Cause Global: Social Media for Social Change

Cause Video Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:17:00 +0000

Here are this year's Do-Gooder Nonprofit Video Award-winners, announced last night at the 2013 NTEN conference. On Wednesday, Cause Global moderated a panel on cause video at NYU that included Do-Gooder co-founder Michael Hoffman, who joined us for a screening of two of the films—including the winner of the Best Nonprofit Video Award, Follow the Frog (Rain Forest Alliance), below:

The two other top cause videos to win awards (below), co-sponsored by YouTube and Cisco, were Pathfinder International's No Joke. Choice Matters, about the difficulties women across the global face when trying to access reproductive health care, and END 7's How to Shock a Celebrity, which was used to draw attention to seven neglected tropical diseases and raise funds to help end them by 2020.

Here's How to Shock a Celebrity, winner of the competiton's ImpactX Award, a new award given this year for measureable effectiveness in a video campaign:

Here's No Joke, winner of the competition's Funny for Good Award, which recognizes cause video campaigns that use humor effectively to draw awareness to a cause:

Hoffman told our panelists Wednesday night that the use of cause video by nonprofits to boost awareness and fundraise is on the rise. But according to a first-ever survey of nonprofit leaders, co-sponsored by See3, there's still a big shortfall in funding available for good video projects. One key reason, the survey says, is that the nonprofit sector's senior executive leadership doesn't yet fully appreciate the critical power of visual storytelling — chiefly across new social networks — to help generate credibility, engagement and support for a cause. "Video is becoming a requirement for nonprofits to compete effectively for new donor dollars online," Hoffman says. He said he founded the Do-Gooder awards "to help encourage the creation of more good films to raise more good money for more terrific causes across the digital landscape."

For more on the winners and to see the runners-up, check out the Do-Gooder site.

Got a favorite? Share it with us here at Cause Global!

--Marcia Stepanek

NYU Cause Video Lab

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 01:09:00 +0000

Part of the social media strategy class I teach this spring at NYU with co-profs Tom Watson and Howard Greenstein is a Saturday Video Lab, which I designed to help students become "viterate" and to help them visualize the missions of the nonprofit causes for which they either work or volunteer. (In class, each student must develop a social media strategy for a nonprofit of their choice, and also make a 60-second visual mission statement for that nonprofit, presenting both in front of the class in May for their final grade.)

To help me teach this mandatory Saturday lab segment of the class this year, I invited USA Today's Jefferson Graham. I'd met Graham at a video lab he taught last fall at the annual PDN/PhotoPlus Conference at New York's Jacob Javits Center, and his approach to teaching video editing — by crowdsourcing the exercise —was so inspired, I wanted Graham to help me and my co-profs, Watson and Greenstein, spread the magic among our students.

There were two rules: I'd insisted that each student use a smartphone to shoot their videos this year, so as to prove that not every good video required expensive equipment to produce. The second rule? Everyone had to participate.

We broke the class into three teams, each equipped with a tripod and a smartphone and a special microphone, and took them outside to Bryant Park, just across the street from our midtown Manhattan video lab classroom. Each team was assigned to find out how Mayor Michael Bloomberg's outdoor public smoking ban has been faring. (Answer? Not very well. The students found quite a few people still lighting up. To document this, we asked some students to conduct on-camera video introductions to the story; others to take turns interviewing smokers and non-smokers. Still others were asked to shoot behind-the-scenes footage and collect B-roll, which included footage of cast-off cigarette butts and anti-smoking signs placed prominently inside the park.)

Among those interviewed by the students was a homeless man who lost his mother and wife to cancer, yet who still smoked every day in the park; a non-smoking mother and her baby, who loved the ban, and a smoker from New Jersey who said he would quit if he lived in Manhattan, where cigarettes cost $2 more than at home.

Back in the classroom an hour later, we group-edited the main video into a 65-second rough cut. (This weekend, Graham and I will be putting together the "movie of the movie" that was shot by one of our three student teams.)

Besides being great fun, the point-and-shoot exercise was proof positive that it doesn't have to cost a lot of time and money to shoot a good nonprofit "cause video" that can have impact and visualize the importance of any organization. And, we proved to the students that it didn't take a lot of expertise to start making a decent citizen video. We used 2 iPhones and a Samsung point-and-shoot camera, and augmented each with IK Multimedia iRig microphones that Graham picked up for me at B&H for $45 each. Additionally, we brought along 3 tripods to help keep everything steady.

Our 14 students have since declared the day a hit; all 14 will be shooting their "for real" project videos over spring break at NYU, which begins in earnest this weekend. Before the lab, students were stressing out about their video assignments. After the lab? The shot lists, storyboards, and scripts I had assigned them were suddenly getting turned in or rewritten—a great indicator of renewed interest. Just this afternoon, three of our students borrowed microphones from my studio.

Thanks, Jefferson, for co-conspiring with me to co-develop this exercise for our class — and thanks, Howard and Tom, for working with us to create a dream team for Video Lab Weekend that has inspired 14 students to embark on citizen video projects now and in the future.

Can't wait to see what the students produce on their own!

(For more on the class, here's Graham's blog post on the experience.)

-- Marcia Stepanek

[PHOTO courtesy of NYU and The Wired Nonprofit: Social Media Strategy and Practice class co-taught by Marcia Stepanek, Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson. Those pictured comprise the #wnpnyu class: Samantha Brody, Jacqueline Wolfson, Nirmal Patel, Aaron Green, Ann Chandler, Tom Watson, Dolapo Ojo, Mrinali Vaswani, Samantha Collidge, Elizabeth Cotter, Regina Weichert, Molly Lukash, Marina Spindler, Jefferson Graham (front center), Howard Green, and Steven Galeazzi]

Crowdfunding 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:29:00 +0000

It's definitely not news that social media have democratized philanthropy, enabling people not previously part of the nation's wealthy "giving class" to start participating at multiple levels.

The digital mass philanthropy movement is definitely making a mark: in the past several years, nearly $1 billion has been raised for good causes via crowdfunding—on platforms ranging from the iconic Kickstarter to somewhat newer players with names like Hope Mob, Start Some Good, Crowdrise and Indiegogo. Micro-donations coming in last year for arts projects via Kickstarter, for example, exceeded the total given in 2012 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

But many social cause organizations and nonprofits are still very new to these platforms, with some still trying to figure out how best to tackle a crowdfunding campaign of their own.

As part of this past week's Social Media Week NYC 2013 events roster, CauseGlobal assembled a panel of crowdfunding pioneers last week during Social Media Week to talk about what works and what doesn't. Among the panelists were: Crowdrise Co-Founder and CEO Robert Wolfe; Hope Mob Founder and CEO Shaun King; Kickstarter's Arts Projects Coordinator Stephanie Pereira; social media consultant and author Geoff Livingston, and Mary Ann Wincorkowski, the coordinator and chief strategist of an Indiegogo campaign staged successfully last fall to raise more than $64,000 and reopen the struggling Word Up Books community bookshop in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood.

Contemplating a crowdfunding campaign of your own? For those of you who had to miss last week's event, here are the panelists' Top 20 bits of advice:

1. Create a sense of urgency. Says Crowdrise CEO Robert Wolfe: "Tell people they have a short amount of time to act on your campaign, and spell out what will not happen or be missing if they fail to act quickly."

2. Tell a shareable story. Most causes are inherently urgent in nature, but without creating a story to convey a sense of urgency, your campaign might fall short of the mark. Instead, tell and share a gripping story of a local individual or group. "Find new ways to clarify the stakes for the people from which you are asking support," Wolfe said. "Make it about the 'here' and the 'now in their sphere of experience" so that sharing it is about sharing the familiar, or that which is knowable and verifiable.

3. Don't wait to build your social network; engage your core influencers early. This is basic, but worth repeating. Says Wolfe: "Treat your crowdfunding campaign like a community acquisition and activation exercise, and measure engagement from the start." Says consultant Livingston: "Keep watering the garden to build your community by sharing with them way before, during, and long after your first crowdfunding campaign. Share what other people are doing in the sector and congratulate them for what they are doing to achieve the causes you're helping. Celebrate their work for the cause, and they will celebrate yours. Share your work and everyone else's like crazy. Make it about the cause and the business of being involved, not about an organization."

4. Get training on the crowdfunding platform you've chosen to use. "Don't assume you know it or can simply pick up on your own what the platform can do," says Livingston. "Get deep training on it so you can maximize measurement and capture community as well as engage in to the max." Training also helps fundraisers understand better how to shape their campaign to the types of supporters they have, and the social media platforms they're already using.

5. Plan to invest 10-30 hours of staff time. All panelists said it takes a core team of volunteers and staff people to pull off a successful crowdfunding campaign. Says Word Up's Wincorkowski: "You can't run a campaign run by three people in a corner. You want to engage everyone in the organization in some way, and you want to work with people who already have a connection and a stake in the outcome."

6. Build trust early and often. Don't promise what you cannot deliver. Set realistic crowdfunding targets low enough so it's a pretty sure thing you will exceed them, and find other ways to reassure people that you and your campaign is trustworthy and "for real." Hope Mob, for example, offers to verify the stories it tells about the fundraising targets on its platform. "We're pretty rigorous that way," says CEO King. "If you don't have a verified story on our platform, you cannot receive a check." King tells of a campaign on Hope Mob that had sought to raise money for a child's hearing aid, but instead of sending a check to the organization after the successful end to the campaign, Hope Mob bought a hearing aid for the child with the money collected and reported that it did this to build trust among donors. "Everyone who donated gave a percentage of the cost of that hearing aid," King says. "This is about trust. For donors who don't have the covering of a charity they know and can trust, we offer them our ability as an organization to deliver and to report back."

7. Don't wait too long to get started. Says King: "People often wait too long to start something that is in their minds and hearts to do. Trust that you probably have everything you need to start right now. It doesn't matter what stage of life you are in, people always feel they're missing something. You never have enough time, right? You never have enough money. But the truth is this: you never will have more time than what you have now. Go get started!"

8. Don't just offer incentives, offer the right kind of incentives. "What you're offering in exchange for people's buy-in should be relevant to your project," says Kickstarter's Pereira. "Think about commissioning a community of local visual artists for some original artwork, or instead of sending donors a movie poster, think of an experience you can offer them, instead—like an invitation to a local premiere, or the opportunity to help sponsor a special showing."

9. Measure. Use your campaign to build your community—not just for one crowdfunding project, but for future support over time. Use an analytical tool and set up a dashboard to monitor the levels and nature of the online community you're attracting to the campaign. If you don't have one, get one. Watch it. Use it to drive future decisions about the kinds of stories you tell and the social media platforms you're choosing to get the word out and build support.

10. Set realistic goals. Says King: "We see people, all the time—because their dreams and hearts are so big—set impossible goals and they often never hit them and then get discouraged. I always tell people to set the goal much much lower than what you think you will need. That builds credibility and encourages internal discipline and serious budgeting." Adds Livingston: "Underestimate rather than shoot too high. You want to blow past your target, not fall short of your goal."

11. Make your content excellent. "Identify a group of strong writers and content creators on your team or among your volunteer base," King advises. "A well-written story and photographs go very far; a really phenomenal video or two makes your likelihood of crowdfunding success even higher. Find a graphic designer to help you. Find a volunteer. There are amazing people who are just waiting for someone to ask them for a meaningful way to use their skills." Also critical, says King: "Don't post mediocrity. It's better to delay publication of a crowdfunding site or a video until it is amazing. Don't be cheap. Have a budget for producing professional content and take a percent of what you're raising to pay for it." And lastly? Offers Wolfe: "Make it less about words and more about the visuals. Let strong images make the sale."

12. Don't just think of your $25 donors as one-offs. Convert them into $200 donors by getting them to bring their friends to the table, as additional crowdfunders around your project. And then, after the campaign is over, continue to engage them and invite them to give more of themselves, their time, or their dollars to the goals you're next trying to achieve.

13. Make it a group experience. "The biggest thing," says Wincorkowski, "is to form a great team to expose your cause and make it a community endeavor. We were all fired up having to shut down this bookstore, so we were all enthusiastic about the chance to get it going again." Word Up was able to engage the writer Junot Diaz, who helped volunteers put together a video about the bookstore. "That helped us to turn the tide," Wincorkowski said. But don't forget to also go offline with your appeals. "We did a lot of our community building in person, as well. We showed our faces and we ended up raising a lot of money offline, as well, convincing supporters to give a portion of their services to this campaign. We made it clear from the start that this wasn't about us but about all of us."

14. Make it a shareable story. Says Pereira: "Take off your fundraiser hat. Don't run a crowdfunding campaign as a fundraiser but as a creative team that is engaging personally with people around the passion you share for the cause. If you're having fun and pushing a positive message, it comes across as a positive attitude that is powerful. Such attitudes are infectious, and sharing is all about inspiring others to say, 'Hey, I saw this great video, check it out.'" Attitude also can be contagious.

15. Make sure the message of your campaign is crystal-clear. "On most crowdfunding platforms, there are at least 10,000 donors, but if your message isn't clear, they will move on—especially when the next campaign is just one click away," Wolfe says. "Nobody wants to read a long document to learn what it is you're up to, so be clear. Make it short, like '$25 feeds 30 hungry New Yorkers.' And keep it focused on getting someone to buy something. No matter how great your message is, if you don't have it matched to a good, short story with a clear message, it's not going to go anywhere."

16. Don't work with inexperienced fundraisers. Says Wincorkowski: "You need people who are aware of what it takes to inspire people to give and to keep track of those efforts."

17. Don't set up a conflict with other initiatives, says Livingston. Don't steal the buzz from another project or dilute the amount of staffing you have to support the projects already under way.

18. Don't assume people know you do amazing work. Prove it to them with links, says King.

19. Choose the right platform for your effort, not the most popular one, says Livingston. Make sure—before you start your campaign—that you know exactly what the fee structure is all about and what is required of them and of you.

20. Link to previous success stories. "Show them that you've done this before and that it is within your capacity and networks to achieve impact," says King.

Got any lessons to add? Share them with us!

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

Cause Film Oscars

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:19:00 +0000

Oscar night is here, and once again this year, there are five short cause documentaries up for an award. The 2013 nominees profile a range of courageous people, from an artistically gifted homeless teen in San Diego to can collectors on the streets of New York, to women cancer survivors. Most of the films reference specific social good initiatives and the work of some largely unsung nonprofits. [It's still not too late to see these important, deeply moving films about the challenges of everyday life across the country and the globe. If you're in New York, the Independent Film Center in Greenwich Village is screening them today and tomorrow.]

And the nominees are:

1. Inocente profiles a 15-year-old girl from San Diego who has been homeless most of her life but who finds "a safe place to go" spiritually in her art and her paintings. "We were looking for a story to do about homelessness, especially about homeless kids," filmmaker Sean Fine told WNYC Radio's Audie Cornish in a February 21, 2013 interview. "We found a nonprofit art program in San Diego called Reason to Survive, and we were invited to go out there and meet Inocente, who had been homeless almost her whole life. Her father was deported for domestic abuse. She has an alcoholic mother who, at one point, threatens suicide. Inocente represents a kind of homelessness that is overlooked in society, that doesn't mean you wake up on the street but are always moving between shelters and friend's houses and apartments, where nothing ever feels like home."

Yet Inocente is anything but a victim. "Here's this girl who, on paper, I would expect to be in a gang or maybe be doing drugs or something horrible because she has had everything in life thrown at her before the age of 15," says Fine, who made the film with his wife, Andrea Nix Fine. "And yet she paints these beautiful, colorful, rich and vibrant paintings and is throwing her soul onto canvas in this beautiful way, and I think it's the way she sees the world." The film was produced by our friend Susan MacLaury, the executive director of Shine Global, a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to ending the abuse and exploitation of children worldwide.

Here's the trailer:

[For more on the filmmakers, see this profile of Andrea Nix Fine for Contribute Magazine.]

2. Kings Point is a heartbreaking documentary about a complex of modest retirement condos in Delray Beach, Florida, where director/producer Sari Gilman's grandmother lived for many years. Filmed over a 10-year period, the film shows the lonely and raw lives of the seniors who live there and offers a glimpse at how illness and advancing age can shape the social lives of people in the last years of their lives. "I wanted to show the clash of that sunny promise we all have of retirement and what happens when you do live maybe 20 years longer than you thought you were going to live," Gilman told WNYC Radio in a February 19, 2013 interview. It is a cautionary tale for the millions of Baby Boomers on the cusp of retirement.

Here's the trailer:

Kings Point trailer from Sari Gilman on Vimeo.

3. Mondays at Racine is a documentary about how some women are coping with the physical and emotional scars from cancer. The 39-minute exploration of cancer patients in their most vulnerable moments is anchored in a Long Island beauty salon, Racine Salon de Beaute & Spa, run by two women who lost their mother to breast cancer, and who, every third Monday of the month, give free makeovers, facials and massages to the cancer patients who walk through their doors. "It is a safe place to cry and laugh and connect with each other," says Director Cynthia Wade. Wade followed the women in her film for 2.5 years, from the time they were diagnosed through the path of their illness and their fight against cancer. "It is not a medical film but a film about their emotional lives," Wade told WNYC Radio in a February 22, 2013 interview. Wade will be taking one of the women in her film, Cambria, to the Oscars; the other women she profiled, all survivors, will be watching from home with their husbands.

Here's the trailer:

4. Open Heart is the story of eight Rwandan children who need life-saving cardiac surgery from rheumatic heart disease (stemming from untreated strep throat) and the Salam Center, the one hospital in Sudan that can save them. Filmmaker Kief Davidson made the film to raise awareness of the massive spread of rheumatic heart disease in Sub-Saharan Africa due, in part, to the lack of availability of basic antibiotics among the very poor. The film focuses on the work of Dr. Emmanuel Rusingiza, Rwanda's long-overworked public cardiologist, and Dr. Gino Strada, an Italian war surgeon and also the Salam Center's chief surgeon. The Salam Center is a $15 million hospital run and managed by the Italian NGO Emergency, founded in 1994 to help civilian victims of war. The hospital is Africa's only free-of-charge, state-of-the-art cardiac hospital and it performs high-risk open-heart surgery. "Emergency (the NPO) chose to build this hospital in Sudan, because it is the only country in Africa surrounded by nine neighbors, and it is the most easily accessible to patients who need to get there in a hurry," Davidson told WNYC Radio in a February 21, 2013 interview. "...There is sadness and anger because rheumatic heart disease is such a preventable disease. In America, 100 years ago, rheumatic heart disease was the No. 1 killer in the United States, and it is now virtually zero. But in Africa, it is estimated that there are 18 million people suffering from this today."

Here's the trailer:

Open Heart - trailer from Zak Mulligan on Vimeo.

5. Redemption, by filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill, is the story of New York City's "canners"—the thousands of jobless or fixed-income New Yorkers who comb through garbage to find empty bottles and cans so they can trade them in for money (five cents each) at the local redemption center. "We wanted to change our neighborhood and make it better," Alpert told documentary.org. "My wife and I were doing community organizing in Chinatown and the Lower East Side of New York in the 1970s, and failing to make a dent. But when we took one of the early, primitive, black-and-white porta-pak cameras and made short films that documented the horrific conditions of our local schools, factories and hospitals, things began to change." That passion for short cause film and video, coupled with HBO Documentary chief Sheila Nevins's curiosity about these can-collectors in her Manhattan neighborhood, resulted in Redemption, a film about these canners struggling at the edge of society. It was shot between 2010 and 2012 on Manhattan's Lower East Side and Chinatown. "I can usually collect enough cans in a day to redeem for $25, and on Sundays I get more, depending on where I go to get the cans, and the numbers of canners on the streets is increasing," one of the canners in the film told The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC Radio in a February 8, 2013 interview. Added O'Neill: "This is the invisible work force in this city."

The link for the trailer is here (click past the ad).

Let us at CauseGlobal know which is your favorite!

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Top photo: One of the cancer patients who patronizes the Long Island beauty salon, Racine's, courtesy Mondays at Racine's)

16 TakeAways

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:01:00 +0000

'Tis the peak season for big social media conferences around the country, and CauseGlobal caught up with two of the year's first this past weekend, the Media That Matters 2013 conference in DC on Friday and the just-ended Social Media Weekend gathering at Columbia. [Social Media Week kicks off today and we'll be there, too!]

NEW TOOLS, NEW GUIDES:

(User-recommendations versus vendor-PR):

* Rebel Mouse. Founder Paul Berry, former CTO for the Huffington Post, asked himself while creating this social media publisher/aggregator, "Does the world really need yet another social media service?" You be the judge. This tool is for helping NPOs create a "social front page" out of the most popular bits of information in their Twitter and Facebook streams, updated in real time. They look a bit like Pinterest pages — all highly visual and updated dynamically from a feed, or many feeds (users choose). Berry says Rebel Mouse can help nonprofits engage better with key supporters in the conversations that matter the most. Here's how PBS used a Rebel Mouse page to share viewer reactions to Hurricane Nemo (photos, videos, and 6-second Vine videos) as it was happening. Here's the Chronicle of Philanthropy's Rebel Mouse page, an information graphic from its survey data. How might your nonprofit better convey its impact and relevancy using a real-time social media aggregator?

* Soundcloud: This is a social audio service that can help organizations create short sound clips (from their iPhones or other mobile devices) and share them dynamically. NPOs can interview an issues expert or a key supporter who can help you make the case for urgency around your cause. How does it work? Upload the audio from you iPhone or recording device to your NPO's Soundcloud page and their direct supporters there to hear it, or embed the audio clip into your organization's home page or blog. A cause might use Soundcloud clips to send a "thank-you" or a brief testimonial from someone your cause helped, and this content also can be tweeted. Recent examples: this recording of what the meteor last week sounded like as it crashed into Russia, courtesy KQED Public Radio in San Francisco. The New Yorker is using it, too, here.

* Vine. Twitter's new 6-second video-sharing app that lets organizations and individuals share clips with motion and sound. Here's a post on the app by Nonprofit Nate, on the "21 Nonprofit uses for Twitter's new Vine Video App."

* Jollyfy. It's a new video recording and sharing app for iPhone and iPad that allows people to record videos during a conference or fundraising event or gala and create a group video album of the collective experience. Think Flickr for short videos.

* Twylah: A Twitter organizing tool that helps you focus and convey your tweets around your organization's top brand attributes or goals. Here's a link to some nonprofits using Twylah. Here's the Twylah page set up by Doctors Without Borders. Use Twylah if your mission needs to be more clearly defined, or if your staff has a tendency to go "off mission" in its tweetstreams and other communications. Getting clarity around mission is at the core of a nonprofit's success on social media; Twylah promises to help cause leaders stay on-message.

* Statigr.am: A tool to measure audience engagement around the Instagram photos you send and share. NBC uses statigr.am to gauge its audience around the news photos it shares; nonprofit groups that are especially well-suited to sharing photos (environment, animal, arts and education organizations) might consider using this tool as part of its volunteer and donor outreach programs. Here's an example of a fundraising page on Statigr.am.

* WhoSharedMyLink: This is a tool that does what its name suggests. Check it out here.

* OneQube: Another measurement tool, but this one for real-time insights into trends, participants and content appearing in #hashtag conversations. See this sample from Social Media Weekend.

* Sparkwi.se. Sparkwi.se helps nonprofits integrate their engagement metrics and data with the stories that they tell. It pulls data from around the web or out of NPO spreadsheets and data dashboards, and displays it graphically in simple widgets. Nonprofits can put their Sparkwi.se dashboards together in any way they choose, incorporating everything from follower counts on Twitter to MP3 files of audio to video clips and photographs and infographics that contain only the most relevant information and data about themselves and their key issues. Fast Company recently gave it rave reviews. See this Sparkwi.se dashboard for Future Leaders of Kenya and this one for Barefoot College. Co-founder Wendy Levy, who I met Friday in DC, says: "We need to get beyond measuring page views and Facebook views, to get a better assessment of how our work as change-makers is actually changing the world around us ... We (nonprofits) are walking and talking data sources, and if we cannot convey that data and convert it into information that helps us make change and measure our impact on the Earth as organizations, then we will be left on the porch while the train leaves the station, and we might as well be shouting into tin cups connected by string."

CAUSE VIDEOS and CAMPAIGNS TO NOTE:

Many cause video storytellers are expanding their reach with transmedia campaigns, aimed at promoting awareness, engagement and fundraising across multiple platforms, online and off. Among notable examples from the #MTMDC conference Friday:

* Cause video-maker Nancy Schwartzman and her groundbreaking "The Line" video about young women and teen rape, and the mobile app she developed to promote the film that has now been downloaded more than 50,000 times in 23 countries. Called Circle of 6, the app gives young women a quick, "always on" way to get advice from the six people they trust the most, precisely at the time they need it the most. The inspiration for the app came from Schwartzman's interviews with hundreds of teens during the making of her cause film. During the filmmaking, Schwartzman said, she "let target audience input help drive the direction of the film, so that it became less a video that I made and more of a video I made with my target audience, together — to help others."

* Manhattan Filmmaker Roland Legiardi-Laura, co-director of "To Be Heard," created the mobile platform, "Power Poetry," from the film to help further promote his push to improve literacy in New York's public schools and on the streets of the city.

* Pultizer Prize-winning authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are releasing a Facebook game on March 4th as part of their transmedia "Half the Sky Movement" campaign. Announced at Saturday's Social Media Weekend gathering, the Half the Sky game title is to be an adventure game targeted at making mainstream audiences more aware of the trafficking of girls and women as sex slaves — and other issues facing females in the developing world (as well as here at home). Produced by Games for Change and co-funded by Zynga.org, the Ford Foundation, Intel, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Nations, among others, the game joins the book and PBS video series, all geared to the mission of ending the oppression and abuse of women and girls worldwide.

NONPROFIT TAKEAWAYS from #smwknd:

* Evidence-based marketing is the next big thing for nonprofits, says UNICEF's Impact and Analysis Coordinator Sebastian Majewski — of the first cause data analysts in the nation. Think data-driven messaging that stresses proof of impact, as well as better strategies for engaging new funders. "This is all about a nonprofit moving from, 'I feel we should do this or that' to 'I know we should do this '— moving from feeling to knowing," Majewski told Social Media Weekend attendees. "It's also about understanding supporter and stakeholder sentiment over time. It's about knowing who is driving communications and the conversations that matter to your organization the most. It's about knowing exactly how your organization can add value in order to be recognized."

* UNICEF is the most popular charity across the two main social media networks, Twitter and Facebook, with 1,010,614 followers on Twitter and more than 1.7 million likes on Facebook, say Social Media Weekend organizers. Says Majewski: "Don't monitor your nonprofit brand using social media analytics," he says. "Monitor for the issues your brand wants to be amplified."

* Build impact measures into your projects from the start, so your projects are less about experimentation and more strongly tied to mission, says Sparkwi.se's Wendy Levy. Adds Sally Osberg, our friend and President of the Skoll Foundation: "I'm tired of raising awareness. Where's the change?" Cause supporters are demanding proof of impact as never before.

* Data philanthropy is among the most important new areas of giving. Big data —- the terabytes of data collected daily across the world by governments and businesses and nonprofits and schools — contains hugely valuable information for nonprofit causes, if only organizations could translate this information glut into insights they could use to help solve social problems and more effectively target their efforts. In the past year or two, new nonprofits and causes are cropping up to make that happen, and a new form of philanthropy, called data philanthropy. See this post by our friend Lucy Bernholz on the coming influence of Big Data on the giving sector.

* More tips from the tweet-stream of Social Media Weekend, from blogger Karen Sieminski:

Cause Global will be attending this week's social media uber-gathering, Social Media Week NYC, and participating on a panel we helped to organize at NYU on Crowdfunding for Causes, here.

Hope to see you there!

-- Marcia Stepanek

(PhotoIllustration: istock.com)

Philanthropy 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:26:00 +0000

Once again this year, I'm curating a Speaker Series for NYU on disruptive innovation in the advocacy sector. Called Philanthropy 3.0, the series, which I founded in 2010, is aligned with the graduate class on social media strategy that I teach with Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson for the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. It's all about the influence of emerging/social media on advocacy for social good.

This year's segments focus on Crowdfunding, women-led digital activism, Cause Video and big data partnerships between nonprofits and the nation's new crop of data hackers/analysts for good. All panels will be held from 6-8p at the NYU Welcome Center Auditorium at 50 West 4th Street, on the NYU campus just east of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.

Wednesday, February 20th — a Social Media Week panel on crowdfunding for causes. Among the panelists are Shaun King, founder and CEO of Hope Mob. King, 28, is the pastor of Courageous Church in Atlanta. he founded Hope Mob in 2012 as a social media platform that asks strangers to vote on which lives to help — "lives that would otherwise fall through the philanthropic cracks of society," King told Fast Company magazine last year. Also on that panel will be: Robert Wolfe, the co-founder of Crowdrise, a cause-focused platform he founded with actor/philanthropist Edward Norton; Stephanie Pereiera of Kickstarter; Veronica Liu of Word Up, an NYC nonprofit that used Indiegogo to raise more than $65,000 to keep the doors open at this community bookstore in Washington Heights, and Geoff Livingston, the social media strategist and author of The Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy. Howard Greenstein will be moderating.

Wednesday, March 6th — we'll be talking about the rise of women-led social networks in advocacy, in honor of Women's Philanthropy Month. The panel, "Women and Philanthropy: Networked Activism for a Changing Landscape," will include Jennifer James of Mom Bloggers for Social Good and Allison Fine, co-author of The Wired Nonprofit. Tom Watson will be moderating this one.

Then, on Wednesday, April 10th — same time, same place — I'll be moderating a panel on the latest trends in the use of cause video and social media in fundraising. It will feature the formerly homeless activist Mark Horvath, founder and CEO of InvisiblePeople.tv; Lee Hirsch, the filmmaker behind Bully, the acclaimed 2011 cause film on bullying, and Susan MacLaury, the chief of Shine Global and producer of Inocente, one of this year's Oscar-nominated short subject documentaries. Michael Hoffman, the CEO of See3 Communications, also will participate. See3 is a co-sponsor with YouTube, Cisco, NTEN and the Case Foundation of the national Do-Gooder Nonprofit Video Awards, and Hoffman will preview this year's finalists.

The last event in the series will be held on Wednesday, May 1st, on Big Data and "hackers for good" in the social advocacy sector. I'll be moderating a demo of a couple of nonprofit projects that are using "deep-data" analysis of government/public information and corporate data in the public sphere to more accurately pinpoint the source and nature of social problems over time — and, in the process, are reshaping these causes' missions and fundraising/action strategies.

Here's the registration link to the program; watch this space for the Series site link. Hope you can join us this year. All panels are free and open to the public.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, above: 15-year-old Inocente, the subject of the Oscar-nominated short documentary of the same name, courtesy of Shine Global)

Lessons from the Front

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:58:00 +0000

Some 21 years ago, just after the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square ended in a spray of violence and live fire from military tanks that killed untold thousands, a Chinese journalist colleague of mine advised fellow activists to "be like water." He was quoting a proverb, urging persistence in the face of towering obstacles. Water, he explained, can seep through and around even the most imposing walls to get to the other side.

Fast forward to February 11, 2011, to Tahrir Square, and to the pro-democracy activists in Egypt and their social-media inspired youth movement that forced Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak to step down following years of strategizing and weeks and months of open, organized protest. Watching the cheering crowds via an al-Jazeera livestream from my office in New York on the night Mubarak was deposed, I couldn't help but recall my Beijing colleague's advice two decades earlier, to "be like water." Social media helped to make the difference this time; it helped a large group of change-makers organize a campaign for change that was able to prevail despite traditional efforts by government military forces to squelch it.

In my keynote on social media strategy last week at Stanford University (and with my NYU master's students earlier this week who are enrolled in the class I teach with colleagues Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson, The Wired Nonprofit: Social Media Strategy and Practice), I shared these Top 5 lessons from the rise of social media movements globally. While social media are still evolving, they continue to influence the balance of power between citizens and organizations, and are reshaping the behaviors of many establishment institutions and organizations.

1. It's not about the tools. Technology—social media —changes our behavior and our relationships with each other, and with our organizations. For years, the Internet has been dis-intermediating the "middlemen" across society, from travel agents to video rental stores. Traditional charities have long operated as the middleman between resources and need, but with the advent of social media and the Internet, more "free agent" donors prefer to "go direct." A new crop of "digital nonprofits" such as iava.org, charity:water.org and Donor'sChoose are meeting that need, reinventing the role of the middleman in the social good sector.

2. Social media decentralize leadership, shifting the locus of power to outside the walls of established organizations. Some traditional nonprofits tend to overestimate their supporters' dependence on them for access to information and underestimate their supporters' access to each other. The rise of social networks means that supporters don't need a nonprofit's permission to act, or to assemble, or to create fundraising campaigns of their own. The nonprofit establishment can no longer completely control the conversation; new strategies are required to accommodate and engage the conversations and activities of free-agent donors that are occurring outside the traditional donor networks. Social media also create new ways that supporters can hold nonprofits accountable to them. Example: last year's Susan G. Komen for the Cure controversy.

3. Social media create shared awareness. Facebook, Twitter, and other mainstream social networks create large networks for rapid information-sharing. They also make it possible for cause advocates to easily create solidarity around particular events that underscore the importance of their missions. Examples: the "We Are All Khaled Said" campaign on Facebook and the "We Are All Trayvon Martin" actions organized by social media, including a "Justice for Trayvon Martin" page on Facebook. Occupy Wall Street's "We are the 99%" blog on Tumblr and the more recent "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" essay on Facebook (which drew 1.2 million likes as a re-post on The Huffington Post earlier this year) provide additional examples of how cause advocates can use social media to create and expand the strategy of "shared awareness" to build support for their goals.

4. Social networks want proof of impact. Nonprofits are under vastly increased pressure to prove their relevancy and impact on social platforms. Supporters and would-be donors want causes to "show" their work, not simply talk about it. Examples: charity:water.org's "Proving It" pages and the 5 Gyres project, a nonprofit that is seeking to raise awareness of the world's five "garbage islands." 5 Gyres employed photographer Chris Jordan to help prove its mission to potential fundraisers.

5. Social media democratize philanthropy. Micro-donations, made possible by online fundraising platforms and social media networks, have been a rapidly growing segment of support for nonprofits. Cause leaders are being forced to expand their understanding of who their supporters are, and to create new ways to work with vast numbers of new advocates, representing more diverse age and income groups across society. No longer can nonprofits afford only to target high net worth individuals and corporations for new dollars. These new free agent social networks represent a powerful new constituency for fundraisers and a new lever of influence. Nonprofits wishing to cultivate the support of social networks must devise new strategies that meet these new micro-donors where they work and play, using social media.

The bottom line? Social media can invigorate a cause and deliver help in new ways, but increasingly "from the outside in."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

Chelsea's Charity

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:25:00 +0000

Chelsea Clinton, in a rare interview, discussed everything from her parents to her own advocacy work to the crisis-mapping social media enterprise, Ushahidi, in this interview today with talk show host Charlie Rose at the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton said she is "optimistic about politics" and hopes that more young people will ultimately go to the ballot box and vote for candidates "who will write the laws and scale the solutions for the change they want to see." It's easier to raise money than ever before, Clinton said, partly through SMS technology but also because there is a growing sense among people across sectors "that we are all in this together and that is good to see."

The full video is below:

-- Marcia Stepanek

Heat 3

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:12:00 +0000

President Barack Obama, less than an hour after delivering a stirring defense of free speech and democracy at the United Nations, told CGI delegates today that he has signed a new Executive Order to boost protections against human trafficking in federal contracts, to help eradicate what he called "modern slavery"in the United States and around the world.

"[Human trafficking] is a debasement of our common humanity," Obama told delegates attending the third and final day of Bill Clinton's annual Clinton Global Initiative conference of global changemakers. "...Now, I do not use that word, slavery, lightly. It evokes, obviously, one of the most painful chapters in our nation's history."

"But around the world," Obama continued, "when a man desperate for work finds himself in a factory, or on a fishing boat or in a field, working and toiling for little or no pay and beaten if he tries to escape, that is slavery. When a woman is locked in sweatshop or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving, that is slavery. When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier and forced to kill or be killed, that is slavery. When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family, runs away from home or is lured by the false promise of a better life — and then is imprisoned in a brothel and tortured if she resists — that is slavery. It is barbaric and it is evil and it has no place in a civilized world."

Obama evoked the stories of three women who were victims of human trafficking, including one from the DR Congo and one from Indonesia who had come to CGI to share their stories with delegates. "In the darkest hours of your lives, you may have felt utterly alone," Obama said, addressing them and other victims around the world. "It may seem in those moments like nobody cares but ... we see you. We hear you. We insist on your dignity."

Less than three hours earlier, GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney took the CGI stage, and took aim at the U.S. aid system in remarks also made yesterday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Romney lauded the "power of free enterprise" and urged more public-private aid ventures in the developing world, just as Clinton had.

But Romney also used his CGI speech to take aim at Obama, suggesting that he is not adequately handling the tensions in the Middle East. "A lot of Americans feel that America has found itself at the mercy of events rather than shaping events," Romney said. He listed four examples, saying: "Syria has witnessed the killing of tens of thousands of people. The president of Egypt is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our ambassador to Libya was assassinated in a terrorist attack. Iran is moving toward nuclear-weapons capability."

[For more of Romney, see the video of his remarks here. For the video of Obama's speech on human trafficking, see video, below.]

Among other Day 3 highlights:

* The Elders, the Ford Foundation, the NoVo Foundation and Nike — some of the same people behind the successful Girl Effect campaigns of 2008 and 2010 to promote the advancement and protection of women and girls around the world — committed to jointly establish a new initiative called Girls Not Brides, a global partnership to end child marriage. The four organizations committed $3 million to establish a secretariat to identify activities to end child marriage in priority countries and to set up a network of donors to support programs to end child marriage worldwide.

* Mohamed Morsi, in his first U.S. appearance since his June election as Egypt's first democratically elected president following last year's demonstrations in Tahrir Square, said Egypt and the Middle East are "at a critical juncture." He called Egyptians "the ultimate gurantors" of his country's transition to democracy but declared that "we will also turn to our friends and partners beyond our borders." Morsi directly addressed recent violent demonstrations in Egypt and elsewhere that are widely blamed on a U.S-made film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad. Morsi today suggested that unfettered freedom of expression was at fault. "Freedom of expression comes with responsibilities, especially when it comes with serious implications for peace," he said. Morsi also warned Western nations against seeking to dominate his region. "The world is not one culture," Morsi said. A former head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi told CGI delegates that "we must live together rather than than seek to dominate each other. The people of the world cannot accept domination (from the West) anymore."

* In an interview with TV host Charlie Rose, outgoing U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said today's bitter political climate in America is standing squarely in the way of faster economic growth. "If you allow what is politcally comfortable to stand in the way of what is necessary for the economy," he said, "that is what leaves countries weak and burning." Geithner predicted economic growth would rise to 2 percent or higher in the coming year but said "it is still a very tough economy and the challenges ahead are very daunting. When the United States does best, it is because leaders put politics aside and find the responsibility to govern." See the full video of that interview, below:

* Puma CEO Jochan Zeitz and Cornell University Law School Professor Lynn Stout talked about what's keeping social good off the radar of many corporations. Zeitz described launching his sportswear company's controversial "environmental profit and loss account" last year, which attempts to put a cost on the impact the business is having on the environment, across its entire supply chain. Zeitz said his hope was to acknowledge that "a new business paradigm is needed, and that the current economic model, which originated in the Industrial Revolution some 100 years ago, must be radically changed." Zeitz told CGI delegates that "if every business monetizes its actual impacts on the environment, they can design new ways of sourcing materials and running their supply chains to alleviate that impact" rather than simply guess "and get it wrong" for the company and the communities they serve. Stout, the author of The Shareholder Value Myth, said public companies also need to stop focusing so hard on maximizing shareholder value. Overemphasizing shareholders leads to a focus on short-term earnings, she says, discouraging investment and social innovation. "We have corporations capable of doing enormous amounts of public good," she said, "but the biggest obstacle these companies face is the myth that a corporation is run well when it is run to maximize stock price." First, this is not what the law requires, she said, and secondly, focusing on shareholder value "is not working out well, not for employees, not for companies, and not for investors, either." Stout said returns to investors who have ownership in public companies have declined significantly in the last 30 years. Further, she said, "public corporations are disappearing. There were 8,823 public corporations in 1997 but by 2008, that number had declined to 5,418. If this were a species of animal and we saw the population decline by 40 percent, we would say it is in danger." But focusing on new community and environmental goals, such as sustainability, won't come "for free," Zeitz cautioned. "We can't just walk around and say sustainability will be great for business. You've got to invest in it. I'm not sure a lot of companies are ready for that yet."

* Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told interviewer Charlie Rose that "certain things that were unclear and unresolved in the 20th century now are clear. Government is necessary but it is better at empowering and setting strategic frameworks than doing everything itself." He added: "Civic society, including NGOs, have a creativity and dynamism that can hugely augment the actions of government. And the private sector now understands it can't just be in places without some sense of responsibility to community. So the 21st century is very much about partnership, and the boundaries between government, civic society, and business should be broken down as far as possible."

* CGI closed with over 150 new commitments made by delegates to projects aimed at making the world a better place, valued at more than $2 billion and expected to impact 22 million people. Since the start of CGI in 2005, members have made nearly 2,300 commitments to improve the lives of more than 400 million people in more than 180 countries.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top, by Brooklyn illustrator Sophie Blackall, from her Congo series for the Measles and Rubella Initiative, featured at this week's Social Good Summit 2012. Photos courtesy CGI.]

Mobile Jujitsu

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:15:00 +0000

This is the week in September when every serious do-gooder and advocacy wonk in Manhattan goes into empathy overdrive, thanks to the simultaneous convening in New York of the United Nations General Assembly, the annual Clinton Global Initiative, Mashable's annual Social Good Summit and the gatherings of at least a half-dozen other social good events and Meet-ups and hackathons-for-change. (Anyone willing to trade their pass to WIE2012, on women's empowerment and 'mompreneurs', for a ticket to the Personal Democracy Forum's talk with authors Stephen Johnson and Clay Shirky discussing the evolution of peer-to-peer networks for social change?)

Let's be charitable. Even the most passionate followers of this week's change panels across town — with names like "higher impact investing" and "strategic philanthropy" and "the built environment for women and girls" —should be forgiven for feeling just a tad overwhelmed.

But despair not, young activists. Mashable's just-ended Social Good Summit, despite the conference-hopping of many of its panelists, delivered enough fresh examples of mobile activism and social networking to keep things interesting for the under-40 set, even if you weren't able to crash the geopolitical schmoozefest at CGI.

Among the highlights of #SGSGlobal 2012:

* Larry Irving, co-founder of the Mobile Alliance for Global Good cheered efforts by activists to use their smartphones to distribute medicine, monitor climate change, spot election fraud, and take aerial photos of oil spill damage in the Gulf region. [He also cited Text4Baby and FrontlineSMS , among others.] But Irving said the cost and complexity of creating do-gooder apps has been dissuading many other causes from experimenting with the technology. To make it work well "in nonprofit mode," he said, "you're not just talking about technology. You've also got to talk about changing business models, changing cultures, changing operational models." To make mobile less daunting for activists, Irving urged organizers of digital hackathons to start making them more about pressing social needs that must be met and less about the event, itself. Irving also urged young activists to do a better job matching philanthropic investors with social entrepreneurs. "If Maasai warriors can use mobile phones to find water for their cows, we can do a better job in this country figuring out how to be connected via mobile for a purpose," Irving said.

* Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer at the White House, urged attendees to take government data and "jujitsu it, put it in machine-readable form, let entrepreneurs take it and turn it into awesomeness." How to begin? "It's all about turning government into a platform for open innovation," Park said. "Data by itself is useless. I can't feed my baby daughter data. It's only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit." Park has been holding hackathons—"data-paloozas" and other events — aimed at encouraging social entrepreneurs to mine government data to leverage impact. He cited his office's June 2012 Health Datapalooza, which attracted 1,600 entrepreneurs over two days, with 242 companies competing for 100 spots to present innovations powered by open data from the government. "We took data already paid for and jujitsued it into the public domain," Park said. The cost? Zero, Park said. Data.gov is the federal government's online home for a wealth of machine-readable, cost-free data. "And now there's healthdata.gov, energydata.gov, educationdata.gov," he said, as part of the specialized data communities section of the site, open to all. Park announced Sunday a new initiative called the Equal Futures App Challenge, to encourage young girls to become leaders in democracy, to aggregate and create new apps to educate girls about gender gaps in elected office and new apps to teach girls about what it takes to run a successful campaign. "It's awesome stuff," Park told conferees. "Check it out and see what you can do with it."

"At the most fundamental level, we are not just connected, we are inseparable." -- Deepak Chopra

* The American Red Cross' Social Media Director Wendy Harman acknowledged that harnessing social media to help speed aid to people in disasters has been a "big challenge" at the Red Cross, forcing her and her team to meld the way people talk about social media with how organizations like hers process real-time information. Harman said that after the Haiti earthquake, "we got Tweets from people saying, 'I'm trapped under the rubble and in a particular supermarket and can you help?'" But the Red Cross didn't always have a way to turn that information into rescue, she said. "That landed like a thud on my shoulders and made me think we had to do something about this," she recalled. Last March, the Red Cross launched its new Digital Operations Center, built with a grant from Dell. "We now have huge visualizations of all of the data coming in to us via social media and we can get, in two minutes, a good idea of what is happening on the ground in a disaster and how people are feeling about the service delivery and how they are affected by a particular disaster," Harman said. Her team is also using the Center to identify topline trends in real time. During Hurricane Isaac, for example, "we were able to affect change on the ground based on what we were seeing at the Center" — to direct volunteers to specific groups of people who were able to communicate their need for help. Harman said social media can help nonprofits identify new ways to leverage existing, ad hoc networks to greater purpose. During the recent spate of Midwest tornados, Harman said, the hashtag #bathtub helped the Red Cross communicate and connect people who were hiding in their bathtubs to take safe refuge from the storms. "To see that people were doing that and to be able to tap into that conversation and connect people together more broadly in that way was awesome," Harman said. "A big part of the mission of the Red Cross is to provde hope and comfort, and in that really scary moment, this was the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life."

* Occupy Wall Street protester Tim Poole talked about how social media has been transformative, both for him and citizen journalism. After seeing a police officer dragging a protester by his leg during the height of the Occupy protests last fall, and noticing that the protester's hands were bleeding, Poole said he decided to start using his smartphone to broadcast the violence to the world via his Ustream livestream channel. On November 17, 2011, one of Occupy's most remarkable days of protests, Poole reached 750,000 viewers using his smartphone, filming the action for 21 consecutive hours — a feat that earned him profiles in TIME Magazine and The New Yorker as a pioneer of livestream reportage. Poole told conferees how he turned a toy remote-controlled Parrot AR.Drone into an "OccuCopter" for aerial surveillance filming and has modified software for livestreaming into a system he calls the DroneStream. "This was reality TV," Poole said. "It wasn't the reality TV that everyone hears about, because that's just scripted BS. This is what it is: an unedited raw window into what's happening." It gets people out of their chairs, he said. "It can be incredibly empowering."

* Actress Maria Bello talked about her work to "Oprah-ize Haiti" —using social networks to begin connecting local women's groups in remote areas of Haiti to each other and to nonprofit support. She created We Advance University, a web and mobile site, as both a directory of local services and a hub for shared videos to educate women on everything from healthy food to the challenges of hygiene in refugee camps to advice on how to fight local violence against women. "This can let women to see that two miles away, the Red Cross is doing rape tests and 10 miles away there is a lawyer who can file rape-charge papers," she said. This will create a "revelation revolution" for women across Haiti, she said. "We got pissed off that women's groups in Haiti were not getting the access to help and community and the funding they deserve."

* "We have ironclad evidence that social media can help people take down bad governments," says Tomicah Tilleman, U.S. State Department senior advisor for civil society engagement and emerging democracies, "but can social media help replace those regimes with better governments?" Tilleman joined Slovakia's foreign minister Peter Michalko and Marina Kaljurand, Ambassador of Estonia to the United States, to talk about the LEND Network, a new experiment in social media hatched in Mongolia this summer by a partnership between the Community of Democratics and led by the U.S. and Estonia. It's a social network that connects people who are experienced managing democratic transitions with social activists currently engaged in that struggle. Activists can use the network to create Facebook-style profiles in which they list their 'change sustainability' expertise, be it training judges, writing constitutions, decentralizing utility companies or setting up the rule of law. A mid-level bureaucrat from, say, Tunisia who is training a police force to comply with human rights standards can browse network and find someone in Estonia who once held that job, or an expert from a human rights NGO. The network also taps into some cutting-edge translation tech and social media to remove the need for human translators.

* Brooklyn illustrator Sophie Blackall [interviewed by CauseGlobal in a 2009 post about her Missed Connections illustrations based on Craigslist postings by the same name] talked about her initiative to use her illustrations from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to stop the threat of measles in that country, in partership with the Measles & Rubella Initiative. "In some parts of Africa, families don't name their children until the threat of measles has passed," Blackall told attendees. "That threat disappears entirely when children are vaccinated, and a child can be vaccinated for a single dollar." Her illustrated stories of health workers and families in the Congo battling the measles epidemic there can be viewed here.

* Spiritual leader Deepak Chopra told conferees that social media marks the world's 'next phase of humanity.' It is a technological creation and extension of society's subconscious, he said, and is the inevitable next phase of humanity —for better or worse. "At the most fundamental level, we are not just connected, we are inseparable," he said. "What drones can't do, what the armies can't do, what the weapons can't do, what the weapons of mass destruction can't do, what biological warfare can't do —we can do through technology." Chopra said social networks can advance humanity but also can bring enemies together. "The world is at a crossroads," he said. "...You can never program true intelligence into a computer."

* A panel of present and former U.S. diplomats talked about how they are using social media to engage in dialogues in countries and communities where the U.S. does not have a diplomatic presence. Victoria Esser, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs for Digital Strategy at the State Department, said the agency has 300 Twitter profiles, 400 Facebook pages, and recently staged a Google Hangout in Persian to engage young people in Iran. Charles Ray, the former American Ambassador to Zimbabwe, shared as story about using Facebook during his tenure to circumvent a local government's obstructionism. "When the government discovered our face-to-face meetings with young people were having an effect, they started disrupting meetings," he said. "They hated it with a passion, so we came up with an alternative. We hosted a live Facebook chat, along with SMS, Twitter, and YouTube. In the first one, 200 people enrolled and we had 250 comments in the first 30 minutes." Dino Patti Djalal, the Indonesian Ambassador to the United States, says Twitter has become a critical way for him and others to interact with Indonesians at home and abroad. Djalal said he recently asked his followers to "do one act of kindness" to honor his recent birthday, and a few hours later, he got hundreds of replies. "They were amazing," he said. "One said, 'I proposed to my girlfriend' and another said 'I kissed my mom on the cheek.' That's when I realized that social media has a use in the field of diplomacy."

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by PixelEmbargo for istock.com)

Heat 2

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:16:00 +0000

The Arab world "did not set out to trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told global heads of state, philanthropists, CEOs and celebrities attending Day 2 of this year's Clinton Global Initiative. In a 30-minute speech, Clinton offered a clear rebuke to Muslim extremists behind the September 11th attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi that killed U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith.

"Human dignity doesn't come from avenging insults, especially with violence that can never be justified," Clinton said, referring to the anti-Muslim video that has sparked recent riots around the world, including the one that preceded the attack in Benghazi. "...Countries focused more on fostering growth than fomenting grievances are racing ahead, building schools instead of burning them; investing in their peoples' creativity, not inciting their rage; opening their economies and societies to have more connections with the wider world, not shutting off the Internet or attacking embassies," Clinton said.

Many leaders from around the world — including the foreign minister of Tunisia, where the Arab Spring originated — have expressed their stance against violence in the wake of the attacks, she told CGI delegates. "All of us need to stand together to resist these forces of violence and oppression to support democratic transitions underway across Africa and around the world. Unity on this throughout the international community is crucial because extremists around the world are working hard to drive us apart."

Clinton also spoke broadly about global development and her agency's work to overhaul the U.S. foreign aid system, saying that "we need to move from development aid to investments." She took dead aim at what she called "the elites in every country" who, Clinton said, do not pay their fair share of taxes to support government investment in their local communities. "I'm out of American politics," she said, "but it is a fact that around the world, the elites of every country are making money. There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries. They do not invest in public schools and public hospitals and other kinds of development internally." She called on government and advocacy leaders around the world "to start telling powerful people things they don't want to hear" about the need to create transparency in governmental budgets and revenues, to work toward political reforms, to bring corruption to light, and create fair taxation models that mobilize resources and establish regulations designed to attract and protect investment.

"There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries." - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at CGI2012

"My goal is to put us out of the aid business," Clinton said, and to expand strategic aid partnerships beyond NGOs, to include businesses, other governments and innovative nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. As an example of this new collaboration, Clinton cited the development of Haiti's first business development park and a recent shipment of sewing machines to that country that is creating thousands of jobs there for women who had not worked previously. "You cannot have development in today's world without partnering with the private sector," Clinton said. She further cited a program in Sierra Leone in which more than 1,700 women serve as health monitors, checking up on clinics and reporting problems to the government so they can be resolved.

Clinton said her agency will continue working to encourage developing countries to pay for more of their own development, and to create impact measurements to ensure greater accountability and efficiency for their efforts to improve conditions on the ground. "I hear from leaders all over the world that ultimately, it must be their responsibility to provide economic opportunity, health care, and good schools to their people. They don't want to turn to other nations forever for assistance. I look forward to the day when our assistance is no longer needed," Clinton said.

In other Day 2 highlights:

* In a panel moderated by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, participants discussed the need to give women around the world the rights to more land so that more buildings and initiatives needed to help them rise out of poverty can —literally—get off the ground. "Only 1 percent of the land titles on earth is owned by women," said Joan Clos, the Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, "and only about 18 to 20 percent of the land on Earth is titled. People want to build but there is no way to register the land, or to use much of it, he said. "There are ancestral ways to register the land that does not end up in the legal system and we need to create institutions for proper land registration that gives more access to women and to everyone," he said. Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, said that in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, Habitat built 10,000 homes on the southeast Indian coast and titled all of them in women's names, then worked with local government to change local landholding policy, which has had the effect of involving women in local policy decisions that previously did not include their input. "Worldwide, currently, only 1-2 percent of titled land is in the hands of women," Kristof said. "This needs to change."

* Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group, hosted a panel of three social innovators who have used the power of partnerships to make change around the world — Yemeni journalist Tawakkol Karman, co-founder of Women Journalists Without Chains and a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is using new media to document human rights violations; Paul Farmer, chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard and Founding Director of Partners in Health, and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Karman said her group's goal for Yemen is to "build our countries up from what revolution has destroyed" to include sustainable development and the rule of law, so as to keep new dictators from taking charge. "We have to work with each other, with the international community, to help people in the Arab region, as there is no peace without development and no development without peace." Farmer, whose public health work in Haiti was profiled in the 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, acknowledged that the last two post-earthquake years in Haiti "have been difficult; Haitians tend to be resistant to change." But Farmer urged tenacity and improved outputs within the development community. "We need to stick with it for some decades to come" but change the way aid advocates engage in Haiti and involve more Haitians in rebuilding for themsleves.

CGI continues through Tuesday. Watch this space for updates.

—Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph of a segment of the Berlin Wall by Knud Nielsen for istock.com]

Heat

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:54:00 +0000

Bill Clinton's eighth annual, star-studded thinkfest on philanthropy, technology, social enterprise and cause advocacy — the Clinton Global Initiative 2012 — kicked off Sunday in Manhattan with a call to delegates to step up their impact on a global scale, to "design your actions in advance to make it more likely they will succeed."

In opening remarks decidedly less optimistic than in previous years, Clinton signaled impatience. "I want to say my standard broken record," he told attendeees, "that cooperation works better than conflict. I say that not for the purpose of avoiding disagreement—there will be a lot of those here—but the point is to act." [At one point during an opening panel with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Queen Rania of Jordan and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Clinton challenged Wal-Mart President and CEO Michael Duke to open a store in Libya and create jobs in some of the world's crisis hotspots. Duke responded that his company already operates in "high-risk areas" but not yet in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.]

"How come we can never seem to take solutions to problems to scale?" Clinton asked delegates and panelists, alike, alluding to the theme of this year's conference, Design for Impact. Since the first CGI conference in 2005, delegates have pledged millions to create new projects to ease hunger, stem environmental damage, and lift thousands of people out of poverty. But Clinton urged delegates to now act more collaboratively, and quickly, to translate what works in their individual projects into larger, cross-border deployments. "There are all of these places, all over the world, and they're all so different. How can we take what we know to work, and scale it quicker?" Clinton asked. "...How can countries come together amid all these cuts in foreign assistance? How can we plan and execute our way out of the current economic crisis (globally) without backsliding on all of these humanitarian goals?"

"If we do not deeply understand the communities we are trying to serve, we cannot design causes for impact." -- IDEA CEO Tim Brown

This is the fifth consecutive CGI that Cause Global has attended; the crowd at the New York Sheraton Hotel in the heart of midtown Manhattan is, once again, a testament to Clinton's continuing clout on the world stage, with appearances scheduled for Tuesday by both Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama, the new leaders of Egypt and Libya (attending amid the opening of this year's United Nations' General Assembly across town], and a blue-chip roster of bold-faced names from the worlds of media, business, policy think tanks and entertainment, including wellbeing guru Deepak Chopra, Actors Michael Douglas, Forrest Whitaker and Geena Davis, Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown, fashion designer Donna Karan, Council on Foreign Relations Co-chair and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Barbra Streisand, Loew's Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch, and philanthropist Eli Broad.

Much of the program will be unfolding during simultaneous break-out sessions and delegate design-for-impact workshops taking place on Monday and Tuesday. Some of the sessions will be livestreamed over the Web. Cause Global will be tweeting from the floor and during some of the breakout sessions. You can follow our CGI tweets @CauseGlobal throughout.

[The 2012 Social Good Summit, a separate conference occuring simultaneously across town, also is exploring impact, but mostly through the use of social media for cross-community action. Cause Global also is covering that conference, sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, Mashable, the 92Y, Ericcson and the Gates Foundation. Watch this space for separate posts.]

To view Sunday's opening plenary session of CGI, a conversation between Bill Clinton and global heads of state, click HERE. In that conversation, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon , alluding indirectly to the civil war in Syria, issued a "call for alarm" by world leaders and, alluding indirectly to Syria's civil war, urged more collaborative political leadership across the world. His remarks are excerpted, below:

"I'm going to sound the alarm to all leaders for more leadership. We are living in an era of insecurity, injustice, inequality, and intolerance. I want to emphasize that political leadership is needed. This is a collective responsibility of all of our leaders at this time in our history. I was just in Srebrenica, a place that may be the most difficult place to visit for any Secretary General of the United Nations. It was most humbling, sad, and troubling to realize the international community failed to protect the lives of many in the civilian popultion. We could have done that. We could have done it if there was a very clear, strong political will. More than 8,000 boys and men were murdered in just three days (in July 1995). Why and for what? In Rwanda, hundreds of thousands were killed in the span of a year. Why? Because we lacked the political will to protect the civilian population. We must respect human dignity ... and we have to set this world right, put this world on the right track for humanity. That is what the UN will continue to try to do but we need all of you to get engaged, as we can't do it alone."

Among other first-day highlights:

* World Bank President Jim Yong Kim acknowledged that multilateral institutions, including his own, "are not very good nor effective at capturing knowledge of what works and spreading it to others." Within the multilateral system, he said, "there are so many good examples of what works, yet we don't capture them, codify them, or duplicate them." He also said that global institutions have been "very bad at pulling fragile states out of instability. We do know that one way to do that is to create jobs. What do we know about creating jobs in fragile environments? Well, the folks in Mozambique and Rwanda have done pretty well at it. What are the lessons? The World Bank is filled with master practioners but we haven't been systematic about capturing that knowledge and spreading it effectively." He said his precedessor, James Wolfensohn, often talked about transforming the World Bank into a 'knowledge bank.' "But what does that mean?" Kim asked. "Does it mean that we send everyone our studies and our reports? Instead, we need to turn the World Bank into a solutions bank, and develop a science of delivery and execution around social goals. Solutions in one place may not work in another, but if you have a commitment to continously learn from what people are doing, there is a possibility we can contribute to stability everywhere."

* IDEO CEO Tim Brown spoke with Fast Company editor Linda Tischler, telling her that global changemakers need to learn about local culture and local markets before they can be effective scaling their designs for change, whether for new products or new social problem-solving. "If we do not deeply understand the communities we are trying to serve, we cannot design causes for impact," he said. "You need to be on the ground and to understand the local cultures. You have to be able to connect to the people for whom your designs are meant to serve."

* During a private dinner panel hosted by 10,000 Women, the Goldman Sachs-backed women's empowerment initiative, Liberian business owner Kabeh Sumbo told invitees that "if you train one woman like the 10,000 Women trained me, you train a nation." The panel, moderated by Newsweek and The Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown, was joined by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Melanne Verveer, Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof said there is mounting evidence that small businesses run by women can dramatically influence local communities and "lift nations" over time. But Sirleaf acknowledged that not every woman who wants to start a company will be a success. "Kabeh is an exception," Sirleaf acknowledged. Her administration has given Sumbo 100 acres of farmland to help her grow her palm-oil business, which Sumbo began with one container of olive oil and a microfinance loan. Sirleaf told Sumbo Sunday night, "Kabeh, your 100 acres of land awaits you. I have chosen to put it in my own county so I will be able to monitor you first-hand."

The conference continues through Tuesday. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to address CGI Monday morning.

Watch this space for continuing highlights.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photographs courtesy CGI and CauseGlobal staff]

Occupy, the Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:35:00 +0000

Here's the first episode of Fault Lines, a documentary from Al-Jazeera about the rise of the Occupy movement and its evolution. "In just two months, Occupy Wall Street had transformed the popular discourse in Amercia, challenging people not only to demand change but to live it," the opening narration says.

To see the movie, here's Episode One. What do you think?

(Screenshot from Episode One of Faultines)

Invisible Networks

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:30:00 +0000

As the KONY2012 campaign continues to storm social networks and dominate the conversation in the cause sector, social data experts have begun analyzing the carefully crafted social media strategy behind it. Since March 5th, the video by San Diego nonprofit Invisible Children (@Invisible) about African warlord Joseph Kony, has been shared and viewed by more than 100 million people worldwide, the most quickly and broadly shared video in Internet history.

How did they do it? Essentially, it was a triple whammy -- extremely engaging video, distributed by highly influential social networks, mostly via Twitter. Here are some very early findings (some obvious by now, some not) by Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development for Social Flow, and media scientist Henry Jenkins:

* The KONY2012 campaign is a verifiable youth movement. The video was heavily viewed from mobile phones and has been most popular with 13- to 17-year-old females and 18- to 24-year-old males. The video did not "go viral" so much as its early surge of circulation depended on the hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to Invisible Children, through their participation in IC and its grassroots campaigns over almost a decade. These highly engaged young people were the first to view the video, receive it and pass it along through their social networks.

* Kony2012 is a transmedia storytelling campaign. According to Jenkins, the video is part of a strategy by Invisible Children to create "multiple points of contact" with its core messages and themes of youth empowerment.

* Celebrity re-tweets played a critical role in early distribution of the video. Invisible Children enlisted its pre-existing social networks to press celebrities and made it very easy, for example, to tweet @TaylorSwift or @Rihanna within just two clicks. "Once celebrities came on board," Lotan says, "the campaign was given multiple boosts." Ellen Degeneres (@The EllenShow), for example, got mentioned 36,000 times on Twitter within the first few hours of the campaign from different users asking her to respond to Konhy2012. Both Oprah and Justin Bieber chose to respond and amplify the cause, while Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Stephen Colbert did not.

* Twitter focused huge spikes of attention on the subjects of Uganda and Joseph Kony, according to Lotan. "It was shockingly high," he says. "If we compare the usage of the #Kony2012 and #StopKony hashtags with the #SXSW hashtag (for the very highly-tweeted and re-tweeted South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin, Texas, which was happening at the same time KONY2012 was going mega-viral), we see almost 20x difference in traffic at the peaks." Lotan adds that "#StopKony had 12,000 tweets per 10 minutes at the height of the (viral) event, while #SXSW had only 900." References to Uganda or Kony on Twitter were nearly zero before the video was posted on YouTube. Just after it was, tweets referencing Kony began reaching the level of 25,000 tweets per 10-minute intervals.

* Invisible Childen's network of young supporters across the United States were activated simultaneously to help kick off the campaign. The graph, top, represents the first 5,000 users who posted to the #Kony2012 hashtag. Each node represents a Twitter user and the edges of the graph tracks their connections, or who follows whom. "The more red a node, the earlier it had participated in using the hashtag," Lotan says. Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell (@JasonRussell) and other employees of IC are represented, as is Kristen Bell (@IMKristenBell), an early active member of the organization. (Russell has 58,872 Twitter followers and Bell has 573,075.)

* Tight-knit clusters of 'superfans' have been essential. Clusters of highly-connected individuals indicate that the viral video campaign was orchestrated initially by the top influencers in Invisible Children's social network of supporters. Profiles of these clusters show that most of the "influencers" involved in this campaign were not based in big cities geographically, but were instead tweeting mostly from five geographical locations -- Noblesville, Indiana; Oklahoma City; Pittsburgh; Englewood/Dayton, Ohio, and Birmingham, Alabama. Many of the young people involved in early tweeting of their support of KONY2012 identify themselves as being Christian youth who responded especially favorably to the use of the words "love" and "hope" and "freedom" in IC's early tweets promoting the video.

For more on these early findings, see Lotan's blog post at Social flow, and see this post by media scientist Henry Jenkins.

What do you think?

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Graphic, top, by Social Flow of Invisible Children's Twitter network just after the nonprofit first posted the video, Kony2012)

The Slacktivism Card

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:25:00 +0000

I was invited to weigh in this morning on WNYC's The Takeaway about the ongoing backlash against KONY2012, the cause video from San Diego-based Invisible Children that went crazy-viral this past week. The 30-minute video, about African warlord Joseph Kony and his crimes against children, has been watched and shared by more than 100 million people worldwide in just six days and set a Web record for speed-sharing. Directed and narrated by IC cofounder Jason Russell, the video is many things, but chiefly a call to arms for a new generation of would-be activists, and an experiment in social media strategy aimed at raising global awareness of Kony and bringing him to justice.

As a cause marketing video, KONY2012 is really, really good. (There. I said it.) It has been deeply engaging for the viewers it targets. And it's an emotionally captivating piece of personalized storytelling, well-written and clear in focus. Its effort to bring a global story home and make it personal, for its donors, is laudable. (We don't see enough of that in the aid sector.) And the KONY2012 campaign makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to participate.

Yet unlike most other cause videos being shared on the Web these days, the KONY2012 campaign has deeply riled the nation's aid sector establishment, which is both envious of IC's global reach, and, among other things, is alarmed by its chutzpah. Critics also have serious problems with the content. Included on the aid establishment's elongating list of Kony2012 criticisms are assertions that the video oversimplifies the story of its central figure, Joseph Kony (it does, but it is a cause primer for teens, not foreign policy journalism); that its young-white-San-Diego-filmmaker-pursues-black-bad-guy-in-Africa conceit smacks of American paternalism (among other things), and that the nonprofit funding the film, Invisible Children, has spent too much money on social media and technology (including high-quality video production) to track Kony's movements -- and not nearly enough to help the victims of Kony's terrorist army. There are more criticisms --some valid, and others not so much.

And now, as the blowback against this media-savvy, cutting-edge cause campaign enters its second week, critics have leveled their biggest salvo yet. They're calling KONY2012 an example of slacktivism -- suggesting that the KONY2012 video, the public protest of Kony's movements inside and outside Uganda planned for April 20th in cities around the globe, the fundraising "action" kits and celebrity-policymaker "influencer" networks curated to help galvanize the viral campaign are not important and ultimately, won't likely lead to much. The assertion is that the people supporting and leading KONY2012 are uncommitted actors who won't do much, ultimately, beyond frenzied video-sharing, to help IC achieve its mission.

Slacktivism? Really? It sounds oh-so-2008. Our world's communication landscape in 2012 has become denser, more complex and more participatory, with more opportunities to engage in public speech and undertake collective action. Isn't it time the establishment aid sector stop crying "slacktivism" each time a tech-savvy nonprofit starts making waves across the Internet? Might it be wiser to ask, instead, how our maturing social networks -- serving us, increasingly, as forums for collective action -- are providing new actors an important way to participate in civic action and politics, and, in many ways, are forcing a much-needed reshaping of the advocacy sector at large?

Here are some other points about slacktivism, from WNYC's Is Slacktivism the New Activism? segment this morning. (Disclosure: I teach social media strategy at NYU and am the author of a forthcoming book, Swarms: The Rise of the Digital Anti-Establishment, about the increasing use of social networks as tools of civic engagement):

* The concept of slacktivism is outdated, misinformed and condescending. It is a term that many in the establishment aid sector have started to use to dismiss the importance of new actors in the sector -- people not previously allowed in before the Internet and before social media lowered the barriers to participation. The youth targeted in the KONY2012 campaign are new actors. They are not slacking, nor are they philanthropy's traditional target group of High Net Worth individuals looking for a meaningful tax writeoff. Invisible Children's stakeholders are mostly young people, born digital. Like most of us, they don't want simply to watch videos about awful things. They want a world in which there is a way to engage, and social media give them that opportunity to get involved, signal disagreement, and advocate for behavioral and social norms.

* The concept of slacktivism dismisses the role of social networks as important signals of public preference and intent. People who are barely committed to a cause will never be able to click their way to a better world. But that does not mean that committed people cannot use social media effectively. As we've seen with recent, ad-hoc groups forming quickly on line to protest the Komen Foundation's attempt to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, or to speak out against Rush Limbaugh's incendiary comments about a Georgetown University student, or to support the Stop SOPA movement to preserve Internet freedom, committed actors -- everyday people with access to influential social networks -- can use social media effectively, not as a replacement for real-world action but as a way to coordinate it.

* Online groups that use social media to achieve a goal can be effective. An Internet firestorm, in just three days, was able to force Limbaugh to apologize -- twice -- to the woman he'd called "a slut" during his incendiary broadcast and he has lost nearly 100 advertisers. The anti-Komen protest swarm that was organized online to protest the breast cancer charity's decision to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood forced a reversal of that decision and led the woman behind the brouhaha to resign. The Stop SOPA campaign was able to delay a vote on legislation to diminish Internet freedom, at least for now. This isn't Slacktivism. This is new form of activism that has used social media to coordinate swift action around a specific goal.

* Organized social networks don't need permission to act. Invisible Children has been launching videos and mass demonstrations around its mission to stop Kony since 2006. Russell and cofounders Laren Poole and Bobby Bailey made Invisible Children, a 2004 documentary film about Kony and his child soldiers that first screened in June 2004 in San Diego. The following year, the trio founded Invisible Children as a nonprofit and on April 28, 2006, it staged a massive demonstration called Global Night Commute across 126 U.S. cities, in which more than 80,000 people walked to their city centers and slept in the streets to make a visual call to end night commuting in northern Uganda. The following year, in April 2007, IC hosted its second nationwide event, during which more than 68,000 people gathered in 15 U.S. cities to experience, for one night, what it was like to be displaced. Last April, 91,355 supporters went silent for 24 hours and in doing so raised close to $2 million to help Invisible Children build radio towers to help protect remote villages inside and outside Uganda from Kony-led violence. There is little to suggest that KONY2012 will fail to again mobilize young people in April and raise more funds for the African victims of Kony's army. With KONY2012, IC is seeking to globally scale its social media strategy for organizing public demonstrations and broad-scale fundraising drives.

The bottom line here? Thanks to social media, the aid sector establishment is no longer able to control the conversation, nor say who gets to be at the table. What really makes KONY2012 so provocative and, frankly, so unsettling to so many, has less to do with Invisible Children and its latest video and much more to do with the ability of new players in the advocacy sector to work collectively -- and successfully -- outside the sector's long-established structures to identify alternative goals.

The Internet is rebalancing power and reshaping the status quo throughout society, and the transformation within the cause sector is just getting started. That is the big story to watch. KONY2012 is just another wake-up call.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, above: Invisible Children's Facebook page)

Cause Docs: The 2012 Oscars

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Five short "cause" documentary films were nominated for an Oscar this year. Taking home the prize last night was Saving Face, a disturbing portrait of violence against women in Pakistan. Though the short film won top honors, each of the documentary shorts nominated for an Oscar this year in the category of Best Documentary Short Subject offer powerful, raw glimpses of contemporary life around the globe.

Here's a closer look at each of the films in the category, including the winner:

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, who made Saving Face with American director Daniel Junge, profiles Mohammad Jawad, a Pakistani-born plastic surgeon in London who helps women disfigured by men who have thrown acid in their faces, to punish them for defying their wishes. According to The Acid Survivors Foundation, about 150 women are viciously attacked each year by men who can obtain acid used in the local cotton industry. Jawad now works with charity aid groups, such as Islamic Help, to rebuild the faces of women like Zakia, who the film follows. Zakia lost an eye and half of her nose after she asked her husband for a divorce. "He wanted her to spend the rest of her life within the four walls of her home and wanted her to regret the decision to divorce him," Chinoy told Radio Liberty in a January interview about the film. Saving Face is scheduled to air in full on HBO on March 8th. Here's the trailer:

The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement by Bay Area photographer Robin Fryday and veteran documentary producer Gail Dolgin, profiles 85-year-old James Armstrong, a barber and self-described "foot soldier" in the nation's civil rights movement since the mid-1950s. The film captures the impact of President Obama's 2008 election to the White House on aging civil rights activists who fought for the right to vote. Since 1955, Armstrong's barbershop in Birmingham, Alabama, has been a hub for haircuts and civil rights. Armstrong, an Army veteran whose two sons were the first to integrate an all-white elementary school, has devoted his life to the dream of civil rights for all. Here's the trailer:

God is the Bigger Elvis by Rebecca Cammisa and Julie Anderson is a profile of actress Delores Hart, who abandoned a film career at the age of 23 to become a Benedictine nun. Hart co-starred with Elvis Presley in the 1957 Parmount movie, Loving You, giving Elvis his first on-screen kiss, and starred in nine other movies before deciding to join a convent. [Hart's photo is above.]

Incident in New Baghdad is a film by New York-based filmmaker James Spione that offers an insider's look of the famous July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike that killed two Reuters journalists and a dozen other mostly unarmed individuals in a suburb of Baghdad during one of the most violent and chaotic periods of the Iraq war. The Morninglight Films production showcases former Bravo Company member Ethan McCord and his recollection of what he saw when he arrived at the scene of the attack to investigate. The film also focuses on footage released a year ago by WikiLeaks from a gunsight camera of an Apache helicopter engaged in the incident. Here's the trailer:

In The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Lucy Walker and Kira Carstensen talk with survivors of last year's horrific Japanese tsunami and explore their courage and resolve to rebuild as cherry blossom season begins again.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom Trailer from Boon Shin Ng on Vimeo.

What do you think of the nominees and the Oscar winner? Let us hear from you.

--Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, top, of Delores Hart on Flickr)

Conflict Calling

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:44:00 +0000

Livestreaming, the act of broadcasting a video to the Internet in near-real time, is fast becoming the weapon of choice for increasing numbers of citizen activists worldwide, from supporters of Occupy Wall Street to protesters in Cairo and Moscow, to civilians targeted for assault in Syria's civil unrest.

Increasingly, cell phones are being used to document events as they happen, and to broadcast them, simultaneously.

Because of a spike in the number of citizen livestreams coming out of Russia, Egypt and Syria in recent weeks and months, here are some quick takeaways on mobile/video activism -- especially significant this past week, amid Syria's failure to completely block all livestreams of authoritarian abuse leaking out of Homs, the epicenter of the 2011-2012 Syrian uprising.

* Bambuser, a mobile app out of Sweden, has become one of the most popular livestreaming platforms, chiefly because of its ability to stream video over poor mobile connections and because it supports more than 200 different mobile devices, from inexpensive Nokias to the latest iPhone. About 90 to 95 percent of live video coming out of Syria in recent days and weeks has been streamed via Bambuser. The Syrian government blocked 3G and desktop Web access to the service on February 17th, yet some streams documenting the government's attacks on civilians as well as horrific conditions in Syrian hospitals caring for the wounded are still getting through. Here's another stream out of Russia today, by citizen journalist Vova Moska, documenting the large crowds that converged in Moscow's Red Square to protest government corruption in advance of next week's expected victory of Vladimir Putin at the polls.

* Livestreams are becoming one of the most potent forms of cause activism and citizen journalism. Thanks to recent improvements in Facebook's newsfeed, it is now easier to broadcast a live feed to target audiences via a smartphone or tablet device. One of the more facile stream-casters to date is Tim Pool, who became Web-famous last fall for his day-long, live videostream on Ustream of the tense, second-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street last November 17th, which he engineered via a Samsung Galaxy S II cellphone operating on Sprint's 4G network. Pool's continous livecasting, which he hosted, narrated and produced on the spot for nearly 22 hours that day, drew more than 20,000 simultaneous viewers and 250,000 unique visitors. His feeds were also picked up by Al Jazeera English and other more mainstream news outlets.

* Livestreams are proving to be effective inhibitors. According to Bambuser Founder Mans Adler, in an interview last December with NPR's Brooke Gladstone, livestreams have evolved over the past five years from content produced by "soccer moms streaming live from soccer games" to live action shots of conflict produced by citizen activists covering civil unrest. When picked up by traditional media channels, livestreams can serve as near-instant documentation of authoritarian abuses as they occur -- and under the right circumstances, help to stop them. "Livestreaming provides (activists) with the opportunity to not be afraid of losing their content because when you're protesting, the police may confiscate your phone," Adler told NPR. "Doing a livestream isn't so risky. Once livestreamed, the content is already out there on the Web." Adler cites the case of Tarek Shalaby in Egypt, who was livestreaming a protest outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last June and got arrested along with 12 other people. "He kept streaming while the police arrested him and the others and you can hear everything they're saying," Adler told NPR. "The police were collaborating with the Egyptian Army, which was the first time anybody had heard that. The livestream was picked up by Al-Jazeera and it was such a huge thing on the news -- even before the police had managed to get those 13 people to the police station. The head of the police station was afraid of all the media attacking him, so he ended up letting them go."

In case you missed it the first time, here's an edited transcript of that interview:

NPR: A lot of people think livestreaming is a paragon of objectivity. Is that really the case?

ADLER: No, but it's definitely much harder to fake. I mean, it has the potential of validating things that a lot of other tools have a hard time of validating. Since Twitter is only text, it's very hard for a news editor to validate if someone writes that there are 100,000 people on Tahrir Square at the moment. However, if they are livestreaming, then a news editor will be able to send a real time chat saying, can you broadcast to the right? And they will validate that this is going on right here, right now.

You founded Bambuser in 2007. What motivated you then?

ADLER: The vision was to democratize the technology of broadcasting. The traditional business model for broadcast video costs several dollars a second. Now, all of a sudden, you had everything on your phone; you had a camera, you had an Internet connection. And boom, all of a sudden, you can do the same with your mobile phone.

How was the technology first applied?

ADLER: There were soccer moms streaming live from soccer games. There were people handing out real time live lectures so that students away from the university could ask questions and interact. A lot of nonprofit organizations picked up the tool here in Sweden. A lot of the political parties started to do livestreamed press conferences. Then, it sort of moved over during the last couple of years to more activists. Livestreaming provides them the opportunity to not be afraid of losing their content, because in scenarios where you're protesting and the police may confiscate your phone, doing a livestream is not so risky. Once livestreamed, the content is already out there on the Web.

Have you seen any of the livestreaming translate into tangible results?

ADLER: We have several scenarios of this. For example, a guy that we actually met in Egypt, Tarek Shalaby, he was livestreaming a protest outside the Israeli Embassy in the beginning of June. He got arrested, together with 12 people. He kept streaming while the police were arresting them. He even managed to get his phone into his pocket before they took it away from him. You can hear everything they say. And they were actually collaborating with the Egyptian Army, which was the first time anybody had heard that.

In Egypt, there is loyalty toward the army and a great deal of hostility toward the police, so this would seem like betrayal.

ADLER: Exactly. And so this livestream was picked up by Al-Jazeera and it was such a huge thing on the news -- even before the police had managed to get those 13 people to the police station. The head of the police station was afraid of all the media attacking him and ended up letting them go. ... And then when a bomb exploded in Oslo on July 22nd (2011), there was a person starting a live broadcast and that video was directly picked up by the Danish national broadcaster. It took four minutes from when he started his broadcast until that broadcast was live on mainstream television.

Are you seeing a trend among the people who download Bambuser?

ADLER: We're receiving a lot of videos from Russia, Syria, from the Emirates and, of course, a lot of Occupy Wall Street movements, still.

So in a way, this live streaming provides a portrait of protest.

ADLER: Absolutely. It's sort of like taking the temperature on a political level of what's going on, on our planet right here, right now.

For more on livestreaming in activism, check out Global Revolution, Livestream's citizen media channel, and this ehow.com on how to convert your camera cellphone into a wireless Webcam. Here's another "how-to" on livestreaming from Livestream.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photos: (Top) A screenshot of a Bambuser-generated video out of Homs, Syria, on February 17th documenting the bombing of a pipeline by government authorities; (middle) a photo, courtesy Fotorater, of Mans Adler, the co-founder of Bambuser, and (bottom) photo of Tim Pool, a chief livestreamer of last fall's Occupy Wall Street protests in NYC. (All photos published here with permission.)

Cause Video Checklist

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Our friend Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, has often referred to the importance of “viteracy” — a word he coined to mean “video literacy” — in the current social media climate. I and my NYU faculty colleagues Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson couldn’t agree more, which is why we’ve added a video lab to the social media strategy class we're team-teaching this term in the Master's program at NYU. (We’ve also just added Andrew as a guest speaker for that March 3 lab, along with some other thinkers and co-practioners.)

Here is Cause Global's list of "10 things to think about before you start shooting" a cause video:

1. Consider your video an “argument for” something — a donation, a better explanation, greater awareness, a solution, a bigger pool of volunteers, a cause. You can make it highly personal, from your own experience. Or you can approach it as a citizen journalist. In either case, you want to showcase a need.

2. Keep it strategic. Remember, you’re making this video to help advance one or all of your organization’s strategic goals as stipulated in your social media strategy papers. Good videos show versus “tell.” What does your organization most need to show? Does it need to clarify its “reason for being?” Promote a lesser-known initiative? Kick off a new campaign? Prove impact? Be clear about the purpose of your video before you start shooting. Just telling a story isn’t enough.

3. Remember “the ask.” Consider your video a visual “ask” aimed at getting individual viewers to act in some way. What will your video be asking them to do, and where can they go to do it? Will you need to configure an extra page on your organization’s Website that will take micro-donations? To text in $15? To tweet your video?

4. Choose a single, simple message. Make your video short, maybe 60-90 seconds, max. Once you’ve determined your video’s “argument” and strategic purpose and ask, then you’re ready to select the message. Boil it down to a sentence. What is the single message this video needs to convey? The American Jewish World Service, in its prize-winning, 2010 video last year, was making an argument for more cross-sector engagement. Its strategic purpose was to boost awareness of AJWS, both inside and outside the organization. The ask? To go to its Website to give money, time, ideas. And the message? Says Judd Apatow, the filmmaker: “They were saying, ‘We are a Jewish organization but we serve and support all people in need, and we need more donations and new members to help us to keep doing this well.’”

5. Choose your audience. It is important to select who you really want and need as an audience so you can target your message. AJWS was facing an erosion of younger members. Its target audience was Millennials.

6. Choose the “voice.” Is your intent to make your message heart-wrenching, clever, provocative or funny? All of the above? At a panel in which I participated during Social Media Week last week, Buzzfeed President Jon Steinberg told attendees that digital content shouldn’t simply be about conveying “information.” It should also be the kind of content that gives people an excuse to connect (again) with their friends. Therefore, the content has to be fun or weild unusual emotional impact. “The stuff that goes viral is the kind of stuff that people can feel important or cool or relevant about, just by being associated with it,” Steinberg said. AJWS filmmakers chose humor as their “voice” because they knew humor was effective in messaging Millennials.

7. Think multimedia. Sure, you’re making a video. But don’t forget to think about the music and the still images and interviews you also might want to use. Does your organization have archival photographs you could use? Can you use illustrations if you can’t get much original footage? How about a simple animation? A podcast for narration? AJWS chose to do a series of short interviews with well-known people and edit them together. But you also can use still photographs and narration, Ken Burns-style -- or mix both stills and video.

8. Don't oversweat the equipment. For organizations operating on a shoestring, it's okay to keep it very simple. Nothing elaborate is required. Check out the video and camera functions of your phone. [Here are some smartphone video tips, to get you thinking about that option.] Or, borrow a Flipcam or dust off your old one. The Kodak zi8 pocket cam, the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 or the lineup of Sony Bloggie Touch cams also offer acceptable options. [We especially like the audio features on the Samson Q3.] See if you can borrow something from your organization.

9. Map your scenes. Learn a bit about “storyboarding” — how to make a visual map of each shot. Where you want to “locate” your video? In your yard? Times Square? A studio? At your organization’s next fundraiser? At an environmental dump? An animal shelter? A performance space? What will this video need to show?

10. And finally, don’t agonize over the “putting-it-all-together” phase of things. Editing is a skill but one that you will be able to get the hang of in no time. Most software programs like iMovie and Movie Maker have simple editing tools, and there are some good Webinars offered by TechSoup and other organizations to walk you through some basic editing.

Go ahead. Involve your organization. Tell them it's time to visualize the mission statement, and get ready for a fascinating ride.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Generation Go

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:59:00 +0000

This week's Social Media Week gatherings in 11 cities around the world -- from Hamburg and Hong Kong to Singapore and Sao Paulo -- are focusing on the role of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks as a catalyst for cultural, political, economic and social change. The theme is "Empowering Change through Collaboration." But the big takeaway so far? Social media innovation in 2012 won't be about Playing Nice with Others so much as creating new ways to battle the status quo.

Madison Avenue is ready and waiting. Tonight, at a special Valentine's Day panel on "connectedness" at J. Walter Thompson's Midtown headquarters, JWT's Worldwide Digital Director David Eastman shared research by his agency's trendspotters on what they're calling "Generation Go" -- an emerging cohort of cause-wired citizens who will use social media to support ever-higher levels of self-organizing across society. "We're becoming hyper-documentarians, chronicling everying -- the big, the small and everything in between -- in words, pictures, video and emoticons as it happens," says Eastman. "Generation Go is finding opportunity in economic advertisty, with many using social media as a platform for their entrepreneurial energies." [See his Top 2012 Trends in Social.] The moniker struck a chord among many #SMWNYC attendees, including Noni Cavaliere, who counted herself a member and tweeted this definition: "We go, not wait for someone to tell us to go." Fellow attendee Valerie Morini tweeted that "Generation Go is more of a mindset" favoring "entrepreneurship" and "change without invitation."

Reflecting back on a year of social media-driven uprisings in the Middle East and on Wall Street, Meetup Founder and CEO Scott Heiferman took it all a little further, saying social media have unleashed widespread energy among citizens seeking to build a new society of parallel political and economic systems. "The future is going to be defined around the idea that people are going to render the old economy somewhat pointless," Heiferman told the #SMW12 crowd. "We're at the very early stage of a true revolution, in that people are turning away from big media and big business and big finance, big pharma, big food. What we're doing on Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms is inventing new kinds of transactions. We're turning to each other now and increasingly for what we need." Heiferman cited the emerging group of networked services like airbnb and Parker from Streetline. "Thanks to social media," he said, "people in social networks are starting to sell or rent or buy from each other. They're renting their excess parking spaces to each other and insuring each other. That might not sound like a lot, but it is no small thing when people have in these tools the power to start creating an economy outside the prevailing system."

Heiferman called this new economy a "do-it-ourselves" economy -- "something between our everyday social interactions on Facebook and our activism in movements like Occupy" that is enabling people to "turn to each other to get what they need" outside the traditional system.

Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, followed Heiferman, saying the market trends are reflective of broader changes across society. "...We live in an era of a new currency" of friends and family and relationships we can trust, he said tonight. Government, for example, "will not get fixed. It is going to get redesigned and rebuilt" by wired citizens demanding faster, more responsive and transparent institutions and social systems.

"...We should not wait to fix the 20th century political system or wait for the 21st century democracy to get built," Rasiej said. "The 21st century democracy and economy will be built by us, by activists, by engineers who understand that the power of technology is not based in the hallways of Congress but in the streets all over the world."

For more on this week's Social Media Week panels, see the schedule and collection of livestreams.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph of torn poster of deposed Tunisian President Ben Ali by Murat Sarica-2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:06:00 +0000

Okay, so everyone is talking about Pinterest. Or sending you invitations to check out the crazy virtual pinboards there. And so now you're thinking, 'Is this really another social network I need to know about?'

Here's the thing: Pinterest is one of the Web's fastest-growing social networks. Though it's been around for two years, it has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple of months. Pinterest now ranks among the Web's Top 10 social networks, among the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. But the biggest take-away about Pinterest? It is becoming one of the highest referral traffic sources out there. Shareaholic's February report on referral traffic from social networks says Pinterest can drive more people to your Website than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. Combined. And now it's starting to gain on Twitter.

So what's the appeal? Pinterest lets you organize and share images and videos you discover on the Web about pretty much anything -- whether a collection of favorite typefaces or our friend Lina Srivastava's collection of images that each represent a different multimedia campaign for social good. Her pinboard is called "narrative design for social action." [My pinboard, on the other hand, is a starter's collection of just a few of my favorite cause videos, here. I have another pinboard, a collection of info-graphics used in advocacy. Social Media consultant and blogger Beth Kanter, has 20 Pinterest boards that mix her personal interests with her work on social media.

Just like other social networks, Pinterest lets you build a list of people and organizations to follow. A number of nonprofit organizations already have a presence on Pinterest -- either on pinboards which they have created themselves (the Humane Society of New York) or on pinboards their fans have created in appreciation, such as this one made about the American Red Cross. Another page for good, Help Japan, had (at this posting) 421,600 followers. [For a wide array of other boards on other subjects, see Mashable's recent post, 21 Must-Follow Pinterest Users. And see this infographic suggesting Pinterest may be "the next social commerce game-changer."]

A few other things to know about Pinterest: It's not just about checking out somebody's collection of wedding gown images or their most favorite album covers from the '60s. Pinterest can be a promotional engine for brands and a way to help drum up support for an activist cause or action. It also is a form of content marketing. If you run a bakery, say, you might want to think about sharing some special cookie recipes for your Pinterest followers. Or if you're a photographer, it's a great place to show off your latest work. Pinterest also is a good way to build authority around a topic. Select a couple of topics related to your industry and create boards to share unique related content about them. Or take it to the next level. If you're showcasing products on specific boards, try running exclusive content and promotions for Pinners, or use it to complement existing campaigns.

It's not yet clear how Pinterest enthusiasts will develop the network over time. [Many social network platforms begin with one purpose in mind and then get reinvented by users to meet a wider need. This past week's controversy over the Susan G. Komen Foundation's decision (later reversed) to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, for example, spawned another use of Pinterest, which Kanter labeled "pinactivism."] But one thing about Pinterest is already fairly obvious. It can help raise awareness for a cause and a brand and build followers. And if Help Japan proves able to raise money on Pinterest, many more nonprofits will be sure to get pinned.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Super Bowl Social

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:19:00 +0000

The Komen controversy spills into the Super Bowl today, with nonprofit tech activists launching a #takebackthepink Twitter campaign they say is intended to "redirect all of the emotion" that arose this past week against the Susan G. Komen for the Cure nonprofit -- and redirect it "in a positive way, back into the fight to end cancer." [According to Nielsen, the percentage of women watching the Super Bowl between the ages of 18 and 54 has increased by 8 percent since 2002.]

While #takebackthepink is targeting anyone who is tracking their social sites while they're watching the game, organizers hope especially to reach and encourage donors who dropped their support of Komen this week and persuade them to back other breast cancer organizations -- rather than walk away from the cause altogether. "This is an effort to make sure that Komen's donors don't walk away from breast cancer -- that we help harness their passion to give and volunteer -- even if that means participating with other organizations," organizers said in eblasts last night to their followers.

#takebackthepink organizers include popular social media consultants and bloggers Beth Kanter, Allison Fine and Lucy Bernholz -- all critics of Komen's move to politicize the issue of breast cancer with its decision, reversed Friday, to cut funds to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings because of PP's support for abortion. The women say their #takebackthepink campaign is not an attack on Komen but rather a push to promote the importance of women's health, the importance of organizational transparency and "to keep politics out of women's health."

"We are interested in leading people to the many paths that will bring an eradication of cancer while educating on the importance of transparency and integrity," they say on their wiki promoting the effort. They also are hoping activists will flood Komen's #supercure Super Bowl hashtag during the game with retweets that include the #takebackthepink hashtag. The idea, according to the group's eblast, is to "'blitz the hashtag' and engage millions of football fans for women's health."

Back in July, Komen entered a partnership between the NFL's Indiana Super Bowl Host Committee and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Tissue Bank at Indiana University's Simon Cancer Center, and according to an item on Komen's Web site last July announcing that partnership, Komen will be promoting the #supercure hashtag during today's game "to merge the fight against breast cancer with one of the largest and widely watched events in the country." After last week's brouhaha, Komen -- the marketing juggernaut and creator of the famous pink ribbon campaign -- also will be using #supercure to rebuild some of the support it lost this week in the controversy.

Will the two Twitter campaigns help expand last week's controversy or serve as a way to help ease the social swarming against Komen? Post your own thoughts here, and watch this space for updates.

For more on the story, see Friday's post here, When Communities Revolt. See also New York Times writer Jennifer Preston's blog post about Komen's reversal Friday and Kanter's "Komen Can Kiss My Mammagram" pinboard on Pinterest, which is tracking and archiving some of the anti-Komen backlash.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, with permission, by Matthew Hollister for The New Yorker]

When Communities Revolt

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:10:00 +0000

There are two kinds of digital swarms in today's nonprofit world -- groups of people who self-organize rapidly on the Web to achieve an urgent, common goal (to help Haiti quake victims, change a law or oust a politician, for starters.) And now, as this week's Komen for the Cure controversy has made clear, there are also the kinds of swarms that can form when an organization's most influential fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platforms start feeling that the organizations they support are ignoring them -- or betraying their trust by doing something controversial without their input or prior knowledge.

This week's Komen swarm acted swiftly -- "with head-snapping speed," according to Jennifer Preston of The New York Times. It began forming on Twitter and Facebook minutes after The Associated Press Tuesday broke a news "exclusive" exposing a decision by the Komen board to stop funding Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening programs because of its support for abortion. Within hours, criticism of the action on the organization's social sites had turned into an angry buzz. According to blogger Kivi Leroux Miller, who was closely monitoring the reaction on Komen's social sites at the time of the decision, "anti-Komen posts were outnumbering pro-Komen posts at the rate of 80-1."

The swarm intensified throughout the day into Wednesday, fueled by a decision Komen made to remain silent, even as the size of the swarm had become nearly overwhelming in its speed and ferocity. "It was as if they were trying to ignore us," one #komen supporter tweeted Wednesday. But the uproar didn't reach critical mass until cause-wired fans caught Komen starting to remove from its social media sites some of their most passionate criticisms. [Komen supporter Mary Anne Van Develde wrote on Komen's Facebook page Wednesday that"...the post I made here yesterday knocking your decision is now gone. Please, no matter how you try to spin it, you have to know this is just wrong."] The swarm ended when its target, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, said tonight that it would reverse its Planned Parenthood decision, three days after the uproar began.

But for Komen, is it too little, too late? It hasn't been only abortion rights activists denouncing Komen but also some of Komen's long-time supporters, furious that the fight against breast cancer has been pulled into partisan battles over the abortion issue. As of this post, ardent protest continues online, with some activists eyeing Sunday's Superbowl for possible further action. Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, says it was able to raise some $3 million from the new fundraising drive it began right after the AP story broke, to compensate for the cutbacks Komen now says won't be necessary. That's money soliticited from many of Komen's old donors that won't ever be going back. Bloomberg, who pledged $250,000 to Planned Parenthood yesterday, lauded the Komen reversal but says he will not withdraw his gift to Planned Parenthood. "Politics have no place in health care," Bloomberg said, echoing the complaints of protesters. "Breast cancer screening saves lives, and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care."

Some take-aways:

1. Don't underestimate the power of your fan networks. They are following your activities closely. They are likely to be more engaged with you than you realize and the most influential of them are always ready to engage further. Ignoring them or removing their posts from your media streams and walls signals censorship. Chastising them for expressing their opinions, even if you don't agree, "is one of the worst things you can do to your community," says care2 blogger Allyson Kapin. "It also riles them up even more."

2. Don't underestimate the power of social media to harness rapid protest. Angry fans have the power to hold even your most headstrong, high-profile leaders accountable, especially when they attempt to shift course abruptly or act controversially. Your fans on social networks also don't like surprises. Give them a head's up before announcing a big decision. [According to the Times, Twitter users have so far sent more than 1 million posts mentioning Planned Parenthood, Komen and related terms and hashtags. On Thursday alone, the Times says, there were more than 460,000 Tweets.]

3. Social media can help people to create a broad, shared awareness of a problem and accelerate the speed at which those problems get resolved. The 2011 Arab spring protests, the citizen's campaign to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the Occupy movement and dozens of other protests all have used social media successfully to create full-blown assaults on the status quo -- and, at least for a short while, to exhibit widespread support for mass action.

4. Nonprofits, governments and other establishment organizations tend to overestimate people's access to informaton and underestimate their access to each other. Komen's decision to end Planned Parenthood grants may have been just as unpopular if announced last December but at least supporters would have heard the news first from Komen -- not from a news organization breaking "a scoop" based on an inside tip.

5. Don't wait to communicate. Komen waited more than 48 hours after the AP story ran to post a video of Komen Founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker defending the organization on Web site and on YouTube. According to The New York Times, the video drew more than 2,800 comments and was been viewed more than 39,000 times but did little to reverse the sentiments of the swarm. According to Bloomberg News, meanwhile, Planned Parenthood was able to raise $3 million from people in reaction to Komen's decision, reversed earlier today, to end its grants. "Women feel betrayed," says Anika Rahman, president of the feminist group Ms. Foundation for Women. She told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Victoria Colliver on Friday the flap -- and the way it was handled by Komen -- "will be something that will have long-term implications."

6. And finally, social networks decentralize leadership. Networks do not need permission to act and they want a head's up on the big decisions. The Komen case serves as a reminder of what nonprofit marketing coach Kivi Leroux Miller called earlier this week the power of social media to "accidentally rebrand" any organization that fails to create new communications strategies aimed at transparently and authentically engaging its digital communities. Sure, Komen has its own Facebook page and Twitter stream. But using them to build ongoing and transparent engagement with fans is a challenge few organizations do well. The Komen brouhaha, Miller wrote this past week, "is what can happen when a leading organization with thousands of fans decides to jump into a highly controversial area of public policy without a communications strategy, stays silent and lets others take over the public dialogue." Ironically, the very same Komen marketing juggernaut that brought the world the ubiquitous pink-ribbon campaign to fight breast cancer ended up portraying itself as being clueless about social media.

Bottom line? Don't mess with your Facebook fans and social media followers. As Wendy Harman, the Director of Social Media Strategy at the American Red Cross told my social media strategy students at New York University last Wednesday: "Transparency is not about vulnerability so much as it is about having the institutional ability to hear what people are saying and to respond in a really human, honest and compassionate way -- in real time."

Just weeks after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power last spring, friend and former PopTech /NYU colleague Kristin Taylor suggested that many institutions today risk "getting Mubaraked." The definition? Said Taylor: "Failing to engage on social media with your stakeholders to such a degree that they eventually render you irrelevant."

Don't let it happen to you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Christoph Kadur for istock.com)

Teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:25:00 +0000

This year, I'm delighted to be team-teaching a new course on social media strategy at New York University with my friends and colleagues Tom Watson and Howard Greenstein. The course expands a pilot social media strategy course I put together for NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising last spring -- and builds it into a 13-week class for the Center's Master's program.

The class is "The Wired Nonprofit 2012: Social Media Strategy and Practice" and Tom, Howard and I will be helping graduate students and future advocacy leaders "to create a comprehensive social media strategy for their organizations." Last year, I asked Tom and Howard to help me further develop the course for the Master's program, and I'm excited (and honored) to have lift-off.

The class began last night and will run through May 2nd. The three of us will be sharing some of the discussion, highlights from the class blog, comments from some of our guest speakers and links for some of the readings. I'll also be sharing some of the highlights here on Cause Global. You also can follow us at #wnpNYU on Twitter.

On another academic note, I'm also again curating Philanthropy 3.0, the Heyman Center's speaker series, a forum I developed for the Center last year that features national leaders in philanthropy innovation debating disruptive changes in the sector, including the latest influences of social media, cause video, the social enterprise movement and mobile fundraising/advocacy. I'll be moderating (and covering) those discussions for Cause Global and will be sharing the stage with some of today's most exciting new voices in social media.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Milos Marek)

Occupy Us!

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:10:00 +0000

It is said that good advertising anticipates -- and acknowledges -- social trends. [Apple's "Think Different" campaign comes to mind.] But bad advertising? Clueless. Consider Bank of America's new "Together, we are the 100%" campaign, which tries to monetize Occupy Wall Street's anti-greed movement, if not simply "re-image" the bank, which is under fire for improper foreclosures and hiking debit card fees.

The bank kicked off the new campaign earlier this month and promoted it on Thursday -- Occupy Wall Street's nationwide Day of Action, which successfully orchestrated protest marches across the country to celebrate the movement's two-month annniversary. BofA's ads are part of the bank's new image campaign that began in September across 12 of the bank's larger U.S. markets, including New York City. Says Bank spokesman T.J. Crawford: "The campaign aims to deliver the facts about Bank of America's local impact. Sharing the work we do and the critical role we play is more important than ever."

But many Occupy supporters are not impressed. Influential BoingBoing co-editor Zeni Jardin yesterday shared some Twitpics of the bilingual ads (including those above), and the images went viral. "I find BofA's new 100% ads positively revolting," she tweeted to a chorus of hundreds of RTs and thousands of thumbs-ups in the Twittersphere.

BOA isn't the only company trying to leverage the "Occupy US" theme locally. Major World, one of the nation's largest used car dealerships, launched a series of 60-second radio spots last week that invite listeners to "occupy us" for the "best deals on used cars in the nation." A spokesman for the Queens-based dealership said today the company has received "dozens of calls" from potential customers since the ads were placed but declined to characterize the feedback.

Okay, it's a used car dealership. But it is unlikely Major's and BofA's ads will be the last Occupy-themed campaigns to launch. Marketing sources across the financial sector have told Cause Global that OWS isn't just changing the political conversation; it's also re-shaping the focus of many ad campaigns being planned for 2012.

Let's hope marketers trying to exploit the Occupy meme will do a better job of it going forward. In today's social media world, smart marketing isn't about the brand so much as it is about making customers the heroes. It's about conveying shared values by supporting customers in authentic, sustainable ways -- not on-the-spot sloganeering. Occupy? Sure --it, too, is a brand. But part of its appeal is that it's the "anti-brand" -- not business-as-usual.

"We want more than slogans," says Occupy protester Nancy Popp, one of some 200 demonstrators arrested Thursday in Manhattan's financial district. "Don't give us slogans and fine print. Deal with us. Hear us. I mean, do they really think an ad campaign is going to make us open bank accounts at Bank of America? Maybe it's true that there's a sucker born every minute, but with social media, the suckers aren't the customers anymore. The message of Occupy? No more bullshit. Are these brands even listening?"

Seen any further examples of Occupy-in-advertising? Let us know. We'll publish them when we see them.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photos by BoingBoing.com]

Counter-swarms

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street organizers -- to further protest their eviction earlier today from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park by New York City riot police -- are stepping up their scheduled global "Day of Action" rally set for Thursday throughout New York City and in other cities where Occupy encampments have been shuttered in recent hours and days.

In a flash rally today attended by hundreds of Occupy protesters along 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan near the failed Lehman Brothers' former world headquarters building, the movement's organizers asked passersby to "join the Global Movement for Economic and Social Equality and the 99 Percent" for a Day of Action on November 17th. Events that day will include a 7 a.m. "Resist Austerity" rally at Zuccotti Park just before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange "to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the front lines of economic injustice." Then, at 3 p.m., organizers have scheduled simultaneous rallies at 16 central subway stops in all five NYC boroughs "to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors." At 5 p.m., Occupy supporters will move to Foley Square near Wall Street to "listen to stories, a gospel choir, a marching band" and "march to our city's bridges to demand that we get back to work rebuilding our country's infrastructure." The flier urges participants to "make it a musical march. ...Bring your songs, your voice, your spirit." [For more information, search N17Event on Facebook.]

Today's flash rally came hours after New York City police, acting on the orders of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arrested 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters in the wee hours as part of a long-planned eviction strategy aimed to clear Zuccotti Park -- the symbolic epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The 1 a.m. eviction was part of a coordinated crackdown by authorities in multiple cities, from Zurich to Portland to London and Calgary after two months of demonstrations in city parks and squares across the country and in cities around the world. In a morning news conference hours after police moved in overnight, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg said the city wanted to clear Zuccotti Park for cleaning but that it had intended to let protesters back in later -- provided they wouldn't live there and re-occupy the space with tents and tarps. But the city decided to keep the park closed when its attorneys were served with a Temporary Restraining Order mid-morning against the evictions. Zuccotti Park remained empty and closed for most of the rest of the day, pending the outcome of a court hearing on the TRO and the legality of the city's actions against the protesters. [ At about 5:30 p.m., the judge upheld the city's ban on tents and tarps, and protesters moved back into Zuccotti Park, without camping gear.]

The raid against Occupy Wall Street came just days after similar actions to break up Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland-- and a half-day before Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, Occupy Zurich and Occupy London were similarly confronted by authorities. Occupy Los Angeles spokesperson PJ Davenport told The Huffington Post that: "The timing of the evictions of occupiers in Portland, Oakland and New York City are no coincidence. Sources at Occupy LA have received notice from our information networks that the proverbial hammer is coming down and that a nationwide effort is underway to close all occupations. Here at Occupy LA, despite our friendly relationship with City Council and the LAPD, we believe that it is a short matter of time before we are asked to leave."

Occupy press spokeswoman Dana Balicki told WNYC Radio Host Brian Lehrer on his daily radio call-in show today that Occupy organizers would not be deterred by the evictions. "The messaging here is that we are undeterred, our spirits are high and our resolve is unbeatable. ...We are letting the City of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the world know that we are not going anywhere and that you can't simply throw an idea in a dumpster." Gideon Oliver, one of the lead attorneys representing the Occupy protesters, told Lehrer the crackdowns represent "a new form of represssive conduct. Unlike temporary, stationary rallies of the past, Occupy has created a 24/7 component and taken on messaging and communicative tactics that are unique, so to attack" the movement by clearing the parks they occupy for health and safety reasons "is clearly a pretext."

Meanwhile, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that leaders of 18 cities in which Occupy protesters had set up encampments coordinated their raids across the county. "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation," Quan said.

On Monday, the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which conceived of the movement -- and apparently aware of the multi-city crackdowns yet to come -- said the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize. "OWS isn't a geographical place so much as it is an idea and an attitude," spokewoman Balicki said.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top: Day of Action poster by Occupy Wall Street.]

[Photos of Tuesday's Occupy Wall Street eviction, top, by Don Emmert of AFP-Getty Images, and below, by The Associated Press - both with permission.]