Coming to the end of a year makes me yearn for lists. Not just Christmas lists, 2010 to-do lists, and New Year’s resolutions (a bit early for that…), but lists of things we saw from not-for-profits over the past year that made us think, wow. Over the next month or so we’ll be bringing you our top five lists in a few categories related to social media.
Whether you’re wearing toe socks or those comfy hand-knitted slipper socks with the leather soles that you buy at the season’s craft fairs (or your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s woolen lumberjack socks), these lists will be sure to knock your socks off. So, here goes…our first list of video picks.
These days with a little will and collaborative effort it’s relatively easy for not-for-profits to produce and post their own videos. Tech is cheap and amateur videographers abound. The difficulty is in creating something that cuts to the essence of what your organization does and in a way that is slightly edgy, but not annoyingly so. Short (not insubstantial) and visually arresting…no three-ring-circuses. The other challenge of course is getting people to download it, another ball of wax altogether.
Go Small has come up with a killer list of five videos we simply LOVE. Please note we almost never use caps! Or exclamation marks.
For years, I’ve been lamenting the declining power of protest marches and public demonstrations. As a teenager, I did my time picketing against clearcutting in British Columbia’s old growth forests, marching for peace and joining the crowds calling for a coordinated and government-backed strategy on HIV/AIDS. But, as I’ve come to realize in a painful, I’m-growing-old kind of way, these types of protests just aren’t as effective anymore, particularly in the Western world. Perhaps we’ve all coccooned ourselves in our comfortable, wired-up homes and can’t imagine venturing out to challenge an issue that seems inevitable to us anyway. Or perhaps governments and other decision-makers have learned to ignore the protests altogether, choosing to only notice movements that affect their popularity in the polls.
(If I sound a little jaded, forgive me. I live with a cynic.)
However, the online world has grown to accommodate dissent, as well as commerce, gossip and networking. And why not? If we can use new media for every other aspect of our lives, then it stands to reason that we can use it to push ahead with social change too.
Want to get involved? The Utne Reader has posted a comprehensive guide on how those of us who live outside of Iran can help, with online tools, of course. Simple acts like changing your Twitter location and Facebook picture can help the people of Tehran get the word out. Because in this new world that we are just learning to navigate, nothing is more important than listening to the voices that are straining to be heard.
Since Oprah officially signed on to Twitter a couple weeks ago, there’s been even more buzz about the mighty micro-blog. The fact that on her first day of tweets she bought 20,000 mosquito nets from Demi Moore to stop the spread of malaria in Africa made our hearts sing a little here at Go Small because it showed the world (well, at least those millions of fans who watch Oprah) how a social networking application with a 140-character limit could actually be used by not-for-profits to reach out to their audiences and–as Demi and Oprah demonstrated–to fundraise.
What else can not-for-profits do with the so-called killer app?
Send tweets during conference talks, links to blog posts and events happening within your organization, drive traffic to your web page, use it as a collaboration tool….
Here is how some not-for-profits and ethically focused businesses are using Twitter for good:
Did you hear? We’re in a recession! As we watch our mutual funds plummet, the one thing many of us don’t even think about is how charities and not-for-profits are going to survive this global economic mess. After all, these organizations depend on donations, which come from the disposable incomes of donors. And, as we all know, no one’s disposable income budget has been immune to the bitter winds of the financial meltdown.
So, we here at Go Small have been waiting to see if not-for-profits would rise to the challenge and find new ways to raise funds for their causes that are innovative, easy and inspire the public to find room in their ever-shrinking wallets. Oxfam Canada has done just that, creating the Oxfam Unwrapped Gift Card, a gift certificate that you can buy online and that the lucky recipient can redeem at the Oxfam Unwrapped e-store. Available for purchase? Goats, donkeys, seeds, tools–anything a family or individual in a developing country needs to build a sustainable future. Also available are donations to all of Oxfam Canada’s programs.
Oxfam Unwrapped Gift Card
What we love about this initiative is that it encourages people to buy donations as gifts. Instead of chipping away at dwindling charitable giving budgets, Oxfam Canada is making it easy for anyone to make good use of the money they’ve allotted for gifts instead. Just because the world’s economic systems have ground to a halt, that doesn’t give any of us free license to forget Mother’s Day!
We’re not leaving the continent of Africa quite yet. An inspiring project came to my attention from Uganda, Rwanda’s neighbour to the north.
The project is called ZoomUganda and it uses the little-known though increasing prevalent technique called “photovoice” to bring attention to Matale, a community in southern Uganda where more than half the children have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS.
Created by Caroline C. Wang and Mary Ann Burris in 1992 to enable rural women of Yunnan Province, China to have a say in policymaking affecting them, “photovoice” enables individuals who are typically subjects, to be creators, as they document their world.
Sponsored by the Harambee Centre in Portland, Oregon, ZoomUganda involves 12 girls who were given 12 cameras and 24 hours to tell their stories. Another part of the project was for the girls to keep journals wherein they captured their hopes and dreams. Proceeds from the project will benefit St. Andrew’s Secondary School in Matale, Uganda.
Photovoice is a powerful tool for organizations, whether working in the Global South or in the Deep South, to help citizens take control over how the world perceives them.
If the technique seems a good fit for your organization, then build on your photovoice project by integrating social media such as video and other interactive web capabilities to seriously engage online visitors and connect them to your organization’s vision for social change.
Remember that–where social media is concerned–there are many ways to tell a story.
To shed light on a little-known and increasingly prevalent social issue, CANGRANDS, a Canadian organization supporting grandmothers, grandfathers, and kinship families as they struggle to keep or develop family ties has released a video on YouTube (thanks to the support of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration).
Originally airing on CTV’sW-FIVE, the two-part programme reveals the roadblocks grandparents who parent their children’s children encounter from living on fixed incomes, addressing their grandchildren’s health concerns (e.g. sexual abuse, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Attention Deficit Disorder) to dealing with their own health problems.
In the video, Paul Muldoon who produced a study on the financial pressures of raising grandchildren talks about the financial toll on grandparents. “These grandparents are saving us as taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “And they’re doing that out of a sense of commitment, they’re doing that out of a sense of love and we need to be there to help and support them.”
PART 1
PART 2
According to the W-FIVE documentary, 65,000 children in Canada are being raised by kin, while in the US, the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey shows that more than six million grandparents live with grandchildren. In both countries, the numbers are increasing.
Making use of professionally produced TV (or other) videos about your organization (with permission!) is a nifty and cost-effective way to further your organization’s message and goals. Remember that it’s good to recycle and reuse. Way to go CANGRANDS!
Over the past few years, musicians, artists and writers have begun to do something that, not that long ago, they would have considered unthinkable: Giving people their work for FREE.
Take the band Radiohead. When they first released their album In Rainbows they told fans they could download it and basically pay what they wanted. Three months later the release was full price. Many people were upset because they thought the band had undermined the whole music industry and what it stood for, while others thought it was a great ploy to reel in more fans. Whatever way you look at it, it got me thinking more about how creators could still keep some semblance of control over their art (and incomes!), given that consumers seem to find ways to download whatever they want for free anyway.
A recent example in the book industry is Kelly Link’s second book, Magic for Beginners, which is now available online for one year under the Creative Commons license. Seven of her nine stories are included in the free download. This is a major step for her publishers, the big guns, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (paperback) and HarperPerennial (UK edition). The move gives even more credence to the Creative Commons and what they’re trying to do, which is let authors, artists, scientists, and educators have the freedom to make their work available within the rules of copyright.
The new marketplace is forcing everybody, not just musicians and authors, to look at ways to attract people to their product, whether it is an actual physical thing like an album or book, or whether it is another way of looking at recycling or caring for the elderly. It seems we have no choice but to be part of the shift. And, since that’s the case, why not take matters into our own hands and create our own version of what that shift looks like?
Not-for-profits looking to make a difference virtually (really, but virtually!) may wish to look at what others, such as musicians and authors are doing in the digital commons in order to glean ideas from these experiments (because that’s what they are…) and prepare their organizations for fresh ways of reaching out and communicating.
It’s been a couple of years since the book trailer for Londonstani by Gautam Malkani came out, and people in the book industry were divided as to whether such a thing could take off in the famously slow-to-change publishing world. Well, it’s been a slow ride, but it now seems as if many companies, big and small, are producing these low-cost trailers, including Canadian publisher Cormorant Books.
Now, these trailers can work in any number of sectors, including the not-for-profit one. They’re cheap to produce (no actors necessary!) and they can convey any number of messages, from the visceral and emotional, to the hard-hitting and newsy. Is your organization launching a new product or service? Can you embed a YouTube video on your website, blog, and Facebook profile? Think about how a video can introduce a new identity for your not-for-profit, and contribute to a flashy launch without draining your budget.
