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/