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Millennials Using Social Media for Social Good

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The adoption of digital technology is one of the major distinctions Millennials have among previous generations. The age group in their late teens to early 30s can create a profile on the latest social network faster than you can say “smartphone.” Many might deem their ubiquitous love affair with social media quite trivial, but don’t discount all the good some of them are already doing with it. Millennials are pioneering ways to give back to their communities, sharing actionable solutions to social issues, and galvanizing others who believe real impact is sometimes only a send button away.

Social Networks Expanding Nonprofits’ Reach

Take IGNITEgood for instance, who has teamed up with The Huffington Post to give away $100,000 to 10 game changing ideas that move humanity forward. The competition dubbed “Millennial Impact Challenge,” will first select five existing nonprofit organizations/businesses that demonstrate scalable impact, viability of getting others involved, and a sense the applicants are uniquely qualified to champion their big idea. The IGNITE Team has corralled an impressive group of–you guessed it–Millennials as the selection committee to pick these winners. The second half of funding is reserved for five startup organizations or companies who get the most “likes” on Facebook during the voting phase. You see, socially-conscious Millennials are using the “like” button for something other than self-esteem boosters and virtual pats on the back.

A Houston darling of a nonprofit is also harnessing the social web to make a difference in their community. Mia’s Closet is barely a year old and is already making established nonprofits take notice with its online presence. Executive Director Chelsea Coffey founded the nonprofit to instill confidence and self-worth in students from kindergarten to high school by providing them with clothing through a personal shopping experience.

Seeing is believing in Coffey’s perspective so she tells the story of her organization through Instagram. The app allows Coffey and crew to showcase the lively atmosphere of pampering, personal styling, and all around family fun. What started out as a small project has blossomed into a steady growth in Facebook and Twitter fans, along with a full-fledged website using the easily-to-learn, WordPress platform. Quite fittingly, the 20-something founder now moonlights as fashion/social media editor for the same magazine that gave Mia’s Closet its early press coverage in March.

Social Entrepreneurs are The New Rockstars

From local zines to globally-recognized publications, Millennials are reported on as leaders in the surge of social entrepreneurship. One such brand is Forbes Magazine, which intends to bring these modern enterprises to a new audience. The magazine has publicized its search for 30 Awesome Social Entrepreneurs Under 30. Known for its lists of actors, rockstars, and  business moguls, Forbes is venturing into content that may add cachet to the young do-gooders of the world. Don’t go nominating your buddy who raised a wad of singles and loose change selling lemonade at the local block party, though. The staff is essentially searching for the dream team of altruistic innovators. The noble group who will help define this generation and their impact will most likely be fueled by Web 2.0.

One clear candidate deserving Forbes glory is Tristan Walker, who is adding value to the nonprofit sector via the social highway. The tech wunderkind Linkedin page looks more like Mashable.com’s top stories. Walker has worked for Twitter, JP Morgan, a major Boston-based consulting group and more recently served as Foursquare’s Director of Business Development (a relationship which he initiated with an email to the founders). Working 12 hour days to develop an investment portfolio so he can buy yachts, expensive champagne, and gold-plated toilet seats seem like the next steps for him, right?

On the contrary, the rising figure has opted to tackle a new venture that yields $0 in profits. Yes, Walker recently founded a nonprofit organization that is primed to give minorities a shot at taking on Silicon Valley’s biggest startups. The bold move has backing from some major players in the tech space, philanthropy powerhouses, and venture capital partners. Their inaugural class of fellows earned paid internships and gained insight from the who’s who of tech startups, as well as established companies.

Tammy Tibbetts is another under 30 community organizer crushing it at the intersection of social media and social change. Tibbetts had already scored a coveted job as Social Media Editor for Seventeen Magazine, which she reported as having the fastest growing Twitter presence in the magazine industry in 2011. She has since made the tough decision to leave that dream job to begin another as founder of She’s the First, a non-profit sponsoring girls’ education in developing countries.

Tibbetts takes social media best practices from her previous role to amplify the impact her organization makes. The site features “Map Your Impact” using Google Maps, as well as tweeting, Facebooking, and Tumbling calls-to-action that drive donors to its Razoo page. One of the most surprising, yet promising displays of support comes from its tie-dye cupcakes campaign, which has turned into social media tour de force. The video below is a taste of how sweet it is for college students to raise  thousands of dollars with a few days of baking and selling cupcakes on campus.

[vimeo width=”575″ height=”375″]http://vimeo.com/48242656[/vimeo]

How Millennials Engage With Nonprofits

These new media-friendly founders help contextualize the bigger picture of how Millennials are working toward a greater good.  A valuable reference to these interactions is the often-cited 2012 Millennial Impact Report, which surveys Millennials’ relationships with existing nonprofits.

  • Connecting: The majority of Millennials surveyed stated they prefer to learn about nonprofits through their website and social media. 77% of them own smartphones, and they like having access to what an organization does, how to get involved, and shareable content, right at their fingertips. Nearly 70% of the participants have interacted with a nonprofit via Facebook. A staggering 87% of them follow nonprofits on Twitter, while 60% give compliments and retweet content from nonprofits they follow.
  • Involving: Not surprisingly, 81% of respondents prefer to learn about nonprofit volunteering opportunities through their peers. This finding warrants an added incentive for nonprofit leaders to create content people want to share, and display social network mechanisms for supporters to do so. Coming in at second and third are emails and a nonprofit’s website to learn about volunteer information. By a margin of more than two-to-one, Millennials who volunteer for nonprofits are more likely to make donations. That’s good news for organizations who can effectively engage with their audience via online and offline experiences.
  • Giving: Millennials overwhelmingly prefer to donate through the web, with 70% of respondents having made contributions through a nonprofit’s web page in the last year. This goes back to nonprofits needing to produce and feature inspiring content on their website in order to gain financial support. To encourage consistent giving, nonprofits should make it clear as to how donations will impact the organization, avoid telling donors how much to give, and stray from sending long letters in the mail for support. Millennials like to make contributions with ease and immediacy.

So there you have it. A look at innovative Millennials using social sites to make meaningful connections and bring change for the undeserved communities they’re passionate about. And a snapshot of overall trends that will ultimately drive new and interesting ways to solve human injustice and inequality. Comment below to share your story or tell us about a person you know who is using social media for social good. Even lemonade stand stories are welcomed here.

 

10 Ways to Double Your Nonprofit’s Fundraising

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Your nonprofit organization is finally gaining traction. Your friends and family come to your events, your website redesign has all the bells and whistles it needs to be taken seriously, and you’ve even been interviewed by a local reporter. But there’s one important thing missing: donations. After you’ve earned 501(c)(3) status, the onus is on you to raise money to keep your organization afloat. Fear not, noble citizen; social media is once again here to save the day and double your donation dollars.

Here are 10 sites to help you in your fundraising efforts:

1. Causecast

Tech entrepreneur Ryan Scott developed Causecast to help organizations through increased volunteer and fundraising engagement around social change. He and his team believe global change must be achieved through collaboration along with individual action. The site helps secure donations as well as volunteer hours from local businesses that are looking to make an impact in their community. The site also provides nonprofits with customizable tools that encourage new and old supporters to donate on your website, blog, and on Facebook. These services are free to your organization so you can spend the extra money on that iPad you’ve been meaning to buy for “business purposes.” Causecast boasts nearly 3,000 nonprofit members on its homepage, which includes some of the top organizations in the country.

2. PostRelease

If your organization hasn’t gotten in the habit of content marketing, you’re missing out on big businesses looking to place sponsored content on your website. Serial entrepreneur Justin Choi created PostRelease to minimize those pesky banner ads and facilitate a much more organic web experience. With a simple plugin, you automatically integrate relevant sponsored content into your blogs, forums, and content-rich sites. It serves as an automated revenue stream and/or you can use it to sell advertiser-sponsored content on your site(s). If you’re not already drooling, you’ll salivate at the ease in which the platform’s dashboard allows you to monitor and manage the sponsored content.

3. Google Grants

You’ve heard of Google, right? Up until now you may not have had much use for their main moneymaker, AdWords, but the search engine behemoth wants to give your organization $10,000 worth of free advertising on their homepage. All this coveted real estate requires is an application to their Google for Nonprofits site. Once approved, you can begin leveraging online advertising to reach donors, tracking online donations and promoting your organization’s website to ultimately grow your fundraising dollars.

4. Youtube for Nonprofits

The third largest search engine, YouTube, falls right in line with Google’s other product offerings for nonprofits. Have you ever watched a YouTube video so moving, so wrenching, so powerful that you wanted to donate right away? YouTube for Nonprofits provides that solution by allowing organizations to monetize video content with one click. Approved nonprofits can easily add a Google Checkout “Donate now” button to their YouTube page so every view can turn into a few bucks. Equally impressive, you can customize your channel with your organization’s logo as well as drive viewers to action by placing a “Call to Action” overlay on your videos.

5. Fundly

Fundly is a super social way to raise money for nonprofit initiatives with its plethora of social features. The site claims to increase donations by over 20%, while helping increase campaign visibility online by 424% on average. Percentages aside, your supporters are directed to a Fundly Cause custom page, where visitors learn more about your cause and can easily donate. They then can tell friends and family about their donation through Facebook, Twitter, and more. Some might call this bragging, I call it your new best friend. In a perfect world, social media aficionado Ashton Kutcher will make a donation to your campaign through the Fundly platform and his post of that contribution will go viral.

6. GoodSearch

GoodSearch takes web browsing to an altruistic level by allowing supporters to raise money for their favorite charities through search. The website donates money to your organization when your supporters search the Internet, shop online or dine out at local restaurants. Everyone you know does these things as often as they brush their teeth! Your fresh-breath supporters will have no qualms about a percentage of every eCommerce purchase they make or percentage of their restaurant bill at participating locations being donated to your charity. I urge you to get started sometime in the next millisecond and easily spread the word with the site’s email, social media, newsletter, and video resources.

7. HelpAttack!

Don’t you wish you could raise money through Facebook statuses, blog posts and even tweets? I’m sure your mother would actually join Twitter just to support your charity. Along with your mother, HelpAttack! lets supporters simply update one of their social sites to help you reach new levels in funding. Their donations are handled securely by a donation processor so can feel confident their good deeds are being funneled properly. The giving platform adds further incentive by rewarding donors with Coins that access new features, and gets others to join your noble cause.

8. Groupon Grassroots

Whether you love or hate Groupon, the daily deal site helps local nonprofits meet and exceed their fundraising goals through local participation. Dubbed Groupon Grassroots, the giving initiative evolved out of Groupon’s collective action platform to discover and support local causes. Each campaign connects like-minded individuals with a nonprofit to help realize a specific monetary threshold. Once that threshold is reached, Groupon sends 100% of the donations to the organization and you get to bask in those warm and fuzzy feelings. Known for their quippish content, a team of writers specific to Grassroots graciously crafts your campaign deals to maximize your “cool factor.”

9. eBayGivingWorks

eCommerce giant eBay enacted eBay GivingWorks to help nonprofits gain exposure and create a new revenue stream. With a simple sign up on www.missionfish.org, organizations gain access to eBay’s billion dollar marketplace. Your supporters can use eBay GivingWorks to donate 10% to 100% of their item’s final sale price to your charity. For every listing that benefits your organization, buyers will see a banner with your information, as well as a link to your eBay GivingWorks page. You can also encourage members, volunteers, donors, and affiliates to look for your organization to make purchases on your eBay GivingWorks page.

10. Crowdrise

Film star Edward Norton has been making major contributions to nonprofit sector for years but you won’t catch him patting himself on the back for it. Instead he helps run a trailblazing crowdfunding site with components of social networking and virtual competitions. Nonprofits and their supporters are encouraged to create a profile to raise money through contests, donations, and even purchasing actor Will Ferrell’s Super Sexy Hot Tan Sunscreen. Each project is complemented with a compelling story, vibrant pictures, and a real-time scroll of who’s donating.

Now that you have these awesome tools to reach your fundraising goals, stop making excuses and start making your donorship grow! Once you’ve found your groove with which sites work best for your organization, double down on those and build an avid community around your efforts. Remember, these social sites shouldn’t be used as gimmicks, but rather long-standing or reoccurring campaigns that create sustainable fundraising solutions.

Kony 2012: The Power of Social Media at Work to Change the World

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This morning, one of my friends posted a video called “Kony 2012.” I didn’t really take notice of it at first because I’m not a super political person, but it did catch my eye because I thought, “Hm, I don’t remember hearing anything about a candidate called Kony in her state.” Then I saw another friend post it. Then another. So I decided to watch it.

Thirty minutes long, and I watched every second of it. That’s not the norm for me, especially in the morning when I’m busy answering emails and getting set up for work for the day. I usually just don’t have the time. But for Kony 2012, I made the time…and I hope you will too.

Kony isn’t a politician; he’s a war criminal that is literally stealing children from their beds to he can arm them and force them to kill. I’ve heard of that happening, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know his name, nor did I know that we’re talking about tens of thousands of children. And that’s what this campaign is all about. He’s able to stay under the radar because people have no idea who he is. We need to change that so he can be captured and brought to justice.

It’s a powerful message, but what I think is interesting is that we’re going to watch something even more powerful in real-time: the use of social media to make a huge change in the world. Already, through Facebook and other social media sites, Invisible Children has made a huge difference, gaining support to raise money, reach politicians, and get the world out about Kony’s crimes.

Twenty years ago, this wasn’t possible. Today it is, thanks to social media. That, to me, is chill-inducing and more exciting than just about anything going on in the new media industry.

I hope you’ll take the time to watch and pass on this video, as well as sign the pledge and consider donating to Invisible Children. What do you think of their social media campaign?

Live Painting & Auction to Benefit United Way LA #Art4Charity

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As you may well know, we’ve got a great Cause Track this year at BlogWorld, and what I’m announcing here, is a way-cool addition to those with an appreciation for charity and beautiful art.

Natasha Wescoat has graciously offered to do a livepainting session in our New Media Lounge on Saturday, Nov 5th from 1230p-330p at BWELA, and will be auctioning off the painting with the proceeds going to The United Way of Greater Los Angeles!

The live painting will be open to the world to watch on Natasha’s Justin.TV channel, and the painting will be up for auction in her eBay store. (This will be clearly labeled in the auction title.)

We’d really love your help in spreading the word about this session, as the more word gets around, the more likely we can get a high bid on the piece and have a nice amount to give to The United Way LA! The official hashtag for this event is #Art4Charity, used in combination with the standard #BWELA hashtag.

Learn more about the United Way of Los Angeles:

HomeWalkLA
United Way LA on Facebook
United Way LA on Twitter

And learn more about Natasha Wescoat:

About Natasha
Natasha on Facebook
Natasha on Twitter

Teacher Who Called Students “Lazy Whiners” On Blog Has Legal Right to Return to Class

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Natalie Munroe

Natalie Munroe, an English teacher at a Philadelphia high school, was suspended after officials found out about her blog where she referred to her students as “disengaged, lazy whiners” and “frightfully dim”.

Her students discovered her blog and posted it all over their social media sites. Although she wrote under another name, her post entitled “Where Are We Going & Why Are We in This Handbasket”, included her picture. Given the power of social media, it didn’t take long for school officials to find out about the blog and Munroe was suspended.

She has now been reinstated as a teacher, because legally, she has a right to her job. The principal of the high school told the Philadelphia Inquirer that around 60 students have requested to not be put in Munroe’s 11th grade English and Debate classes.

Will she return to the school where it obviously seems like most students do not want her there? Her lawyer said she is not commenting at this time, but did say she prefers to work at another school.

This goes back to the post I wrote the other day “Do You Think Teachers Should Blog?“. How do teachers blog without crossing lines like Munroe did?

 

Do You Think Teachers Should Blog?

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For a teacher, writing a blog can be very tricky. You can’t openly write about your students or there will be repercussions from parents. You can’t openly write about the staff or, well, you could get fired. So, should teachers blog and if so, how?

In this article, Amy Dominello says that teachers can and should blog so they can “build awareness about issues, share information and best practices with one another and bring about systemic change in education”.

But how do you blog without crossing any lines? Here are a few guidelines that were given during a panel at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Conference.

  • Blog as a group with other teachers
  • Make sure your boss is aware of your blog
  • Write about stories from other districts
  • Approach blogging as if it were a sermon, meaning focus on one point

Are you a teacher and do you blog? If so, what kinds of guidelines do you set for yourself and do you have advice for other teachers wanting to start a blog?

REDU: Social Media and Corporate Outreach for a Cause

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… by Betsy Aoki

When I first joined Microsoft seven years ago, I had a long history of keeping any community activism separate from my work life. My prior career as a journalist mandated absolute silence/discretion about any political leanings, and while a post-journalistic career in tech enabled me finally to work on causes (I went on to found Webgrrls and Linuxchix chapters in Seattle for example), these activities continued to be completely separate from my work life. Work was work, and while my Internet work certainly had an impact on the world, influencing societal problems remained carefully partitioned to my non-copious “other life” time.

REDU

Then last year my boss Stefan Weitz set our team on a new trajectory by putting Bing and our team more front and center in the national education discourse with the REDU project. It was something Aya Zook and I also believed was important, but would take us out of our tech industry comfort zone and into the realm of advocacy, which again, I’d only done in my non-work life prior to this.

Doing something that unusual for Microsoft while still keeping our jobs took a bit of finessing. For us on the team, it meant a lot of internal communications work – Microsoft is a big place, there are folks already working on government/education/community issues from whom we could learn and get a sanity check on what we were doing while being “synergistic”. There was also a lot of external communications work to be done with partners and agencies who were creating the Web site and various programs around REDU. Some folks inside and outside the company got the importance of REDU right away; others were “are you sure?” skeptics we fended off all summer while we prepared to launch the site.

(Incidentally, it helps me that any time I do a v 1.0 or some weirdo community outreach project like REDU, I ask myself: would you still do it if it failed? Usually the answer is yes. After that, I find I’m much freer to do the right and more effective thing as a result. Live like the samurai, fight like you are already dead, and often oddly enough those will be the times that you will win.)

The cause behind REDU is “rethink, reform, rebuild” US education. We decided early on to go out slow and grassroots, do a few arts projects in New York (Yosi Sergant’s Reform: School, Jeff Staple’s:REDU Homeroom), build our rep with good content from Good and outside contributors like  Jacob Soboroff of School Pride and Steve Hargadon, founder of Classroom 2.0. We decided consciously to obscure the Bing brand as much as we could without losing transparency, because the social media and real-world outreach we wanted to do really wasn’t about Bing as the mainstay of the story, but as part of the story.

I can’t talk specifics (sorry), but REDU was done with the corporate equivalent of money scrounged from under the couch cushions (another reason to go slow and build grassroots – no money to burn on traditional media blitzes or dramatic Superbowl animations). People donated time and discounted fees to help us out because they believed in what we were doing. We aren’t blowing smoke thanking our partners – their support has been more critical than ever.

What’s been interesting – and again, sorry I can only give you the shape of things here, not actual numbers – is that the folks we’ve attracted to REDU show a similar level of Bing brand recognition with other more directly Bing-branded marketing campaigns. That is, when marketing programs send someone to bing.com, those customers would indicate via survey the name of the program from which they first heard of Bing. In our case, they say they’ve heard of Bing from REDU). Half of these folks, sometimes more, have opted-in for email information about Bing and other education efforts the team supports, which is separate from REDU information and info about education reform topics. Furthermore, when we do Bing-related email outreach to those REDU-recruited folks, they are more likely to be responsive.

Which if you think about it, turns traditional marketing on its ear. Traditional PR and marketing insists on consistency and ubiquitous brand mentions and logos. More impressions! More mentions! Plant both feet and stay on message! Even if you use social media means, never deviate, stay on message.

Instead let people help craft the message assigned to your brand. Don’t insert a call to action related to your project – give them options about what they can do to make it their’s and change the world. We aren’t dumb – if they want to research more Web information about education reform, they can use the Bing search box on the REDU site. But we created REDU knowing we had to work with folks on what we both thought were important issues, and meet them on their terms. We’d rather the education system got fixed than the alternative.

Numbers I CAN point to that describe this phenomenon are those in the Edelman Good Purpose study where they looked at consumer expectation of companies’ roles in making the world a better place. Sixty-four percent of those interviewed said that a company with fair prices who did good, would get their business over a deep discounter with no cause integration.  This, in the middle of a recession, fascinated me because it runs counter to my cynical expectations of human nature.

Another set of cause marketing surveys that fascinated me are the ones that came out by Cone. In 2007, just as the recession was beginning to break out Cone came out with a study (often quoted on the Internet) that showed how 87% of those surveyed  were likely to switch brands, all things being equal, if the new company was associated with a good cause. In 2010 the Cone study went on to say that in a competitive marketplace, 19% of consumers would purchase more expensive brands to support a cause, and 61% would try a brand they never heard of.

I’ll be completely honest with you guys and say: I hadn’t read any of these surveys until three months after we launched REDU, while I was trying to figure out why REDU stats were the way they were. We had agreed to instrument the REDU site and related programs as best we could, in ways similar to other marketing campaigns, so that we’d be able to justify what we spent on it.

And REDU is honestly not the full-time job of our team – it’s just a successful side project that we hope will do some good for as long as we can keep it going. But the next time you think about how to position your product, yourself, or your company, I think it makes sense to consider what you really stand for in terms of creating social good and put that marker of your product, yourself, or your company in the forefront.

Betsy Aoki is a 15-year veteran of Web technology and online community applications.  Recently Mary Jo Foley of CNET called her  a “Microsoft Woman to Watch” for her work in launching Microsoft’s corporate blogging platforms, the Live QnA consumer question-and-answer site, and the Xbox Live Indie Games platform.  Lured to the marketing side for Bing, she has devised its social media strategies and recently launched the education reform platform, http://bing.com/redu .

5 Ways to PWN the Cause Blog

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… by Jessica Kirkwood, VP Interactive Strategy & Michael Nealis, Interactive Strategy Coordinator
Points of Light Institute & HandsOn Network

Most of us have a cause that is dear to us.

We are driven to feed the hungry, or house the homeless, or just love the heck out of all of the animals that don’t have a loving home.
But sometimes it is challenging to blog about what we hold dear.

[That blinking cursor can be so intimidating!]

As curators of HandsOn Blog, we’re charged with publishing fresh content on volunteerism on a daily basis.

We compared notes and came up with a list of five strategies we share for creating cause related blog content:

  • Listen First – We’ve found that the best way to know how to contribute to the conversation about our cause is to listen first. We both use Google Reader to follow online conversations about volunteerism and stay on top of new developments, news, trends and politics. This gives us ideas and helps us add to the larger conversation via our blog posts.
  • Share a Lesson – Over the last year we’ve found that some of our most popular posts are simple “How To” posts. Like 33 Ways to Make a Difference in Schools or 4 Tips for Using Social Media to Mobilize People. Luckily, this kind of post is easy enough for us to create as we can pull and repurpose content from our organizations publications, training materials, speeches, and training toolkits.
  • Tell a Story – We love to profile an individual project, volunteer or person whose life has been changed through volunteerism. It’s easy to find the universally compelling center of each story and draw that out, letting each single story represent the larger whole of the cause itself.
  • Connect your cause to something unexpected – We’ll often link volunteering to an editorial trend – like New Year’s resolutions – which is, admittedly, expected. But we also look for connections in unlikely places. Recently a cell phone commercial inspired a post about whether or not flash mobs could change the world.
  • Use every day experiences so simplify the message– We’re always looking for more resonant ways to talk about volunteering. We try talking about program evaluation (kind of boring) as if it were like eating cookies (kind of awesome). And when we need to write about the intersection of social media and volunteer recruitment we might say, “Did you ever see that commercial for Faberge Organics Shampoo (and Wayne’s World) – where they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on… well ideally, volunteer recruitment via social media is… like THAT.”

Don’t let the cursor blinking against the blank page intimidate you.

Trust us, that cursor is a punk.

To learn more about volunteering, please follow @HandsOnNetwork and visit HandsOn Blog. You can learn more about Jessica and Michael via Twitter @HeyJK and @MikeNealis.

10 Mom Bloggers To Meet With Congress Next Week

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Amy Lupold Bair was one of our amazing speakers during the 2010 BlogWorld conference, a part of the Mom Bloggers: Blog for Money, Not Swag! session. I recently had the chance to chat with her about another topic of interest to Mom Bloggers (and any United States Citizen for that matter) – the national debt. Amy is working with Intellectual Takeout and their project, MomThink.org, which is sending ten Mom Bloggers to meet with Congress next week about this issue – the first of many the organization plans to tackle. Amy explained further:

How did MomThink.org come to exist?
MomThink.org is a project of Intellectual Takeout, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank. It came about as a public awareness campaign designed to educate mothers about important issues that will impact their children today as well as in the future. While the first topic of focus is the national debt, MomThink.org will continue to develop to cover a variety of topics ranging from education to health care reform.

What is your role in the website/organization?
I am an independent blogger who is working as a strategic advisor to Intellectual Takeout’s communications team.

How were the ambassadors chosen for the position? Was their blogging background a requirement?
The bloggers were chosen for a variety of reasons, including how they would impact the overall make-up of the group. We are proud to have engaged bloggers who bring a diverse skill set, blogging background, and audience. Some ambassadors write regularly for traditionally conservative collective blogs, while others write for sites known to lean strongly towards liberal. Some bloggers have an educational background that fits nicely with the national debt topic, while others blog about fiscal responsibility on a regular basis. Together they nicely represent the moms of this country; diverse in interest and lifestyle yet all invested in creating the best life for our children.

Why was the national debt chosen as the first issue of focus?
The national debt is on the minds of many Americans as we continue to recover from an economic crisis and watch hopefully as a new Congress is sworn into office. The debt currently stands at nearly 14 trillion dollars. That means every taxpayer would have to come up with $125,000 to pay it off. As moms, we could use that money to pay for 12 years of groceries for a family of four, 7 years of health care, or 7 years of public education. While the national debt is on the minds of many Americans, we think that it specifically should be on the minds of moms.

What will be the format for making others aware of the issues? The blog? Social networking? The media?
MomThink.org is currently sharing information through videos on the site as well as YouTube that can be shared throughout social networks and embedded on blogs. The MomThink.org bloggers have also helped to make others aware of this first issue through posts on their own sites and networks as well as through interviews with the traditional media. Outreach will expand as MomThink.org continues to develop future public awareness campaigns.

What is the goal of the upcoming trip to Washington DC?
The goal of the upcoming trip to Washington, DC is to bring awareness to the issue, allow prominent members of the online mom media to gather information from Members of Congress about the national debt, and at the same time demonstrate to Members of Congress and the traditional media that Thinking Moms are deeply concerned about the issues that affect our children’s futures.

Where can we follow the interviews and dialogues taking place?
Watch MomThink.org for updates.

What have the bloggers been doing to prepare for the trip?
The bloggers have been learning more about the national debt and what it means to each individual taxpayer both today and in the future.

What is the message you hope everyone takes away from MomThink.org?
Socrates said that “Knowledge is power.” I hope that readers visiting MomThink.org take away a deeper understanding of the issues that our nation faces. Once the audience understands the impact of public policies on them and their loved ones, they will likely want to learn more and spread the word about the resources provided by MomThink.org.

How can other bloggers (Moms and non-Moms alike!) participate and help?
Bloggers can participate and help by sharing the MomThink.org videos and key points with their own audiences as well as by signing up to learn more here.

Thanks Amy! And I look forward to seeing how the bloggers at MomThink.org interact with Congress, and learn about the future issues they plan to tackle.

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