Strategy Details

The Web

The Culture Alliance website will be the centerpiece of our multipart program. Young people today are immersed in Internet culture, as are the 25 to 50 year old professionals in our target audience. The website will be the hub of the excitement The Culture Alliance will generate, a place where all our members, even those who choose not to partner with us, will come back time and again to plug into the bigger picture, the grand narrative mentioned above.

With YouTube, MySpace, and other social networking sites so much a part of people’s lives, it is imperative to have a website that will help us establish, nurture, and sustain relationships over the long term. It will be a vehicle to help us bring the right people together in mutually beneficial, culturally transforming relationships. It will also be a critical information source for those who want to immerse themselves in professions of cultural influence (and others, outside those professions, looking for authoritative sources), giving them a competitive advantage over their less informed colleagues.

Content is king, as the saying goes, and The Culture Alliance website will be an essential destination for proponents of America’s foundational values in the Cultural Influence Professions. They will find a clearinghouse for news, information, knowledge, and opportunities in one place that they could find nowhere else.

The website is also an objective measurement tool that we can use to prove to foundations and other supporters that the project is actually working. There are a variety of reasons people will come, and come back, to the website, and we will track it all so that it is clear exactly what an investment in The Culture Alliance is producing.

Mentoring

As a young classical liberal, I was fortunate enough to have a mentor who influenced me mightily, both spiritually and in career terms. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a larger narrative to plug into. So although I intended to pursue a career in academia, when I was confronted with the liberal PC agenda of much of higher education, I wanted nothing to do with it. If I had had something bigger than an isolated mentoring relationship, I am convinced I would have fought through the difficulties and challenges. The mentoring aspect of The Cultural Alliance will be tied into the larger context of thousands of other young people and established professionals pursuing careers in the culture.

Mentors, and even those who choose not to be mentors, will also have connections within their chosen professions, and as the saying goes, it’s not what you know but whom you know. Instead of young people going into a culturally transforming career alone, or never making it because they couldn’t secure a job, the connections from established mentors and other conservative professionals will mean more effective job searches and eventually more conservatives in positions of influence.

Internship Programs

Project internships can provide motivated young people with stipends, professional networking opportunities, hands-on experience within their chosen professions, the opportunity to work side by side with professionals, and practical learning experiences that will benefit them throughout their career. There are already many internship programs within our cultural influence professions, and we can direct our members to them. In time we may want to start our own, but initially there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

Conferences, Meetings, Workshops

The Culture Alliance will provide numerous opportunities for expert instruction and interaction on a personal level. In regional and national conferences and local meetings and training workshops, members will benefit from the dynamism created by people with a common objective getting together. Here too, we can tie our people into opportunities that already exist, and as the project matures we can develop our own if that is the best use of our resources.

College Campus Organizations and High School Students

Obviously, young people who haven’t decided on a career path are a crucial target audience for The Culture Alliance. Kids who are very interested in culture-related careers but aren’t completely sure should benefit greatly from our mentorship programs, networking opportunities, conferences, and other resources. For instance, a college senior majoring in business wouldn’t have to change majors, but instead could pursue a career in the business side of Hollywood, music, journalism, or some other important field of culture. Post-graduate work in law or an academic career will be of interest to many.

The Culture Alliance will establish cooperative relationships with campus leaders throughout the United States. According to the College Republicans website, the organization has chapters on over 1,800 campuses, with over 250,000 members in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Membership means access. Once leaders are convinced of the value of the project, the word will get out. This can be accomplished through e-mail, Web and traditional advertising, public relations, and word of mouth. All it requires is to direct kids to the website and get them to return regularly. That’s where it all starts.

The College Republicans are only one among several organizations that can afford access to young conservatives. Others include:

High school students today are the most web-absorbed group today. Finding a way to get their attention via the website can certainly help us reach them as they enter college and consider careers. Our focus, at least initially, will be on college students, but as we grow and mature we will look to find ways to recruit high school students who are interested in cultural influence majors when they get to college.

Established Professionals

There are multitudes of proponents of liberty and personal responsibility in each of our cultural influence professions. Many work incognito because they feel isolated and outnumbered. They would love to contribute to an effort to change American culture for the better, but they don’t know how to do it because their work is not part of a larger meta-narrative. The Culture Alliance will provide that.

Fortunately, we are at a time in our nation’s political history where classical liberal voices are heard nearly everywhere–talk radio, cable TV, think tanks, blogs, and print media and their website counterparts. The professionals we are targeting are by definition intellectually engaged in the civic discussion, and they are consistently exposed to the plethora of voices available. Advertising in all these media can be very effective in driving conservative professional to The Culture Alliance website to begin a relationship and introduce them to all the resources and opportunities we provide.

Another effective tool is networking. The so-called conservative movement, from pundits to think tanks to media figures, is a fairly tight knit community. Getting referrals from one to the next to the next can lead us far and wide into professional areas to find folks inspired by America’s foundational values who will want to be engaged in The Culture Alliance.