iParticipate and Social Change
Posted by Allison Fine on October 29, 2009
Greg Baldwin, President of VolunteerMatch, sent me a link to his provocate blog post, Turning Good Intentions into Action: Hollywood vs. Google. Greg says that the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s much-ballyhooed iParticipate campaign to boost volunteerism was a bust.
The idea of the campaign was for a significant number of TV shows to incorporate volunteerism into their episodes during one week. Participating shows included Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. According to Greg the goals of this effort was to create a surge of volunteers that would avail themselves of the opportunities available through VolunteerMatch, VolunteerSolutions, Craiglist, 1-800-Volunteer.org, and Idealist.
No surge resulted. By Greg’s estimate VolunteerMatch will net about 15-20 new volunteers as a result of the broadcasts. What happened? According to Greg:
“on…Thursday, we had a total of 33,250 visits, which if you are doing the math, means that about 98% of visits came from someplace other than the TV. Really? So where are they coming from?
The answer of course is Google and the long-tail of the internet. That is how much the word has changed, but not everyone is ready to believe it.”
Greg’s thoughts are interesting and provokative, good fodder for an interesting conversation.
Here are my thoughts in response.
1. It is important to unhook from the zero-sum notion that the world will either be broadcast or social media in the future. It’s not going to be one thing but an ongoing mixture of the two. Of course, broadcast media has lost steam in the last ten years, but it hasn’t disappeared and won’t in the near future. We need to keep exploring and learning about the intersection between the two and find patterns and methods for them to strengthen one another.
2. I think this is largely a case of what I call “malmeasurement.” iParticipate was hyperbole gone wild. We hear this kind of language so often. That the next campaign will be a “game changer,” or create a “tidal wave” of interest, etc. The expectations that highlighting volunteerism within TV programs would be a catalyst for millions of people to volunteer was never realistic in the first place. The distance between raising awareness and action is too far through the light touch of a mention in a TV show. But that doesn’t mean that raising awareness isn’t important. On the contrary, remember those public service announcements that seeped into our consciousness, whether it was Smoky the Bear or the egg frying symbolizing a brain on drugs. Those were powerful messages that shaped a national shift on behavior. But those PSAs were run many, many times on TV when television stations were required to conserve part of their bandwidth for public service. And that is one very interesting lesson learned for me in the iParticipate campaign. If this effort was a substitute for the many years that television helped to shape the national conversation about issues through PSAs it certainly is a pale, ineffective substitute.
3. What is very interesting about this discussion is the fact that Greg knows what happened immediately as a result of the television shows. In the analog world there would be no way for the rest of us to know what effect a television shows was having out there in the real world. But, Greg knows, he’s looking at the numbers of volunteers frozen stuck after the broadcasts. Of course, this is only one measure. People tend to marinate over ideas and activities over time. A focus group with watchers of the programs would provide terrific additional data as to whether the programs affected how viewers felt about issues and what else is needed to move them to action.
4. This is an opportunity for volunteer matching websites and organizations, and the nonprofit organizations that use volunteers, to engage with EIF to develop a longer-term strategy of how to continue to raise the importance and opportunities of volunteerism. Social change takes a long time and an enormous amount of diligence, patience and resilience to pursue. These are not characteristics often associated with the entertainment industry, which is why its incumbent on the nonprofit community to find ways for the industry to use it’s best strength, their ability to be a megaphone to share issues with large audiences of people at one time, and couple it with the best strengths of efforts like VolunteerMatch which is to inexpensively reach people — and stay with them over time.
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This entry was posted on October 29, 2009 at 7:11 am and is filed under Social Media. Tagged: EIF, Greg Baldwin, IParticipate, VolunteerMatch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
7 Responses to “iParticipate and Social Change”
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David Geilhufe said
“Social change takes a long time and an enormous amount of diligence, patience and resilience to pursue.”
I wouldn’t generally think the EIF would be “in it for the long haul,” but if they were there might be a real opportunity there.
The data on the actual impact is suspect however. Poor technical implementation means that we will never know how many people got to iParticipate. but never actually got to VolunteerMatch where they would make a difference. Yet another case for making sure you have the right Geeks doing your work. http://blogs.volunteermatch.org/engagingvolunteers/2009/10/28/open-letter-from-the-president-regarding-iparticipate-org/
And finally, you have a massive #fail, but looking at the blog (http://www.iparticipate.org/blog) absolutely no mention. They might not be in it for the long haul.
Allison Fine said
Thanks, David. We can make iParticipate go to the water, but we can’t make them drink! Making people with broadcast media DNA more social is a huge challenge, as you well know. Hopefully, they’ll be more interested in learning how to do this after this experience, but I don’t have my hopes high.
AF
Greg Baldwin said
Allison,
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I hope the data we are able to make available will help continue to encourage a lively discussion about the tools and strategies we invest in to advance the public good. We think some ideas work better than others, but the real question as you rightly point out is how to invest in getting them all working together.
Greg
David Katz said
Hi Allison and Greg,
I think that what the stats above show…is that it is incredibly difficult to connect with individuals who are traditionally unengaged from anything remotely related to volunteerism and fundraising. It’s even more challenging to get them to act…
And that’s why I launched JackTheDonkey.com, the community where your time online supports the charity of your choice. Or what some call, a socially responsible social network, as we donate more than half of all ad revenue generated by an individual’s time online to their choice of more than 20 charities from across Canada and the US, and now the UK (1.1 cents every impression paid at par depending where the charity is registered…that’s the theory, I haven’t been charging the existing advertisers as they have been friends and family..so I continue to pay the 1.1 cents per impression to the charities from my pocket).
Jack is set up in such a way that we take a “softsell” approach to keeping the charities top of mind among existing supporters, while trickling into the consciousness of potential supporters (as the charities’ Twitter feeds have recently been incorporated into their supporters’ personal profile pages…viewable to the community).
I thought the charities were posting some really great things on Twitter….and thought that this could be an effective way to enhance the effeciency of their tweets among true supporters. Quite frankly, every time an SEO or other type of “evangelist” reads a tweet…you know there won’t be a response (most of the time).
My hope is that by serving as a general purpose network where people can post and discuss anything of interest, while they just so happen to be benefiting a charity, that in time, jackthedonkey.com will serve as a gateway for individuals to participate in bigger and better forms of support (be it through volunteering, fundraising or making a direct donation to the charities dearest to their heart.
That’s the hope anyway…I think the current generation is ready and longing to make a difference. I think that what we are creating will help them realize this for themselves.
Dan Bassill said
This is a valuable discussion and needs to be taking place in many sectors because unless we can create greater daily attention that encourages more people to be volunteers and donors and thousands of different locations around the world, we’ll never get the high qualtiy outcomes we want from the non profit sector because we’ll aways be dependent on an inconsistent flow of resources.
I was an advertising manager for the Montgomery Ward corporation where we spent over $250 million each year (in the 1980s) to draw potential customers to 400 stores in 40 states. We also had teams of people trying to make sure those stores were located near customers, easy to reach, well constructed, had well-trained staff, and had merchandise and services people wanted, at fair prices.
I don’t know of anything in the non profit sectors that works in the same manner, to assure that there are great tutor/mentor programs, or teen pregnancy centers, or AIDS clinics, etc. in all of the places of the US or rest of the world where people need these services.
Instead we have thousands of NPOs competing with each other, for the attention of resource providers. In such an environment only a few win consistently.
Thus, anything that would enlist the media (including print), and business partners (using their advertising and sales promotion) as partners who help communicate messages that get volunteers and donors involved would be a step in the right direction.
However, as this happens efforts should also be made to shore up non profit organizational capacity to respond to volunteers who contact them so interested volunteers become connected volunteers. And we should be focusing on the capacity to help non profits who already have volunteers, keep them, so those volunteers become a “word of mouth” campaign that enlists others to join this. This is the most powerful form of volunteer recruitment. It’s also a way to unlease thousands of people who would use social media to encourage others to volunteer.
I focus on these ideas in the articles I write on the Tutor/Mentor Blog because this is a strategy we follow to help tutor/mentor programs grow in Chicago.
iParticipate’s TV Volunteer Week: Was It a Failure? | LA Philanthropy Watch said
[...] Allison Fine offers sensible comments with some perspective in response. She suggests, for instance, that we don’t live in an either/or world and that the messages may move people eventually (even if they didn’t click on VolunteerMatch’s website last Thursday). She also writes, “This is an opportunity for volunteer matching websites and organizations, and the nonprofit organizations that use volunteers, to engage with EIF to develop a longer-term strategy of how to continue to raise the importance and opportunities of volunteerism.” [...]
CherylMahoney said
Allison, thank you for these reflections on the iParticipate campaign and its results. I especially appreciated the distinction you made between creating awareness and producing action. Though action is a far more measurable item, awareness may be the key for the long-term. But, as you observe discussing long-running PSAs, it is an ultimately long-term result. I think the TV Volunteer Week looks much more positive viewed in the larger context of societal norms than as a one-time event with limited-time results. Even if people didn’t rush to VolunteerMatch Thursday night to go out and volunteer that weekend, the fact of many high-profile TV shows highlighting volunteering positively is a sign of how volunteering is viewed by the culture and, hopefully, an influence on how it will be viewed in the future. Even if the result is a slow-growth instead of a surge, and one which comes from many factors rather than one event, it’s still a hopeful indication of a positive trend. I don’t feel it’s so much about getting people to go out and volunteer that day, as it is about getting people to think of volunteering as a normal, regular part of life.
Thanks for the information, the reflections, and the resulting discussion, Allison!
Best,
Cheryl Mahoney
cmahoney@universalgiving.org
http://www.universalgiving.org