Change



6 lessons to take away from Jumo’s fail


It is a shame that a social media platform about making positive change went down like a lead balloon, especially when you had very clever people behind it.   Read  FB Co-Founder Sells Jumo for $0 and a Job

For me, Jumo always had a bit of a ghost town feeling about it and if you add that to the initial restrictions in updating a NGO profile, it didn’t encourage me (and many others)  to go out of my way to put my organisations content on the site or to use it.

IHere are six lessons that I took away from Jumo’s fail.

1. Be very clear that the problem you are trying to solve exists.
Did the NGO sector actually want a specialised social media platform? If they did what did NGOs want from it?

2. Make sure you include your potential audiences and key users in the site design process.

Did the design and functionality work for NGOs or give reasons for their supporters to use Jumo over other sites like Care2 or change.org?

3. Be focused on who your target audience is and be knowledgeable about them.
Was Jumo ever clear if they were focused on only US market or a more international audience? Or, did they really understand why people support organisations or causes and what they like to do online?

4. Have more open, two-way conversation with the key drivers of content for your site.
Did Jumo have or seek a “Critical Friend”  via advisorary board of NGOs or from well respected people in the US and International  NGO or campaigning sectors?

5. Ask permission before you use organisations name and content.
It seemed that Jumo staff scraped/wrote content and set up profiles of NGOs for Jumo’s launch without asking permissions of those NGOs or checking if the information was correct.  Not a great way to get a key user base on side with your product.

6. Let Profile owners change/have control their content from the outset.
Organisations that found themselves with a profile on Jumo at the launch where not able to remove, add or update content and the process of contacting someone from Jumo was difficult. Again, not a great way to get a key user base on side with your product.

Do you agree with the lessons I took away form Jumo’s fail or  have anymore to add from Jumo’s and other social good start-ups.





It’s a better life without Oxfam


In last night’s D&AD Awards for design and advertising professionals and students Oxfam sponsored the student category. The winning film – “Help us End Oxfam” – was produced by students from the Miami Ad School in Madrid who also went on to col

l

ect the jury ‘Students of the Year’ award. Watch it here:

WATCH: It’s a Better Life Without Oxfam – Student Awards winner

In their statement the judges said the following about the winner:

“Their entry was selected by the jury for being a powerful piece of
communication that challenges the viewer to consider a world where Oxfam doesn’t need to exist…”

Rumor has it their tutor tried to tone down the provocation, but the students stuck to their guns! I think they were right.

So the only question now is, will Oxfam take the challenge and launch a campaign based on imagining it will no longer exist? What do you think? Is this the right direction for an agency like Oxfam?

Full disclosure: I am one of those ‘Oxfam workers’ the film refers to, and you can follow me on twitter @VinothorsenRich Text AreaToolbarBold (Ctrl / Alt + Shift + B)Italic (Ctrl / Alt + Shift + I)Strikethrough (Alt + Shift + D)Unordered list (Alt + Shift + U)Ordered list (Alt + Shift + O)Blockquote (Alt + Shift + Q)Align Left (Alt + Shift + L)Align Center (Alt + Shift + C)Align Right (Alt + Shift + R)Insert/edit link (Alt + Shift + A)Unlink (Alt + Shift + S)Insert More Tag (Alt + Shift + T)Proofread WritingToggle fullscreen mode (Alt + Shift + G)Show/Hide Kitchen Sink (Alt + Shift + Z)Add Author Avatars Shortcodes
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In last night’s D&AD Awards for design and advertising professionals and students Oxfam sponsored the student category. The winning film – “Help us End Oxfam” – was produced by students from the Miami Ad School in Madrid who also went on to collect the jury ‘Students of the Year’ award. Watch it here:
WATCH: It’s a Better Life Without Oxfam – Student Awards winner
In their statement the judges said the following about the winner:
“Their entry was selected by the jury for being a powerful piece of
communication that challenges the viewer to consider a world where Oxfam doesn’t need to exist…”
Rumor has it their tutor tried to tone down the provocation, but the students stuck to their guns! I think they were right.
So the only question now is, will Oxfam take the challenge and launch a campaign based on imagining it will no longer exist? What do you think? Is this the right direction for an agency like Oxfam?
Full disclosure: I am one of those ‘Oxfam workers’ the film refers to, and you can follow me on twitter @Vinothorsen
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MoveOn admits they hacked Fox News


About 300.000 + of you have seen the video of the news reader on the Fox News building in New York being hacked with messages not exactly of the type Fox usually fills the airways with. It’s shot in a shaky hand held spontaneous kind of way.

The maker of the video seems as shocked as the viewer about what they are watching. Watch it yourself:

<iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/brlo4qqkDZ8″ frameborder=”0″ width=”450″ height=”286″></iframe>

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It turns out – this was a pretty clever pre-campaign launch stunt by the campaign group MoveOn which on June 23rd, alongside former White House adviser Van Jones and The Roots, are launching what organizers are calling “Rebuild the Dream,” an effort to move the political conversation away from austerity and towards job creation. For more on the story of the hoax and the up-coming campaign check out <a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/08/moveon-fox-news-the-roots_n_873054.html” target=”_blank”>Sam Stein’s blog in the Huffington Post.</a>

Clever use of online media – let’s hope they have some more tricks up their sleeves as the campaign get’s rolling properly. Something to look out for.
















Pro-Mubarak trolls hit Facebook #Egypt #Jan25


An interesting look at how Mubarak’s thuggery went online as well as offline from Wired’s Danger Room blog:
Some of the new up-with-Mubarak commentary at the Facebook page We Are All Khalid Said is classic concern-trolling: people wringing their hands over how Egypt’s dictator deserves better than calls for his downfall. Some is pure abuse, questioning the loyalties of the page’s administrator. And some are blatant attempts to disrupt the protests by claiming upcoming rallies have been canceled.

It’s hard not to see the trolling as part of a larger effort by Mubarak’s allies to win the propaganda battle surrounding Egypt’s unrest. They’re detaining and beating foreign journalists in order to control the information flow. On Thursday, they arrested online activists.

A sampling of pro-Mubarak posts on Thursday: “I’m sad that I was one of you,” Tamir Said hissed. Semsema Elamora called the admins “sons of bitches” and “garbage.” Moamen Bokhary inveighed, “God forgive him he spread fitna [division] and wants to burn the country, God is my refuge. We are all against him. Send it to each other so we can rid ourselves of him and his poisons.”

Bokhary didn’t specify whether he meant the administrator or the page’s namesake, an Alexandria blogger beaten to death by police. But the point is clear enough.

As online properties go, We Are All Khalid Said is a strategic target for the Mubarak regime. The #Jan25 dissident movement is about a lot more than internet tools, but there’s no denying that Facebook and Twitter helped the rallies coalesce. The Khalid Said page is the most important Facebook asset for the protesters. Six months old, it has garnered 464,000 Likes and counting.

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Digital Activism does not = slacktivism


The Guardian recently posted a blog about digital activism – mostly a nice personal reflection on the author’s positive experience of taking Avaaz actions and how that they feel connected to a wider movement and part of a social change by doing so.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/18/online-activism-internet-campaign-mobilise

But, the comments to the piece made me reflect on the wider debate on digital activism, particularly the “digital activism=slacktivisim=not real activism” debates of the last year and it left me feeling uneasy.

The uneasiness stems from feeling like I am a spectator in a debate about my area of expertise and passion instead of an active participant, and I know that others feel the same.

It really bugs me that the main commentators called on in this debate are not us or the women using mobile phones in small isolated villages where they save lives by providing and receiving information about health, markets and important civil news or the activists who resist dictatorships and human rights abuses by documenting evidence on videos/mobiles and sharing with the world via the web or the million of us who show our concern and empathy for others by taking part in activities we online and in the real world after reading about them via an email passed on by a friend, a twitter or facebook share we came across.

I am bored to death of seeing academics, pundits and “things were more activist in my day before this internet stuff” campaigners who are driving the debate, putting us into a constant defensive back foot focused on debating the tools rather than how we can use them to work together to achieve the changes we collectively want.

Collectively I think we (and I include me in this) need to step up and start directing this debate. I know we have amazing and inspiring stories, lessons, observations and techniques that if shared, would go some part to changing the tone of the debate into a more rounded discussion that looks at how we can achieve our goals rather than looking backwards to defend the tools we happen to use.

So radically I am suggesting a collective course of action and hope there is some energy in the room for it to run, but first a question.

Why do the current pundits and academics get the media space? Because they are writing/written books that have a PR campaign that provides hooks and ideas for editors to run with and the book gives the writer a authority above their normal role as graduate student, researcher, campaigner to comment in the public sphere.

So my suggestions are that we follow suit.

We collectively write and launch a e-book, or collection of our collective blogs, articles, interviews, and digital know-how. The actual format doesn’t really matter, what does is the buzz that the content generate, as it provides the authors a wider readership, authority and profile, a more knowledgeable sector and a wider range of pundits for media and editors to feature to balance the current cynical and pessimistic tone around most public debate and comment on the impact of digital activism and campaigning

This will mean that fellow campaigners and NGOs can have access to a better understanding of how effective our digital campaigning efforts are, partly informed by our results as well as these debates in the media, and at the moment the digital activism=slacktivism crowd is getting more airspace than us.

To ensure that we do tell our stories in a way that are understood in the way we intended, we need to be seen advocating and developing our own profiles with leading articles rather than justifying ourselves in the comments section.

What do you think?