I’m ready for ‘Green Communications’ case studies conference

Tomorrow I am going to a conference on a hot topic — Green Communications 2008: the case studies conference, put on by Business Development Institute and PR Newswire. I only hope it lives up to the promising relevance of its title. You can listen to the webcast live if you login here.

As someone who already thinks a lot about green communications, I hope I learn something new. So to preface what I am sure will be a titilating blog post tomorrow, here’s a mini-benchmark of my green communications knowledge.

- Walk your talk: don’t put green themes in your PR if you are not really living them out in your activities.

-Check your energy footprint. Are you really recycling everything (talk to your garbage company)? Are your lights on timers? Are you using the new energy efficient light bulbs and buying post-consumer waste paper? I hear office depot has a whole line of green products, and there are even companies that can print your company pens or catering plastic on recycled plastic. Let your building management know you care.

-Work from home for employees. During slow seasons especially, working from home has less of an energy footprint - no travel, no take out lunch, less energy use. And I am sure it would boost company morale.

-Make it someones job. Some one must be answerable to your greening plan.

-Don’t reinvent the wheel. There are a million greening blogs and studies out there already. Do your homework before you write a new white paper. One I like because its is targeted at foundations & non profits is Green Beyond Grants: A Toolkit for Greening Foundation Operations.

Now I am sure both my corporate social responsibility professor and my evaluation and measurement professor would be pleased. Tune in tomorrow to see what I’ve learned.

Unleashing the Girl Effect

This video explains why investing in girls is a save the world strategy using just words and music. No girls even! I love it and I am planning to use it in a workshop I am doing next week for the gathering of the Women of the ELCA. If you watch the video directly from Youtube — and it is doing well with 63,000 views — there are companion videos that feature girls talking about their lives, like Addis from Ethiopiawho was married to a 40-year-old man at age 12 and had to drop out of school.

Though this is where my training in branding and gender justice collide. I love anything that makes more people aware of how poverty limits the full being of women and girls. But after the feel good music winds down I ask: We are just going to give a girl an education and a cow and everything will be fine? Is it really the obligation of a woman to make a new and visible economic contribution to the village before she is listened to by male leaders?

Well, you can’t get to every issue in a three-minute teaser. But the website could do a better job with linking people into action strategies. Right now it just links to a fact sheet that any 101 student could have assembled. I want to know more of the backstory and forward strategy of this video, it is a collaboration between UN Foundation, Nike Foundation, NOVO, Plan and others.

I’ll have my eye out for more impacts of the girl effect. I hope ripples of girl power are felt round the world.

Genderwiki has visuals as well as documents

I love this “picture of the week” from a Wiki on gender… they have a whole catalog of photos that are useful if you need visuals for things like child marriage, safe motherhood, female genital mutilation, women and poverty.

Wikigender is your online platform to find and exchange information related to gender equality. The website is work in progress and benefits from your active participation. Users are invited to comment on or improve existing articles, and to create or upload new documents. By providing a platform to share experiences and to learn from each other’s knowledge, Wikigender will contribute to a better understanding on the situation of men and women around the world.

a liscense plate is communication for development

gotta love those Millennium Development Goals…   this is the plate of the Nigerian Ambassador for the Millennium Development Goals.

A Chinese blogger tells of earthquake heartbreak

I don’t think many of us in North America are really going to understand the devastation of the earthquake in China.   I have many friends and colleagues that have gone to the Gulf Coast to help after Hurricane Katrina– and are still going 2 years later — to help the communities rebuild.  I can imagine the Chinese government having a massive volunteerism effort… but that is still in the future for now.  

I really recommend reading this blog post: China, Survival stories of the quake.   It tells the stories of many heroic rescues, dying requests, and of course talks about the children and schools.   Here is an excerpt that will break your heart:

The story of a mom:

She was found dead under the collapsed house, kneeling down, creeping and leaning forward, both hands on the ground holding her body….. 

Suddenly, people found a 3-4 month baby under her body, wrapped in a red-yellow quilt. Because of the mother’s protecting, he remained unhurt. He was sleeping so peacefully, making all the people around warm.

When the doctors were examining the kid, a cell phone was found inside the quilt. An already written text message appeared on the screen.

“Dear baby, if you are alive, please remember I love you.”

links for 2008-05-08

• Strategic Communication for Development
  toolkitwebjan2004.pdf (application/pdf Object)
  book by World Bank

links for 2008-05-07

• The Social Times - Covering All That’s Social On the Web - News, Applications, OpenSocial, Social Media and more!

links for 2008-05-06

• Media & Entertainment For Good - WikiForGood

taking back the cognitive surplus (from the TV)

• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

I love this speech.  It is about how we are living in an era of surplus leisure time that is being gobbled by the TV, and he argues that we are now using wikis and social media and taking back some of this time for social benefit…. 

“And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation…

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.”

living in a culture of the written word

I took the subway uptown today with my new intern from Kenya, who is one awesome young lady.  I had stuffed an article in my purse, three pages about a trip of US church leaders in Sudan.  I skimmed it on the S train, it took me about 5 minutes.  She was reading over my shoulder, and it took her all the way to 116th, about 20 minutes.  Now she is an articulate youth leader, brave to come over to our crazy country, and btw, Kenya is a British colony so her English is arguably better than mine.  

But it got me thinking.  In the field of development, progress is marked in thick reports from the UN and NGOs.   In my world, development studies is a race to read as much research as possible and then produce your own.  This is a huge cultural divide.  I have copiously read and reported since the age of five, yet she could get up and give a brilliant speech off the top of her head whereas I would melt into a pool of shy.  

But this is a story about what cultures have to learn from each other. She can read all my favorite NGO reports and I can listen to her and absorb some of the oral tradition, which we have moved away from in this country.   If only we could get this kind of cultural exchange to happen at a grand scale.