Oil and Water

The BP oil spill is out of the headlines, but not off the radar of international cause groups. The latest initiative comes out of Happiness Brussels, a Brussels-based design and communications studio that has created a pro bono project around the slogan, Oil and Water Don't Mix.

The designers, earlier this fall, scooped up some of the sludge still washing up on the beaches of Grand Isle, Louisiana, from the Deepwater Horizon spill and used it to "ink" a limited edition of 200 hand-printed posters featuring the slogan -- and as of today, all posters have sold out. (Designers are considering extending the run and/or designing new posters to continue the global fundraising drive.) All proceeds benefit the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, or crcl.org, an environmental cleanup group based in Baton Rouge.

The posters are cool, but even cooler is that social media linked this small studio in Brussels to these activists in Baton Rouge to printers in New Orleans to environmentalists all over -- faster than a plane ride to either location. Also significant? The oil is still washing up; the posters are proof positive.

Here's the video on the project:

OIL & WATER DO NOT MIX from Happiness Brussels on Vimeo.

Choose a Different Ending

There are a variety of ways that social advocacy groups use videos -- to break news, tout their passion and thought leadership, and explain complex issues. All focus on storytelling in traditional video formats.

But there's a new type of cause video starting to gain notice as an effective way to engage new supporters. It's interactive -- your supporters and would-be supporters decide what happens next. It's a type of video that combines good storytelling with the interactivity of a video game. Here's an example, called Choose a Different Ending, developed for the UK nonprofit, droptheweapons.org, to fight street violence. It was shot by British filmmaker Simon Ellis.

What do you think? Might this be an effective way for your cause to engage supporters? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Twestival Global 2010

Twestival Global kicks off tomorrow, this time bringing thousands of people in 175 cities around the world together to support the cause of education. Last year, the first global Twestival raised money for charity:water. This year, all proceeds will go to Concern Worldwide, a global organization that works to boost education for children born into poverty.

During a visit to London last week, I spoke with Renate Nyborg, a Twestival cofounder who parlayed her social media skills into founding Madhouse Collective, an interactive events company in the UK. [Nyborg was on a panel I led last week at Justmeans.com's Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement conference in London.] Here's an edited transcript of our short conversation about Twestival:

What led you and Amanda Rose to start Twestival last year?
I was running an events company at the time and had started using Twitter; at the time, just journalists and bloggers and tech geeks like myself were using it and we thought: Wouldn’t it be great to bring a bunch of these people together in the world to connect and share resources and give each other advice and use this collaborative idea to raise money for a good cause? So we rallied people on and offline, at first to benefit a local soup kitchen, and then we put that idea of a larger event out there on Twitter, and rather quickly, we started asking people where they were based, what were their skills, and what would it take for them to get involved? Two weeks later, we had 200 registered cities, 1,000 volunteers and we ended up raising $250,000 for this in the space of a month.We knew we were on to something from the start -- though I must say, we had no budget; basically, there were two of us doing it alone from London, but leveraging the buzz around it allowed the infrastructure to scale. We ended up being one of these online swarms that made a huge difference. We used the money to build 55 water wells in Ethiopia and Uganda, which directly affected 70,000 people. That was one campaign –we’ve done several others since. I think campaigns like Twestival are a strong example of how people can use social media to collaborate, versus popping up to exert pressure. And it's a sustainable group so far. It's building on what we started, not having to start from scratch.

What's next in the evolution of Twestival, in your view?
I believe passionately that collaboration is the way forward. Since we did the first Twestival campaigns, we have engaged a number of corporations and other stakeholder groups to help us to facilitate the work that we do -- PayPal, eBay, and other companies are helping us to do good and raise money for charity. The proposition to them is this: we tell them we have 1,000 people worldwide investing their time and skills and speaking well on their behalf, so let us build this for you. I think that's how things will evolve in many uses of social media for good, once the social capital -- the sheer numbers of people can be charted and brought to bear. I think corporations, rather than having to sit down and figure out what they have to do, or how they can change things or put up a budget, might better simply align themselves with people already out there doing things that can help change their organizations from the inside out.

Last year, we raised $750,000 for Twestival and we'll raise more this year. Now we have in place an infrastructure, and every single day, we've been getting lots of requests from corporations and individuals wanting to do something -- a design-for-good competition, for one, and a group of musicians offering to donate downloads of their music for charity, to cite two examples. It's really all about using social media to moderate group activity, to keep connecting the right people to each other, and the right brands to the right actions. We have high hopes for this year but we're still just getting started about seeing how widely this can scale over time. For those asking us where the money goes and how it gets there, this year, there's a Twestival Results section to the site, where you can look at detailed statistics including funds raised to date and how they're being spent. (Click on Impact tab)

For more on Twestival Global, check out the promotional video, below:

After Slacktivism

Who says social advocates can't raise big money and forge lasting donor relationships online for their causes? Today's South by Southwest (SxSW) panel on slacktivism -- more elegantly and formally called Debunking the Myth of Social Media Fundraising -- offered a rousing antidote to the notion of ineffectual, click-and-give philanthropy. Urban Dictionary defines slacktivism -- a portmanteau of the words "slacker" and "activism" -- as "a way of pretending to care while sitting ... in front of a computer playing WoW." Such detachment, the panelists asserted, is becoming less of a factor in today's cause-wired, text-aided giving arena: the outpouring of mobile contributions to victims of Haiti's January 12 earthquake and donor retention strategies being crafted to hang on to many of those donors over time should be proof positive that online giving has, at last, begun to evolve and inform even the most traditional philanthropy circles.

[Evgeny Morozov, one of the critics of slacktivism, wrote in a Foreign Policy Magazine article last fall entitled "From Slacktivism to Activism" that he is skeptical of numerous digital activism campaigns "that attempt to change the world through Facebook and Twitter." He said the desire to instantly connect with others online around ever-new causes poses a threat to more productive uses of time, such as brainstorming solutions to the world's ongoing problems.]

Combining research data with personal anecdotes, panelists Stacey Monk (Epic Change); Brooke McMillan (the Lance Armstrong Foundation); Donna Wilkins (Charity Dynamics), and Frank Barry (with Blackbaud, the fundraising software firm) made a strong case for the potential of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to raise money and awareness -- not simply as tools in one-off fundraising campaigns but also in efforts to build richer and more sustainable donor relationships across the socioeconomic spectrum.

There are dozens of commonly-held misperceptions about the use of social media in advocacy, the panelists said, and here are five of them:

Myth One: Social Media Aren't Very Effective. Not true, said the panelists. Social media can be effective in breaking down geographic boundaries, building communities of donors who otherwise would not be able to connect, and bringing in contributions from many more people than before. Monk says her nonprofit has raised nearly all of its money via Twitter, to build classrooms in Tanzania, buy school supplies for the students there and provide skills training inside and outside the classroom -- including social media skills aimed at helping them to learn more about other people from around the world. While the panelists agreed that using social media to fund-raise can take time, as it's all about relationship-building and not simply a matter of learning the technology.

Myth Two: Major Donors Do Not Exist in Social Media. Not true, said McMillan, and cited the example of @fatcyclist, the Twitter handle for a man who blogged and Tweeted to raise some $800,000 over the course of a year for Livestrong, Lance Armstrong's cancer research foundation. With social media, Barry said, "major donors" are no longer just wealthy individuals. Now they include individuals of all income levels adept at using their social influence online and off to engage others around giving to a cause.

Myth Three: No one Raises Money on Twitter. Guess again, said the panelists. For one, look at Twestival, the regional, national, and global fund-raising campaigns staged on Twitter to benefit a variety of causes. Then look at TweetsGiving. Both micro-blogging fundraisers have increased donations year over year, suggesting such campaigns are sustainable. To be sure, Monk said, "when you first get on Twitter you don't know what you're doing there." But soon, she added, you discover that "Twitter engineers serendipity" -- all sorts of connections that can be leveraged to raise money and awareness over time.

Myth Four: Building Community Does Not Help You Raise Money. Also not true, the panelists said. Social media campaigns allow nonprofits to reach new donors and build the relationships required to raise funds from previously untapped sources. Nonprofits, said Monk, "shoot themselves in the foot" when they put a "give" button on their Web sites. Causes need, instead, to humanize fund-raising by using social media to engage donors in the cause. "Authentic connections between humans create movements, and movements raise funds," Monk said. "...Social media should humanize the process of giving, not automate it." Storytelling, the act of humanizing your cause to engage donors, is critical, she added. "If the word 'donate' is in your Tweet, you're doing it wrong," said Monk. To emphasize the point, Monk says she writes the Twitter handles of donors on the walls of the classrooms they're helping her to build as a way of showing them both her gratitude and their impact, and it works.

Myth Five: Social Media Cannibalize Other Fundraising Channels. Au contraire, said Monk. "Social media are just additional tools. Donors want to be able to choose" the way they give money to a cause, she said, and sites like Facebook and Twitter give them the option to give in new ways. Besides, the panelists agreed, social media offer an effective way for causes to reach the hearts and pocketbooks of Baby Boomers, the largest-growing demographic using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Both Wilkins and Barry said multi-channel fund-raising strategies proved most effective, citing a recent Blackbaud/Charity Dynamics study. One finding: organizations that use email effectively to fund-raise also tend to use social media more effectively, as well. "My job didn't exist a year ago," said McMillan, the social media evangelist at Livestrong.

For more on the subject, check out the study on social media in fund-raising released last month by Charity Dynamics and Blackbaud.

Still not convinced? Come to the NTEN annual conference in Atlanta in April to hear some opposing views on the subject and a debate over the challenges to online giving that exist. My panel on Slacktivism will feature Nancy Lublin, CEO of dosomething.org; Jacob Colker, Cofounder of The Extraordinaries; Wendy Harman, social media director of the American Red Cross, and Aaron Smith, of Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, which is conducting ground-breaking research on the use of social media by Generation Y. Hope to see you there!

--By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Jumpingsack for istock.com)