Articles

 

• create new profile

    Print this Page Email this Page

Mashable’s Social Good Summit: The Highlights

Ted Turner opened the Social Good Summit with many humorous quotes.
One of my favorite is that guys that are wrong will give up before guys that are right.

Last week, I attended the first day of Mashable’s Social Good Summit, which examined how emerging new media tools are reshaping the work of NGOs and others looking to change the world for the better. The summit had a lot of great contributors, whose projects provided inspirational new models that will influence how WLF and others work in the future. Here are a couple of note-worthy projects I enjoyed learning about.

Charity:Water

Charity: Water brings clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries by building freshwater wells. Scott Harrison, the founder, devised a charitable model that called for 100% transparency. Funding from donors and partners allows Charity: Water to pass 100% of public donations straight to water projects. Charity:Water’s most recent initiative, “Dollars to Projects” tracks every dollar raised at mycharity water. Through this program, both fundraisers and donors can see the direct results of their donations – the photos of people they’ve helped, facts about the lives they’ve changed, and GPS mapped locations of wells. It’s a great project that proves to donors that they’re part of a movement.

FWD

USAID’s FWD campaign also uses geo-location in an inspiring way. Unlike Charity:Water, which uses mapping as a tool to showcase progress and results, FWD’s website uses mapping to show the problems . FWD stands for ‘Famine, War, Drought’ –the three major crises threatening millions of lives in Africa. A key component of the campaign calls on people to forward facts (via Facebook, Twitter, or email) to raise awareness of the issue. To that end, the campaign’s design provides infographics, interactive maps and tool kits that people can use to learn and share details about the crisis in simple, clear ways.

DoSomething.org

The shortest (and sweetest ) presentation came from DoSomething’s Nancy Lublin. At DoSomething.org they’ve discovered a new way of engaging young people through mobile texting. The concept started with the idea of sending texts to their 500 ‘defunct’ users, who rarely opened emails or actively participated in campaigns. They found that texting, unlike email, has a 100% open rate! Currently they are testing texts, messaging 60,000 youths a week with calls to action. Every month, they target young people with different campaigns that require no money, no cars, and no parents to take action. They have had a 12% response rate and 0.4% opt-out rate. The challenge now is to expand the experience socially, since texting is a one-to-one relationship.

These are certainly interesting projects WLF will be keeping on the radar, and looking to learn from, as they evolve! Throughout the day, many people mentioned mobile devices will be key in future social media campaigns, especially in the developing world. They are already a lifeline of information for people in the most disparate parts of the planet. Mass media campaigns which target these mobile phones may be able to reach vulnerable populations that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

The summit introduced me to some great projects and made me newly aware of some important issues. I especially appreciated how the presenters I saw approached their work and life with humor, compassion, and dedication!