By: Ale Jochum, Blitz Bazaar Community Manager
I like metaphors, so today I found myself pondering the following question:
How do you plant a movement? Can you buy movement “seed” packs? Do they need special sugar water to grow up nice and strong? Should you sing to them? The best way to go about answering this question is to delve a little deeper into Stanford University’s Social-M Challenge.
The Seeds:
The Social-M Challenge is the movement plan competition happening at Stanford that I mentioned in a former post. And though none of the participating, sustainability-themed movements are truly off the ground yet, they are pretty cool. Never before have I heard of such truly creative ways to tackle modern environmental problems.
The Sprouts:
For example, the Thanks for Acting Sustainably movement would like to recognize and encourage small, environmentally-friendly acts by simply thanking people for doing them! Did you see someone pick up somebody else’s litter? Tweet “Thx for picking up somebody else’s litter!” to the hashtag #sustaction and your Thank You will be added to a stream of Thank You’s. There are also plans to allow texting and emailing into the same stream. The idea is so simple, but has great potential to be a great source of sustainability-themed motivation.
Secondly, the Team Awesome movement wants to make it fun and mainstream to act sustainably. In Team Awesome’s perfect world, environmentalism shall NO LONGER be associated with dirty hippies. NO LONGER will “true environmentalists” look down their noses at people who aren’t hardcore enough. By creating an accepting and “silly” online community, EVERYONE can be on Team Awesome. It doesn’t matter if you spent your weekend chained to a tree or toting your disposable coffee mug around town instead of using 4 to-go containers.
These and SIXTEEN other movements are currently entering the implementation phase of the movement challenge (Check ‘em out). They now have four weeks to contend with the realities of running a campaign. I have high hopes and I can’t wait to see…
THE FRUIT!
Signing off, this is your community manager.
