See What’s Out There

Starbucks has a certain image that it projects. It’s cool, progressive and in-touch with a cultural hipness that you don’t see from many other companies. But they are also a big public company with the primary mission of increasing shareholder value, i.e. making money.

So it should not come as a surprise that Starbucks became a target for an advocacy campaign from Oxfam over their treatment of Ethiopian coffee growers. As The Economist put it, “A growing number of coffee drinkers seem to prefer their morning grande skinny latte without a foul-tasting double-shot of social injustice.”

The dispute centers around Ethiopian coffee farmers desire to trademark the names of their specialty coffee. This would ensure that if Starbucks and other companies wanted to use those names in their marketing, the farmers would get a higher price per pound. There is precedent for this approach and it seems to be working in Latin America. (I am no expert.)

We are pleased to have Oxfam on the panel we are hosting at the Nonprofit Technology Conference this year to talk about their action against Starbucks and how they used video as the centerpiece of the campaign. Starbucks has begun to buckle, and just last week announced they were working on an accommodation with the Ethiopian government.

But what one hand does badly another does well. Starbucks, in partnership with our friends at UNICEF, are marketing a book called, A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. I did something I have never done before, bought a non-coffee product at Starbucks.

I usually think of those who buy music or games at Starbucks as some kind of sucker, paying higher prices than they need to and being influenced by Starbucks’ manufactured cultural cool. But tomorrow I am on a 15-hour trip to Jerusalem, and I need something to read (if my kids sleep) and the story of children soldiers in Africa is an important one, and we are talking to the folks at UNICEF about making their excellent marketing even more excellent… so I bought the book. While I think Starbucks has more to gain financially than UNICEF in this deal, I think, as I said recently, that we can’t only think about marketing in terms of straight dollars. We have to be aware of the incremental steps we take toward positive cultural change, which, as we see with the TXU deal, can pay off big down the road.

There are some people who think YouTube is only big because of the content that is ripped (off) from TV and movies. Wrong. There are some real and emerging stars on YouTube and, as reported in today’s Times, this talent is being poached by YouTube competitors through the promise of revenue sharing payments.

What is your theory of change? How do we impact the world with our advocacy and our dollars. If you are a nonprofit advocacy group, I hope you have a good answer to this question.

I can be a pretty cynical person and I think we live in a cynical time — a kind of Orwellian world dominated by quests for fame (reality TV, Paris Hilton) and fortune (hedge funds and payday loans).

But, for a minute today, I wasn’t cynical and I thought change is not only possible, it’s happening. And for all of you who, through your hard work, have made an imprint on the culture to bring the issue of climate change to the public consciousness I say, “Thank you!”

If you haven’t heard the news about the largest leveraged buy-out in history and its environmental implications, take a look. When someone from Environmental Defense says this is “a turning point in the fight against global warming” then that’s gotta be something. The short story is that the buyers of TXU (KKR and Texas Pacific), as well as their lender Goldman Sachs, decided to only do this deal if TXU abandon their plans to build 11 coal fired power plants in Texas. They sought out Environmental Defense and the NRDC and asked them, “what would it take for you to support this deal.”

This story also makes me think about goals and measurements. Something like this is due to the work of many many people over many many years because it was not just the recent work that changed the hearts and minds of the people involved. Al Gore gets credit as does the guy at Wal-Mart who decided to push compact florescent light bulbs as does Yahoo! for making a kick-ass website to help push it along. And, lets not forget all the video! There has been lots and lots and lots of video that have begun to change people’s ideas about the environment in general and climate change in particular. The images of dirty smoke stacks and polar bears struggling on melting ice have had a huge cumulative impact.

Because it was all of these things together, the focus on too narrow of measurement of success for any individual one would be a mistake. Yes, organizations need to focus on the dollars raised and the names added and evaluate programs that way. But lets not forget the harder to measure, but equally as important, impact on the culture.

Below is Environmental Defense’s ad against TXU that surely helped push the buyers into a deal.

Our best conference every year is N-TEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, or NTC. The NTC is a great place to meet nonprofit people who are interested in technology and learn a lot from some very smart people. And while a good chunk of the people there are hard-core techies, another large group (maybe larger) are senior management and marketing staff interested in what is happening online. There are sessions about blogs and RSS and website platforms and all kinds of things, including video! This year it’s in Washington, which means it will attract and even larger group of nonprofit community peers. Here’s the message from N-TEN:

There are only a few days left to register for this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference at the current low rates. Register by Wednesday, February 28, and save $100!

Register now at www.nten.org/ntc-register.

Join us April 4 – 6 in Washington, DC, for the 2007 NTC. Need a little incentive? Here are five reasons to register for the NTC today.

1. Location! What better place to have a nonprofit technology conference than in the nonprofit capital of the universe?

2. People! With more than 1,000 people attending this year’s conference, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make the connections you need. We’ll help you along with things like Birds of a Feather lunches, receptions, local tours and dinners, the NTC After-Party, and Affinity Group meetings.

3. Know-How! With more than 70 breakout sessions designed for IT staff, program staff, nonprofit leaders, communications and development professionals, circuit riders, and other technology support providers, you’ll come away from the 2007 NTC with the strategies and skills to do even better work.

4. Extras! The Nonprofit Technology Conference stands out from other conferences because you also get opportunities like the Day of Service, when attendees can give back to the local community by volunteering time and skills to a local nonprofit, and the Science Fair, where you’ll find organizations and services that can provide you with the tools and support you’ve been looking for.

5. Value! For three days of learning, connecting, and playing, the NTC is a bargain at $399 for NTEN members and $599 for non-members. Compare it to other conferences and see for yourself. But after February 28th registration rates go up $100, so register now!

You can browse the full agenda, see who’s coming, and more at www.nten.org/ntc.

If you’re not already an NTEN member, join and save an additional $200 on the registration rate! Go to www.nten.org/join.

Hope to see you in DC!

I wrote recently about the great little videos David Pogue does. He also works for CBS and just did a piece for them about SecondLife, which is something that I talk about in our consulting and seminars with nonprofits. Mr. Pogue does a nice job of showing us around. I think this is very very early and as a nonprofit you have a lot of basic things you have to be doing before you put resources into SecondLife. But I also think it’s for real. I think their decision to make it open source — allowing anyone to extend applications on it’s platform — is going to turn out to be a huge decision that will create a mechanism for rapid and exciting improvements.

Watch the video about second life that David did for CBS, and then know that nonprofits of all kinds are already there, raising (some small amounts of) money and awareness.

A message to David Pogue: David, I sent you an email about this, but I actually think you are more likely to see this post than find me in your in-box. Maybe a year ago, maybe more, you did a great little video about what you do to make videos. You showed us that your “staff” was a $15 tripod and your “studio” was your attic. You showed us how to attach a camera to a hotel lamp to make a traveling tripod, and your “secret” for those moving shots you do. That video is hard to find on the NYTimes site. I would love to put that video on DoGooderTV to show nonprofit organizations how easy it is to make videos of this type. We can credit it and link it any way you want. How ’bout it?

The singer/songwriter Alice Peacock is in my office right now meeting with some of our team about the nonprofit she founded, Rock for Reading. Did you know that 1 in 3 people in Chicago are functionally illiterate? And it’s getting worse, not better. (There was that UNICEF report this week that placed the US and UK at the bottom of the list of developed countries for children. When you think about a statistic like this one about reading it is not so hard to imagine.)

Last year we produced a video for Rock for Reading and we did some additional shooting and are talking today about how we plan to repurpose the material into some new products.

If the music business had much to do with talent, Alice would be a huge rock star. If you haven’t heard her music look out below. Better yet, just go ahead and buy her album right now.

In this edition of, “lets make the blog the story,” the New York Times once again has a story about blogs on its Sunday front page. This installment, called Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs, is about the many blogs about being in, and trying to get out of, debt. These blogs are published mostly anonymously. Maybe the Times, and other papers, have added a new section to their papers. They have Business, Editorial, Style… and now a Let’s Seem More Relevant by Reporting on Blogs section.

We have PCs and Macs in our office and the Mac people are… well, I don’t want to stereotype… Those “I’m a Mac” ads are clever and ubiquitous, so much so that they have spawned parodies. The nice thing about parody is that if done well it can go viral very quickly because it travels the well worn path of its cultural referent. Apple has spent tens of millions on those ads and so the parody takes advantage of that. It’s a tactic I hope we will find a way to use for a worthy nonprofit.

By the way, this is playing in a player from Microsoft’s newly launched Soapbox video sharing service, their answer to YouTube (good luck with that…)

Video: What Apple's Mac TV Ads SHOULD sound like

Internally here we have been cataloging video website and services but we know that they grow faster than we are able to find them. The folks at Read/WriteWeb do a nice wrap up of sites and they categorize them to make the list more useful. At this time there are over 60 comments to this post, most of them mention that the authors forgot another company! Don’t worry. Knowing all of these companies and what they do is not a requirement for participating in the online video revolution. See the full posting about video sites here. Thanks Ami Dar for posting this link on the N-TEN list.

My wife and I had a nice time last night watching videos on the website of the New York Times. Really. We were watching David Pogue, a multi-talented technology writer in funny and informative video clip after clip. In his short pieces he reviews technology products and services. Sound boring? Not at all! His piece about the Vonage USB device is a riot. You really should watch this stuff and you can start here with this clip.

A few observations about this that you can take into your nonprofit organization:

1. Effective 2-4 minute videos can be done with no budget, if you have a creative talent around and can give them a bit of time to play.

2. You don’t need fancy equipment or editing gear to do videos like these. You do need basic equipment and a lot of practice.

3. The concept has to work for the piece to work. You have to have something to say, and a hook to build the piece around.

4. Pogue’s pieces are funny, and funny doesn’t always lend itself to the work of nonprofit organizations. But if we can make torture funny — see these clips we did for Amnesty International — then you can probably do more than you think.

5. These kinds of pieces are no replacement for the kind of cinema verite documentation that we often do with our nonprofit clients. But these kinds of pieces are about leverage — you already have interesting, funny, engaging personalities within your organization and these techniques allow you to use them to connect well beyond what was possible before.

6. The Times misses an opportunity by not allowing me to embed the video clip here. They are thinking that if I embed the player here, then I get the benefit of the traffic that on their site results in a page view — which helps sell to advertisers. This will change, because with AJAX pages that don’t load with new information, traditional page views are meaning less and less. In any case, you won’t make the same mistake. When you have engaging video to share, let it go and carry your message as far and wide as the web will take it.