Animated Debate

If you can type, you can make movies -- or so says the new text-to-video start-up xtra normal, which has created a way for anyone to quickly (and cheaply) create an animated video to promote a particular cause or point-of-view. [Think Wordpress meets South Park.] The video animation templates offered by the start-up are the latest entry into the fast-growing, short-form video space -- and hold promise for nonprofits and other cause groups that are cash-strapped and video-challenged.

Here's one example, referred to us via DoSomething.org. Made on the xtra normal platform, it urges a more peaceful debate around the construction of a proposed mosque and spiritual center in lower Manhattan:

Of course, as soon as this was made, other (longer, bolder and alternative) versions were released, as well. Here's one of them:

How does it work? Upload your script and choose your actor from a range of English-speaking animals, John Doe types and Sarah Palin look-alikes; the templates do the rest.

What to say? The fight for Good v. Evil is getting animated, indeed. (wince)

Let us know what you think.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Game Theory

(Scene from Riverbed, a new game about water scarcity)

Water shortages? There's a game for that now, too. Ditto world famine, the global oil market, and the struggle for Middle East peace. In fact, over the last couple of years, there has been an increase in the number of video game developers who would rather design for social problem-solving than entertainment (Think Grand Theft Auto meets the electric car).

That's good news for the rest of us: video games have finally begun to shed their one-size-fits-all reputation for blood and bombast; behavioral experts now agree that so-called "games for good" can teach empathy to those who play them -- a prerequisite for collaborative problem-solving.

But the really good news here? Demand for such "social issues" games is rising, too -- thanks in part to the federal government, which is starting to view them as a new and effective catalyst for education and civic engagement. Kumar Garg, of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says there are hundreds of games now being commissioned across multiple agencies, with more demand certain to continue, at least for the next couple of years. "Society is becoming more social given the social networking technologies before us," Garg told a recent Games for Change Festival in Manhattan. "How can we channel today's rising levels of collaborative social interaction into social problem-solving? Games can be that bridge to more civic engagement."

Garg said the most aggressive new demand for interactive games is coming from the Army, the Department of Education and public health agencies seeking to catalyze public action around complex social problems and skills training.

Here are three of the newest games out this summer:

The Riverbed. There's a new social issues game about water scarcity called Riverbed that says "water IS the new oil. According to the United Nations, a shortage of clean water is a root cause of poverty, social instability and even war." So what's so fun about that? Developer Mary Wharmby wraps a murder mystery around it to make the sleuthing an interactive -- and educational - experience. Wharmby told Cause Global that she got the idea for the game 15 years ago while writing an academic paper about the Aral Sea in central Asia, which has lost 75 percent of its mass since 1960. Said Wharmby:

"This game is a mystery that asks players, who killed the environmentalist? As you solve this, you realize there's a deeper mystery, which is, who killed the river? All suspects are based on character archetypes who have a stake in real-life water scarcity situations -- fishermen, politicians, farmers, engineers. By the end of this game, you've solved the murder and brought this person to justice. But you also have restored the river. For each suspect you eliminate, you get a chance to undo his or her environmental damage."

Fate of the World. Due out in September, Fate of the World is the latest offering from the British husband-and-wife team of Gobion and Hannah Rowlands. Their social enterprise, Red Redemption, co-developed an earlier game called Climate Change with the BBC; that game was used in 2007 and 2008 by the World Economic Forum in Davos to help train CEOs in the effects of climate change under various scenarios. The couple's latest offering takes scenario play to a different level. "Players have a choice," Hannah told Cause Global. "They can either save the world or burn it down, depending on their use of various scenarios covering the next 200 years." The game's synopsis says it all: "After another decade of inaction, the governments of the world wake up to a planet in chaos. The first impacts of climate change, population growth, resource over-exploitation and species loss have struck and a global organization has been created to respond. You are that response. Will you help the whole planet or will you be an agent of destruction?"

That both games are about environmental "crimes" is no accident. Hannah is a climate modeling expert with an Oxford degree; Gobion had been working as a forensic psychologist in the UK by day and tinkering with game development at night. Climate Change was the couple's first project together, made partly in the couple's kitchen. "I have been making games in various forms since I was 10," Gobion says, "but the satisfaction you get when you make a game that matters is huge, and these next 200 years are really critical to humanity. I felt disconnected at first from the issue of the environment. Games are a way to connect people personally to any number of social problems."

Participatory Chinatown. Players assume the role of one of 15 virtual residents of Boston's Chinatown district, all working around language difficulties and differing income levels to secure jobs, find affordable housing and discover new places to socialize. "This project is really an intervention into the community," says Eric Gordon, a new media professor at Emerson College in Boston who received a MacArthur Digital Media and Learning grant to develop the game, which debuted May 3. "Participatory Chinatown is a new way of engaging the democratic process," he told Cause Global. "I think what we've done is innovate the town hall meeting by bringing in gaming, by bringing in social networking. I think we can change the way that decisions are made -- as well as the way groups get together, collaborate, form political alliances and do the dirty work of democracy." Gordon says that game is targeted to teens as well as to seniors. "We are trying to foster inter-generational collaboration," Gordon says. "The game is not designed for gamers but for those with no gaming experience and those with some."

What do you think? Games-for-change attempt to foster "empathetic learning" -- putting players into the "shoes" of others so as to teach them new perspectives and solutions to global and local civic problems and societal challenges. How effective do you think games might be in bringing about behavioral change in the streets or in the boardroom?

Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Cause-washing: The New Black?

We've all heard about green-washing, what Urban Dictionary defines as "when companies pretend to be environmentally friendly -- when in fact they are not." Now there's a new term -- cause-washing -- that's being used with increasing frequency in the blogosphere to describe inauthentic marketing-for-good.

To talk about this and other new trends and challenges in the worlds of corporate responsibility and social enterprise, I sat down recently with the popular Harvard Business School marketing professor V. Kasturi Rangan, who moderated a panel in February on the subject at Harvard's Social Enterprise Conference 2010. Rangan says he worries a lot about how some causes may be considered a better "sell" than others. He also says he thinks it will soon become critical for companies involved in cause-branding to start proving social impact amid an increasingly cause-crowded marketplace -- but adds that few firms are, as yet, up to the challenge. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation:

What are the new cause-branding trends going forward?
I see pluses and minuses. Cause branding requires you to attach the cause to brand and then commercialize it; there are some causes that are more commercialize-able than others. That does not mean that those other causes are any less important. Some causes pull on your heartstrings. And sure, none of us want to see a hungry child; none of us wants to see children without access to education; we don't want to see children without access to health care. I mean, emotionally, we get pulled in. But there may be other things, for example -- drug addicts; for example, older adults who some in society might think are supposed to take care of themselves. Those kinds of causes may not be saleable, commercialize-able. So my worry is that if we cause-brand some causes and not others based on how sale-able they are to the general public, then we are letting private enterprise choose what is most important for society -- which may not exactly align with what the most important causes are. I really worry about that a lot. There needs to be some sort of clearing mechanism where not just the causes that are commercialize-able dominate all of the money from corporations. There must be some mechanism whereby some of the other causes also have a chance to get some corporate money to play up their causes.

On the plus side, we in America are a mature market. Most consumers in America pretty much know what kinds of products and services they can get and so it's very clear that a differentiation factor is what a company is doing for society. I believe a lot more products and brands will jump into cause-branding. When all is said and done, cause marketing is just a teeny fraction of philanthropy - about $15 billion or $20 billion, alone, versus all of philanthropy, which is about $350 billion. So we might see more corporate money coming into cause branding, and this is good. Once a corporation attaches itself to a cause, it tends to take it seriously, and public companies have oversight and so forth to help guide them in how well they execute. So it's good for the business. It's good for the social fabric.

And the downside? Is cause marketing a tougher sell?
Yes, if everybody claims that everybody is doing a great thing for such and such a cause, and then sooner or later, consumers will become skeptics. It's already starting to happen in some cases. I think the most authentic brands going forward will not only have to be transparent about how they are raising money and how they are spending it, they also now will have to show they are having a social impact. This is something that I do not think that most corporations are ready for. Corporations are willing to show financial impact. They are willing to show transparency. They are willing to show they're authentic about what they are thinking. But are they ready to show that yes, this is the cause that I care for, and look at the impact I've made in society? That, I don't think, the corporations are ready for. But it is something that corporations that really want to differentiate themselves are going to have to step up for. It's a new game for them that many haven't yet started to think about.

Why aren't most ready?
It's a cost item, and it's incredibly more difficult to achieve. Measuring social impact is different than measuring financial impact. (See "Does Corporate Philanthropy Sell?)

Can you cite a company that is?
Timberland, for one, is trying to measure the social impact of what it is trying to do. It's an early symbol of what is happening.

What are the stiffest challenges for cause-marketers?
The only way to succeed here is to support value. Newman's Own and others say that at best, consumers may pay a small premium for a cause-brand, but not a lot more. Cause brands now need to operate at a superb level of efficiency and effectiveness just to generate an extra surplus to support the cause and the movement. Cause brands have to be very lean, very hungry and really tough.

And secondly, of course, cause brands need to be authentic. That's always been the case and this is becoming ever more critical. When you lose trust on 'good' initiatives, your brand suffers irretrievably. A decade ago, maybe you could get by with a little sloppiness on the authenticity front but now - because there are so many companies claiming to be helping a cause - you have to run these cause branding campaigns as both a terrific business and you have to be authentic. There are so many watchdogs on the Web now that will call you out if you're not. With online social networks, successes and failures get amplified. Customers talk to other customers and stumbles can hurt badly. The Web is both a friend and a foe.

In that vein, what do you make of the new consumer activism online - chiefly social enterprises like Carrotmob, Quiet Riots and Good Guide that crowdsource consumer opinion? Are these new online networks friends or foes?
My quick takes on it? This is good for companies; they can get real-time consumer feedback. But companies and movements have to be careful. Ultimately, corporations and brands exist to show a return to shareholders. Some of these movements and the things they ask for may be perfect from the point of view of the small group of consumers that these movements represent. However, what these consumer groups are asking for might not form a valuable business proposition in terms of scale or in terms of sustaining the franchise because a company may not be able to make that kind of product or service available for, say, a mere 10,000 people in a northeast corner somewhere, or to a certain type of demographic. And that's where I think the problems might come, where it becomes like an activist movement, where the activists get up in arms over, say, what mothers really need but there's not a single firm able to take care of it.

If these new online consumer movements can be translated by companies into something viable business-wise, they will present an opportunity for businesses. As long as the consumer feedback is viewed constructively and firms are mindful of the fact that these are great opportunities for them to learn about digital markets and get a very quick sense of how [online complaint] builds up, maybe [online consumer groups] can help companies to decrease the cost of launching a product and taking it to market.

Otherwise, I'm afraid that these [consumer] movements could create more dissonance - cases where these online groups will not have impact and then start to feel used, thinking 'I gave all of these ideas to this company but look at what corporate American has done. It's not stepped up to the plate.' Businesses, beware.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Matt Hertel for istock.com)

Vlogspotting

Video blogging—vlogging–seems more cause-minded than ever.

New-and-improved digital video-sharing sites with names like Vimeo, blip.tv, Flickr video, Seesmic, and Viddler are making it easier for citizen activists to share their concerns about the world around them. One new storytelling form emerging on these sites is the short, "cause vlog" —brief, home-made mini-documentaries meant to create community around issues close to home.

Here are a couple of recent examples:

* Bike-Lane Emergency from Nicholas Whitaker on Vimeo. Whitaker attaches his camera to his handlebars and takes us for a dangerous, humorous spin through the streets of New York City.




* River Reactions from Kevin Co on Vimeo. Co uses a combination of news and original footage to raise safety concerns over the proposed construction of a nuclear reactor in his Yukon River village in Alaska.




Want to distribute your cause vlog globally? That's easier now, too: Dot.sub is a Web service that lets cause activists publish their docs with subtitles in other languages—and makes it possible for others to add subtitles of their own, in other languages. Viewers, meanwhile, can choose their preferred language for watching.

Founder Michael Smolens wanted to substantially remove language and cost as a barrier to cross-cultural communication using video. "I remember thinking after I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 that if one documentary film in English could have an impact on a very close U.S. Presidential election, imagine if all independent and documentary films, TV programming, and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages," Smollen says.

Look for wider use of vlogging by nonprofits in coming months. Here's how one, the global citizen news community, Rising Voices, is using dotSUB to distribute an informational video about its work in more than a dozen languages. Click here to see its vlog.