What do The Most Amazing Online Organizing Guide Ever, The Range blog at High Country News and a tweet from the UN WOMEN agency have in common?
Besides residing in former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes,” the answer is the Resource Media connection.
We provide a wide range of communications services to partners day in and day out. But as a mission-driven nonprofit, Resource Media staff are always looking for – and finding – ways to add our own perspective to the issues we work on and the communities we engage or call home.
Sometimes, that looks like one-off opportunities. Just this week, Nicole Lampe presents at PDXTech4Good’s Net Tuesday, bringing Portland Oregon’s digital innovators together to share lessons from the field, and Liz Banse guest lectures to a Fundraising & Communications for Nonprofits class in the University of Washington’s Nonprofit Management Certificate program.
It also comes through sustained contributions. Ben Long writes a regular blog on life in the West for The Range at High Country News. Nicole serves as an advisor for the Web of Change community, part of a team of volunteers who organize the annual gathering that explores the digital frontiers of social change. And we are very proud to be an official sponsor of the forthcoming The Most Amazing Online Organizing Guide Ever. Stay tuned for that one!
It can also take the form of generating our own content to inject into a news cycle or a deeper discussion.
When Nevada Energy CEO Michael Yackira commented recently “the future of energy in the U.S. and in our state specifically does not have coal in it,” the opportunity was too good to pass up. We cobbled together a simple billboard to spread around Facebook, and then set it free and alerted our friends. The result? Lots of likes & shares, and hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on a simple message, from a utility leader, about the transition away from coal-fired power generation.
In advance of Earth Day, recognizing an opportunity to highlight important connections between conservation and voluntary family planning, we produced a more polished infographic, arguing for placing women at the center of better policy decisions. Our rollout for this was measured and intentional, encouraging a broad range of partners to leverage their networks for distribution. In the end, it flew fast and furious around the globe, with hundreds of Facebook and blog posts, as well as tweets from NGO’s, government agencies and experts, like this one that was delivered to over 200K followers of @UN_Women.
There are so many stories yet to be told in the pursuit of social change. Once in a while it’s our job to tell them ourselves.
