How Social Media Can Change The World
(This is a long one, but an important topic, so I hope you’ll read it through and share your thoughts.)
A few days ago I touched on the idea of why the “social media” component of Social Media for Social Change is so significant. ”The importance of SM4SC is unquestionable,” I commented over on the SM4SC blog the following day. But why? Why is this a bigger idea than Auto Mechanics for Social Change, or even CEOs for Social Change? The answer, I think, is that we in the social media space have the power, and thus the responsibility, to do more — to leverage the tools we use every day to reach millions of people, and to continue to build new tools to allow messages of social change to be acted upon.
I’m currently reading The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, an eye-opening a book by former World Bank economist William Easterly. Easterly advocates small, direct, piecemeal solutions to real problems on the ground in developing countries, rather than the “Big Plan” mentality of Jeffrey Sachs and others. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the potential of social media when it comes to aiding serious humanitarian causes. The conclusions I’ve come to are: 1) yes, social media provides the most valuable platform to social causes that the world has ever known; and 2) it’s going to take some visionary people to connect the right tools with the right organizations to maximize the measurable benefits.
The first conclusion may seem bold, but to me it’s strikingly obvious. For the first time in the history of humanitarian aid, individual donors and worthy organizations can connect meaningfully on opposite sides of the world.
Whether or not you take the time to think about it when you file your tax return each year, you are already sponsoring domestic non-profits and foreign aid organizations abroad. But a portion of your contributions also goes to the pockets of your state and federal government officials, and another fraction goes to World Bank president Robert Zoellick’s salary and expense account. I won’t try to calculate what percentage of your taxes allocated to social causes actually make it there, but I’m not sure I’d even want to know.
In contrast, you now are beginning to have the tools at your disposal to have a direct, measurable impact on these causes — to help solve the immediate problems, on the ground, in communities with the most need. You can help build a school in Southeast Asia, provide clean drinking water for an entire African village, or prevent domestic abuse in your own neighborhood, with the social media tools you use every day. The real solution is in going straight to the source, and it doesn’t take much:
Medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only 12 cents a dose. A bed net to prevent a child from getting malaria costs only four dollars. Preventing five million deaths over the next ten years would cost just three dollars for each new mother.
Easterly points out that the real tragedy is that the Western world has spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still failed to accomplish these remarkably simple goals.
But you no longer have to stand by and let someone else decide how to divvy up your contributions to worthy causes. If wanted to give $20 towards saving the world, or even saving a single life, my guess is you wouldn’t donate it to the United States government or the World Bank. Fortunately we are entering an era where, with social media, you can choose to make a difference yourself.
Social media addresses two of the biggest hurdles of social change: reaching the people who can actually make a difference, and providing the means and channels for them to do so. Only very recently has it been possible for individuals like Tim Ferriss to raise over $250,000 in one month for the construction of new schools in Vietnam and elsewhere – a campaign organized exclusively through blogs and Twitter. Tim wasted no time raising another $15,000 for a school in Nepal, again promoted solely through social media and word of mouth.
This is earth-shatteringly great news for NGOs and non-profits, in the US and abroad, not to mention the deserving recipients of their services. Not only are the tools available (for free, no less) to broadcast an organization’s message to the people who can help the most, but those messages are actionable, meaning help can be delivered directly, immediately.
Where I see the need for visionaries is in establishing platforms that close the loop between the cause, the message, the individual contributor, and the quantifiable result. I don’t mean a central organization equivalent to the World Bank or IMF, who gets to decide who is worthy of aid and who is not — this is social media we’re talking about here, in the age of transparency, where the vox populi dictates the direction of change. Some resources already exist as steps in the right direction. In terms of raising awareness, Change.org is a great central resource for information on humanitarian, social, and geopolitical issues. Applications like Causes in Facebook provide the back end, allowing individuals to contribute directly to the organizations of their choice. And the countless blogging and microblogging platforms provide the channels to promote and connect the two.
There are countless worthy causes out there in need of support from you and me. Many of them can only be served through larger organizations like the United Way, UNICEF, or the federal government. Don’t get me wrong, these organizations do an immense amount of good in the world, but they add a lot of overhead to the contributions they take in. Social media is the key to bringing a new level efficiency to enacting social change.
How would you spend $20 right now if you knew 100% of it would be used directly by a worthy cause? And how far away do you think we are from this becoming a reality?
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This is great thought!. I am so happy you are having this discussion because as soon as I saw FAcebook, I saw it as a direct personal way for people to connect in the now to help the cause whatever that may be.
Great cahnge alwasy happens in the grassroots….when the beurocracy sets in things get cloggred and personla politics shut things down. This is where we need to be very att
ntive and intentional not to be those “in the know”, making it impossible for the many to gain access to any of the tools and applications that may develop because of SM4SC’s possibility to create outside the big entities.