Move the needle: How to activate your supporters

And download these 3 flyers on tools & platforms for social change

Last night I gave another in the series of Mobilize Your Cause mini-camps at the Hub SoMa in San Francisco. It went well, with representatives from Women’s Film Institute, CBS Interactive, Small Act and a number of startups and consultancies coming by to do a deep dive into how to use social media to move the needle for your cause or organization.

My partner and colleague Sloane Berrent wasn’t in town for the joint presentation, but Pamela Hawley, founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, came by and offered some great thoughts about the importance of stepping back and identifying your organization’s story — its core value proposition — before diving into the toolsets. Her recent trip to the White House with 50 other social entrepreneurs drew a number of questions from people eager to connect with the social enterprise community.

Handouts on social action hubs, mobile apps & more

For the event, Socialbrite produced three new or modified flyers — download them for free and repost on your site!:

• 12 Social Action Hubs — Online communities and crowdsource platforms (shortener: bit.ly/12socialhubs — PDF)

• 10 Mobile Apps for Social Good (shortener: bit.ly/10mobileapps — PDF)

• 12 Steps to Mobilize Your Cause (shortener: bit.ly/12steps-flyer — PDF)

A presentation to get the ball rolling

The presentation was intended not as a comprehensive survey of social media tools or strategies, but as a way to introduce concepts that can be plumbed more deeply in the weeks ahead. In the main, it consisted of three main parts:

• Case studies — successful cause campaigns by Equality California, Tweet for a Cure, Grassroots Mapping, charity:water, Greenpeace, Egypt’s Women & Memory Forum and Nawaa, a group of political activists in Tunisia. (What they did with Google Earth blew me away!)

• 12 steps to activate your supporters, starting with listening and ending with real-world events.

• Tools and action hubs for social change, including Google Earth, Creative Commons, Google Sidewiki, widgets, word cloud visualizations and more.

A technical glitch: Any theories?

We spent a half hour before the session began tackling a technical glitch I had never seen in 10 years of presentations: My videos were playing fine in Keynote on my MacBook Pro, but when the image was projected onto the wall, only the QuickTime still image was visible — nothing that “moved” was displayed through the projector during the entire evening. Which threw me for a loop, since my presentations are intensely media-rich. Have you ever seen that before? What do you think could have caused that?

Despite that, it was a great gathering and I hope to be back at the Hub soon! If you’d like a Mobilize Your Cause workshop held at your organization, drop us a line.

Related

• 12 steps to a successful cause campaign (Socialbrite)JD Lasica, founder and former editor of Socialbrite, is co-founder of Cruiseable. Contact JD or follow him on Twitter or Google Plus.