I presented about the possibilities for social media and how it was changing the way we play – as well as the way we act as citizens and witnesses. Since my presentation consisted only of screen shots, I airily told everyone not to worry or take notes, that the links for everything I was talking about would go up on my blog. I made it sound like this would happen within about five minutes, might even be up by the time they got home.

And a geologic age later, here it is! So let’s talk about serious games, and how it could make us better citizens. Thanks to everyone at the conference who was kind enough to chat about this in person.

What? You’ve never heard of her?

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815, and she wrote the world’s first computer programs for the Analytical Machine, a device invented by Charles Babbage.  Women’s contributions to tech aren’t talked about enough – today is aimed at changing that. You can read more about Ada Lovelace Day and its organiser Suw Charman-Anderson, as well as join the challenge yourself here.

To participate, today we’re telling you about a woman who made a huge difference to the way we think about non-profits and the internet.

Ok, we know we talk (rave) about Jane McGonigal all the time. She’s a self described game designer, futurist and games researcher.  MIT Tech review pegged her as one of 35 innovators changing the world for her groundbreaking work in alternate reality gaming.

The reason we think she’s so fascinating for people working on technology and non-profits? Because she creates games that motivate people to take a stake in them and work together on solving the game. She motivates people to tell stories. And she’s into being playful for the sake of playful (she was one of the organisers for the San Francisco flashmobs) but she recognises the power that play has to change the way we think… and she’s using that power for good.

I used to worry that games like the one’s she’s worked on were too addictive – she’s designed games that were so immersive, people had trouble  distinguishing the game from reality (think I Love Bees, or The Beast).  I wondered who had time to play these kinds of games. I was freaked out by the hive-mind aspect – I knew that groups of players had proved collectively smart enough to solve problems her team had estimated would take a month to solve in just one day.

But then I thought about the implications these characteristics have for social change on the internet. Getting people to pay attention to a problem without being overwhelmed by it, and motivating them to work together on a solution are the keys to changing the way we handle problems.  And Jane is working hard on developing this angle: you can check out her recent projects that had an explicit social change edge at World Without Oil (where players pretended we’d hit peak oil – and then survived without it) as well as the non-profit game  Superstruct (a future predicting game that played with the idea of using grassroots solutions to solve big problems).  I have a feeling Ada and Jane would have gotten along very well – check out the other women who are changing technology at the FindingAda mashup here, and keep tracking Ada Lovelace day as it moves around the world!

“…Creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for clients, partners, and society at large.”*

Surprise: the secret word for your job is marketing. Why is it a secret? When you work as a fundraiser, “marketing” is a bit of a dirty word – it sounds corporate, and insincere. But good marketing isn’t about lying to people or tricking them into your product – it’s about connecting with the people whose values line up with yours.  And a  little cross-pollination is all it takes to save you reinventing the wheel when it comes to, well, getting on with the job of marketing your non-profit.

Where can you access online marketing advice that applies to non-profits?

Some excellent (and amusing) tips are available in the form of The Age of Persuasion, a CBC radio show about advertising. Hosted by Terry O’Reilly, it’s not available in podcast format, but it is available for streaming. While O’Reilly is specifically talking about advertising, truths about considering your target group and doing your homework are made awfully vivid by stealable examples from the corporate world.

Katya Andresen’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog calls this “Robin Hood Marketing”, that is “the concept of stealing corporate savvy to sell just causes”  and offers clear-cut breakdowns of marketing essentials, such as going to where the attention is. Nedra Weinreich’s excellently-written blog Spare Change focuses on social marketing and how it applies to non-profits.

No matter what, though, you cannot do better than getting an expert into your non-profit. Offline, see if your local university has opportunities for marketing students to intern with you and take their knowledge seriously – an intern who helps you learn the ropes of Robin Hood marketing could be a fantastic board member in the making.

Guess where the term "marketing" originated? Original Photo: Flickr user lumierefi (CC license 2.0)

*quoting the American Marketing Association’s definition – you can see the whole definition on Wikipedia.

You clearly need to enjoy the benefits of going analog. Here are 3 tips we use all the time to get our projects done.

Original Photo by flickr user Dave77459

Kitchen Timers:

We’re serious. We like to set the timer for half hour or hour long sprints to help us focus on a task. It ticks, it dings, you’re done.  The timer works well for three reasons – the ticking makes a white noise that keeps you on task,  estimating how much time a task will take you helps you to manage it, and timing yourself means that you’re allowed to take breaks. In fact, breaks are enforced, because you have to take your hands off the keyboard to reset the thing.

Task Breaks:

A friend told me recently about a study that showed that humans are evolving to aggregate information better, courtesy of using computers. Unfortunately, we’re the unevolved ones – this generation of humans aggregates poorly. The answer? Take breaks and let yourself process.

The only rules for a break are: you cannot input on a break (so, you can’t read your book, you can’t listen to music) and you cannot output on a break (don’t make notes, don’t go on Facebook, don’t answer your emails).  The best breaks, the ones that will bring you back to your desk with your work processed, are the ones that get you moving. (And this makes sense when you consider that our brains evolved partly from being able to walk.)

However you do it, banish yourself from input/output tasks for ten minutes, and you’ll find yourself sifting through information and coming back to your work with better focus.

Sticky Note Questions

Make your own content filter. Pick three (max) questions that help you define your goals, write them on a sticky note, and keep it where you can see it. This lets you check if you’re spending your time on the right priorities. For example, a funding developer might have this on her sticky note:

a) Will this bring in money?

b) Will this bring in new donor prospects?

This keeps her from going too far off onto websites that probably won’t support either goal.

If you’re interested in doing further reading about productivity (and you’re not on a task break right now) Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com is the site for you. Among other great posts, you’ll find this one on the benefits of using paper (yes, he invented The Hipster PDA). You’ll also find a great digital tool for keeping yourself from wandering off-task; if you’re not a kitchen timer kind of person, you might be a Brain Dad kind of person.  Kim Klein has also written a bit about analog efficiency – the sticky note idea is featured in her book Fundraising for Social Change (2001, Chardon Press) and it’s good advice.

Spread the news

Tell your friends. I was not focused on the news coming out of the Gaza strip until a friend of mine linked me to this article and this one in chat, and pointed out that phosphorous bombs are banned by the UN for use on civilians (for details on how they burn skin to the bone, click the above link). Your friends respect your opinion, so tell it to them – and Tweet it, Digg it, Reddit it and Facebook it too.

Support Other People’s Efforts

Big organizations like Amnesty International can move fast when it comes to the news, organizing ways for you to help them apply international pressure. Amnesty Canada’s launched an open letter you can sign to Canada’s Foreign Minister and Amnesty USA is hosting online chats with their Gaza researcher to promote understanding of the crisis, and to talk about how you can help. Obviously Amnesty is not the only game in town, so list organisations you think we should have mentioned in the comments section of this post.

Get Your Community Non-Profit Involved

Yep, turns out acting locally has an impact for global change.  If you’re working at a non-profit, your organisation may have something to say about global news that will help convey the relevence of these issues to your neighbours. If the media isn’t calling you, call them (hint: reporters’ phone numbers are on newspaper websites). Tell them your non-profit’s stance.  If you don’t belong to a non-profit, but you have a local group or you belong to a religious community, talk together about what you can do to change the news you’re seeing. A good first step might be to call the local chapter of a big non-profit like Amnesty or the Red Cross to ask how your group can help.

Start Your Own Movement

You don’t have to wait for the big guys to get their act together (although it’s easier). Start a petition. Gather donations for a non-profit you like. Read about what your foreign minister is doing. Think it’s not enough? Send around an email to your friends that asks them to write your mp. Call your mp and tell them you’re unhappy about the news today, that you think it’s time we did something together to change it. Hey, and if noone is answering the phone?  Flash mobs aren’t just for pillow fights. Hold a flash protest.

The most important thing is – don’t just make yourself another cup of coffee and forget about the news that makes you angry. All of these things we’re talking about are easy for you to do, they bring attention to injustice and put pressure on politicians – and that’s how change happens.

————————-

We used the stories coming out of the Gaza strip as inspiration for this post, but that’s not the only news we’d like to act on. Please post organisations or other take action ideas in the comments section of this entry and help us get everyone past the shaking-their-head solution.

As a Warsaw resident, I got super excited about this. I thought – hurray, a chance for Poland to access all of the issues around climate change. Take recycling. This is a concept that has not really taken off in Warsaw: public bins are available everywhere, but only to recycle glass and not for other basic elements like paper. What’s more, few Gen Xers or baby boomers recycle because it’s seen as dirty and a pain in the butt – which it is since you have to lug your recycling for blocks to the bins after the one door-to-door program was shut down earlier this year. Now, before you imagine that this is because Poland is somehow underdeveloped or uninformed – consider that nearly the entire population listens to the radio and buys at least one paper every day, that we are all on the internet and that there are two cell phones for every person. If you want to get a message out, UN, now is your chance!

And they are trying.

Conference websites have to be clear, pretty, interactive and  – unlike a normal non-profit website which caters to a target audience – useful to thousands of stakeholders with radically different needs.  To this end, the UN Climate Change conference website has some really good elements for members of the public looking to get informed about climate change. For example, they’ve organized very complex issues into the category of ‘Essential Background’ and an ‘Issues Quickfinder’ that makes it easy to get up to speed. They also include background on recent climate change conferences and set out their priorities clearly on the homepage.

Unsurprisingly, their efforts to make all of these issues intelligible are interspersed with glacier-sized chunks of jargon and a labyrinthine ring of links.  Worse, they’re using social media only as a transmitter, not for interactivity: this means that you’re welcome to watch a press release hosted by Youtube, but no discussion is invited.

It doesn’t have to be like this – for the last few years a main feature of the International AIDS conference websites (the latest was in Mexico) has been a ‘Global Village‘ part of the site for citizen organizing, as well as extensive site for youth to organize together.  Still, the Climate Change conference has just started, and so far I’m mostly impressed with how the UN has coordinated with the media to get their message out over Polish radio, media and the internet.

The shocker is that week’s loser is the usually web-savvy social change organisation Avaaz.  Two weeks before the climate change conference they sent out a message to all their Polish members, asking for help with logistics in Poznan. We offered to volunteer translate over the internet, or to translate in person in Poznan. No response. We went on their website to see what they were doing around the conference and what other activities we could get involved in online. No response! All the climate change info they have up right now is about their work in 2007. Where’s the community discussion, the petition, the outreach between countries, the face on a global problem?  Since when is the UN doing a better job of getting personal online than Avaaz?

Speaking about the exhibit, Madrigal asks ‘What are the social consequences when science allows us to see things that had previously been invisible?’ This gets at what I think is a key problem for social change oriented photography.

Original Photo by Flikr user Frishmilch (CC 2.0 Generic)

Collective Lens is a website that promotes photography for social change. Anyone can upload a photo, submit an essay, search for photos and organizations or follow up on causes they’ve discovered through the sites’ photos. Websites like this one are doing their best to address the perception that photography and social change don’t go hand in hand.

Why the perception? As Collective Lens contributor Andris Bjornson points out in his article on ‘Giving Back To Your Subjects‘, photography often involves taking a less-fortunate person’s picture and not giving anything back.

Case in point: in 1994 South African photographer Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer prize for his photo of a starving and collapsed Sudanese toddler being followed by vultures.  He came under heavy criticism for taking the photo, instead of helping the child.  I have to admit I think of this photo and am wary when I see exhibits or photo essays intended to raise awareness. Do I want to see the invisible world at so high a cost?  What happens to the people in these pictures?

Collective Lens is a good step towards encouraging everyone to bring issues they care about into focus, and to act on these issues so that positive change comes out of the photos on the site.  But mostly, their concrete followups are very much of the ‘donate!’ variety. Donations are great, but what I would love to see them do is more photography projects that empower their subjects by teaching them to make their own photographs. An example of a project like this is Canadian youth organization LOVE (Leave Out ViolencE). They teach youth who have been victims of violence to become reporters of violence through photography, journalism and broadcasting workshops. Collective Lens’ photos of kids in Africa are beautiful, but LOVE’S scratchy black and white online gallery hits home for me because with this kind of photography, the lens goes both ways.

But you do not have to wait for Collective Lens to do something about this. Since Collective Lens depends on viewer content it’s up to you to influence their subject matter: sign up and get out there! Take photos of the world around you and the change you want to see and upload it to their site. Promote respect for the world you photograph. Challenge photographers who promote complacency and ask yourself: where is the invisible world?

Of course, this wasn’t actually the staid, grand grey lady of the NY Times. Instead, a collective of activists had created the spoof, with the intent of encouraging President-Elect Obama to stick to his election promises. Gawker has a good story on some of the incredible logistics behind-the-scenes, and the technical work that was done to pull off the creation and delivery of the papers.

In recent months, it seems like political pranks have been on the rise. Some have been aided and abetted by high technology, like the extensive website of Martin Eisenstadt - a political expert according to the mainstream media, who was, in fact, a hoax.  Several major networks fell for the fake pundit. The pretend political expert was actually the creation of two filmmakers who wanted to draw attention to lack of fact-checking by the media during the election. “Martin” had an official looking blog and a series of professional YouTube videos. He was just a little lacking in actual credentials.

Then there’s the tried and true, low-technology weapon of choice: the phone. Take, for example, a prank call made to Sarah Palin by a Montreal radio DJ posing as French president Nicolas Sarkozy. A highlight of the conversation built upon Sarah’s memorable earlier remark that she had insight into foreign policy because she could ‘actually see Russia from here in Alaska.’ The fake Sarkozy remarked that he had this in common with her – except that from his house, he could see Belgium.

Pranks in the name of politics, or in the name of any social cause, can be an effective way to get some attention. In doing so, you put yourself on the subjective knife-edge of good taste and poor judgment. As our technology gets better, it gets easier to pass off a hoax for the real thing. But I think that it’s the intent, not just the execution, that matters. What impresses me most about the NY Times hoax is its optimism and compassion: maybe it will create a better future tomorrow, by pretending that it’s truth today.

Update: Okay, I don’t know how the Yes Men escaped my attention before.  This is the gang that are partially behind the NY Times prank.  Their website is well worth a visit, and the 2004 documentary is both hilarious and disturbing, in a “Ha ha…yeesh…” kind of way.

click here to see our full cartoon, made on stripgenerator.com!

Cartoons are such potent generators of social change, and so under fire in terms of media freedom, that Cartooning For Peace has become a regular side event to the United Nations World Press Freedom day.

This group started in response to the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed Controversy, when a Danish newspaper printed 12 cartoons that were intended to criticize extreme censorship in Islam. The cartoons used the Islamic prophet Mohammed, and ignited fierce controversy about censorship, and the role of cartoons in promoting peace, among one or two other thorny issues.

When they are published with change as their goal (as opposed to say, selling papers) cartoons are efficient tools for political change. For example, in 1985 G.B. Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury brought so much attention to the fact that Florida minorities needed a passcard to get around, that the law was repealed under ‘The Doonesbury Act‘.  More recently, comics have been used for everything from talking about war to explaining how to protect yourself from voter fraud in the current US Election (by the way, if you’re looking for interesting approaches to fundraising, that link to Steal Back Your Vote is worth a look).

Someone once explained to me humor is when you bend the rules. Breaking social rules is rarely funny. Bending them is hilarious, because if you bend far enough, you’ll see yourself from the outside. Are you inspired to use cartoons in your next non-profit appeal? Here are two immediate resources:

First, a practical how-to article on using cartoons in direct-mail fundraising.

And then once you’re warmed up? Off to Strip Generator with you, the online comic strip blog platform. You point, you click, you publish. We’ll laugh with you. You wear a bullet proof vest.