Birthing a Social Change Project

The initial idea was simple and profound: build an online application that would allow the user to easily start an online petition campaign and recruit the friends to join.  "Do One Thing" became the working title. 

Beyond this, we wanted to incorporate a number of social web techniques and principles of influencing social chance that we had explored in Christopher Allen's class on Using the Social Web for Social Change.

Soon, with a team assembled and creative sessions begun, the idea began to grow.  What if we could use the social web to spread any simple request for positive change among larger social circles of friends?  What if we could inspire even inactive and apathetic people to stand up and announce their first attempt at encouraging others to do the right thing?  What if we could design a platform from which anyone could successfully launch social change campaigns, and grow them?

As the idea grew, a new name emerged.  Do One Thing was no doubt central to our project, but the potential for influence was growing in our minds.  If doing one thing to start a campaign is a stone thrown into the pond, then its the ripples spreading across the pond that are the waves of influence we want to create with each new campaign.

And so we birthed the RipplCampaign.

The storyboard is a creative tool as old as, well, perhaps as old as paper and pencil.  Good old paper - pencil - crayon - magic marker storyboarding is a technique that doesn't need much improvement with newer technology.  Likewise, sitting down together to share ideas and draw-up a storyboard can produce a group experience that is hard to match by any online tool.  The process is dynamic, interactive, and tactile.

Our team sat down a week ago in a Tacoma cafe, armed with paper and pencil and a slew of ideas. By the time finished our coffee, we had produced a storyboard that incorporated our philosophy, our users, their motivations, our triggers, and our tools.

The storyboard proved to be a great launching pad for the next phases of our project.  Going online at our next meeting, we presented the storyboard using PowerPoint and Blackboard Collaborate.  From here, Dave Ventresca rebuilt the storyboard in PREZI.  Our next step is to produce a video for our second iteration product.

Meanwhile, Dave is coding the Facebook Application. But even without the application in hand, the storyboard allows us to illustrate and consider user behavior, as well as the potential outcomes of using our product.

Key to our social change methodology:

• Help our users overcome their feeling of apathy and sense of inability.
• Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.
• Allow one small action to spread and influence others.
• Leverage the social network expanding tools in Facebook.
• Track and measure activity, and use these measures to create compelling illustrations of success.
• Remind users of their influence, encourage them to recruit others to their cause, and encourage them to take action again.

We have found a number of organizations that share some of our ideas and methods, but none who have used Facebook quite the way we envision using it.  

Yet another tool is becoming more powerful than I had imagined.  Put to use to help others overcome apathy and become change agents on the social web, Facebook is staring to look like a great platform for positive social change.

UPDATE:
The current products of Team Rippl and the RipplCampaign Project are posted here:
http://makingarippl.blogspot.com/

More Relationships: Weaker Relationships?

(photo by Keoni Cabral)

In her YouTube video "‪Ease Of Losing Community Trust‬",  Nancy White says

"I think when we have relationships based on content its easier to ignore them… the relationship is around an issue, its not an enduring bond.  The relationship comes and goes very freely.  There are times when we that's what we need, and times in our lives when we also need a persistent conversation that keeps going even when its rough…. And I wonder about that balance in this world: Are we going to deepen relationships in the network as we figure out how to do that?"

The video was recorded in 2009.  If I could have a conversation with Ms White today, I would ask her what she's learned about encouraging more persistent relationships and conversations in the online network.

Its become conventional wisdom that online communication produces a life filled with more shallow relationships than in the pre-internet world.  So much so that a Pew Center survey in 2010 seemed quite impressed with its result that as many as 85% of people surveyed agreed with the statement "In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."

And yet, googling the words "online relationship" or "deeper online relationships", or even "deepening relationships online" each yield results almost entirely devoted to attracting new dating partners or business customers, rather than actually deepening existing relationships.

Fortunately a few greater minds have broached the topic in their blogs.

Gideon Rosenblatt, former Executive Director of ONE/Northwest and expert in CRM tools, offers insight to relationship building in business in his blog Alchemy of Change, saying

"[How] do we integrate the strategies for cultivating lots of weak ties with our strategies for deepening relationships?  When it comes to social change, the problem with online social networking tools has less to do with the tools themselves – and more to do with how organizations fail to connect their social network organizing with their efforts to deepen their relationships with people… deep relationships don’t just appear magically out of thin air. They need to be cultivated over time with thoughtful and deliberate organizational effort and they need to be fed by influxes of new people, which is precisely where online social networks like Twitter and Facebook can play an important role."

And yet, it is those social networks - in their current state - that are adding to our angst.  Christopher Allen, in his Blog A Life With Alacrity, helps define the problem of having too many relationships to manage, saying "social networks can become too large, and many social networking services are causing the problem rather than solving it."  He goes on to suggest that perhaps a "cultural strategy for managing excessive relationships is prioritization. I could prioritize my relationships and focus only on the 100+ or so that might be the most useful to me."  And yet he admits this is not a satisfying solution since this would risk "offending people forever by excluding them today."

I've seen little evidence of social networking tools being designed or used to help cure the problem of weakening relationships.  I hope that this points to the immature state of these as communication tools, rather than a tragic flaw in the technology or a lack of desire for meaningful relationships in today's culture.  I'm inclined to believe that human intention and focus, rather than technical solutions, are what must be better employed by us all to solve this problem.

As for our current state of affairs, I'm inclined to agree with blogger Mark Schaefer:

"The days of conducting business based on these deep relationships is largely over I think — relationships that were built on a golf course, a boat, long dinner conversations — not text messages, online help functions, and customer service tweets. 

Ten years ago, if you had a business crisis, you could probably count on those deep relationships to help pull you through, at least to a certain extent. Today, and especially after the recession, people just don’t have time for relationship-building.  I can’t imagine inviting a customer to a weekend of golfing any more.  Everybody is doing what used to be three jobs. Who has the time for building business friendships? 

Maybe there will be backlash and a re-focusing on deep relationships at some point. 

 There was recently a story about tech start-ups scrambling for office space near Twitter because of the live networking opportunities.  Kind of ironic.  Seeking deeper offline relationships with people dedicated to spreading low-impact online relationships."

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A Video

Rethinking my personal brand caused me to revisit a recurring theme in my life: difficult problems and the opportunities I might not have found without them.

Social Change and the Fun Theory

The article How Psychology Can Help the Planet Stay Cool in New Scientist August 2009 points out that the failure of pessimism to change human behavior has been well recognized.  Environmental groups have already learned some obvious lessons: no one likes to be hectored, and preachiness is not a winning tactic. Positive campaigns like "We can solve the climate crisis", run by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, are a better idea. 

"As social animals, we like to interact with others and take inspiration from their actions. Psychologists are working out how to exploit this to spread behaviors that will help limit climate change. 'My sense is that social networks are going to be important, says Swim."

So what do we do now?  I went in search of web sites and projects seeking to overcome pessimism and embrace optimism, fun and silliness in their efforts to change people's behavior.  

One climate change org that clearly gets the message right is 350.org.  350.org creates unique campaigns and public events that inspire: 

The most amazing thing about this October 2009 event is that it was hundreds of small separate events that were all seen as a "global event" only because they were leveraged spectacularly well through social media.  350.org also maintains strong social media tactics on their website, encouraging members and site visitors to create and share photos showing themselves valuing climate change solutions.

The EcoTipping Points Project (tag line: "models of success in a time of crisis") is dedicated to making the stories of success known.  I found their 100 stories of success very inspiring.  Now we need 100 stories of climate change success.

"Inspiring" is good, and "inspiring" is needed.  But back to silliness…

Halloween: It’s getting scarier by the Climate Reality Project offered this Halloween message on climate change:

1. Climate change is projected to shrink the world’s chocolate supply.

2. Extreme weather, caused by climate change, is bad for halloween pumpkin crops. 

3. There’s reason to believe climate change will ruin the colors of your fall foliage.

Okay, that made me smile.  Plus, all these cute headlines were backed up by data.  I like data, that makes me smile too.

For something sillier, how about some singing climate scientists?

Now that's silly, and silliness is good, right?  Of course, changing people's behavior is what we really need to do.

I think we can learn something from this project funded by Volkwagen.  They call it The Fun Theory!  Enjoy

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Can we change people's behavior through fun?  Let's try.

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Pessimism Has Failed Us

"People have to be persuaded to act on climate change even though the benefit won't be felt for decades", says the opinion piece Positive Thinking for a Cooler World from New Scientist.

"It's hard to find any positive messages: a vegan who doesn't own a car, never flies, takes public transport to work and shares a tiny apartment in a US city would still be told that their lifestyle requires 3.3 Earths. It is hard to see what this is going to achieve, other than disillusioning people who are already doing their bit and telling everyone else that it isn't worth the bother."

Often, negative messages don't work to inspire people to change their behavior.    Intuitively, this has always made since to me.  I went in search of more evidence.  I found this UC Berkeley study.

"Doomsday climate change messages may make the public more skeptical about climate change," says this report published by scientists working at the University of California, Berkeley.  "Far from urging people to take action, such bleak and emotionally-charged warnings over the potential consequences of global warming may have the opposite effect, prompting not only ongoing lethargy but also denial."

"Fear-based appeals, especially when not coupled with a clear solution, can backfire and undermine the intended effects of a message," the report warns.

Study participants were asked to read two distinct versions of a single news article about global warming, each presenting the same factual data on climate change.  One presentation concluding with a positive message highlighting the potential solutions to the problem of global whamming, while the other concluded with a 'doomsday scenario'. 

Notably, those participants who read the more-upbeat version of the story tended to express a greater level of optimism in science's ability to tackle the threat of climate change.

At the same time, those participants who were presented with the pessimistic version of the news story were found to be more skeptical about the threat of global warming - they did not simply respond with a more pessimistic view of the problem, they expressed skepticism that the problem exists!

Pessimism doesn't work; it does not inspire us to action.  NGOs I've worked with have known this for some time.  After all, they read Psychology Today while waiting at the dentists office, just like you and I do.  Still, how to approach thorny nasty problems without being pessimistic eludes most of us, even those of us in the world-changing profession.

Clearly, if pessimism has failed us, what we need is a dose of optimism, fun, and cheer.

Or, as my wife says: "when all else fails, be silly."

I will now go in search of silly approaches to the climate change problem.  I'll report back once I'm laughing hard enough.