Meme: What's Your Peer-to-Peer Social Change Success Story?

Organizers of the NetTuesday Meetups are considering an October theme on peer-to-peer social change.

To help the NetTuesday Meetup organizers identify potential panelists, Social Actions is asking for your peer-to-peer social change success story.

To submit a success story:

Click on "My Settings" form the Social Action blog, and then click "About Me." You will see a textarea called "Meme: What's Your Peer-to-Peer Social Change Success Story?". Please add your success story there.
You can also just submit the story in the comments below, or include a link in the comments to a blog entry about the success story.

We'll post a round-up each day of success stories as they come in (through September 12, 2008).

In your response, please indicate your location and whether or not you would be interested in presenting at a NetTuesday event in October. Please consult this map and list for a guide to all 21 NetTuesdays.

By "peer-to-peer social change success story," we are referring to examples of individuals or organizations using social media to empower their friends, family, an supporters to raise awareness, collaboration, or funds for a cause. The term is intentionally broad. We'll feature online and offline success stories of all stripes.

Here's my success story. What's your's?

Three weeks ago, organizer Clare Ondrey created a campaign on ThePoint called Show Our Beauty: A Challenge to Women's Magazines. Clare asked people to commit to buying two copies of the first women's magazine that published "an issue where at least the feature photo shoot and cover does not have any airbrushing." The campaign spread quickly through social networks, Twitter and blog entries. Clare has successfully recruited 1015 members. That's 1015 people who will pay twice the new-stand price for a copy of the first women's magazine that listens to the demands of its consumers. Well done Clare. I'm not sure where Clare is based, but she would make a great panelist for a p2p social change themed NetTuesady Meetup in October.

Tags: net2, net2tuesday, nptech

5 Comments

Comment by Peter Deitz on September 4, 2008 at 11:18am: Sharon Schneider has contributed to the meme:

Meme: What's Your Peer-to-Peer Social Change Success Story?
I'm working on it right now! So far, I've raised $214 in just one day for building wells in Ethiopia by promoting my "Born in September" page for charity: water. I wrote a blog post, and tweeted about it, which got picked up by Beth Kanter. She retweeted, as did others, and picked it up in her own blog. I'll keep putting the campaign out there (I also emailed all my relatives) and update totals. The direct link is above, so please be one of the 24 people we still need to reach my goal of raising $1000 for a well in Ethiopia!

Comment by beth pickard on September 5, 2008 at 10:38am: I jump on board with Blood:Water Mission's CLEAN WATER campaign ($1 provides 1 year of CLEAN WATER for 1 African) and. . . social media for social change success! I used Firstgiving.com to create an event and a fundraising page in about 10 minutes asking visitors to my page to donate $1 for each glass of clean water they drank on the Friday of that week.

Firstgiving automatically uploaded BWM’s mission statement. I then linked my page to BWM’s official video on YouTube. I also linked an album of my own photographs on Flickr from a recent trip to Uganda, where I stayed in a community without easy access to clean water. I sent email and Facebook invites to my friends, family, and colleagues. I posted my fundraising page on my Facebook profile. I dug, twitted, stumbled and shouted.

Result: over $700 raised, including a donation from a perfect stranger who came across my page on Facebook and donated out of pure enthusiasm. Additionally, I received a great deal of feedback from my friends about their awareness and support for the CLEAN WATER cause.

Comment by Peter Deitz on September 5, 2008 at 11:12am: Hi Beth, Thanks for this success story. Congratulations on a well-implemented and worthwhile cause. If you get a chance, can you post about our success story meme on the Firstgiving blog. I have a feeling there are quite a few Firstgiving success stories out there. I'd love your blog readership to know about and have a chance to contribute to this meme ahead of the 9/12 deadline. All the best, Peter

Comment by JoeSolomon on September 10, 2008 at 12:27pm: One of my favorite examples of a peer-to-peer success story is when Alan Levine discovered a classroom project from one of his posts (via the DonorsChoose.org WP plugin) and then helped fund it. This has been extremely inspiring when it comes to my work with Social Actions Labs - http://cogdogblog.com/2008/08/01/a-different-way-to-make-a-plugin/#comment-55902

Comment by Stacey Monk on September 13, 2008 at 4:19am: Thanks for the meme, Peter! At Epic Change, peer-to-peer social change has been our primary means of fundraising and spreading the word - I've posted my response at http://epicchange.org/blog/2008/09/13/my-first-meme-our-first-year/