Panel, Fireside Chat
Building a Global Community to Drive Social Change
Milken InstituteAlden, Sean, Ben, Jesse, Michelle, Yancey, Patty, Xavier, Dwayne Johnson, Steven Spielberg, George Soros, Clinton, Barack, Obama
- The organization anticipates 300 million monthly Facebook game players and aims to reach millions via a game project that prioritizes playing over fundraising, though it has already raised roughly $200,000 and faces risks regarding US stickiness, shifting platform rules, and the need for NGO partners to avoid trivializing issues like women's oppression.
- Media expansion plans include a new TV network launching August 1st, a team structure of five on film, five on television, and three to four on digital, and a daily feed of approximately 11,000 content pieces annually to support a community of 600,000 active members who will be re-engaged through legacy campaign elements.
- Strategic focus involves creating a unified team based on shared values rather than siloed issues, tracking "do" versus "learn" clicks via a site relaunch to create accountable metrics, and developing local chapters across all continents except Antarctica managed via Google Hangouts.
- Content curation standards mandate that films must be compelling entertainment first, require social action department approval for community leverage, and explicitly reject white supremacist content or partnerships.
- Financial and partnership models expect that corporate alliances rarely last long unless they benefit the partner's P&L, with a focus on selling ads to reflect an engaged life and generating revenue through hustling while managing the risk that philanthropy can sometimes cause harm.
- Future growth projections suggest a tipping point driven by 54% of people desiring more engagement, fueled by rising global challenges like climate change and a societal shift toward transparency and consumer habits that prioritize value alignment.
- Operational plans include spending advertising money in countries outside the US to build critical mass, creating a cross-media impact index measuring personal, shared, and public interest, and using a "Neighbor Day" event with 2,100 previous iterations to recruit new community members.
- Risk factors include bureaucracy and turf wars preventing nonprofits from pivoting, the unpredictability of monetary engagement due to imperfect reality understanding, and the difficulty of convincing partners like Gems to accept game-based concepts without adequate participation calls.
- Organizational philosophy centers on decentralization to increase individual efficacy, moving away from structures built around specific individuals toward issue-underpinning models, and applying pressure to fix specific problems like slavery while explaining complex stories for major entities.
- Market trends indicate a disconnect between the mainstream world's awareness and the "integrated good" movement, with expectations that the trend of doing good will increase due to significant future problems and that people need to be asked to participate to drive engagement.