NYU Cause Video Lab

Part of the social media strategy class I teach this spring at NYU with co-profs Tom Watson and Howard Greenstein is a Saturday Video Lab, which I designed to help students become "viterate" and to help them visualize the missions of the nonprofit causes for which they either work or volunteer. (In class, each student must develop a social media strategy for a nonprofit of their choice, and also make a 60-second visual mission statement for that nonprofit, presenting both in front of the class in May for their final grade.)

To help me teach this mandatory Saturday lab segment of the class this year, I invited USA Today's Jefferson Graham. I'd met Graham at a video lab he taught last fall at the annual PDN/PhotoPlus Conference at New York's Jacob Javits Center, and his approach to teaching video editing — by crowdsourcing the exercise —was so inspired, I wanted Graham to help me and my co-profs, Watson and Greenstein, spread the magic among our students.

There were two rules: I'd insisted that each student use a smartphone to shoot their videos this year, so as to prove that not every good video required expensive equipment to produce. The second rule? Everyone had to participate.

We broke the class into three teams, each equipped with a tripod and a smartphone and a special microphone, and took them outside to Bryant Park, just across the street from our midtown Manhattan video lab classroom. Each team was assigned to find out how Mayor Michael Bloomberg's outdoor public smoking ban has been faring. (Answer? Not very well. The students found quite a few people still lighting up. To document this, we asked some students to conduct on-camera video introductions to the story; others to take turns interviewing smokers and non-smokers. Still others were asked to shoot behind-the-scenes footage and collect B-roll, which included footage of cast-off cigarette butts and anti-smoking signs placed prominently inside the park.)

Among those interviewed by the students was a homeless man who lost his mother and wife to cancer, yet who still smoked every day in the park; a non-smoking mother and her baby, who loved the ban, and a smoker from New Jersey who said he would quit if he lived in Manhattan, where cigarettes cost $2 more than at home.

Back in the classroom an hour later, we group-edited the main video into a 65-second rough cut. (This weekend, Graham and I will be putting together the "movie of the movie" that was shot by one of our three student teams.)

Besides being great fun, the point-and-shoot exercise was proof positive that it doesn't have to cost a lot of time and money to shoot a good nonprofit "cause video" that can have impact and visualize the importance of any organization. And, we proved to the students that it didn't take a lot of expertise to start making a decent citizen video. We used 2 iPhones and a Samsung point-and-shoot camera, and augmented each with IK Multimedia iRig microphones that Graham picked up for me at B&H for $45 each. Additionally, we brought along 3 tripods to help keep everything steady.

Our 14 students have since declared the day a hit; all 14 will be shooting their "for real" project videos over spring break at NYU, which begins in earnest this weekend. Before the lab, students were stressing out about their video assignments. After the lab? The shot lists, storyboards, and scripts I had assigned them were suddenly getting turned in or rewritten—a great indicator of renewed interest. Just this afternoon, three of our students borrowed microphones from my studio.

Thanks, Jefferson, for co-conspiring with me to co-develop this exercise for our class — and thanks, Howard and Tom, for working with us to create a dream team for Video Lab Weekend that has inspired 14 students to embark on citizen video projects now and in the future.

Can't wait to see what the students produce on their own!

(For more on the class, here's Graham's blog post on the experience.)

-- Marcia Stepanek

[PHOTO courtesy of NYU and The Wired Nonprofit: Social Media Strategy and Practice class co-taught by Marcia Stepanek, Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson. Those pictured comprise the #wnpnyu class: Samantha Brody, Jacqueline Wolfson, Nirmal Patel, Aaron Green, Ann Chandler, Tom Watson, Dolapo Ojo, Mrinali Vaswani, Samantha Collidge, Elizabeth Cotter, Regina Weichert, Molly Lukash, Marina Spindler, Jefferson Graham (front center), Howard Green, and Steven Galeazzi]

Invisible Networks

As the KONY2012 campaign continues to storm social networks and dominate the conversation in the cause sector, social data experts have begun analyzing the carefully crafted social media strategy behind it. Since March 5th, the video by San Diego nonprofit Invisible Children (@Invisible) about African warlord Joseph Kony, has been shared and viewed by more than 100 million people worldwide, the most quickly and broadly shared video in Internet history.

How did they do it? Essentially, it was a triple whammy -- extremely engaging video, distributed by highly influential social networks, mostly via Twitter. Here are some very early findings (some obvious by now, some not) by Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development for Social Flow, and media scientist Henry Jenkins:

* The KONY2012 campaign is a verifiable youth movement. The video was heavily viewed from mobile phones and has been most popular with 13- to 17-year-old females and 18- to 24-year-old males. The video did not "go viral" so much as its early surge of circulation depended on the hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to Invisible Children, through their participation in IC and its grassroots campaigns over almost a decade. These highly engaged young people were the first to view the video, receive it and pass it along through their social networks.

* Kony2012 is a transmedia storytelling campaign. According to Jenkins, the video is part of a strategy by Invisible Children to create "multiple points of contact" with its core messages and themes of youth empowerment.

* Celebrity re-tweets played a critical role in early distribution of the video. Invisible Children enlisted its pre-existing social networks to press celebrities and made it very easy, for example, to tweet @TaylorSwift or @Rihanna within just two clicks. "Once celebrities came on board," Lotan says, "the campaign was given multiple boosts." Ellen Degeneres (@The EllenShow), for example, got mentioned 36,000 times on Twitter within the first few hours of the campaign from different users asking her to respond to Konhy2012. Both Oprah and Justin Bieber chose to respond and amplify the cause, while Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Stephen Colbert did not.

* Twitter focused huge spikes of attention on the subjects of Uganda and Joseph Kony, according to Lotan. "It was shockingly high," he says. "If we compare the usage of the #Kony2012 and #StopKony hashtags with the #SXSW hashtag (for the very highly-tweeted and re-tweeted South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin, Texas, which was happening at the same time KONY2012 was going mega-viral), we see almost 20x difference in traffic at the peaks." Lotan adds that "#StopKony had 12,000 tweets per 10 minutes at the height of the (viral) event, while #SXSW had only 900." References to Uganda or Kony on Twitter were nearly zero before the video was posted on YouTube. Just after it was, tweets referencing Kony began reaching the level of 25,000 tweets per 10-minute intervals.

* Invisible Childen's network of young supporters across the United States were activated simultaneously to help kick off the campaign. The graph, top, represents the first 5,000 users who posted to the #Kony2012 hashtag. Each node represents a Twitter user and the edges of the graph tracks their connections, or who follows whom. "The more red a node, the earlier it had participated in using the hashtag," Lotan says. Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell (@JasonRussell) and other employees of IC are represented, as is Kristen Bell (@IMKristenBell), an early active member of the organization. (Russell has 58,872 Twitter followers and Bell has 573,075.)

* Tight-knit clusters of 'superfans' have been essential. Clusters of highly-connected individuals indicate that the viral video campaign was orchestrated initially by the top influencers in Invisible Children's social network of supporters. Profiles of these clusters show that most of the "influencers" involved in this campaign were not based in big cities geographically, but were instead tweeting mostly from five geographical locations -- Noblesville, Indiana; Oklahoma City; Pittsburgh; Englewood/Dayton, Ohio, and Birmingham, Alabama. Many of the young people involved in early tweeting of their support of KONY2012 identify themselves as being Christian youth who responded especially favorably to the use of the words "love" and "hope" and "freedom" in IC's early tweets promoting the video.

For more on these early findings, see Lotan's blog post at Social flow, and see this post by media scientist Henry Jenkins.

What do you think?

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Graphic, top, by Social Flow of Invisible Children's Twitter network just after the nonprofit first posted the video, Kony2012)

Teaching

This year, I'm delighted to be team-teaching a new course on social media strategy at New York University with my friends and colleagues Tom Watson and Howard Greenstein. The course expands a pilot social media strategy course I put together for NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising last spring -- and builds it into a 13-week class for the Center's Master's program.

The class is "The Wired Nonprofit 2012: Social Media Strategy and Practice" and Tom, Howard and I will be helping graduate students and future advocacy leaders "to create a comprehensive social media strategy for their organizations." Last year, I asked Tom and Howard to help me further develop the course for the Master's program, and I'm excited (and honored) to have lift-off.

The class began last night and will run through May 2nd. The three of us will be sharing some of the discussion, highlights from the class blog, comments from some of our guest speakers and links for some of the readings. I'll also be sharing some of the highlights here on Cause Global. You also can follow us at #wnpNYU on Twitter.

On another academic note, I'm also again curating Philanthropy 3.0, the Heyman Center's speaker series, a forum I developed for the Center last year that features national leaders in philanthropy innovation debating disruptive changes in the sector, including the latest influences of social media, cause video, the social enterprise movement and mobile fundraising/advocacy. I'll be moderating (and covering) those discussions for Cause Global and will be sharing the stage with some of today's most exciting new voices in social media.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Milos Marek)

Interactive YouTube

Leading the Web's viral video list over Labor Day weekend was this bit of interactive video, below -- part of an ad campaign by a German company that makes Tipp-Ex, a brand of correction fluid that is popular throughout Europe. The ad has generated some serious buzz across the Web as the latest thing in interactive, YouTube marketing. It features a hunter and a bear in the woods. Tell them what you want them to do and, well...let's just say there are a lot of options.

[Hint: Choose "Shoot the Bear" and get directed to the next round]:

http://www.youtube.com/tippexperience

Silly? Undoubtedly, but the technology used to create the video offers many possibilities for cause messaging and marketing for nonprofits and for-profits, alike. What do you think? Let us hear from you.

"You" Video

And now for the next generation of bringing YOU into videos, check out the latest "Blue State" fund-raising appeal from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), in partnership with MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. Called "Glenn Beck Attacks," the campaign personalizes a video to include, well, you -- using a Facebook interface that "grabs" your photo with the click of your mouse.

The video caption reads: "Fox host Glenn Beck spent much of the last week claiming that a normal, everyday progressive was linked to Stalin, Elvis, Joe Biden's cousin, and the guy who came up with the idea of taxes."

But what's interesting here is not simply that the campaign is a digital send-up of Glenn Beck, the politics-of-paranoia purveyor that TIME Magazine has called "that pudgy, buzz-cut, weeping phenomenon of radio, TV and books." It's the technology, folks -- the ability to customize a video for millions, with the click of a mouse and a cause.

The interface adds your name and picture to a pseudo "newscast" but for those who wish [apparently depending on your level of political activism], the video can be personalized even further, to include one's hometown, friends' names, employer, and so forth.

Have a look by clicking on http://beck.cnnbcvideo.com and walk through the paces:


Is this the next generation of political advertising -- the experiential LOL version that can be just as easily used by a children-in-poverty group to rail against homelessness or child-trafficking, or by other groups to, say, put donors "on the spot?" The site advises people to worry not: "This video and site are fictional and satirical," it says.

What do you think? Is this campaign going to go viral or does it run the risk of scaring off potential donors? And regardless, what applications might there be here for your cause? The technology is here, folks -- regardless. Let us hear from you.

(Illustration by Matt Hertel for istock.com)

Apples and Oranges

There has been, for a while now, a spirited debate over whether philanthropy and social media-driven giving sites should have a place in social enterprise. The argument heated up again recently at a conference sponsored by New York University's Heyman Center on Philanthropy and Fundraising called "Charities on Trial."

There, New York Times philanthropy journalist Stephanie Strom questioned the blurring of lines in the social change space. Perhaps one of the most unsettling behavioral trends by today's philanthropy donors, Strom told conferees, is their growing willingness to funnel their tax-exempt dollars to support for-profit programs- and sometimes, at the expense of the nonprofit organizations they used to support."Newer forms of philanthropy," she said, "have been quick to promote the use of for-profit models for social good, and the case they make is persuasive. Why shouldn't GE get some sort of tax break for creating a system that better enables the management of health records, a system that would benefit nonprofit hospitals? ...When Citibank provides mortgage financing to low-income families, why shouldn't that portion of its operations be eligible for the same tax treatment as a local community loan bank gets?"

Trouble is, Strom told the NYU conference, some of the projects seeking funding on some of the new online giving sites -- such as Global Giving, for example -- are corporate programs. Donors making gifts to support those projects "are, effectively, underwriting corporate social responsibility," Strom says. "In other words, companies are using gifts for which a donor has received a tax deduction to finance their corporate philanthropy - something they used to have to fund out of their profit streams." Meanwhile, she says, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other private grantmakers, are starting to devote a small portion of some of their grants to partnerships with for-profit companies ranging from MTV to JPMorgan Chase and Merck.

Further, says Strom, donors are pushing charities to "look more like business" in their analysis and evaluation of their impact. "The demand for results that donors can understand arises every day, and it increases the challenge for fundraisers," Strom says. "The simple fact is that there’s a paucity of good, honest information about the impact nonprofits have and organizations today are going through enormous time, effort and expense to try to devise systems that will demonstrate their efficacy."

The problem, says Strom, is that many of these efforts also "blur the line between for-profit and nonprofit as fundraisers, consultants, and experts appropriate the language of business to try to explain what nonprofits achieve." For-profits, meanwhile, benefit from this new vocabulary, Strom said. There is a danger, she suggested, that this new language can sometimes be misleading to donors. "What is social investing if it’s not philanthropy?" Strom asked. "And is SASIX, the South African Social Investment Exchange, really a capital marketplace? Its Web site says SASIX makes 'carefully selected social development projects available as investment opportunities with a social return.' It sounds a lot like the materials I just got from Charles Schwab."

And there are other questions. Said Strom:

"A year or so ago, the IRS granted tax exemption to a small organization called Zeus Energy Movement. Its founder told me that he and his three partners had sought a tax exemption because they were finding it too difficult to tap into federal support to sustain their research on clean energy devices. ['One is a gadget that harnesses energy from sea waves. It's very interesting,' Strom says.] Their plan is to sell the patents they get on such devices to major energy companies as well as attract foundation grants to support research and development. The problem for me was understanding how Zeus was different from any one of the many small startup companies that my friend Richard, a venture capitalist, invests in. Richard invests his money in solar energy, wind energy, and water energy companies. He puts in the risk and hopes that the devices that his money is supporting will have widespread commercial value and produce a handsome return. Moreover, he pays taxes on those returns. Zeus doesn’t have to." (Is that fair?)

These and other questions will get debated again at this fall's Social Capital Markets conference, a place where investors in the business-for-good space are starting to converge. For the first time this year, there will be a Tactical Philanthropy track to look at how philanthropy is changing in response to the expansion in the types of groups and people now working for change. That track is being developed in partnership with Tactical Philanthropy, Sean Stannard-Stockton's philanthropic advisory services firm, which grew out of his blog of the same name.

What do you think? Does philanthropy have a place in social enterprise? Are new tax rules required to keep it all kosher? Where is collaboration needed? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[This piece first appeared on Justmeans.org and appears here with permission.]
(Illustration by Ray Meyer for istock.com)

Social Production

There's a debate among business leaders about the impact of social networks on social enterprises and innovation. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Don Tapscott, a strategy consultant and an author of books on the so-called Net Generation and corporate transparency in the Digital Age, predicted sweeping changes in the way companies operate. What follows are excerpts of his remarks during a hot-ticket workshop co-led by the top executives of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning, among others.

How do you think social networks will impact businesses and social innovation?

I think we're at an inflection point where social networking is changing and becoming a new mode of production. It's becoming what I call "social production." And social networks within the enterprise are becoming the new operating system of a business. Best Buy, for example, has a social network (Blue Shirt Nation) that involves tens of thousands of people, and this changes the way Best Buy operates its business. It has a link to its social network, as part of broader collaborative platform, to an electronic water cooler of 70,000 people that come up with all kinds of fantastic new ideas. It uses prediction markets to better understand what's really happening within the company. This is changing the way you run a business. It's no longer about hooking up online or creating a garden community for your products.

The more important opportunity for business is using these new collaborative platforms that are built around social networks to change the deep structure and architecture of the company; to orchestrate their capability to innovate and create value. I used Ning to run a contest for a book I'd written recently [Grown Up Digital], where I asked kids around the world to give me a two-minute video that says what's wrong with the education system and how they'd fix it. I had a person working on this for two weeks. I got hundreds of videos from dozens of countries and it changed the way that I, as a company, relate to the rest of the world.

What other examples can you share?

InnoCentive is basically built on a social network. I'm Procter & Gamble and I'm trying to find a molecule that will take red wine out of a shirt. I've got 9,000 people inside the company but there are 200,000 outside on the InnoCentive network, and sure enough, there's a retired chemist in Taipei or a grad student in London that comes up with a molecule. I pay them $200,000 for the fix and I have a product that ends up being a billion-dollar product.

Or take Goldcorp Inc., a gold mining company. The CEO there was very frustrated that his geologists couldn't tell him where to go into production -- where the gold was. So he ran a contest on a social network and collaborative platform. He offered $500,000 in prizes for anyone who could tell him whether he had any gold in his company, and if so, where it was. He got 77 submissions from all over the world. They used techniques that he'd never heard of. And for his $500,000 of prize money, he found $3.4 billion worth of gold. The market value of his company went from $90 million to $10 billion. He's my neighbor, and I can tell you he's a happy camper. Social networks are changing the way we innovate and the way we get capability.

What are the risks?

One big problem has to do with moving to this new paradigm. There's a crisis of leadership in companies and enterprises typified by this popular habit that some companies have of banning social networks like Facebook within the enterprise. I was talking to the CIO of a state where the governor had banned Facebook and I asked, 'Why do you do that?' And he said the governor felt the people were wasting their time on the job -- to which I replied, 'Well, if young people are wasting time, is that a technology problem? Do you fix that by banning the technology? Maybe it has something to do with work flow, or job design, or performance evaluations.' I asked what the effect was of banning Facebook, and he said that everybody went to MySpace. Another youngster, 27 years old, had a different answer. He said it was the single most demoralizing thing management has ever done. It said to him that management doesn't get collaboration, doesn't get his generation's tools, doesn't understand his generation, and doesn't trust him. So there is a crisis of leadership emerging.

...The whole theme of Davos this year is that the world is bust and we need to rethink, redesign, and rebuild our institutions. The current model of nation-states coming together to fix things isn't working very well. The model we are exploring now at Davos is to create new multi-stakeholder networks to solve problems, so that while world leaders get stalled at Copenhagen coming up with a climate change deal, for example, there are something like 10 million people organizing on the Web around this issue. This is the first time in human history where we're all pretty much on the same side as citizens on an issue like this. To me, this presents a new opportunity to change the way we collaborate in the world and in the way we solve problems.

Nike has just launched something called the GreenXchange, where companies are going to contribute their intellectual property and put it in the commons and use social networking to do this. Nike is giving away 440 environmental patents and placing them in the commons. It's not just on the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats but we have big environmental problems in the world and need to move toward more open innovation and competitive strategies. Social networks give us a platform that radically drops innovation costs. This is a big change.

...Transparency is a new force that's causing companies to be more open, truthful and honest. Now, it's true. You don't always see it. But that's the general trend. Companies that are honest can use transparency as a friend.

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Saul Herrera for istock.com)

Digital Fish

Here's a good use of social media for change. Note how this group, the Iraqi and Afghanistan Veterans of America, is integrating a well-done, viral recruitment video (below) with its launch of two private, online social networks on Ning. The three-pronged strategy creates instant engagement and drives membership into IAVA's month-old communityofveterans.org. Community members help each other work for the cause—in this case, their own reintegration. (IAVA's separate, online Family and Friends network—also private—closes the circle, providing further, back-up support and engagement for returning veterans.) For more on the use of private social networks by nonprofits to drive recruitment, retention, support, and engagement, see Members Only, posted here earlier this week.)