A Partnership To Build Community: charity: water on GivingTuesday

Last week, we announced our weekly Giving Tuesday. We’re committed throughout the rest of December to help support non-profits doing incredible work. We’ll be giving 20% of our pass sales each Tuesday in December will support an incredible non-profit we love.

This week, we’re partnering up with charity: water to support their efforts in Cambodia. 4.6 million people in Cambodia don’t have access to safe drinking water – that’s 33% of their population. That’s where charity: water comes in. Partnering with two local organizations, charity: water helps supply BioSand Filters to families.

A BioSand Filter is a cement box with chambers for filtering dirty water, containing gravel, two layers of sand and a film of microorganisms that eat up to 99% of harmful bacteria in the water poured into them. charity: water covers the material costs of each BSF; the families who receive them contribute $5.

charity: water BioSand Filter

With these filters, families will have access to clean, safe water for years to come.

Join us in supporting this program. Grab your pass today.

Our Weekly GivingTuesday: The Adventure Project, BOND, & SMW NYC

We’re rapidly approaching February and what promises to be our best SMW NYC ever. Our initial speaker lineup is taking shape and looking awesome and tomorrow we publish the initial schedule of events to give you a taste of what February will have to offer.

Speakers include:
+ Buzzcar & Zipcar’s Robin Chase
+ Cindy Gallop of Make Love Not Porn
+ Steve Case of AOL, Revolution, & The Case Foundation
+ BuzzFeed’s CEO and founder Jonah Peretti
+ Smirnoff’s, Global VP, Michelle Klein

We want to make sure you get in on the action early. Register for an Insider Pass today, and we’ll give you a $50 gift card to mobile gifting startup, BOND.

And in the spirit of giving, every Tuesday for the rest of December, we’re building on #GivingTuesday. We’ll be giving 20% of our pass sales to support an incredible non-profit.

Today, we’re supporting The Adventure Project. The Adventure Project helps empower female entrepreneurs in Haiti. Each year four million people die from chronic exposure to cooking smoke, from cooking over open fires. In addition, cooking over open fires uses a lot of energy from charcoal and firewood. In Haiti, where 90% of the country is deforested, charcoal is mainly imported from the Dominican Republic, at a high price. Families spend 40% of their daily expenses on buying charcoal to cook with.

The Adventure Project works with female vendors in Port au Prince on a solution. They distribute $20 charcoal-efficient stoves, creating jobs, stimulating the local economy, and helping create change. When families in Haiti move from using an open fire to a charcoal-efficient stove, they save $220 in fuel costs each year. The median per capita income is $665. So this impact is incredible for families in Haiti.

Check out the gift options here, grab your Insider Pass here now, and help us support sustainable development.

The Adventure Project Haiti

Takeaways From #GivingTuesday

Fundraisers have a lot to learn from the success of #GivingTuesday — make it simple, make it social. At the SMWNYC event — Giving Gangham Style: An Ideathon with the #GivingTuesday Team — a social gooderati crowd gathered eager to learn more about the simple-social potion and commune around this holy day.

The #GivingTuesday team panelist, Henry Timms (92Y) Sharon Feder (Mashable) and Aaron Sherinian (UN Foundation) said it all started with a good hook that latched on to the start of the giving season and the Black Friday, Cyber Monday consumer exhaustion. With a good idea in hand, the next step was to go social. Yet this wasn’t to tell everyone what to do, but to invite everyone to the party. The first gift made was this idea to anyone who wanted to get involved.

When 2,600 partners and nonprofits jumped on the platform, the #GivingTuesday team were gracious hosts. They facilitated the event, listened to their guests and then made changes based on their suggestions. Then when someone gave, they felt good about it, felt apart of something and felt ok to brag tweet about their philanthropic ways.

The panel facilitator Susan McPherson (Fenton) outlined three big takeaways:

+ Listen more than you speak.
+ When you have a great idea, collaborate.
+ Use every tool at your disposable.

In other words, anti-nothing and pro-everything is the giving mantra. But how did this diner-menu  strategy not become overwhelming? Again, it was that simple hook and hashtag that acted as a north star guiding everyone to one call to action on one day — give on Tuesday. All everyone else had to do is point to that same star and say yes.

@AmandaLehner is a digital strategist based in New York City.

NonProfit Guide to SMW NYC

At a Social Media Week party last year, I asked a very accomplished entrepreneur, “so, will I see you at SXSW?” He looked at me and smirked, “I don’t go there anymore because everybody is there.” I see what he means. It’s important for a conference to maintain the right balance of top people in the field, great programming and accessibility — that is Social Media Week.

As a nonprofit professional at SMW, I always feel catered to as there are plenty events on using the powers of social media for social good. I also tend to veer from my track to learn from other industries and network with the speakers post event to pitch a corporate partnership (as any self-respecting nonprofit hustler would do).

Here are my top picks for SMW NYC. Also for networking, looks like the Society & Social Impact Hub at 92Y Tribeca is the place for us. See you there!

Tuesday, February 19
Using Film to Galvanize Lasting Social Change
GIVING GANGNAM STYLE: An Ideathon with the #GivingTuesday Team #SMWGT
Rewiring Government for Openness, Connection, and Choice, Featuring Susan Crawford and Beth Noveck
Open and Unfiltered: Defending the Internet, Featuring Alexis Ohanian and Eli Pariser
Keeping Up with the Agile Consumer
Authors Roundtable: Social at the Intersection of Paid, Owned and Earned Media

Wednesday, February 20
A Conversation with Neil Blumenthal, Co-Founder and CEO, Warby Parker
Content Marketing: How to be Memorable and Measurable in 2013
Lean Startup for Social Good: Create a Compelling Website User Experience Using Lean UX

Thursday, February 21
How Social Is Your Foundation?
Societal Brands In a Social World
Social Media Analytics Helps UNICEF Save Lives

Friday, February 22
Keynote: danah boyd on the Ethics and Challenges of Dealing With “Big Data”

Hub Spotlight: 5 Minutes With 92Y’s Asha Curran

Each year, we partner with iconic institutions to bring you dedicated content for SMW NYC. 92Y is the city’s premiere nonprofit cultural and community center, and they’ve been all about social good since 1874! 92Y will be serving as our Society & Social Impact Hub, and we couldn’t think of a better home for those conversations. Now, we want you to meet Asha Curran, Director for Center for Innovation & Social Impact at 92Y. As director of the Center for Innovation & Social Impact, Asha Curran works to expand the depth and reach of 92Y’s programming through social media, partnerships and collaboration within 92Y’s diverse programming centers. She’s also been working with our team to help pull together the programming for the week and make sure you have a great experience there, while learning how we can all make the world a little better.

Asha, how did 92Y get involved with SMW NYC?
92Y has become more and more active in programming in the social media space, from hosting the last AllThingsD event with Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and Eric Schmidt, to our multi-platform partnerships with places like Mashable, Politico, Buzzfeed, Comedy Central Indecision and others. We’re thrilled to be the Society & Social Impact hub for this year’s SMW, since it’s so aligned with what we do—with social media specifically but with our mission in general. As a Jewish institution, we’ve been serving the community since 1874 have always strived to meet emerging social needs. A commitment to service, as well as a passion for ideas, is core to our mission.

This year, our global theme is “Open & Connected: Principles for a Collaborative World.” How does 92Y embody or support this idea?
92Y is a community center that has been encouraging open dialogue, engagement and enrichment for 139 years, but evolving technology and new media offer us the chance to radically expand our definition of community and engagement. We’re strong advocates of the use of social media to catalyze social change, and of encouraging the connected generation to tackle the world’s biggest challenges by using the technological and new media tools at their disposal. The idea of collaboration is becoming more and more central to what we do—collaborating to draw together all the genius of our various programming departments, to start with, but also reaching outside our organization to partner with NGOs, media companies, other NFPs and big businesses to create amazing collaborative programs, and to leverage those networks to share the content more widely.

The Social Good Summit that we present every fall in partnership with the UNFoundation, Mashable, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UN Development Programme is centered entirely on the theme of using social media for social good, and focused on the principles of openness and accessibility, crowd-sourced solutions, grassroots thinking, and empowerment of local communities.

92Y is well known for your incredible programs- from comedy to arts to film. Can you tell us more about how 92Y has evolved and why providing those programs is so crucial to the community?
Intellectual exploration (in whatever form—classes, lectures, art, music, dance) has a more important place than ever in such a frenetic, multi-tasking world. We’re becoming a society which digests a neverending firehose of content in short-form servings, often in solitude, and in which people often gravitate to that content which reinforces what they already think. But vigorous debate is so crucial; the hardest conversations are often the most important ones to have, and real growth and progress can’t happen without being open to new ideas, new positions. It’s the engagement itself which is valuable. Our mission is to provide education and entertainment at with depth and thoughtfulness, with many points of entry and many voices. Most experiences are richer when they’re had with a community.

If you walk through either 92Y location, you might hear the strains of a string quartet rehearsing from the concert hall, or a jazz band in the Tribeca mainstage, the voices of children and their parents, the instructions of an art or jewelry teacher, or a group of strangers getting to know each other over a glass of wine before the start of a lecture. And with our digital work as well, our goal is to get people together, learning, talking, engaging, taking action.

The nonprofit and social impact space is deeply impacted by social and emerging media. What trends do you see taking shape in this area?
Technology now allows us as a not-for-profit (or, as we call ourselves, a for-purpose) to scale our core values of community, connection, conversation, and philanthropy, and reach a much wider audience. That’s an amazing opportunity and we’re taking full advantage of it. We’re big believers in the potential of what we call the “connected generation”—not just young people, but all people who are technologically savvy, engaged, lateral thinkers, and hungry for social change and willing to work to make it happen. The ability of communities—of anyone—to curate powerful, influential conversations via social media, to rally people around an idea, is having a profound impact even on the national agenda. The old power model is changing.

What are some of the success stories from 92Y in social & emerging media?
92Y founded and led #GivingTuesday, a national day of giving to follow on the heels of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our original goal was to gather 100 partners in support of the idea. Instead, we had 2,500 by the time the day itself came around. The White House endorsed the idea, as did the Mayors of New York, Philly and Chicago; it received nationwide press and Blackbaud, a not-for-profit software company who gathered analytics for us, estimated that online giving went up over 50% year over year for that date. It was a phenomenal success that spoke to the philanthropic nature of Americans, the sheer power of social media, and the eagerness of communities to rally together in support of a cause.

Our annual Social Good Summit, now in its fourth year, reached a record number of people last year due to the combined social media reach of our partners Mashable, UNFoundation, the Gates Foundation, the UN Development Programme and Ericsson. We held the flagship event here in NYC, livestreamed simultaneously in seven languages, with hub events in Beijing, Nairobi and Mogadishu, as well as over 300 local community meetups around the world in over 150 countries. Each meetup was held around one question: “what can technology and new media do to improve conditions in your community?” We received incredible feedback from localities from Austin to Syria to Bhutan to Bangalore.

92Y also began 92Y American Conversation this past year, which is a multi-platform initiative to share the best in 92Y political content as widely as possible. We partnered with Harvard Kennedy School, Comedy Central Indecision, Politico, the Aspen Institute and many more to create new, original content as well as share the best moments from our stage. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of views and media pickups from HuffPo to the NY Times.

What should SMW NYC attendees expect to see from 92Y Tribeca and at the Society & Social Impact Hub?
We’ll host a range of great programs on topics from urban development to visual social media to the ethical challenges of “big data.” I’m particularly excited for “Giving Gangnam Style: An Ideathon with the #GivingTuesday Team” (Tuesday, Feb 19th at 12pm) and for “Grassroots + Social=Change” (Wednesday, Feb 20th at 2:30pm), which we’ve programmed in partnership with our good friends at Mashable and which will speak on the theme of social media as a catalyst for societal change, which is at the heart of so much of our work.

My Top SMW NYC Events

When I was asked to share my top SMW NYC events, I must admit I got a bit excited. Coming from the non-profit background, I love the tools that SMW NYC provides to organizations seeking to create change and the discussions that evolve around making a positive impact. It’s interlaced in so much that we offer- and that excites me. But the best part is — that’s not all SMW NYC offers. There’s a bit of everything for everyone.

So, when I’m not exploring our new Global HQ (and seriously, why wouldn’t I be with our hands-on classes, disruptive speakers and interactive exhibits), I’ll have my eye on these events for the big week. If you’re there, make sure you swing by and say hey!


1197 Monday Event: Opening Reception 1197Juried Exhibit & SMW PicYourCity
There’s no greater feeling than seeing a project come to fruition; and having spent the past two months manning the PicYourCity competition, I couldn’t be more excited to see the gallery with 1197! Plus, there’s wine & cheese. Monday, evening, I know my plans. And if mobile photography is your thing, 1197 is a weeklong series of events entirely devoted to the topic, brought to us from our friends at Nokia. If you don’t make it out on Monday evening for the reception, I encourage you to check out many of their events throughout the week!


gsummitX- Gamification in NYC
I had the pleasure of hearing Gabe Zichermann drop his gamification knowledge last year. And let me tell you, the man is a phenomenal speaker. I’ve never heard the concepts broken down in such an intuitive and easy to understand manner. So, on Tuesday, if you’re wanting to learn more or wanting to go deep with gamification, loyalty and engagement, be here. There will also be 1-2 demos from companies using gamification in their business model, and Gabe’s unique workshop-like game called “Play for a Cause.”


So You Think You Can Start Up?
Ok, confession time: the recovering reality show junkie in me LOVES pitch events. So, when I saw our friends at Hearst were putting together the ultimate fashion startup pitch event, I was in heaven. On Tuesday, digital fashion start-ups will go head to head in this ultimate “elevator pitch” challenge and demonstration. Teams will have a total of 5 minutes to impress the judges, competing for editorial coverage on ELLE.com. Just make sure we all dress to impress for it.


Giving Gangham Style: An ideation With the #GivingTuesday Team
If you’re into NGO’s, the phenomenon that is #GivingTuesday is something you’re well acquainted with. The backstory: on November 27, 2012, thousands of companies, NGOs, small businesses and individuals came together to celebrate the first-ever #GivingTuesday— a new social media-driven campaign to create a national day of giving. It was a success and on Tuesday of SMW, the creators behind will share what made it a success and how social is a major player in philanthropy.


The Rise of Visual Social Media
Being in community management, the increase in visual is something you learn to deal with. Images are so vital to telling stories. But the ethics of using them is still a bit more nebulous. So, on Tuesday, the WSJ is bringing together photographers and social media editors to talk about how images can be used ethically in social. With everything from copyright issues, elements of a viral photo, photoshopped images, the use of filters and Instagram’s TOS changes, it’s a must if you’re in the field of social media content.


Girls Empowerment & Women’s Empowerment in Real World Social Networks
Kicking things off on Wednesday, She’s the First will touch on the power of education and female empowerment. It’s a serious topic and one we can all contribute to to create more sustainable and lasting change. And the panelists on this event know what they’re talking about.


PSFK: The Future of Work
Ok, another confession for you: over the past 3 years, I’ve become a big PSFK fan girl. If you’ve not read through any of their reports, you’re missing out. And this year, PSFK is delivering big again. They’ll be sharing an exclusive preview of their upcoming Future of Work report, part of a series of in-depth analysis of trends driving key sectors and subject matters. Don’t miss it.


Equalizing the Playing Field
Social media is the great equalizer. It’s been fascinating to see how small and large companies respond to it. Pulling together 3 unique companies of various sizes, we’ll be exploring how each is navigating the space. The best part- it’s got Nokia’s Craig Hepburn. This guy drives some serious discussions around social and doesn’t hold back. If you missed him last year, don’t make the same mistake again.


Daria Musk and Google: Social Media and the Rock Star
Continuing on the trend of exploring case studies, few make a greater example of the power of collaboration on Google+ than Daria Musk. With the power of social media, Daria has become a self-made rock star. Dara will join a fireside chat to talk how social has helped her career (and dreams) grow- and perform a mini-set for all those in attendance. It’s sure to be inspiring, and our friends at Google+ will share tips on how you can maximize the platform. Win- win.


How To Be Funny in 140 Characters or Less, Part Deux
I missed the original last year- and I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Seriously. Our How to Be Funny in 140 Characters or Less was amazing. It was funny; relevant; and informative. I’m not missing the sequel. You better believe come Thursday, I’ll be in the audience taking notes, and all my friends will hope I pick up better jokes and comedic timing. So, join me as we watch Lizz Winstead, Julieanne Smolinski and Jon Friedman break down comedy in brevity and aim to take the #1 trending spot in an hour.


Deep Focus Presents: An Evening of Disruption
We’re big fans of Deep Focus and Advisory Board member Ian Schafer. It’s really hard not to be. They are pulling together some of the industry’s biggest disruptors for a thought-provoking evening of why we should all learn to feel very comfortable being uncomfortable. Knowing them, it’s bound to be insightful, humorous and an all-around great time. Thursday evening, this is where it is.


Betting on Journalism: Andrew Sullivan & Buzzfeed
Ok, if you’re never gotten a chance to view the Buzzfeed offices, you’re missing out. But aside from that, this Thursday event will pull together two seemingly opposite styles of journalism and talk how these models work. Exploring what content counts online and dissecting what everyone means when they talk about “the future of journalism,” this event will be great for the news geek in us all.