Best practices to help you leverage the power of the crowd

Guest post by Soha El Borno
Idealware 

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, general public.

Crowdsourcing can help you harness the crowd to increase awareness, cultivate new volunteers, gather information and even get work done — all for a minimal investment. How can you put it to work for your nonprofit or organization?

Since the earliest days of the Internet, people have used it to solicit and organize groups of people to participate in projects in small ways. Called crowdsourcing, this process can be done in a number of ways and used for a variety of goals.

In an early example of the practice, nonprofits would post questions to a Usenet discussion board to seek answers from the community — for instance, asking how to write a particular policy, or for recommendations about recognizing and rewarding volunteers. That “open call” approach is what distinguishes crowdsourcing from outsourcing, in which you’d send a task to a specific person or organization for help.

Crowdsourcing can be done at an organizational or individual level, and nonprofits have used it for everything from marketing and fundraising to volunteerism and activism. It’s a great way to enlist help from a wider community knowledge base, and to engage people in your work.

In the last few years, the rise of social media and new technologies made it easier to reach and engage a broader audience. But how can your organization harness the power of the crowd to help achieve your mission? We asked nonprofit experts and professionals for crowdsourcing best practices and techniques that have worked for them.

The whys and hows of crowdsourcing 

Nonprofits can use crowdsourcing for a number of purposes, including cultivating new volunteers and donors and spreading the word about your organization’s work to a larger audience.

At its simplest, crowdsourcing is community engagement. Engaging a community — whether it’s your local community, your group of volunteers, donors and clients, or a community of like-minded people who share an interest in your cause — can provide you with ideas, feedback and contributions you might not otherwise get. It can also demonstrate transparency and openness in decision-making. Whoever is in charge of your nonprofit’s Facebook and Twitter activities should keep an eye out for questions to regularly ask followers about activities and events to help keep them engaged.

But there are some cautions to keep in mind, the most important of which is to keep crowdsourcing simple and meaningful. For example, if your organization is drafting a social media policy, your volunteer manager might share a draft with an online community of volunteers and ask for their feedback. If your organization wanted to come up with new plans for an annual fundraising event, your fundraising manager might email all your organization’s supporters to ask for ideas.

We’ve identified five categories of crowdsourcing, and found some real-world examples of nonprofits that have used them successfully.

Pooling collective knowledge

1This category follows the idea that two heads—or more—are better than one. This type of crowdsourcing can be used to share and aggregate information to help solve problems. For example, Ushahidi is an open-source software platform that plots a set of particular incidents, submitted by people via cell phone text messages, onto an online map. Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It has also been used in disaster relief in Pakistan and to map crime incidents in Atlanta.

In an older example, a public radio station in New York City asked listeners to check the price of milk at their neighborhood store and enter it online. Several hundred submissions later, the station had created a detailed map of food prices showing inequities across the city.

Microvolunteering (asking the crowd to help with tiny tasks)

2By breaking large tasks into tiny ones, it’s possible to outsource repetitive jobs to the crowd. For instance, The Seed Company enlisted more than 1,000 residents of a remote village in Asia for help translating the Bible into their native language, with each participant translating a small piece of text. The project was made possible using the crowdsource translation platform Lingotek. Through sites like Sparked  or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, organizations can ask people to perform a small task, such as tagging a picture, finding a phone number or typing a particular piece of text in a specific format. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, thousands of volunteers manually entered 15,200 records to consolidate all the dozens of sources of information about lost or missing people.

Crowd creation

3Tasks of this nature use crowds to help create original works of art. For example, The Royal Opera used Twitter to crowdsource a new “people’s opera” that drew more than 900 contributions, resulting in a 20-minute production in London performed by professional composers. Similarly, the San Francisco Symphony crowdsourced musician auditions for a mash-up performance over YouTube. The end result was a symphony orchestra of more than 90 players representing over 30 countries.

Crowd voting

4Everyone has an opinion, and most people like to express them by voting on or rating something or giving feedback. By tapping into that desire, you can increase awareness for your cause and draw in new audiences for your message. A great example of this is the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which launched a campaign encouraging locals to submit and vote on projects to make the borough a better place. More than 356 projects were nominated, and the number of votes totaled well over 300,000.

Art museums have also used crowdsourcing to let crowds curate and plan exhibitions. A good example is the Brooklyn Museum’s “Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition,” which involved an open call for people to submit photographs. Nearly 3,500 people participated, evaluating more than 350 images and selecting a number for a final exhibition of the photographs in 2008.

Crowd funding

5This category opens the collective pocketbook, encouraging crowds to fund projects that benefit others. Perhaps the most widely known is Kiva, a micro-lending website that uses crowdsourcing for its work. By allowing people to make micro-loans as small as $25 to entrepreneurs in developing countries, the site taps into the generosity of donors to change the lives of thousands in the developing world.

Across the United States, communities are harnessing crowds to provide funds for nonprofits on special “giving days.” In Minnesota, Give to the Max Day raised more than $13.4 million in November 2011, and GiveMN, an affiliated website, raised $46 million since its launch in 2009.

Any of these categories can be used on its own or combined with other approaches to achieve your goals.

Tips for successful crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing and crowd funding projects are within reach of any organization, but there are a few things to keep in mind that will help ensure your success.

• Plan ahead. Start by choosing the right model for your goals. Figure out what you’re trying to achieve and find the best way to do it. Make sure you choose the right crowd, too — setting up a crowdsourcing campaign is the easy part, but getting the word out to the right people is not. Create a fully developed outreach plan, and use a combination of social media and emails to current supporters. These people, in turn, will have access to networks of people with similar interests, and help you pass your project along. If you’re using a crowd-funding site, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, make sure you choose the one that most closely matches your goal — each has a different approach.
• Keep it simple. Make it very clear what you want the crowd to do, and break down your strategic goals into smaller tasks people can help with. Keep your message as easy as possible to communicate to help it get passed along. In order to help you meet your goal, set reasonable expectations. Crowd-funding is an easy way to ask for donations, but it creates the illusion that hordes of people with large amounts of money are sitting at their computers looking for some place to give it away. Most successful crowd-funding initiatives rely on friends, family and colleagues rather than total strangers. All the same traditional fundraising rules apply: You have to have credibility, you have to have a strong network, you have to have a track record of success, and you have to be transparent on how the money will be used.
• Engage the crowd and reward participation. Approach crowdsourcing as an opportunity to engage a new group of potential supporters. Be as creative as possible in your outreach and plant your campaign in places that you hope will reach new audiences. Think about how to regularly engage with your current supporters and start doing it. Consider giving incentives to reward participation — what do people want in exchange for their help? Try to really understand their motivation. Do they just want to be heard, have fun or learn something new? In this case, a simple acknowledgment might work, but other times, cash incentives might be used.
• Stay positive — both publicly and privately. Throughout the campaign, it’s important to remain personable with the people who might contribute, and a little personal interaction can increase the likelihood of a donation or action. Have faith in the process  and stay focused on your mission — if an activity doesn’t obviously support your mission, forget it.

Crowdsourcing is more than a tactic, it’s a mindset

Crowdsourcing provides many opportunities for nonprofits to tap the power of crowds. If you have a task, question or idea you want to explore, there are many ways to reach and involve people. Always look for opportunities to ask questions or seek feedback from your volunteers, donors, newsletter subscribers, clients, the local community or any community.

Crowdsourcing is a mindset. Want your community to be a part of your decision-making process? Don’t get mired in top-down thinking, and don’t be afraid to take risks or listen to criticism from your constituents or the public. Running a crowdsourcing project is a lot of work. The best approach to accomplishing it is to take your time and just chip away at it. Read through all the necessary steps and complete one task at a time. Unless you are in a rush, there is no rush to complete this. In the end, the tools don’t matter. What’s important is coming up with meaningful ways to engage, learning from other organizations that have successfully used crowdsourcing and have faith in the process.

The post How crowdsourcing can help your nonprofit appeared first on Socialbrite.

Code for America from Inkerman Road on Vimeo.

Code for America: 5 tips on upping your video game

Code for America, a nonprofit that uses technology to transform local governments, boasts a creative, compelling promotional video that not only clearly describes its message but also engages its viewers to get involved. In just five simple steps, any nonprofit can follow its example.

Be human and personal

1Be sure to make a personal connection early in the video. Many organizations and causes have a cohort of motivated, smiling people behind it. Bring these people to the forefront and show how upbeat and promising working for the cause is! Code for America illustrates its work environment by interviewing employees about what part of the job and cause they like. People are human and social creatures and are more inclined to stick with a video if they can relate to the on-screen subjects.

Use captivating visuals

2Watching a talking head is no fun for anyone. But listening to someone speak while looking at colorful flowers or a fun work environment is far more interesting. The supplemental footage in a video that does not capture a talking head is called b-roll. For example, Code for America’s video displays a shot of the office while founder Jennifer Pahlka speaks over it.

Get creative with light

3The video’s lighting is bright and vibrant throughout. This, quite literally, illustrates Code for America’s cause in a positive light. For example, founder Jennifer Pahlka is interviewed outside, allowing her to be shot with the warmth of natural lighting. The creative use of silhouettes, close-ups and angles, by video producers Inkerman Road, provides a nice break from the traditional head and shoulders frame.

Keep it short — under 2 minutes

4The ideal length of a web video is under 2 minutes. People love video, but attention spans today are dreadfully short. This Code for America piece clocks in at 2 minutes 30 seconds. Wistia, a popular Web video hosting service, found that the completion rate for a 30 second video is close to 90 percent, but it drops to barely more than 50 percent if the video is 2 minutes. Of course, completion rate might not be critical, as long as viewers get the important bits of your message and are happy with your video. But if the call to action is in the last 10 seconds and no one watches that far, you have a problem.  Which is why it’s a really good idea to front-load the video with the call to action and other critical message elements. Whatever you want the targeted audience to walk away knowing should be at the start of the video.

Instill optimism and hope

5Code for America does not focus on what the government is doing wrong, or why its services are necessary. That would lower the mood of viewers. Instead, the organization encourages people to take action by focusing on the future and how the combination of technology and government can improve lives, ending with a positive message: “Try helping your government work better for you and see what happens.”

Did you improve your video to make it more successful? Are you interested in learning how you could? Let us know if you’d like us to analyze your video.

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Matanya’s Hope tells stories of Kenyan schoolchildren through photos & video

Multimedia storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool for your organization to attract funders, motivate volunteers and demonstrate the power of your message.

Our friends at Matanya’s Hope asked us to create a visual story for their nonprofit by seamlessly blending photos and video footage that they have captured over the past several years with original interviews, music and graphics we developed.

Founded in 2005 by Illinois native Michelle Stark, Matanya’s Hope is a nonprofit dedicated to educating children in Kenya. Last summer I accompanied Michelle to Matanya Primary School and saw the destitution these children and their families face: severe poverty, hunger, lack of clothing. And I realized why Michelle is dedicating her life to this cause.

For nonprofits and other organizations looking to capture their stories through powerful imagery, here are some simple tips for creating professional-looking video:

• Use “b-roll” (stills & video)
• Incorporate stock music
• Use narration or background sounds

How to incorporate b-roll

By using B-roll – still photographs and short video clips referencing what the interviewees are talking about – you can make the video much more interesting than by solely using “talking heads” (straight interviews of people talking without any additional footage). As we are hearing Michelle talking about the children with “no shoes and torn and tattered clothing,” the still photographs visually reinforce what the interviewee is saying. B-roll also allows us to edit the interviews without a noticeable cut (“jump-cut”) in the action or picture on screen.

Use background music to add texture

Background music was also selected to set the mood of the video. Royalty-free music can be purchased online from a number of stock music websites for a modest charge. One of my favorites is Triple Scoop Music. There are also a slew of free sites offering rights-cleared music, generally using Creative Commons — see Socialbrite’s Free Music Directory.

For the Matanya’s Hope video, we licensed a song from a local Kenyan composer we discovered while we were there filming the video.

Narration and background sound round out the piece

Using natural, or ambient, sound captured while videotaping b-roll is another effective way to make the storytelling more compelling. Background sounds of children talking in a classroom help create a more natural, captivating video. Natural sounds can also be useful in making transitions or in reinforcing a point the speaker is making.

Next up: We’ll share our learnings on professional interviewing techniques.

And please make a donation to support Matanya’s Hope’s efforts to educate children in this region of Kenya. All net proceeds from the sale or leasing of photographs from the Matanya’s Hope gallery will go directly to the children of Kenya this charity supports.

Related on Socialbrite

• Online advocacy video best practices
• How to find amazing, powerful stories for your nonprofit video
• How nonprofits should be using visual storytelling
• 10 secrets to video storytelling success

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Moving movie audiences to take action from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I‘ll confess: I was excited to see The Cove take home the Academy Award for best feature documentary last night. While all the entrants were worthy, “The Cove” is among the handful of movies pushing the idea of Hollywood productions as the fulcrum for social change.

A few weeks ago I caught up with Christopher Gebhardt, general manager and executive vice president of TakePart, the Beverly Hills-based digital arm of Participant Media, which marketed and helped bring “The Cove” to theaters nationwide. Participant Media (formerly Participant Productions) — Jeff Skoll’s social entrepreneurial film production company — has an incredible track record in bringing socially relevant films to screens nationwide, including “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The Kite Runner,” “The Soloist,” “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Visitor,” “Food, Inc.,” “North Country” and now “The Cove.”

A breath-taking string of success.

“The Cove” is remarkable for its guerrilla filmmaking tactics in chronicling the grisly business of dolphin hunting in rural fishing villages in Japan, where as many as 20,000 dolphins are slaughtered annually. It won the Audience Award at Sundance last year. Participant didn’t fund the film but funded its marketing.

“We’ve spent the last five years at Participant figuring out how to take the film and really use it to … really get people involved with an issue,” said Gebhardt, speaking after a conversation on stage at Social Capital Markets 2009.

You may have noticed one fellow on stage at the Oscars — film subject and animal activist Ric O’Barry — holding up a sign that said, “Text DOLPHIN to 44144.” (The camera cut away after only one second — the academy has a long tradition of not acknowledging or encouraging overly activist sentiments.)

What’s cool about “The Cove” is that, just as the movie ends, theatergoers are met with the same message: Text DOLPHIN to 44144. When you text the short code, Gebhardt explains, you’re given ways to connect, including the option to sign online petitions to protest the brutal practice, send letters to President Obama, the US ambassador to Japan or Japan’s ambassador to the United States, or you can take other actions.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo. (I’ve started producing these in a higher resolution 3800 kbps bitrate at 720 pixels wide.)

I should mention that I was in the first group of bloggers in 2005 who signed on to guest-post on Participant’s first such effort: the “Good Night and Good Luck” site to discuss press reform and how changes in corporate ownership of the media have affected our democracy since the days of Edward R. Murrow.

Actions you can take

I’ve been a fan of TakePart for months now — it’s the mechanism that connects Participant Media films with taking action. “Every film [we produce or market] has a social action campaign wrapped around it,” Gebhardt says. One aspect of “The Cove’s” marketing campagn was to reach out to NGOs to see what kind of campaign makes most sense with the topic that the film addresses. My own view is that Participant Media could use a bit more guidance in running social cause campaigns.

The TakePart site has a section on The Cove where users can take the following actions:

• Write to our leaders and help get the word out in Japan
• Learn more about dolphins in captivity
• Calculate your mercury exposure
• Help Save Japan Dolphins’ efforts on the frontlines
• Support the filmmakers with your donation

I’ll post an interview with TakePart editor Adriana Dunn soon.

The post ‘The Cove’: Will movies usher in a new era of social change? appeared first on Socialbrite.

I‘m flying to Las Vegas early Thursday to moderate a panel on social media tools for nonprofits at Blogworld Expo. I know a lot of the keynoters: Laura Fitton, Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Kara Swisher, Scott Monty, Jay Rosen, Leo Laporte, Guy Kawasaki — the list goes on.

This is the first year the Expo has added a Cause/Activism track geared toward nonprofits, and it’s a welcome addition. The track, organized by Casemedia Group and funded by eBay, aims to provide a forum for nonprofits and bloggers to learn more about how to use social media to spread awareness and raise funds.

eBay and PayPal are sponsoring a Charity Smackdown Arcade at the show, allowing 10 charities to attend the show for free and be featured in the Arcade. The top 10 voter getters were Alex’s Lemonade (2,817 votes), Best Friends Animal Society (2,652), Surfrider Foundation (2,189), Mothers Fighting For Others (2,063), Spirit Jump (1,658), LA’s Best (1,475), 3for5 Foundation (1,466), Stepwise (1,303 votes), Heifer International Portland (1,152) and Canine Companions for Independence (1,143).

Blogworld still hasn’t updated its (badly designed) schedule — even though the Expo starts tomorrow — so here are the latest details on the nonprofit track:

All cause sessions are on Thursday, Oct. 15, in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s eBay PayPal Pavilion, Room 219

Tools for Nonprofit Organizations

When: 11am to 12:15pm (time change)

Topic: What social tools are out there to help organizations raise awareness about social causes? How can we use those tools to generate support and raise money? What strategies should nonprofits use to recruit members, evangelize causes and advance their missions?

Panelists:

Judy Chang, Paypal
Justin Perkins, Care2
David Levy, SocialVibe
James Sutandyo, Causecast
Scott Henderson, Media Sauce
JD Lasica, Socialbrite.org, moderator

Kick Cancer’s Ass

When: 10-11am

Topic: We all want caner gone. The panelists will talk about how they’ve built proactive communities that are passionate about kicking cancer’s ass.

Panelists:

Drew Olanoff, Blame Drew’s Cancer
Natalie Lent, Stand Up 2 Cancer/ ID PR
Meaghan Edelstein, Spirit Jump
Jay Scott, Alex’s Lemonade Stand
Christine Lu, moderator

Online locally, acting globally

When: 1:30-2:45pm

Topic: There are no small towns online. One click literally connects you with a worldwide audience you can reach and inspire. The panelists will talk about how they’ve shared their passion with others and made a global impact using basic social media tools

Panelists:

Amanda Rose, Twestival
Cameron Sinclair, Architecture for Humanity.
Andy Sternberg, Live Earth
Robert Chatwani, EBay, Director of Global Citizenship
Jess McCarter, Samasource
Shira Lazar, moderator

Making America Less Invisible: Homelessness in America

4-5 pm, A special session with Mark HorvathThursday

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The dos of mobile advocacy

1. Mobile messaging should be about interaction, not just pitch — a hard notion to learn for advocacy organizations used to pushing email messages by the millions. Mobiles offer a unique opportunity for interacting with a constituent. Advocacy organizations need to think about mobile marketing as a conversation, a way to talk two-ways with constituents.

2. Trust is key as the mobile medium is so very personal. Gain permission and offer relevant and timely content that is valuable to the recipient. Note how to opt out regularly and never ever spam.

3. Pull people to mobile interaction through other media — ads, billboards, the web and offer, in turn, mobile interaction with those media. Think of mobile as an acquisition tool.

4. Know your constituency. Be careful when targeting your demographics and make your ask accordingly — asking an older constituency to upload mobile photos is not going to be very successful.

5. Be relevant. Offer timely news and functional updates that are of interest to your audience — and be clever. Just by way of an idea: The American Lung Association could offer air quality updates via sms for where I live. If engaged in a campaign where I am signing a mobile petition, for example, let me know how it’s going — how many signatures have been gathered, for example. Remind me of events I have signed up for or activities that are part of an organization’s campaign. Give me information I want and need just-in-time when I need it.

6. Be action-oriented. Ask me to forward a note, ask me to make a call, ask me to express myself in a some way in a poll, in a 160 character message, poem or statement. Ask me to do something.

7. Ask me how I want to engage and give me choices. If we are interacting via SMS, do not ask me for my email address first. Give me an option to get SMS reminders when I sign up for an event with you. Tell me how to disengage. Let me opt in to a mobile alert via the web, via a 1-800 number and via a short code/SMS. Move me to the next level when using mobile as an acquisition strategy. Think about that ladder of engagement carefully.

8. Mobile marketing works best when it’s pull, not push, and there is an opportunity for people to express themselves — to ‘talk’ back, to suggest, to respond.

9. Be creative. (See examples in this handout.) In addition to text messaging and sms campaigns, there are lot of other ways in which an advocacy organization can use mobile campaign tactics.

10. Most importantly: Be whole-media. Integrate your mobile marketing and messaging into your entire media and messaging campaign. Know what mobile is good for and for what it’s not.

The don’ts of mobile advocacy

1. Don’t ask me to sign up with my mobile number and then never contact me with a text message until months later. Opt me in right away with an immediate SMS reply and then start talking to me and move me into a conversation with you.

2. Don’t bombard me with messages. Too many messages are obnoxious and a sure way for me to immediately opt out of any further communications.< 3. Don’t be quiet about how to opt out — I need to know that texting STOP, END, OUT all get me out of further communications from you.

4. Don’t give me ambiguous information (160 characters is not a lot!) in a text message or information impossible to understand because it’s in texting gibberish. Test your messages to be sure that a recipient understands them and they are crystal clear.

5. Don’t let me guess what you are asking me to act upon. Always ask me to do something in your message — forward, call, text back, sign, you name it. Text messages are highly actionable. Because if you don’t ask, I won’t do anything.

6. Don’t give me any irrelevant information I don’t need or can’t use. That would be the event alert AFTER the event has already happened.

7. Don’t text me at 4 am in the morning.

8. Don’t use just mobile as a stand-alone medium. When I go to your website, I should see a reference to the mobile portion of the campaign — a short code to text into, text messages from supporters, campaign results including those generated by mobile, a widget to sign up, whatever makes sense in the context of your campaign.

9. Don’t expect huge returns – at least initially. Return on investment will take time to materialize. Do measure the returns, though!

10. Don’t be dour. Use humor, be personable, engage me and make me smile. I will like you better.

Photo credit: hoyasmeg

This post originally appeared at MobileActive.org.

Related

• A user’s guide to mobile activism (Socialbrite)

• How to set up an SMS campaign system (Socialbrite)

• 10 mobile apps for social good (Socialbrite)

The post 20 tips for mobile advocacy appeared first on Socialbrite.

And seasoned practitioners are debating whether a particular social media tool is in and of itself a strategy.   And, while it may be an argument about semantics, it further illustrates this tension.

The “is Twitter a strategy or tool debate” was fueled as Twitter got lots of attention (and  hype) as part of the coverage of last week’s protests in Moldova. Ivan Boothe points out in his post “The Fire and Food: Why There’s No Such Thing As A Twitter Revolution,” the real-time use of Twitter as an organizing tool is a not revolution.  Twitter has been used during the G20 protests and crowd-sourcing the location of a torch when it was passing through San Francisco.   And while quite, different from the “mainstream” use of Twitter by nonprofits, Ivan warns against tool-driven decisions for activism campaigns:

Stretching his metaphor of fire and food, Ivan says:

Ivan ends with this advice:

Colin Delaney puts it another way:

Again, I ain’t hatin’ on Twitter, but professional communicators ought to know why they’re using it and what they’re trying to get out of it. Otherwise, they’re just jumping on a crowded bandwagon without even knowing where it’s headed. And our public discourse is shallow enough as it is.

Once this is in place, it is important to understand how the tool can or can’t be use to reach that goal, what the limitations are, and how to take a “multi-channel” approach. This requires getting your hands on the tools and doing some experiments. But not wild experiments – having a objective, metrics to monitor, and a reflection process.

DigiActive Guide to Twitter

The recently published The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism (click here to download the PDF version) offers some mini-case studies organized by objective.  The objectives:

1.  Spread the Word
2.  Campaigns
3.  Coordinating Collective Action
4.  Crowdsourcing
5.  Personal Security

There is a useful section that explains the getting started steps.  What’s missing is a Step 0 – which is asking the question – “Is Twitter the best tool to reach your campaign strategy outcomes?”  The rest of the guide is a great basic primer on getting started with Twitter.

What are some of the best examples of digital activism that use Twitter?

Resources

Colin Delaney: Strategy or Tool, On the Metaphysics of Twitter
Alan Rosenblatt: Is Twitter a Strategy? Like, Come On
Ivan Boothe: The Fire and the Food: Why There’s No Such Thing As A Twitter Revolution
Lina Srivastava: Telling Your Across Media Platforms To Effect Social Change
Jon Pincus: Twitter Is A Strategy
Seminal: Activism At the Speed of Skittles
BL Ochman: Ten Reasons Your Company Shouldn’t Be on Twitter
Digiactive: Using Twitter To Coordinate Protests in London

This entry originally appeared on Beth’s Blog.

The post Twitter as a tool for activism appeared first on Socialbrite.

Aden Van Noppen of Brown University discusses a youth initiative and campus engagement strategy, supported by the Acumen Fund, to involve college students in social causes. The initiative is focused on how finance and business can be used as a tool for social impact in fighting poverty and advancing other social causes — and making students aware of it.

We chatted for a few minutes at the first Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco in October 2008. The next SoCap is scheduled for Sept. 1-3 in San Francisco. Information here.

Watch video in Flash on Viddler (embedded above)
Watch video on Ourmedia

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz.

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Over the past couple of months, I’ve been having discussions with the good folks at Witness.org about how Witness and Ourmedia could work together. Witness has announced an ambitious plan to build a set of publishing tools that would let those in repressive or abusive conditions shine a spotlight on what’s happening in their countries. We already have parts of that publishing infrastructure built, so it makes sense to join forces.

Tonight on PBS’s “Charlie Rose,” Witness founder Peter Gabriel and executive director Gillian Caldwell spoke eloquently about their stirring vision, which is now within reach. I transcribed this exchange:

Peter Gabriel: Part of the original mission [at Witness] was to get cameras out to the world, but in a way, cameras are traveling out to the world anyway disguised inside phones. And in, say, Orwell’s vision in 1984, one of the means through which those in power controlled those who weren’t, was through observation, and in a way it’s trying to flip that on its head. If we get cameras out everywhere, perhaps through observation, the small guy, the little guy, can keep an eye on those in power—

Charlie Rose: It’s like the little guy watching Big Brother.

Gabriel: Exactly. You know, the whole Internet revolution is about putting power down at the bottom rather than just up at the top. So we’re now at a real point of transition, and the dream is that we can have a website where anyone who is desperate and suffering that has images can get them uploaded. Effectively there would be a new human right: If you suffer abuse, you get your story recorded, seen and heard. …

The dream for Witness.org has always been to be a service to all those in the human rights movement rather than a competitor.

Gillian also showed off a new book I need to get: Video for Change : A How-To Guide on Using Video in Advocacy and Activism.

Update: Change agents

Witness has made significant progress since that date, as evidenced by its new tagline: See It, Film It, Change It. See the Media Archive, Training, and Act Now links in the site’s top navigation in particular.

The post Witness puts tools for empowerment online appeared first on Socialbrite.

And so it was earlier this evening when Sundeep Ahuja — a born connector and former marketing chief for Kiva who’s now on the executive team at RichRelevance.com — organized the second  awareness2action event at the Dragonbar in San Francisco’s North Beach. The event, attended by about 60 people involved with various social causes, featured an hour of socializing and an hour of panelists discussing social enterprises.

On the panel:

• Premal Shah, President of Kiva.org (here’s the video interview with Premal I published last week)

• Kevin Jones, Principal at Good Capital

• Steve Newcomb, serial entrepreneur & founder of Virgance.

No one videotaped the event, but here are a few snippets:

Kevin Jones mentioned the-hub.net, a co-working space for social entrepreneurs that began in London and has spread to about 8 locations in all. Good Capital is looking into opening a co-location space in San Francisco.

Steve Newcomb: "I’m on a hiring spree — I’m not paying anything, but I’m on a hiring spree." … "I don’t know how to replicate what the Barack Obama campaign did and apply it to business."

Premal Shah announced the first downturn in lending in Kiva’s history: a 10 percent drop from a year ago because of the economic downturn. The nonprofit has reduced its 2009 budget from $6 million to $4.4 million.

Premal said Kiva planned to release a developer platform with an open API in 2009 so that the community could create additional features and unlock more growth. Great news!

Premal also said Kiva should empower the 17-year-old in Boise, give him the Kiva Powerpoint presentation decks and publish it out on SlideShare. Even if volunteer evangelists got some of the facts wrong, just spreading the word is an enormous win.

Newcomb echoed the approach I’m taking with the upcoming launches of Social Media Camps and Socialbrite.org [this blog] by citing the "train the trainers" model. While many people thought the Obama campaign was a decentralized, democratically run effort, in truth the campaign used a hybrid model of command and control at the top facilitating grassroots efforts at the bottom — "managed empowerment," in Newcomb’s words.

Cool webite: Carrotmob. Carrotmob organizes consumers to make purchases that give financial rewards to those businesses that agree to make socially beneficial choices.

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