| Q & A 12.26.07 12:35 PM |
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| Connecting With a Common Cause |
| Environmental activist Jamie Henn used new online tools—and smart marketing tips—to coordinate 1,400 events across the country. |
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Step It Up coordinator Jamie Henn.
Photo: Courtesy of Jamie Henn |
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All this month we're bringing you Q&As with our 2007 Event Strategists of the Year. Our fourth and final honoree doesn’t really consider himself an event planner or strategist—he’s really an environmental activist—but his work offers insights for business-minded tasks such as planning PR stunts, organizing teams online, and sending a consistent message at simultaneous events in different locations.
Jamie Henn may be a 23-year-old recent college grad who wears shorts to work, but his experience rallying far-flung groups around a message should be familiar to executives planning corporate events and meetings. Henn and six other coordinators of the Manchester, New Hampshire-based nonprofit Step It Up combined old-fashioned networking with modern technology to coordinate concurrent events in every state this past April to raise awareness about global warming. (The group was at again with its “National Day of Climate Action” on November 3.) Compelling someone to ski down a glacier (as a few daredevils in Wyoming did) is ambitious stuff, but crafting a strategy to engage hundreds of thousands of disparate participants spread around the country is even more impressive.
You graduated from college this past April. Do you have any event experience?
I’ve pulled together rallies before, but it’s a different ball game when you’re trying to pull off 1,400 simultaneous events in 50 states. It requires a whole new skill set.
Explain how you encouraged organizers to put their own stamp on an event, while still staying true to your organization’s values.
By making this an open-source event and allowing people to set up events that fit the local audience, we ended up with some rallies that had a big activist theme and others that didn’t have a political message and were more about individual action. That does come with risk, and the way we avoided it was by being very loose in some areas and very specific in others. For example, our location theme for April was broad: gathering in iconic places. But the specific result we wanted was someone to take a picture and for there to be a banner in that picture that read, “Step it up, Congress! Cut carbon 80% by 2050.” So when we got the pictures back, there were thousands of different places and different types of people, but right there in the center was this united call. If we hadn’t had that united theme, we could have ended up with a bunch of events that didn’t really feel connected.
The Internet has given you a huge advantage in getting the word out so quickly.
This campaign wouldn’t have been possible even three or four years ago. But we aren’t just using the Internet to ask people to organize a digital rally or sign a petition online; we’re asking them to get out there and organize. This is an online campaign, yet the real result occurs offline. To get the word out, we did some traditional outreach—or what’s become traditional—on Facebook and MySpace. We also had a ton of help from more than 125 organizations, from the Sierra Club all the way down to churches and local food co-ops. We could have engaged only those people directly involved in global warming, but places like churches are where people are coming together to talk about these things. We valued those networks as much as a Sierra Club. If someone gets a message from a local group they really know and trust, sometimes that means even more. We asked all of those groups to put up a link to us on their home page, to write a blog post. What helped was that we weren’t extremely dogmatic about the way we went about it. The goal of all our online efforts was redundancy. People want to see you everywhere, and they should see you everywhere. So one day they might read a blog post about your organization and a few days later hear about it in an email from someone they know.
Did you take your message offline, too?
Early on we partnered with Working Films, which creates movies that inspire change. When Everything’s Cool, a documentary that follows global-warming activists, was showing at Sundance, we partnered with the company on a publicity stunt. We got more than 1,000 middle-school students from a school in Park City, Utah, to spell out “Step It Up” in the snow, and took an aerial photo, which we used in our publicity campaign. The New York Times ran the photo, along with a story about us, on the front page of its national section. When people are thinking, How do I get people excited about this event?, powerful, newsworthy images are really important. They convey a sense of momentum and convince people that this is something they really want to be associated with.
Once people found out about Step It Up, how did you keep them engaged?
I think a lot of nonprofits and companies miss out by using their Web sites just to convey information, like a poster on a building. We tried to make ours interactive and newsworthy. When people use it to organize a local event, that event gets listed alongside all the other events across the country, on a map. That’s rewarding for them to see. We also make it easy for people to communicate with us. We get almost 100 emails a day from around the country, some of them angry. Someone wrote in asking why we don’t have press releases that people could upload, so we added that capability. You can’t really write the administrators of most sites and expect them to make a change. Our strategy is like Wikipedia—we weren’t creating the content, our users were. And we give people a reason to come back. On our blog right now is information about an event happening in Buffalo, a guest post from an activist author, and a video. The more you use your online communication as an opportunity to engage, the more likely you are to get people interested.
What business lessons have you learned?
Adding a level of creativity about how you get the word out shows people that this is something interesting, something unique. There’s risk—it might turn people off. But when people see there’s a real human putting this together who is thinking about what will appeal to me, people really value that. We really wanted to get members of Congress involved to carry the message forward, and one of our organizers in Maryland, completely unprompted by us, canoed up the river right in front of the congressman’s house and was invited into his backyard. They ended up talking about global warming for 45 minutes. People get 100 emails a day, so I think they appreciate it when you think untraditionally, or use a little humor, to go around the normal systems society sets up.
Do you see overlap between what you’re doing and the corporate world?
I do, especially with something like global warming, which involves people from all different backgrounds. How people want to be engaged applies to business as much as nonprofits. I think the one lesson from Step It Up that applies to both is that people want to make change in their own lives but also want to be part of something and be connected to the larger community. When you’re providing a service or getting people engaged in an event, it’s good to show not only the big-world meaning of it, but the meaning for the individual, too. Here’s the connection for you, personally, and here’s what it’s going to do for the whole. Finding the best way to bridge those two layers is really important.
MORE FROM JAMIE HENN
What’s Not in His Job Description: “Introducing elderly folk to the Internet.”
What He’s Reading: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild and Fight Global Warming Now: A Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community by Bill McKibben
Biggest Accomplishment of 2007: “Organizing the largest, national global-warming demonstration in U.S. history.”
Goal for 2008: “Mobilizing enough grassroots support through organized events to pass serious climate legislation in the U.S. Congress.”
How He Sees Events Changing: “With new technology, there is no longer the need to transport people to a central location, spewing carbon along the way. Instead, individuals and groups can host events locally and connect nationally, even globally, through the Internet.”
Favorite New Technology: “Basecamp, an online, collaborative project-management application that facilitates communication when handling tasks with multiple contributors.”
How He Measures ROI: “We look at the number of distributed events we are able to coordinate, measure our media coverage, and count off how many politicians got their act together because of our work.”
—Michele Marchetti
RELATED TOPICS
Event Strategists of the Year, Step It Up, Going Green
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