting the owners of two businesses, one being the innovator of an online catalog business and the other, the entrepreneur of a business that does one-ofa- kind gift-wrapping.

“Through Stellar Connections, people have the chance to meet fascinating people and have trust and confidence that are all a part of the meeting so women can really talk. In the connecting roundtables that Stellar Connections hosts, women can find a venue to be in their glory and to meet other women who are shameless supporters,” she says.

Stellar Connections’ Web site claims it “sets itself apart from other commercial groups because our focus is first offering an attractive venue that suits the needs of the whole woman, not just the professional woman.”

In her site she says, “Our belief is that there is no professional challenge that does not impact us personally and no personal challenge that doesn’t impact us professionally. Each of us is in a different place.”

The Stellar Connections Roundtable for Women is a membership-based organization that offers three themes: membership support, leadership/activism and good health, both physical and financial. Stellar Connections was launched two years ago. In addition to the Roundtables, it offers Stellar Supporters, Leading Light Business Woman’s Roundtable, Rising Stars Business Woman’s Roundtables and Guiding Lights.

Weekend retreats, potluck evenings and other gatherings are among the many events for the groups to meet and build connections.

Since she started Stellar Connections, Hanson Brown has connected with other women who are interested in starting their own businesses, and she has given them the inspiration to go for it. Three women she has worked with are Rebecca Saltman, Corrinda Campbell and Porcia Silverberg.

REBECCA SALTMAN
Foot-in-door.com
Rebecca Saltman has literally thousands of business cards she uses in her connections business, “A Foot in the Door Productions,” which began operations more than three years ago. She has been connecting people her whole life.

Saltman says she learned the craft while in the theater business. “If you’re not nice to the lighting designer, you could be in big trouble. In the theater, you have to work with actors, costume designers, directors, a stage crew and all the rest,” she explains. After earning degrees in theater in the 1990s, she opened New York and Boston offices for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization
established in 1994 to videotape the firsthand testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

She worked with Holocaust survivors, then the Holocaust museum in New York, where she was in a position to use her fund-raising skills. “As a cause-aholic, I’ve been involved with nonprofits for a long, long time. Creating events around the country helped develop these skills,” Saltman says.

She also worked as the national field director for the Huntington Disease Society of America. She has honed her extensive skills in fund raising, public relations and networking to carve a newfashioned business. Hanson Brown encouraged Saltman in the idea of going forward with a connections business.

“Erika taught me how to utilize the skills I have. She taught me to step into my identity, to use it, to be proud of it,” Saltman says. She and other connectors are creating social capital, a recreated use of the term that she defines as “the concept of growing a sphere of influence. It’s about people being able to work together in ways other than just passing cards,” a reference to the most recent vision of networking as an opportunity
simply to distribute business cards to other “networkers” at a networking event.

“I connect people to their community so they can find a doctor, get new business leads, and so on. People see me as a resource, as I’m a connector. I do go to traditional networking events, and I hold them as well, but when I meet people for the first time, I ask them what they need. Women, especially, are so surprised by the question that they turn it around and ask me what I need. I take the information that I get and connect the dots,” Saltman says.

The dots she’s connecting are in her head, where she stores the thousands of names she has on the business cards she collects. “People ask me how I know where a card is. I can simply see the connections. I have them organized in my head by how I met them or where I met them,” she explains.

Until Saltman took a workshop called The Positive Defiant, she might not have known just how to describe this gift for organization that she always had. She learned through the workshop that everyone has unconscious competencies and came to realize her mental organization of all the people she’s met is her own unconscious competency.

A Foot in the Door Productions is a firm that introduces groups so they can be more effective as a group than as individuals. Though many groups have similar visions and missions, they don’t work together simply because they don’t know each other, Saltman says. She believes that if groups and individuals can meld their strengths, they will achieve more. In addition to using MySpace as a way to connect, she also uses traditional networking organizations.

This woman of connections lives by the Jewish saying tikun olam, which translates as “repair of the world.” She hopes to leave the world a better place than she found it.

CORRINDA CAMPBELL
www.businessconnectionnetwork.com
With an educational background in business, Campbell started her own company as a lead generator, and from there “it grew to so much more.” She sees the world of business as being in a new cycle. Just as the industrial revolution changed how people in business networked with each other when the development of big business
in America gave birth to the founding of chambers of commerce and the like, the new age of technology is giving rise to the use of the Internet and cell phones as the ways to connect.

“It’s all about relationship building, whether you’re a sole proprietor or part of a larger business,” Campbell says. With her company, Business Connection Network, Campbell focuses on helping people create and keep connections. Hanson Brown’s mother wrote letters, but the new connecting point might be mobile marketing, according to Campbell. “We are creating a whole new relationship and experience with your clients. We need to create a new environment and cater to that client,” she says.

Part of Campbell’s organization involves hosting luncheons where participants have the chance to present themselves and what they do. “We make it an easy place for women to be,” she explains. “We give them a time length, and they can talk about what they wish to talk about. We say that if they are just here to look for a client, that’s OK. But if they are willing to look beyond that, there is so much to harvest.”

There are no membership fees to join. Campbell says the network connects business professionals with tools and resources that don’t cost time or money and offer ways to take action. She heard from business professionals they needed tools and resources and determined that BCN could be the clearinghouse for making these tools available.

Campbell’s group is more business oriented than other such groups. “The social aspect is not so significant,” she says; the mission of her connection network is “to create abundance by helping build businesses. We connect business professionals with tools and resources that don’t cost time or money.

PORCIA SILVERBERG
www.thenccr.org
Porcia Silverberg has started a nonprofit organization known as the National Center for Community Relations with its vision being “to inspire an epidemic of good will.” She loved the term but has come to revise the word “epidemic” as some people, she thinks, were concerned that it sounded too much like an illness. Her mission statement now reads, “a better world one connection at a time.”

A seasoned community relations professional, Silverberg realized she wanted to bring together people who are passionate about making a difference. She aims to connect government, nonprofit and for-profit groups, knowing, as she does, that Colorado has one of the highest number of nonprofit groups in the nation.

Four and a half years ago, she began her connections group. She started informally at first, as she was working for public television. She then decided to take her connections business to a full-time operation. “It’s a membership organization at $115 per year, a membership fee being a way to increase the commitment to the organization,” Silverberg says.

“Ours is a very experiential organization. It’s about creating and building relationships. People say ‘Oh, you’re networking.’ But it’s much more than that. I believe in synchronicity. I’ve done coaching on attracting the right customer,” she says.

Silverberg mentions the book Bowling Alone, which others in the connections field also cite. She defines her group as “social capital in action.” To encourage this development of social capital in the making, she allows people to stand up and describe their needs for volunteers. “It’s like the classifieds,” she says.

“Wonderful things happen all the time. We’re really helping people who make a difference. It has been very, very rewarding,” Silverberg says. “We do create opportunities for people who are like-spirited to work together. It is not for people who are simply like-minded, as in all being Democrats or all being Republicans. They don’t all think alike, but they have the same spirit.

“It’s for small-business owners, entrepreneurs, all kinds. The beauty is we always have new people. We meet for lunches monthly. It’s always interesting— you never know whom you are going to sit next to,” she says.

Silverberg emphasizes that members have to be big-hearted. People who are looking only for ROI won’t find it. “There’s no judgment in that. NCCR is perfect for you if you thrive on using your gifts for good will, if you value the spirit, if you live with ethics,” Silverberg explains.

The National Center for Community Relations has as its mission “inspiring community-based partnerships across public, private and nonprofit organizations.” She doesn’t think there is anything like it in the country.

In addition to NCCR, Silverberg is writing success stories of immigrants.“We’re all here. If we can celebrate one another, that’s what I believe we should do. I believe in bringing people together from different worlds, from different ethnic backgrounds.” she says.

Her Web site says that the firm offers monthly educational and networking programs, professional development, leadership skills training, social networking connecting events, strategic roundtables, tele-classes and tele-forums, conferences and an annual awards celebration.

Making the world a better place is a theme repeated by these entrepreneurs, who have created custom-made connecting businesses. Some, such as Corrinda Campbell, emphasize the business side of making connections, while others, such as Porcia Silverberg, are keying in on a social network that“embodies a norm of reciprocity that encourages innovation, learning and productivity growth.”

The social and business lines cross over. Saltman has a client who is in the painting and remodeling business. He wanted to grow his business, but not in a traditional way. He had asked Saltman to connect him with Habitat for Humanity, which she considered, but she knew that Habitat focuses on building new homes. Having learned of Rebuilding Together, an organization whose goal is to keep people safe, warm and dry, often in remodeled homes, she was able to suggest the organization to her client. It’s just one of the thousands of contacts she has in her head.

“What we do, Erika and me, is to follow this thin thread rather than the fully made cloth,” Saltman says. “I follow a little thread that I understand and know that it’s about helping people. I have learned so much from Erika, from Porcia and from Corrinda — they’re all extraordinary people,” she says.