Socialmedia by Anders Sporring

For me this year has been full of revelations, mostly about myself and my attitudes both to myself and my surroundings. It might sound very dramatic, but this is what it’s all about: “No one can do everything, but everyone can do something!” For me this has got a deep meaning and a deep impact, and earlier this year I decided to act on that. So I started something I call creativity3.org, this is to serve as a platform for the people that want help out in charityprojects and to help charity organizations. But then I got someone that started following me on Twitter, and when I followed him back he said he had something he wanted to discuss with me. So I went and checked him up (webpage) and said, alright mail me and tell me what you want me to be interested in. This someone is Globalpatriot (Mark Lovett) and what he wanted was to setup a concert in Stockholm to support his cause to collect money to Doctors without borders in association with 12for12k, a Canadian organization that has got as it’s goal to raise $12000 to a charity every month this year.

For me the timing couldn’t have been better, as my urge to participate and engage others was my greatest desire right now. So after the first meeting (a Tweetmeetup) a group with me, Renee Viterstedt and Johan Burell crystallized itself from the people present at that first meeting. I started off by setting up a Wiki at PBWorks to have a group platform to collect all information and have as a mediator for our conversations. WE will continue using our wiki as a platform but the last part of our first Concerts For Change event planning we resorted to Emails and meetings as we found that more efficient due to the short time for us to plan the event.

So this week we had our Concert for change – number one. And I have to tell you its amazing what you can do on only three people, we managed to get two good Live artists (Sofia Talvik and Tom Levin), and two DJ’s (Dj Monica Bergmark and Dj Emil) to play at the concert. The venue was ‘Eken Bar’ at Hilton Hotels here in Stockholm and the other sponsor is the best Swedish Webhotel Binero. And yes we didn’t get sponsors for everything, but for this first event we’ve been as successful one can be. And the rest we’ve had to sponsor ourselfs….

For me has this adventure just started for us, and for C4C has everything started in a good way. Our plan is to create fantastic events every three months, and make them both interesting in regard to the Charity involved, as well as with artists participating. Our plan besides this is also to develop a ‘Open Source’ kind of way to do this so more people can start their own charities (or maybe be a part of C4C) and to see how easy it is to to this if you just got faith in the process and the group you start.

Globalpatriot raised some interesting questions on SXSW 2010 Panelpicker about charities and Socialmedia, and I will answer those more in detail in a later post. But for you interested, here’s the questions for you to read and think about:

1. Social media campaigns have benefited millions through charitable donations, but can these campaigns change how people think and act in the long term?
2. With the ease of promoting social causes across multiple social media platforms, how do we avoid inundating the public with requests and diluting the intended effect?
3. Is today’s implementation of social media sufficient to cause a shift in consciousness, or will broader adoption in the developing world be required first?
4. Are all social media platforms equally effective in causing change, or does one platform hold an advantage?
5. Are the various platforms battling for mindshare, or can they be synergistic and actually cause change to occur at a faster pace?
6. With so many great causes and people using social media for good, is it time to create a single body that everyone can work under to maximize awareness and create long-term change for charities and support?
7. Thoughtful arguments have been made that social media may actually be dehumanizing and lead to the “end of empathy”. Is that theory true, and if so, how can we avoid it?
8. We witnessed a change in consciousness due to the civil rights marches, how can social media replicate that effect?
9. Do certain types of causes – hunger, poverty, equal rights – benefit more than others from the use of social media?
10. What sort of new social media platform would be more effective is causing a change in consciousness throughout the world?

So I end this post with saying thanks to all the good people out there that do ’something’ to make a change in this World!

Technorati Taggar: Aid, Charity, Change, Charity 2.0