The Social Change Media Delivery Problem

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-03-27 03:10:00 UTC
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I'm at a session at the Skoll World Forum called "Technology and Shifting Power in a Hyper-Connected World," with panelists including the directors of Pop!Tech and Witness. One of the interesting questions the session brings up is how social change media creators find pathways to deliver the content they're trying to deliver to the people they're actually trying to get it to?

Witness is a great example. Witness does an incredible job helping train people around the world use multimedia to fight human rights abuses. They recognize that with the technology we have - particularly mobile photos and video - everyone anywhere can become a human rights defender. They've created a site called The Hub that is designed to be the home of all of that very powerful content and help get it to people.

The question becomes, however, how organizations like theirs cultivate the audience they're looking for? As we can testify at Change.org, building communities of regular content consumers is an incredibly time consuming and complicated job. With so many options for content, giving users reasons to keep coming back to your site (or as is the case with feed readers now, to select your content to come to them) requires giving them a constant and continuous stream of valuable material.

It seems to me that while social change organizations are often in the position to create some of the singularly most compelling content out there, the amount of time it takes to cultivate the audience that they actually want to consume that content is very difficult.

Does this resonate with others' experience?

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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