Can social media make a real difference for a cause? It's a challenge taken on by Marc Ecko and his Unlimited Justice, a campaign to fight corporal punishment in U.S. schools. More than just an isolated campaign, it's an example of how the Internet is changing modern activism.
Online activism has been both the whipping boy and unexpected hero of social good. The recent revolutions in the Middle East offer a strong case for the powers of social media to amass people into a sum greater than the individual. However, social good has also given birth to ugly terms like "slacktivism" -- a portmanteau that picks on the perceived apathy and laziness of social media users.
It may take less physical effort to sign an online petition than stage a protest, but those online efforts are starting to mean more and more to officials. Ecko's Unlimited Justice campaign helped pressure New Mexico into banning corporal punishment and made in-roads on the practice in Texas.
The Campaign
Unlimited Justice was focused on ending corporal punishment in U.S. schools. The practice of hitting students was permissible as a form of discipline in 20 states. More than 200,000 students received some form of physical punishment in 2006 according to the latest report by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights.
The online campaign was made of two distinct parts: the UJ platform and a Foursquare campaign. The platform lived on the Unlimited Justice website. In many ways it was a social good "game," whereby users gained points through five steps -- learning the facts, signing a pledge to join the movement, recruiting friends to participate through social sites, petitioning government officials, and creating unique art and video. Each step earns the users points, which are calculated and displayed on a leader board.
The site pitches Unlimited Justice as a game where those points are proxies for real influence and impact in the realm of education reform. It's a nice touch to have the points reflect user credibility rather than act as a way to get merchandise. So many other sites use game mechanics as a way to draw their fans back to a purchase button. With Unlimited Justice, that cache of points is a reflection of a user's commitment to ending corporal punishment.
That interaction was key to the campaign, said Eric Kuhn, a social media specialist at United Talent Agency, who helped build the site. "Marc understood very quickly that having game mechanics on his website and going the Twitter and Foursquare route was better than the traditional hire-a-lobbyist route." The site was able to have an impact by gathering a user base and collectively advocating change.
Geo-location has had a tricky relationship with social good, but Unlimited Justice made it a priority. They started a Foursquare campaign wherein users who checked in to a school could be notified if that school had a previous record of corporal punishment. For example, people who checked in to Prosper High School in Texas received: "In 2006, 270 students (half the student population) received a paddling. In all, 500 swats were delivered to students." Checkins to Ennis High School in Texas, received: "At Ennis High school, misbehaving students may receive swats but only twice every nine weeks." Ecko claimed that all the information had been verified, and came through the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights Data.
Marc Ecko
Marc Ecko is a serial entrepreneur perhaps best known for his clothing brand, Ecko Unlimited, from which the social good campaign draws its name. Ecko is also somewhat of a serial philanthropist with a passion for education reform. Ecko runs a social think tank called Artists and Instigators as well as three in-house charities. Still, education reform has been a passion project for Ecko. "You get two people in a room talking about education reform and you get 20 different opinions," Ecko said. "One of the topics that really breaks down the line between right and wrong rather than "right" and "left" is the issue of corporal punishment in public school systems ... It's conceivable that with all the work I've done in the past decade, that if I could change a law, just get [corporal punishment] banned in one state, two states, then that will be more than all the work I've done with my team and my 501c3s."
One of the main obstacles to tackling the cause was its low degree of visibility: "We knew we were up against something that was very inside baseball, so how do we make it feel like a food fight with a degree of activism? ... We had to make the interface not like this goofy [corporate social responsibility] thing that's overly face or overly vanilla ... how do we make it so it's exciting?"
Ecko set out to create not just a site to end corporal punishment, but a full-on platform that could be used and developed for any kind of activism campaign. The end result was a site (Unlimited Justice), that could be re-skinned or made into a widget so that Ecko or any other non-profit could load up their cause and use the tools Ecko and his team already developed.
That platform is setting into place a new form of activism that doesn't rely on swathes of money and teams of specialized lobbyists. Ecko said he respected what lobbyists do, but called it the "slow boat" to activating public opinion.
Change occurs because people, connected through social media, start speaking up. "Ultimately, here's the reality," Ecko said. "When the state representatives start getting 50, 100, 200 messages from different people -- of which maybe half of them are constituents who can vote -- then their staffers have to do something about it. It sort of levels up the importance."
While Ecko is proud of the campaign, there's still a lot of tweaking that needs to be done. He's unsure if the game mechanics on the site really helped the end cause besides making it novel. The campaign only spurred legislation in 2 of 20 states where corporal punishment is still allowed.
It raises a problem that plagues online activism: How do you know if your efforts created the change? It's a stumbling block Ecko not only recognized, but embraced. "It's not all us, but we are definitely one of the pieces in the puzzle that if we get critical mass, we could create momentum to drive even more impact and more policy change and more advocacy ... So it's our job to be out there and pound the drum. And it's not that sexy, but you get credit by beating the drum. You can't just talk about it, you have to be about it."
Online activism has been both the whipping boy and unexpected hero of social good. The recent revolutions in the Middle East offer a strong case for the powers of social media to amass people into a sum greater than the individual. However, social good has also given birth to ugly terms like "slacktivism" -- a portmanteau that picks on the perceived apathy and laziness of social media users.
It may take less physical effort to sign an online petition than stage a protest, but those online efforts are starting to mean more and more to officials. Ecko's Unlimited Justice campaign helped pressure New Mexico into banning corporal punishment and made in-roads on the practice in Texas.
The Campaign
The online campaign was made of two distinct parts: the UJ platform and a Foursquare campaign. The platform lived on the Unlimited Justice website. In many ways it was a social good "game," whereby users gained points through five steps -- learning the facts, signing a pledge to join the movement, recruiting friends to participate through social sites, petitioning government officials, and creating unique art and video. Each step earns the users points, which are calculated and displayed on a leader board.
The site pitches Unlimited Justice as a game where those points are proxies for real influence and impact in the realm of education reform. It's a nice touch to have the points reflect user credibility rather than act as a way to get merchandise. So many other sites use game mechanics as a way to draw their fans back to a purchase button. With Unlimited Justice, that cache of points is a reflection of a user's commitment to ending corporal punishment.
That interaction was key to the campaign, said Eric Kuhn, a social media specialist at United Talent Agency, who helped build the site. "Marc understood very quickly that having game mechanics on his website and going the Twitter and Foursquare route was better than the traditional hire-a-lobbyist route." The site was able to have an impact by gathering a user base and collectively advocating change.
Marc Ecko
Marc Ecko is a serial entrepreneur perhaps best known for his clothing brand, Ecko Unlimited, from which the social good campaign draws its name. Ecko is also somewhat of a serial philanthropist with a passion for education reform. Ecko runs a social think tank called Artists and Instigators as well as three in-house charities. Still, education reform has been a passion project for Ecko. "You get two people in a room talking about education reform and you get 20 different opinions," Ecko said. "One of the topics that really breaks down the line between right and wrong rather than "right" and "left" is the issue of corporal punishment in public school systems ... It's conceivable that with all the work I've done in the past decade, that if I could change a law, just get [corporal punishment] banned in one state, two states, then that will be more than all the work I've done with my team and my 501c3s."
One of the main obstacles to tackling the cause was its low degree of visibility: "We knew we were up against something that was very inside baseball, so how do we make it feel like a food fight with a degree of activism? ... We had to make the interface not like this goofy [corporate social responsibility] thing that's overly face or overly vanilla ... how do we make it so it's exciting?"
Ecko set out to create not just a site to end corporal punishment, but a full-on platform that could be used and developed for any kind of activism campaign. The end result was a site (Unlimited Justice), that could be re-skinned or made into a widget so that Ecko or any other non-profit could load up their cause and use the tools Ecko and his team already developed.
That platform is setting into place a new form of activism that doesn't rely on swathes of money and teams of specialized lobbyists. Ecko said he respected what lobbyists do, but called it the "slow boat" to activating public opinion.
Change occurs because people, connected through social media, start speaking up. "Ultimately, here's the reality," Ecko said. "When the state representatives start getting 50, 100, 200 messages from different people -- of which maybe half of them are constituents who can vote -- then their staffers have to do something about it. It sort of levels up the importance."
While Ecko is proud of the campaign, there's still a lot of tweaking that needs to be done. He's unsure if the game mechanics on the site really helped the end cause besides making it novel. The campaign only spurred legislation in 2 of 20 states where corporal punishment is still allowed.
It raises a problem that plagues online activism: How do you know if your efforts created the change? It's a stumbling block Ecko not only recognized, but embraced. "It's not all us, but we are definitely one of the pieces in the puzzle that if we get critical mass, we could create momentum to drive even more impact and more policy change and more advocacy ... So it's our job to be out there and pound the drum. And it's not that sexy, but you get credit by beating the drum. You can't just talk about it, you have to be about it."
No comments:
Post a Comment