Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (20 page)

Sadly, there are too many charities and causes that struggle with this. During my time at Facebook I often talked with groups that cared only about getting millions of fans or likes. They invested more time in driving up these numbers then actually thinking about what the real purpose of their campaigns were or what kind of value they wanted to provide people with their pages and content.

What’s a better approach? More important than focusing on driving up your number of fans is making sure you have the right people.

The White House was able to mobilize the Internet community over Haiti by calling people at key Silicon Valley firms. I was only able to get the Facebook page going by having a team of extraordinary people who were willing to work through the night to launch it.

There are plenty of other examples of giant acts of change that started off with just small groups of people really committed to a cause. In January 2011, Wael Ghonim was a marketing executive for Google based in Dubai. When the Arab Spring began, Wael returned to Egypt, his home country, to take part in demonstrations for greater political freedom. Wael became the creator of a popular Facebook page that mobilized many Egyptians to take to the streets in protest, and today he’s credited as one of the most important and courageous young leaders of the Egyptian revolution.

But Wael almost didn’t get to play his part in the revolution. A few days after street protests, he was picked up by the police and quietly thrown into a jail cell. None of his friends or family was told of his arrest. Wael could have expected to sit out the rest of the revolution from his cell.

Thankfully, however, just before being arrested Wael had managed to update his Twitter account. “Pray for #Egypt,” he tweeted. “Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.” Because of that worrying message, concerned friends and family began to scour local hospitals and prisons looking for Wael, and an online campaign formed to raise awareness about his disappearance. The posts and stories continued for twelve days until Wael was released from prison.

Wael went on to play a much larger role in the revolution. But it wasn’t the power of the online masses or the value of the Internet as a platform for new ideas that got him released. It was something much less lofty: the fact that Wael had used social media to communicate with his friends, family, and closest supporters—the people who would never give up on him and who went the extra mile to find and free him.

When a massive tornado hit Oklahoma in May 2013, social media enabled organizations and responders to mobilize quickly and effectively. Hashtags on Twitter such as #OKNEEDS provided valuable information on available places to stay, get a bite to eat, or even charge a cell phone with a dead battery. Reddit, a site that played a large role in mobilizing Internet users to discover the identity of the Boston Marathon bomber a few weeks earlier, now played an important role in displaying images of missing persons and lost items displaced during the tornado, so they could be returned to their rightful owners. Social media enabled people around the country to feel like they could do something rather than just sit by helplessly.

According to a 2012 study by the Red Cross, 76 percent of those who found themselves in the midst of a natural disaster during the previous year used social media to contact friends and family; 44 percent turned to social media instead of calling 911 and asked their friends to contact help lines or responders on their behalf; and 37 percent used social media for help finding shelter, supplies, and support. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, twenty-three Red Cross staffers monitored over 2.5 million Sandy-related tweets and social media postings.

So, sometimes you don’t need a million people to make a difference. You just need a few people who really care. That’s why all online movements for social good need to focus, first of all, on building meaningful connections and long-lasting relationships with a strong core group of supporters.

Just as important is making sure that when you ask people to lend you their support online you don’t just ask them to like your page or passively consume information. To turn a small group of people into a movement with a much larger impact takes hard work and concrete action. As much as possible, you need people to participate—to actually do something.

It can be as simple as inviting people to share a meme or change their profile pictures, attend events, or contribute ideas and content through YouTube videos, tweets, or blog posts. But there are other more ambitious ways of getting people to make a tangible action.

One example is how Barack Obama totally reinvented the model of electoral fund-raising during the 2008 campaign. Instead of a traditional campaign strategy that focuses on getting large corporate donations, the Obama 2008 campaign ran a massive online campaign encouraging people to offer small donations and get their friends to contribute in kind. Over 90 percent of the contributions made to the Obama campaign were for less than a hundred dollars, but the cumulative impact of all these small sums completely turned the race on its head. It also probably laid the groundwork for a lot of crowdfunding sites that followed soon after, such as Kickstarter, Crowdrise, and Indiegogo.

Kickstarter is a fantastic and powerful example of how you can get people to create change themselves. Kickstarter is a website that allows people to raise money for creative projects through crowdfunding, collecting many small investments from people in order to create original films, theater, music, games, and inventions. Before Kickstarter, you could be a “patron of the arts” only by donating tremendous sums of money to your local museum or at an opera house gala. But now anyone can become a patron of the arts. And they have. Since launching in 2009, nearly 4 million people have pledged over $588 million to fund more than 40,000 projects, from the Pebble e-paper watch to 10 percent of the films at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. And in 2013, the documentary
Inocente
became the first Kickstarter-backed production to win an Oscar. So, by enlisting the support of millions of Internet users, artists and entrepreneurs are helping create new innovations and forms of cultural expression.

One final point on starting small: sometimes when organizations and causes are starting off, they guard their independence jealously and see their work as a struggle to define themselves against other “competitors” working to drive action on the same issues or for the same community. I’d encourage them to think otherwise.

To get to scale necessarily means working with others, and if you’re working to drive action on an important cause, then there will inevitably be other organizations working to achieve the same things you want. If you really care about the change you want to achieve, swallow your ego and work out how to identify the right partners among other organizations, and then work with them to achieve change together.

During my time in Silicon Valley, I worked on several projects that were truly pan-Valley, which is unique for such fiercely competitive tech companies. During the election, I worked closely with Google and Twitter. On Election Day 2008, we actually displayed on Facebook users’ home pages a Google Map that showed the location of their nearest polling stations. Postelection, I worked with execs from Google and Twitter to teach a seminar at Stanford’s business school. And Haiti, of course, was an unprecedented moment of cooperation for the industry. I sat at a FEMA roundtable convened at Facebook with senior executives from companies around the Valley. And I worked closely with Google to get out the message about their Person Finder app.

So, if all those industry competitors could come together to do good, there’s no reason others can’t. And for groups that are just starting out, sometimes the best thing they can do is work with other organizations in the same field to share resources, cross-promote, and help drive audiences and traffic to one another.

Of course, no matter how desperate the crisis, eventually public attention will begin to fade. There’s a natural limit on the human capacity to remain engaged, especially when people have their own challenges to cope with. The trick is to keep a passionate community and user base mobilized and interested in a cause after it has faded from the public consciousness and long after everyone has stopped donating to the Red Cross and gone back to their normal lives.

This is where effective storytelling comes in.

The Power of Storytelling

In 2010, Facebook reached the incredible milestone of five hundred million active users. The company wanted to mark the occasion in some way, and internally there was a lot of discussion about how best to do it. A big party? A video about Facebook’s evolution as a product?

It was an important moment for the company and a testament to the work of a lot of amazing people. But I didn’t think that the focus of the celebrations should be on the company. I always held the belief that the most powerful thing about Facebook wasn’t just the platform itself, but what people were doing with the platform. The average users didn’t care all that much about how many people were on Facebook or how big our server farms were. They cared about the value the site added to their friendships and relationships.

At lunch one day in the cafeteria with my colleague Matt Hicks, we fantasized about driving a bus around America and talking to real people about how technology was changing their lives for the better. From that conversation, Facebook Stories was born. In the end, we never got a bus, but we did decide to build a Facebook app that would shine a light on the individuals, communities, and causes that were being empowered by the site and help them tell their stories to the world.

Drawing on my experiences, I knew that in addition to showcasing the lives of fascinating people, it was also important that the app showcase best practices for other brands looking to market themselves on Facebook. I had to set a good example and create something that could be replicated by others on the platform. So, Stories received no internal support or special engineering resources. The whole app was programmed using third-party developers anyone could work with and promoted with ads anyone could buy.

We worked with the design firm Jess3 to create an app that was able to highlight user stories and plot them on a map of the world. The app was also embeddable, so, for example, the Red Cross could put it on their Facebook page and ask for stories about disaster relief, or Babies “R” Us could use it to collect and display stories about social media and childbirth.

One of the first stories shared on the app was that of Ben Taylor, a seventeen-year-old boy from Kentucky who used Facebook to rally support to rebuild his state’s oldest outdoor theater after it was damaged by flooding. There was the story of Holly Rose, a mom in Phoenix, who was prompted by a friend’s Facebook post to examine her breasts for suspicious lumps, found one, and then sought treatment for cancer. She used Facebook for support during her cancer treatment and went on to organize an awareness-raising campaign on Facebook called “Don’t Be a Chump! Check for a Lump!”

There were countless stories of lives changed, saved, and empowered thanks to connectivity.

Facebook Stories even came to the attention of Justin Bieber, who posted a link to the app on his website. Subsequently, this unleashed a torrent of tween “Beliebers,” who posted so many “stories” about how they loved Justin and wanted to marry him that we had to temporarily shut down the app. Though many of my colleagues stopped being Beliebers that day, I was impressed.

All in all, the project was a huge success. The stories told by our users were inspiring, poignant, and memorable. And looking back, Facebook Stories was one of the most important and human additions to the Facebook platform that I worked on.

At the core of a person’s life is a narrative. This is why, if you’re trying to convey a message, simple, relatable storytelling will enable your audience to see themselves through the eyes of the people you are trying to help. This is the beginning of empathy. The story is the glue that binds together the human experience; it’s the device through which both understanding and a desire to help emerge.

An unintended side effect of the many methods now used to broadcast for charities and social causes is tragedy fatigue. Like many of you, I am constantly getting requests for Kickstarter and Indiegogo drives, Kiva microfinance pitches, Causes.com causes, and any number of other microsourced and crowdfunded campaigns. During the 2012 election, the pitches from interest groups and the Obama and Romney campaigns were even more unbearable. There was clearly no limit on the number of e-mails that campaigns would resort to sending, and all of these were impersonal in the extreme—they knew my first name but nothing else about me.

There are only so many times people can ask you to support a crowdfunded Crowdrise campaign or help them “donate” a birthday to charity or donate to a race, walk, marathon, half marathon, racewalk, or SantaCon, before you start turning down every request.

Effective storytelling breaks through the crowd to reach a receptive audience. With a good story, it’s possible to grab not only people’s attention but also their understanding.

If an organization is trying to raise money for hunger, it’s not enough to just say that a certain number of kids go to bed without food every night. It is critical to relate on an emotional level with the struggle and plight of someone who may be in a foreign country and with whom the audience might not feel any natural connection.

The one charity e-mail request that, for me, broke through the pack came from a friend of mine who was raising money for a multiple sclerosis charity walk. Normally, these kinds of things all blend into the background or stay relegated to the limbo of the never-replied-to Facebook “event.” But this one request included a link to a video, which I clicked on. It showed the guy at his wedding, lifting his mother, who suffered from MS, from her wheelchair in order to dance with her while uplifting music played in the background. It was one of the most heart-wrenchingly emotional moments I’ve ever seen on the Internet. After I wiped the tears from my eyes, I immediately clicked to donate.