Featured

Follow Us Around (The Internet)

cstowell — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:43:47 +0000

DoSomething.org is everywhere you are, literally. You should be a fan, friend, like and follow all of our networks if you love us as much as we love you.

Want to know what's going on at the org and who we're talking to? Click here to follow us on Twitter.

Need a little inspiration? Our Facebook is so sweet it'll make you sick (in the best way). Click here to be a fan.

We like gifs and so should you. Click here to follow our Tumblr and see all of our favorites.

Want to see all of our commercials? (The answer is yes btw.) Click here to subscribe to our YouTube Channel.

Learned Something: Giving Tuesday

Ravelle Mohammed — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:38:53 +0000

This week's learned something comes from Liz Eddy. She's in charge of all special projects here at DoSomething.

#GivingTuesday took place on November 27^th, 2012 as the first ever national day that asked everyone to donate to the charities they love. The goal was to have a day of giving, to offset the day(s) of spending – Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

At Do Something, we have some important guidelines:

You must be under 25
Our campaigns can't require money
A car
Or an adult

So how do we become involved in a major movement that is based around adults and asking for money?

Enter: the Pop (and Mom) Quiz. We know young people are passionate and wired. The quiz asks teens to challenge their parents (and other old people) on how much they really know about teen culture, technology and trends.

The 5 question quiz comes with a little wager. For every question they get wrong, parents pledged a $10 donation to DoSomething.org. This quiz not only helped to support the clubs and campaigns (and more!) that teens care about, but it gave them an opportunity to discuss their volunteerism and passions with others. And young people did send adults to us!

The quiz page had 6,763 pageviews (5,825 unique pageviews) which is 8-10% more than any given Tuesday. While teens may not have the income to donate money to the organizations they love, they have the desire and the connectivity to support them in unexpected ways.

Through this process we realized that simply asking for money is not enough. We need to be able to give teens the opportunity to talk to adults about the causes they care about.

To date, 3,909 people took the quiz but less were inclined to donate. We learned that there needs to be a clearer path to donations, possibly by offering more incentives like Indiegogo or Kickstarter does.

Now we are looking forward. With over 2,000 partners in all 50 states, our role as a founding partner is only going to get bigger and better next year!

Want to take action today? Collect jeans for homeless teens. (It's their number one requested item.) GO

DoSomething 2012: A Year in Pictures

Ravelle Mohammed — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:40:52 +0000

As you get ready to count down to the New Year, we’re taking a look back at some of our best moments from 2012. Cue: DoSomething highlight reel.

1. Teens for Jeans: Over 1 million pairs were collected for homeless teens!

2. Green Your School: Thousands of students (over 141,000 to be exact) helped make their schools more eco-friendly.

3. Epic Book Drive: 28,000 young people helped collect books for low income families.

4. Prom for All: 6,025 girls got to go to prom this year, thanks to the dresses we received from you guys.

5. Battle for the Bands: You guys rocked out in the name of music education. And these guys ("Point to Infinity") were selected to play at Lollapalooza. Baller!

6. Thumb Wars: 60,000 thumb socks. 30,000 people not texting and driving.

7. I <3 Dad: 1,086 dads took the pressure off and got their hearts checked.

8. The Hunt: Over 5,000 teams across the country took part in 31 challenges for our 11 days of doing.

9. Staples for Students: 73,305 of you helped collect school supplies for students in need.

10. Do Something Awards: We honored 5 amazeballs young people for the work they're doing. And Katia Gomez (the grand prize winner) was awarded $100,000 for her project.

11. Give A Spit: You guys are gettin' swabbed and saving lives. And all it took was some of your spit. Sweet.

12. Pics for Pets: You snapped their pictures, shared them with your friends, and got over 160 animals adopted. Love.

13. NYC Boot Camp: Young community leaders came together for a day of networking and training. It was an awesome day of idea sharing.

14. 50 Cans: You guys are rock stars. Why? Because you took our 50 can challenge and collected OVER 1 million cans.

15. Grandparents Gone Wired: We're getting seniors wired. They're learning basic computer skills, Facebook, and Skype. Woot!

Get your grandparents connected in the new year. GO

Remembering the Newtown, CT Shooting

Ravelle Mohammed — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:52:17 +0000

This personal account comes from Liz Eddy. She handles all of our special projects here at Do Something. She's also one of the NICEST people you will ever meet.

As a little girl, Newtown was like Pleasantville. Manicured lawns and neighbors who brought over apple pies – it was something out of a story book. When I saw Newtown in the headlines, I almost immediately assumed it was somewhere else. I have spent most of my life trying to explain where I lived: "next to Danbury, an hour south of Hartford". Now, it will never be unknown.

I was immediately angry. Angry for the loss of 26 innocent people, angry for the loss of childhood. I couldn't help but question humanity and fear for the future. I sat at my desk watching the news evolve and the numbers rise. My quiet, naive memories suddenly took on new meaning. Mostly, it was a feeling of helplessness. With so much media coverage, we are confronted with the pain and sadness at an arm’s length. It made me feel like I couldn't do anything but be an onlooker.

At DoSomething.org, we are doers by nature. Often, this makes it challenging when we face times where we feel there is little we can do to help. However, we did find ways to make the greater community feel they could lend their support. When a candlelight vigil was brought up by a co-worker, the team sprang into action to make it happen in a few short hours. By 6:30 pm Friday much of our team stood in Times Square with candles and signs.

There is something strangely powerful about holding a vigil amongst all the noise and lights. A choir joined us bringing many more people together. It was amazing how music made so many more people feel they had something to contribute. A woman joined us with tears in her eyes, her niece and nephew had just escaped the shooting that morning. The pain was real and shared amongst the group throughout the evening.

Meanwhile, another miraculous gesture of compassion was happening across the country. With a simple ask of texting "hope" to 38383, over 50,000 people nationwide sent in their prayers and words of support. We were able to deliver some of the messages on a banner to Newtown Monday. Driving to my childhood home, in the midst of tragedy, was surreal and heartbreaking. Despite the noise of the media, there was a broken community still holding strong through its support for one another. The banner was hung next to the memorial site on Glen Road. Almost immediately, dozens of people came to read the banner. With tears in their eyes they seemed in awe that so many people were reaching out to them. We, all 50,000+ of us, proved that the power of love and how it can ignite peace even in the most chaotic and troubling times.

I will be in Newtown on Sunday and will visit the memorial again. Please remember the families, friends and classmates through the holidays and know our love and support will still be needed in the months and years to come.

Raise awareness about this issue at your school. GO

Bullying and Violence

Gun Control

Learned Something: Give A Spit About Cancer

Ravelle Mohammed — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:10:05 +0000

This week's Learned Something comes from Farah Sheikh. She's one of our kick-ass Campaigns Associates. Something else that kicks ass – her hair. Seriously.

There are 10,000 cancer patients who are in need of a lifesaving blood or bone marrow donation this year. And even more shocking, 70 percent of these patients rely on complete strangers from the Be The Match Marrow registry.

Give A Spit About Cancer gives young people the necessary tools to run registry drives. Reason: 18 to 24-year-olds provide the most successful donations. The problem though is that asking someone to sign up to donate bone marrow is scary...so we changed that!

Here are five things we did:

1. Knowledge is power.

80 percent of life saving donations for cancer patients are non-surgical blood donations that require nothing more than a few hours of time. The first step in getting rid of fear is providing the necessary knowledge.

2. The ask should be easy.

Bone marrow donation is complicated, but at the end of the day the action is easy. All it takes a swab of your cheek to sign up. We focus on the essence of the action to make getting involved easy for our members.

3. The ask should also be fun.

The number one reason teens volunteer is because it’s social. We created Give A Spit drive pages – a page drive leaders could share with their friends and update with details about their drive.

4. ...and personal.

You’ll have greater success by reaching out to people you know care deeply about the issue. Not everyone has the capacity to run a drive, so we provided an option to swab individually. That way everyone can take action.

5. Be their best friend.

Swabbing a cheek is easy enough, but what it means to donate always brings up the “what if’s.” We provide weekly email tips for running your drive, an infographic (see pic below) about what the donation process is like, and an easy way to spread awareness about the cause to their friends with stat shares.

Cancer

Learned Something: Increasing Site Speed

Ravelle Mohammed — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:56:49 +0000

This week's Learned Something comes from Darren Lee. He's pretty baller. His official title: Director of Hooks (see what we mean ?)

In response to our exciting plans at DoSomething.org to tailor the content on our site to young people and their interests, the issue of site performance was raised. Nothing is free, especially in the world of web content delivery.

If the page takes too long to load users will simply leave out of frustration – 7 seconds is the limit, but 5 sec is the more like it. The more specialized the web page content the greater the demands to meet the request.

Here's what we learned:

All of the cool features on our site need to be balanced with consideration for what it will take to deliver the goods. No matter how sexy the content, waiting has its limits and comes at very high costs.

Every time a new campaign, cause or petition is organized, related content is added to the site. Content like infographics, mailing/phone list sign ups, slide shows, etc. all need to be balanced with the weight they add to the site.

It's the uploader’s responsibility to question if the benefits of the new content outweigh the costs to site performance.

There's a pile of fantastic content on the web site. A limit has been reached where now anything new must not push the site beyond that limit. The good news: thanks to our learnings we were able to cut a second off the time it takes to load a page. (Woot, woot!)

Share a stat about seniors and tech. You could win a $5,000 scholarship. GO

Education

Learned Something: Texting For Good

Ravelle Mohammed — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 23:22:39 +0000

A mobile phone is the most important possession of today’s teen. It's how they keep tabs on their social circles, store precious memories, discover new information - and communicate with the world.

About two years ago, a light bulb went on for the DoSomething.org team. We realized that an organization that understands young people could have a real impact with them through text messaging.

Since then we have grown and maintained one of the largest mobile subscriber lists for non-profits in the country with 705,000* numbers (updated as of Nov. 28, 2012). And we're growing at a rate of 15,000 new subscribers per week.

But how do you communicate with a hyper-wired, hyper-active 16-year-old who sends more than 160 text messages per day?

Here are 5 things I’ve learned for communicating with teens and growing an SMS subscriber list:

1. Provide value to the user.

Don't look at text messaging as a one-way tool for notifications or alerts - rather as a simple platform that can provide the same value to a user as a website, mobile app or phone call could.

At DoSomething.org, teens can get involved in campaigns, report back on their experience, win scholarships and get their friends involved in causes they care about— all through text messaging.

2. Offer context and creativity in your SMS messaging.

Using SMS is understanding that the user is on-the-go. Our members could be at an after-school club meeting, chatting with friends on the bus, in the middle of a Halo game, etc.

This on-the-go mentality coupled with the fact that teens are texting all the time, means that when they see a text pop up on their phone they need immediate context.

We maintain consistency by sending text messages to our members weekly, on the same day, signing off with the name of the staff member who is sending the text and always mentioning DoSomething.org.

3. Quirk it up. Why not?

It's important for messaging to have personality and be relatable.

We’ve seen as high as 12% increases in response rates when we’ve had funnier, edgier and an overall more relatable tone in our messaging.

4. Yes! Text messaging can be inherently social.

We harness the refer-a-friend functionality of our mobile platform so our members can do everything from invite friends to join a campaign, sign a petition, play a texting game together and even enter to win scholarships.

Truth: the number one reason teens volunteer is because it’s social. (Fun fact: 1 in 3 of all DoSomething.org mobile subscribers have been brought in by a friend!)

5. Innovate. Innovate. Innovate.

While text messaging is typically seen as a limited medium, we are constantly pushing the limits and thinking of ways we can create and build better experiences for our users.

President and CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer once said that "creativity loves constraints." This couldn’t be truer when it comes to text messaging. Our weekly mobile experiences may seem like just a 160 character text message, but in reality it is a way for users to get involved, have their voices heard and to use their phone for social good.

- Marah Lidey is our fab Digital Engagement Manager. She sends the best txts. Literally.

Text 50CANS to 38383 to find out how you can run your own recycle drive. GO

Recycling

Learned Something: Motion Tracking

Ravelle Mohammed — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:11:20 +0000

Inspired by some really cool videos and TV shows, I decided to up my skills in the dark-and-daunting program known as After Effects. One of the coolest things that I have seen recently is the seemingly “live text” you can get in a moving camera shot.

Standard text or titles usually look like they are just stuck in front of the video and don’t interact with the 3D space. However, you can use Motion Tracking to make it appear as though the text is REALLY there, on set with the actors. You’ve seen it in movies like Zombieland and in TV shows like Sherlock and it always looks freaking amazeballs. Well, DoSomething.org is going to step it up and get some cool motion graphics!

Here are three things to consider when trying to make a two dimensional video appear to occupy three dimensional space:

MARKERS: After Effects has a Motion Tracking function that picks high contrast areas of the screen and analyzes them frame by frame to determine the movement through space. One way to MAKE these high contrast areas so that After Effects can track them easily is to take a dark piece of tape (a MARKER) and put it on a light area. If I wanted to make it look like someone had the word LOSER on their head, for example, I would put a marker on their forehead and take a video. Once the program has tracked the movement of the marker, I can add the text and apply the movement to the text. Wherever the marker goes, the text follows.

DEPTH OF FIELD: Another thing you will notice about films (and real life) is that not everything is in focus at the same time. The objects or people nearer to the camera may be in focus and the objects in the background may be out of focus. This is determined by the depth of field and capabilities of the lens. To make it appear as though the text is REALLY actually in 3D space, I wanted to use focus and apply a depth of field to the text. This is done by creating a “digital camera” with a “digital lens” in After Effects. I can set the text in 3D space in After Effects and the digital camera lens will automatically put things in focus and out of focus depending on how far they are away from the camera.

MOTION PARALLAX: There is a property of motion known as parallax. Parallax is a phenomenon that you can observe when you look out the window of a moving vehicle. Objects very close to the window, such as mailboxes or lamp posts, appear to move by very quickly, as objects in the distance, like trees or mountains, appear to move quite slowly through your field of vision. So to make the text look as real as possible, I applied a motion parallax to the text as well as setting three different tracking points on a table – each a different distance away from the camera. I set one word to follow each tacking point and, voilà; we have text that look like it is in real 3D space.

Observe. Make sure to take notice of the motion tracking, the depth of field and the parallax of the different words. #LearnedSomething #BecauseApathySucks.

- Brad Williams is our kickass Video Producer. He's responsible for that baller video clip below.

Get your grandparents wired and using technology today. GO

Education

Learned Something: Facebook-Based Campaigns

Ravelle Mohammed — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:41:42 +0000

One thing that DoSomething.org has been focusing on in the last year is how to make our campaigns more social, and how to utilize more social platforms to get teens to take action. As you’ll note from our national survey results, a huge factor driving teens to volunteer is whether or not their friends are involved. They want a volunteer event to feel like a party; they want to know who is going, whether or not there will be snacks, and they never want to be the first one there.

As we began to develop Pics for Pets, a campaign that involved young people taking and sharing awesome pictures of shelter animals to help get them adopted, we realized that it was the perfect opportunity to build a campaign on a platform that was completely focused on social interaction: Facebook.

We built the Pics for Pets app so that it would be easy and meaningful to both our content creators and our sharers. The beauty of the app was that a user could see a post on their timeline about an adorable adoptable animal in their area, click on the post and be taken to a profile page of the animal to then re-share or even adopt, without ever leaving Facebook. If they then chose to, they could find a shelter that needed some photography help in their community and get all the tools to get a great picture to then submit to the gallery and share with friends. Any user could participate in the campaign, on any level, without leaving their Facebook comfort zone.

Here are 6 important things I learned when creating a Facebook app:

Building on a social platform doesn’t make something inherently social. One thing that you need to think about when developing a Facebook app is whether or not your app is more fun with friends. If not, you might as well keep it off the platform.
Test. We tested different types of messaging to increase click-through rates of the timeline posts to see what drove more people to action once they saw a post. With each test, we got closer and closer to a respectable click-through rate.
Find out what is important to Facebook. We ended up using Open Graph posts instead of stream.publish because Open Graph is a priority to Facebook, and the posts get more visibility.
Find benchmarks. When you start to analyze engagement on your app, you will realize that there aren’t a lot of comps to compare your metrics too, but they are out there. Search and search until you find someone that can help you understand how your app is performing compared to the industry standards.
Launch in beta first. You’re going to make changes to your app, even if you think you have a winner already. Until you see what the data says, you don’t know anything, so you’ll want to give yourself time to pivot after you launch. Even when you are out of beta, it's important to keep testing and iterating. Launch early, test often, as our fearless CEO tends to say.
Launch strong. If you don't have strong post-beta launch, with all of your marketing and PR guns hitting at once, you won't be able to cut through the clutter and get your app noticed. Focus all of your firepower on a small window of time, even a few hours, to try and rise above all of the app noise out there.

- Greg Thomas is one of our amazeballs Campaigns Managers. He's also pretty sick on the guitar.

Help a shelter animal find a home today. GO

Animals

Animal Homelessness

Learned Something: Facebook Infrastructure

Ravelle Mohammed — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 14:12:29 +0000

Facebook is complicated. Those are three words that best describe its infrastructure. Many of us are lucky that we only ever really see the "consumer" end. Facebook.com is built to be relatively easy for your standard visitor – posting to your friends' walls? No problem! Sharing a photo? You got it. Sending a message? Piece of cake.

But there's more. Oh, so much more.

It's part of my job here at DoSomething.org to make Facebook useful to you. We want to make the experience better for you and for us. We want you to share whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want. And we’ve found several ways to help make that happen.

We've been focusing a lot on Open Graph of late. What is Open Graph?

It is, in short, a special kind of post. Open Graph lets us personalize the messages that are shared. Example: "So-and-so shared a pet that needs a home via DoSomething.org." That bold text isn't your normal share text. We've found that personalizing your messages encourages more sharing, so we're pushing more for that.

We've also found that connecting to many friends at once is a good thing. You and your friends have spoken – we're adding that functionality to our Facebook tools. With a combination of third-party technologies and our own intuition, we're making it easier to tell all your friends about what you're doing.

And lastly, we're making it partly our own. We've come up with some really awesome ideas in the office about how to make Facebook more useable by us and by you. We're taking those ideas and running with them. And some of the things we've created have been revolutionary.

It's all quite exciting and we’ve learned a lot from it.

Help a shelter animal find a home today. GO

Education