This month I’ve seen two videos of political leaders go viral in my Facebook newsfeed. One from Australia, and one from the USA.
The content of each gives you a feel of the split between the cultures:
Barry Obama (POTUS 2008 – ) sings in Harlem:
Bob Hawke (Prime Minister of Australia 1983-1991) skulls a beer at the cricket:
Last year I was honored to be invited to record a session for the Smart CMO Virtual Forum, an innovative online event providing top-notch content to a remote audience.
The Smart CMO team just shared a video of my session to share with all of you, check it out to hear about all the work we’re doing in marketing at charity: water:
The next Smart CMO virtual forum is scheduled for March 1 2012 – sign up to see more content like the above, from even better speakers than yours truly, such as the CMOs for both the NFL and SAP.
This morning just before I headed to work this tweet from Clay Shirky pointed me to an incredibly interesting podcast from This American Life:
Mike Daisey’s extraordinary look at the people who made your iPhone, now as a ‘This American Life’ episode: bit.ly/xmoLhB
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) January 9, 2012
Like many of us, I spend most of my waking hours touching an Apple product. First thing in the morning I fire up my iPhone to check overnight notifactions. For my full workday I bang on my MacBook Pro. When I get home I’m liable to unwind with some Fifa 12 on my iPad. Apple products and electronics surround my life, but I rarely stop to think about where they come from.
After listening to this podcast, no longer.
Like Mr Daisey the narrator, I always assumed a high tech factory used robots to construct my products with some human oversight. I didn’t think about an army of workers assembling my products painstakingly by hand while they barely made a living.
Thought provoking. Especially the analysis afterwards – are sweatshops like this a fact of life in developing countries that lead to growth despite our western sensibilities? Or do we as consumers, and more importantly Apple, Dell and their ilk who make massive profits from the labor, have a responsibility here?
Humblebrag (urban dictionary): Subtly letting others now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or “woe is me” gloss.
Somehow winded up in the Wall St Journal twice today.
First was for work, quoted in an article on the new trends in online philanthropy. 18 words made the quote, 2 of them “Justin” and “Bieber”.
Read the whole article here, here is the section on charity: water
Like some other nonprofits, charity: water, a New York-based organization dedicated to providing clean drinking water to people in developing nations, uses traditional and nontraditional fund-raising methods for separate purposes. Big gifts from private and corporate donors fund the charity’s operations, from staff salaries to ink for the printers. That allows 100% of donations from alternative channels, such as social media and the organization’s various websites, to directly fund water projects—an assurance meant to appeal to potential small donors concerned about where their money will go.
Seventy percent of donations to charity:water come from digital channels, mainly from individuals donating on its main website, by pressing the “donate” button, or going to mycharitywater.org, where anyone can set up a fund-raising campaign and ask friends to donate.
Mycharitywater.org has raised $11.5 million since August 2009. Individual fund-raisers have done everything from running marathons to setting up lemonade stands. The average campaign has raised $1,000, says Paull Young, director of digital engagement at charity: water. “Justin Bieber had people donate for his birthday,” he says. “Little girls have friends donate $7 for their seventh birthday.”
charity: water is experimenting with a new site, waterforward.org, that also relies on people’s social connections to expand the charity’s reach, but in a different way. The site maintains what it calls a “book”—a compilation of photos of people who have had a $10 donation to the site made in their name by someone they know. Once a person is in the book, he or she can bring in any number of other people by making a $10 contribution for each of them. Those people can then do the same, and so on. In effect, every donor becomes a fund-raiser.
The site is designed to make donating fun and engaging, and to allow donors to see that their contribution goes beyond the amount they can give, since each donation can lead to so many more donations, says Michael Birch, a major fund-raiser and contributor to charity: water who has helped the organization build its websites.
The second was more amusing. For 4th of July this year I embarked on a Texas trip with a bunch of rugby mates. For the occasion, I was in search of a stars’n'stripes Speedo… a surprisingly difficult item to acquire.
I turned to Zaarly, an awesome iPhone app turning commerce on its head, and a few hours and $50 was delivered a US flag speedo by a very confused personal shopper.
That same confused personal shopper appeared in a WSJ video today talking about his experience with Zaarly… his most awkward moment (you guessed it), my speedo.
I’m currently home in Australia visiting family and I’m taking the opportunity to host an event in Sydney to share the story of charity: water.
If you’re in Sydney this Thursday, November 24, I’d love for you to join us at the Exchange Center at 6pm for drinks and a presentation.
I’ve recently had the pleasure to meet and learn from Simon Sinek as he has been doing some work with our charity: water executive team.
Simon’s clarion call is to ‘start with why‘ – he boils down the need for purpose to be at the core of businesses in today’s web-based business world into a simple, but highly compelling framework that will change how you think about your brand.
I strongly urge you to take 5 minutes to watch his TED Talk:
Then, think about what the ‘why’ is for your organization.
For charity: water, our ‘what’ is to bring clean and safe drinking water to the nearly one billion people living without.
We’re still working on firming up our ‘Why’, but you can guarantee it will revolve around helping people see their impact.
That’s why we mark every water project on Google Maps. That’s why we devote energy, time and resources to developing features like Dollars to Projects. And that’s why we’re different from every other cause out there.
Mary Meeker is one of the most respected Internet trends analysts. The report she shared yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit has some amazing data, key points:
Full report is here – if you’re at all interested in where the web is heading, read it!
My good mate Steve Garfield invited me onto his segment on Pulse.TV to talk about the charity: water September Campaign.
Steve’s been a great supporter of the September Campaign. Back in 2008 when I first gave up my September birthday Steve was my biggest donor. This was the second year in a row he had me on his show as we launched the campaign. As I wrote this post he gave another tremendous donation to my current campaign.
Steve’s a true gentleman and knows more about online video than anyone. Follow him!
Watch the full interview here:
I’d love YOU to help support the campaign! Either by visiting the September site and sharing it with your friends, or by donating for my upcoming birthday.
100% of donations will contribute to the drilling rig, and a matching donor will double what you give. For the next decade the rig will go to work in northern Ethiopia digging hundreds of wells, and we’re going to stick a GPS unit so you can see where your money goes to work!
I’m proud of my team today as we launch charity: water’s 5th anniversary September Campaign.
In 5 short years charity: water has provided access to clean water for over 2 million people in 19 countries. But with nearly 1 billion people living without safe water we’ve hardly even started. And we need to go faster.
Some of our best partners are starting to run at 100% of their capacity to bring people water, so this September we’re funding a drilling rig that can bring another 40,000 people each year water in northern Ethiopia.
Watch our video here for the full story:
The 2011 September Campaign. Our 5-year-anniversary video from charity: water on Vimeo.
I’d love it if you’d consider fundraising for the Rig this September. If you can’t fundraise, please donate for my September birthday instead of buying me a birthday beer.
And today – please share this video anywhere you can!
Rachel Beckwith’s story has touched me deeply. She was trying to raise $300 for charity: water her 9th birthday when she was tragically killed in a car crash. Strangers have since donated nearly $1 million in her name.
So it’s all the more inspiring to see one of my favorite journalists, Nick Kristof, cover her story in the NY Times:
“In the midst of this grim summer, my faith in humanity has been restored by the saga of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23 … Yet this is a story not just of one girl, but of a generation of young people working creatively to make this a better world.”
