The Ad Council has been a big promoter and facilitator of large public service campaigns by connecting non-profit organizations and charities with big advertising agencies. The Council has been very successful in launching very large campaigns to help numerous causes and has maintained the symbiotic relationship between causes in need and agencies who can give.
In more recent years, the Ad Council, as well as a few interactive agencies working on their own, have launched several stand-alone interactive campaigns for various causes.
Some of the more prominent ones are:
The One Campaign with a robust online presence including a blog, podcast, Facebook communities etc…
Boost UP which focuses on getting kids to stay in school with its cool microsite, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube extensions and rich media ads.
Own Your C is a killer microsite that teaches kids about their choices as they relate to tobacco.
I’m sure there are literally hundreds of other pro-bono interactive projects that have launched in the past year alone. Excellent projects that were fantastic in their execution and effective in their message for the cause. I feel the opportunity however, to truly utilize the vast talent and power of the interactive industry to create dramatic, effective, life changing projects for numerous causes remains untapped.
The Model
The main reason I feel that the power of our industry to create positive change is being underutilized is due to a lack of organization. The model by which the current pro-bono work is being created is based on the dated model set up by the Ad Council and the traditional advertising community. No doubt this model is somewhat effective in that it connects interactive agencies with causes in need, but it is too narrowly focused and limiting. The resulting projects can be very cool, but the old model really only scratches the surface of the available brain power out there to help create the work and a receptive audience.
I propose the creation of a new organization whose mission is to organize the global network of developers, designers, information architects, hosting companies, email providers, ad servers, research and analytics experts, content distribution networks, interactive agencies…etc…etc.. to create ongoing, distributed, multi-platform, leading edge interactive initiatives to facilitate positive change for humanity. I say we call it
The Society For Philanthropic Computing
There are many categories of projects under which this organization could engage. Once people embrace the idea of the organization, I’m sure literally thousands of ideas will emerge. My initial thoughts for the society fall into two categories:
Human Computation Rich Media Widgets / Toolkits
Interactive Public Service Advertising
Human Computation
I won’t go into a great deal of background on human computation here. The subject is something that has intrigued me for a while. You can view Luis Von Ahn’s presentation at Google Tech Talks on the subject below to get a thorough overview and see some of his excellent projects on the subject.
The opportunity here, as it relates to the society, is to create interactive experiences that make use of wasted human brainpower to analyze human-only readable information that could be of use to non-profit organizations.
For example, these projects could take the form of game-like loading movies or widgets on sites that ask the user to identify elements in an image for some type of research or analysis. They could also simply be missing person’s widgets or components that ask the user “Have You Seen This Person?”
The key here would be to develop a suite of easily-used components or widgets that ANY user could include on their site. These could be Flash components that activate while loading larger files or buffering video clips. They could be widgets for bloggers to feature in the sidebars of their blogs or commercial sites to incorporate in existing ad space.
The projects should all be open source and have simple to use API’s so that organizations could make use of the tools to integrate their own material and images and easily gather the data collected by the widgets.
The society would need to organize and facilitate the development of these projects by creating online collaboration tools to enable communication between developers all over the world, monitor bugs and incoming data, and set up and train organizations as users of the tools.
Interactive Public Service Advertising
Everyone has seen a public service announcement on television. Probably the most famous one would be the “This is your brain on drugs” campaign from the ’80s.
Most of us see these campaigns because the FCC mandates a certain percentage of broadcast content be for the public good. Often, this airtime occurs in the middle of the night, though some networks do make time available during more reasonable hours. This mandate to air non-commercial, PSA’S does not exist in the interactive world.
In order to create a mandate for the delivery of a certain percentage of online advertising be in the public good, The Society For Philanthropic Computing will connect:
Interactive Agencies – to donate creative and production services
Media Planning and Buying Agencies – to donate planning services and facilitate the donation of a portion of each media buy
Ad serving networks – to donate ad impressions on their networks
Content Distribution Networks – to donate bandwidth for video and rich media content
Ad publisher sites – to donate ad placements
Commercial Advertisers – to donate a portion of their media buys
The society would set up the relationships between all of the parties and coordinate the execution of the campaigns. A web interface to seamlessly integrate with all existing ad serving networks would enable painless implementation. Ideally, the insertion of interactive PSA’s into larger media buys would only happen with a few clicks. The management, tracking and analysis of those campaigns would be done independent of any larger commercial ad buy that the PSA would piggyback on.
The society would provide very public political “encouragement” for large ad buyers and companies to use the system and would heavily promote the companies who donate.
These concepts represent only a few of the possibilities for a strong, organized, well-funded organization. Seeing the success of the current independent campaigns and the viral power of the web should be encouragement enough for both non-profits and the interactive community to come together to significantly step up the interactive efforts for public good.
Adopting a philanthropic business model does seem like the way forward and in tune with modern ideas such as FOSS. Consumers needs to be much more demanding for any of this to work, they also have to have the intelligence and foresight to realize where their spent money is going to go.