Online Engagement for Social Change

On Friday, I presented a session called “Online Engagement for Social Change” at the She’s Geeky UnConference in Mountainview.

We had a great group of women from all different sectors but there seemed to be a focus on causes and the non-profit sector. It’s interesting how ’social change’ is still not equated with for profit ventures.

I began by showcasing how brands are using Facebook to create and support social change.

We talked about Hopenhagen.org which was created by my company to build a community of citizens from around the world who supported the creation of a fair and binding agreement at Copenhagen. This campaign was widely supported by Coca-Cola, SAP, Siemens and Ogilvy.

Coca-Cola has been a real leader in the space of online engagement – especially on Facebook. Their current campaign is donating $250K to the Boys and Girls clubs of America for every person who messages their friends about the campaign which gets their brand out there on the newsfeeds. They are clever ways to engage fans, give them something to do and increase their brand recognition on Facebook.

The questions with these campaigns is, are brands actually getting more recognition for doing the same things they’ve always done? Imagine that Coca-Cola always gives $250K to the Boys and Girls Club. In the past, Coca-Cola would publish the donation in their CSR report and very few people would actually see it. Now Facebook gives them a way to broadcast their good deeds while also ‘engaging’ users in the donation through amplification of their brand.

The Chase Community Giving campaign on Facebook  is another great idea that brought up some new issues. This was a campaign by Chase bank to give away $5M to non-profits, including $1M to the charity who garnered the most votes for their charity during this campaign on Facebook.  First off, there was an accusation from Invisible Children (the eventual winner) supporters that the Isha Foundation (the runner-up)  had cheated by creating ‘fake’ users on Facebook in the final hours of the campaign. Secondly, in our session, there  were a lot of concerns about how brands, like Chase, are using non-profits to build their fan base on Facebook. Target was the first company that created a giving contest on Facebook, their Bullseye Campaign, back in early 2009. They identified 10 charities they wanted to support and said they would give away $1M across all 10 charities based on their percentage of the vote. Part of the requirement of voting was fan-ing the page.

What do you think about this type of campaign?