The internet was an experiment that got loose, Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and one of the “Fathers of the Internet”, told comedy talk show host Stephen Colbert in July. He said, “There are about 3 billion people online now. Every time they come up with new ways of using the internet, we all learn something from that.”
By 1980, before the public internet even existed, the ARPANET bulletin board Usenet was being used to swap jokes and programming tips between engineers. In the late 1990s, internet technology was becoming more widespread, and as AOL launched features such as chat rooms and instant messaging, some of the first communities to develop reached far across geographic borders to allow cancer survivors or mothers of children with rare diseases to connect.
Twenty years later, new ways of building communities and creating connections through technology are created every day. A young boy in San Francisco became Batkid for a day, and inspired those suffering from leukemia on every continent. When nearly 300 girls were kidnapped from their school for the sin of learning, the world reacted with outrage and spoke out on social media in solidarity.
Doing good on a global scale has never been easier—but that does not mean it is easy. To have real impact, it requires accessing a community willing to leverage and support a message, as well as a platform or system that allows people to give their input into changes that affect their lives. Technology makes this more possible than at any other time in history, but some initiatives are more successful than others.
Five years after it launch, the Social Good Summit has become one of the most successful models yet for leveraging technology to create a better world for all and bringing global citizens from all corners of the world together in a space where anyone’s voice can be heard.
Social Media for Social Good
In 2009 Mashable, the news website dedicated to social media and Web 2.0 news, launched SocialMediaforSocialGood.com. At the time, Mashable was dedicated more to being “The Social Media Guide” than the viral news site it is today, and had already launched a number of campaigns to leverage the power of social media, including Tweetsgiving and Twestival; however, this social good initiative was meant from the beginning to be something different.
According to the archived website on the Wayback Machine, Social Media for Social Good was meant to be an umbrella organization run by Mashable “for organizations and charities that use social media.” Each week, a different charity would be highlighted, and guest bloggers would have the opportunity to contribute. Its first initiative was the Summer of Social Good, “the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet.” Before potato salad Kickstarter campaigns went viral, this charity drive was meant to show the world the power of social media to do good. From June 1 to August 28, 2009, the Summer of Social good raised money for WWF, Oxfam America, LiveSTRONG, and The Humane Society, and finally culminated on August 28th in the Social Good Conference hosted at 92nd Street Y in New York City. In all, over $55,000 was raised and split between the four charities.
The first Social Good Conference was dedicated primarily to how charities could leverage social media, reaching out to new audiences like never before possible. It featured some big names as speakers, like Randi Zuckerburg, then-Marketing Director at Facebook, and executives from charities such as Earth Hour and The Case Foundation. Although photos from this first conference show a few empty seats, the one-day event was livestreamed (the archived videos are still available online) and concluded with Mashable’s COO and the Social Good Conference’s main organizer Adam Hirsch proposing to Managing Editor Sharon Feder (she said yes).
Unfortunately for SocialMediaforSocialGood.com, the idea of a place where people could blog and connect to discuss the power of social media for charity was put on hold, and there is little mention of that umbrella organization again after September 2009. The Internet Archive’s last record of the site is August 30, 2009, showing a blog that had not been updated since June 1st. Author Beth Kanter walked away from the conference filled with “youthful enthusiasm for generosity, and the desire to do something,” but it was not clear that this was the best outlet for that sentiment. The Summer of Social Good ended up being its only initiative, but the “social good” concept was just getting started.
The United Nations Meets New Media
Some time in early to mid-2010, Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation, received a call from Henry Timms, Executive Director of 92nd Street Y. Calvin credits that call as the start of the Social Good Summit as we know it today.
“It all started with Henry. It’s funny how many ideas this man can generate,” Kathy Calvin said in a phone interview. “He and I were in a conversation about the mission of the UN Foundation, and he said, ‘You know, the biggest thing that people know the UN does is come together in New York every September and discuss everything, and yet the average person is not privy to the conversations that take place behind closed doors at the UN. What if we could bring that conversation out into the open and let other people really hear the important things being talked about?’”
It was a match meant to be. Mashable and 92nd Street Y were co-hosting the rebranded Social Good Summit, with the aim of creating one of the first—and only—public side events taking place during the UN General Assembly. (Neither Mashable or 92nd Street Y responded to requests for interviews for this article.) It was no coincidence this happened in 2010, as that year the United Nations dedicated a High-Level Plenary Meeting to the “significant opportunity to galvanize commitment, rally support and spur collective action in order to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.”
The 2010 Social Good Summit was meant to take a broader approach than the previous year, with the theme “How new media can change the world” and focusing on new media’s potential to accelerate the progress to the Millennium Development Goals. The UN Foundation, with its mission of connecting average citizens with the issues and work the United Nations is involved in globally, was the obvious partnership for this conversation.
The 2010 list of big name speakers grew even more: Ted Turner, founder of CNN and the philanthropist whose gift of $1 billion launched the UN Foundation, was highlighted as the Summit’s “Keynote Conversation”. Speakers representing Facebook, Kiva, (RED), PepsiCo—even a Sesame Street Muppet—took the stage on September 20th to bring awareness of the Millennium Development Goals to the public.
Although the Summit itself only lasted one day, the rest of UN Week was not left to waste. From September 21st to 24th, new media were given access to the UN Week Digital Media Lounge, where high-level UN officials and development experts alike were brought in to talk to bloggers who otherwise may not be able to get media accreditation to UN meetings in its iconic headquarters. For the first time, new technology’s potential to spark world-changing conversations from the ground up was being harnessed, and the words of global leaders were brought unfiltered to digital influencers and community creators.
The response was huge: the 971 seat auditorium at 92nd Street Y held 700 in-person attendees for the Summit; the UN Week Digital Media Lounge brought in 861 in-person attendees; and the livestream brought in a total of over 45,000 viewers over 4 days.
The world had a hunger for change, and that youthful enthusiasm Beth Kanter described in 2009 was just beginning to be recognized. But youthful enthusiasm can be capricious.
Download to Upload
In 2011, the world saw live what the Social Good Summit attendees already knew: social media can be a radical force for change in societies where challenges are deeply ingrained. The Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and more were fueled by the communities that passionate citizens were able to form on social media platforms, and while planning the 2011 Social Good Summit, Mashable, 92nd Street Y, and the UN Foundation saw it needed to respond somehow.
“That’s a bit of our challenge. We want to hold onto a big theme and look into the future, but you can’t ignore what’s going on,” Kathy Calvin said when asked about the planning for the 2011 Summit after the Egyptian Revolution. “That year, people were really intrigued with understanding what happened, but we weren’t trying to recreate the Arab Spring.”
She continued: “One thing we’ve tried to hold onto in the Social Good Summit is the focus on solution. People want to walk away thinking, ‘That’s interesting, I could go work on that,’ or ‘I could take that concept further,’ as opposed to just being freeform communication. [The Arab Spring] probably doubled the impact of the Social Good Summit because it crystallized for people who hadn’t appreciated as fully as we did that a revolution has taken place. People really wanted to listen to this conversation.”
The format of the Summit itself changed that year, growing from one day open to the public to four, and integrating the Digital Media Lounge into the full program. It also began to shift its focus in the speakers presented, shifting slightly away from high-level titles and long talks (as is seen at other globally-focused summits like the Clinton Global Initiative’s or World Economic Forum’s annual meetings) to shorter, more accessible conversations by everyday people working to make the world a better place (à la TED and SxSW). This was no longer the Summer of Social Good—it was a Digital Davos.
But despite the sessions having been livestreamed online since the very beginning, the live audience was still required to be in New York City during one of the city’s busiest times of year; even watching the livestream requires more internet speed than some developing areas can access. So in 2012, the Social Good Summit went global.
“UNDP believes that everyone should have a voice in the global conversation about the future of our planet, as well as about the role technology and innovation have in creating a better future for all of us,” Helen Clark, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and former Prime Minister of New Zealand, said in an email interview. “We see the Social Good Summit as an opportunity to connect more people in more places, including many currently living behind the digital divide. We realized that through our global network of country offices we could help bridge the gap and make sure that people were not left out of the conversation.”
After three days of discussions in New York City, participants looked to Asia and Africa as Beijing, Nairobi, and Mogadishu became central hubs to their own Social Good Summits. Even more impressively, beyond the formally organized Summit meetings, UNDP offices hosted meetups in more than 40 other countries, many of which face daily challenges of connectivity and security. Manila, The Philippines; Yerevan, Armenia; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Tokyo, Japan; Kampala, Uganda; Wellington, New Zealand; Myanmar, Egypt, Oman, Bhutan, Brazil—over 300 meetups from every continent came together during UN Week to discuss ways that technology and development could improve their own lives as well as their global neighbors’. The Global Conversation, as the worldwide reach was dubbed, resulted in 24 hours of discussions, translated into seven different languages.
“These meetups are tremendously important,” said Helen Clark. “This is part of the ‘democratization’ of social media and mobile technologies which is opening new communication channels for many hundreds of millions of people around the world. These channels allow for an unprecedented and truly global conversation which fundamentally changes the way in which we interact with each other and with public institutions.”
“September’s UN Week used to be about closed doors and closed streets. Up went the barriers as soon as the most important leaders arrived,” Henry Timms of 92nd Street Y wrote in a Global Conversation blog post. “We launched the Social Good Summit to try to open the conversation. We believed that the ‘connected generation’ had both a desire to be at the table, as well as something important to say. […] We can shift the conversation from download to upload. It’s been thrilling to see the conversation change direction. The Social Good Summit is now far more about people in New York listening to what’s happening around the world, than people around the world to listening to what’s happening in New York.”
G-Everyone
By 2013, the Social Good Summit was solidly established as a global force for development and change. But as with any major initiative, the conversations faced the potential of getting stuck in an echo chamber, not to mention the challenge of keeping the conversations’ momentum going after the Summit ended. And if there was one thing the success of the 2012 Social Good meetups showed, there was a huge thirst for a community in which people could come together to share ideas with others, both locally and internationally. People wanted to take charge of shaping the future of the world they live in.
“As soon as the [2012 Social Good Summit] was over, our phones started ringing,” said Aaron Sherinian, Vice President for Communications and Public Relations for the UN Foundation, to a room full of experts on women’s health and empowerment issues attending the 2013 Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “People were asking: How can we engage our community?”
And with that, the next step in the social good conversation was born: +SocialGood, an online platform that provides a space for ideas and best practices to be shared; that collaborates on a mix of online and live events connected with major gatherings such as SxSW and the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting; and that provides anyone with the tools and resources to host a local meetup dedicated to the Social Good conversation. (Diplomatic Courier has partnered with the UN Foundation on a series of +SocialGood events.)
+SocialGood launched with a bang, hosting a list of events including Women Deliver +SocialGood, discussing the potential of technology to empower women in areas where they are traditionally left without a voice; G-Everyone +SocialGood at the G8 Summit, a 24-hour digital gathering that brought voices from around the world together to discuss issues presented at the G8 Summit; and Diaspora +SocialGood, a series of gatherings hosted by the U.S. Department of State and the International diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA). The platform is flexible, allowing anyone from individual citizens to private sector organizations to host events targeting a specific social good topic, whether purely philanthropic or infused with elements of social entrepreneurship. In its first year, +SocialGood grew to a community of over 30,000 people, and hosted over 200 global meetups.
“The +SocialGood events have shown us how much people want to be connected,” said Kathy Calvin. “They want to exists in the microcosm that all of the Social Good Summit is, because they want to feel [what they do is] important and it was important that they did it in connection with others. That’s been a lesson for us; I think that’s what drove us towards the Keynote Listeners.”
Another new element of the 2013 Summit, the Keynote Listeners turned the inclusion of big names at the Summit on the concept of the keynote’s head. High-profile people such as Richard Branson, entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group; Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and HRH Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway attended the summit not to talk at the international audience, but rather to engage with emerging leaders, absorb the most important UN General Assembly conversations, and bring their key findings back to the Social Good conversations. This leaves space in the rest of the Summit for truly global and “authentic” voices to be heard.
“One of our problems is the authenticity of what we hear, and what we hear is often what international NGOs are telling us,” Kathy Calvin told Diplomatic Courier. “And one thing we’ve learned from some of the listening that we’re doing is that the really authentic voices don’t really see things the same way, so we’ve been looking for ways to bring those authentic voices in. We’re trying really hard to break out of the ‘New York knows everything’ mindset.”
Further building on its 2012 success, the 4th annual Social Good Summit expanded its global meetup reach—even streaming the concurrent meeting happening in Haiti to the New York City audience—and launched a new theme for the Summit: #2030Now. While technology as a force for good was still at the heart of the discussions, the new theme allowed for the world to come into the conversation on its own terms. What kind of world do we want to create between now and the year 2030?
#2030Now
In five years, the Social Good Summit has exploded, growing from its initial beginnings as a flash of conversation on how social media can bolster philanthropy and charity, to a worldwide, non-stop effort to create a better future for everyone. From the Summer of Social Good to #2030Now; from download to upload.
“Many solutions to global challenges will be found through technological innovation—from climate change mitigation to disaster preparedness. A data revolution is also taking place. Transparent access to updated, reliable and disaggregated information about development issues is needed,” said Helen Clark. “New online platforms allow citizens to speak directly to their governments and to their societies on what matters to them, and on how they can help shape creating a better world for themselves and their communities.”
In the process, the Social Good conversation has disrupted no less of an institution than the United Nations itself. In what would normally be a closed debate between world leaders and select NGO partners, the discussion over what the UN’s priorities show be following the 2015 due date of the Millennium Development Goals have been opened to all global citizens through the MY World campaign.
“So far, more than 3.2 million people from 194 countries and territories have participated in the global outreach on post-2015,” Helen Clark told Diplomatic Courier. “The UN has sought the voices of those who are usually not heard—particularly those of the poor, excluded, or marginalized. We used the technology available today to empower people, and to give voice to an unprecedented number who otherwise would have no opportunity to participate.”
“This has been a time of radical inclusion and radical consultation, and I feel that we helped create the acceptance of that at the UN,” said Kathy Calvin. “I think we’ve gotten enough experience to show that you can bring people together and they can have really creative and positive conversations; and that would be what kind of wonderful things can happen to ensure total buy-in to the goals.”
This ability to bring people together—to ensure that buy-in by giving everyone a place to make their voice heard, to listen to what people are passionate about—was credited by both Helen Clark and Kathy Calvin as a major element of the Social Good Summit’s success.
And the Summit organizers have taken to heart the entrepreneurial mantra to never stop learning. In five years of Summits, new features have been continually introduced—some later discarded, some phenomenally successful. This year, the Summit introduced a SxSW-style opportunity to pitch your own panel, expanding even further the radical inclusion concept. Helen Clark and UNDP hope to eventually expand the meetups and summits to every country in the world.
Kathy Calvin sees the future of the Summit in broader terms. “The work we’ve been doing over the past few years to get the conversation going is one thing,” she said. The next step she sees is “how we’re all working together to achieve it.” The next big shift for the Summit may be from an aspirational mindset to a practical one—once we know what we want out of #2030Now, how do we get there?
The answers to that challenge could come from anywhere. And with the power of technology to create communities like the Social Good Summit and +SocialGood, everyone can have a voice in shaping the world we want.
Chrisella Sagers Herzog is the managing editor of Diplomatic Courier and Editor-in-Chief of WhiteHat Magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @Chrisella.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's September/October 2014 print edition.
a global affairs media network
Download to Upload: Five Years of the Social Good Summit
September 2, 2014
The internet was an experiment that got loose, Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and one of the “Fathers of the Internet”, told comedy talk show host Stephen Colbert in July. He said, “There are about 3 billion people online now. Every time they come up with new ways of using the internet, we all learn something from that.”
By 1980, before the public internet even existed, the ARPANET bulletin board Usenet was being used to swap jokes and programming tips between engineers. In the late 1990s, internet technology was becoming more widespread, and as AOL launched features such as chat rooms and instant messaging, some of the first communities to develop reached far across geographic borders to allow cancer survivors or mothers of children with rare diseases to connect.
Twenty years later, new ways of building communities and creating connections through technology are created every day. A young boy in San Francisco became Batkid for a day, and inspired those suffering from leukemia on every continent. When nearly 300 girls were kidnapped from their school for the sin of learning, the world reacted with outrage and spoke out on social media in solidarity.
Doing good on a global scale has never been easier—but that does not mean it is easy. To have real impact, it requires accessing a community willing to leverage and support a message, as well as a platform or system that allows people to give their input into changes that affect their lives. Technology makes this more possible than at any other time in history, but some initiatives are more successful than others.
Five years after it launch, the Social Good Summit has become one of the most successful models yet for leveraging technology to create a better world for all and bringing global citizens from all corners of the world together in a space where anyone’s voice can be heard.
Social Media for Social Good
In 2009 Mashable, the news website dedicated to social media and Web 2.0 news, launched SocialMediaforSocialGood.com. At the time, Mashable was dedicated more to being “The Social Media Guide” than the viral news site it is today, and had already launched a number of campaigns to leverage the power of social media, including Tweetsgiving and Twestival; however, this social good initiative was meant from the beginning to be something different.
According to the archived website on the Wayback Machine, Social Media for Social Good was meant to be an umbrella organization run by Mashable “for organizations and charities that use social media.” Each week, a different charity would be highlighted, and guest bloggers would have the opportunity to contribute. Its first initiative was the Summer of Social Good, “the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet.” Before potato salad Kickstarter campaigns went viral, this charity drive was meant to show the world the power of social media to do good. From June 1 to August 28, 2009, the Summer of Social good raised money for WWF, Oxfam America, LiveSTRONG, and The Humane Society, and finally culminated on August 28th in the Social Good Conference hosted at 92nd Street Y in New York City. In all, over $55,000 was raised and split between the four charities.
The first Social Good Conference was dedicated primarily to how charities could leverage social media, reaching out to new audiences like never before possible. It featured some big names as speakers, like Randi Zuckerburg, then-Marketing Director at Facebook, and executives from charities such as Earth Hour and The Case Foundation. Although photos from this first conference show a few empty seats, the one-day event was livestreamed (the archived videos are still available online) and concluded with Mashable’s COO and the Social Good Conference’s main organizer Adam Hirsch proposing to Managing Editor Sharon Feder (she said yes).
Unfortunately for SocialMediaforSocialGood.com, the idea of a place where people could blog and connect to discuss the power of social media for charity was put on hold, and there is little mention of that umbrella organization again after September 2009. The Internet Archive’s last record of the site is August 30, 2009, showing a blog that had not been updated since June 1st. Author Beth Kanter walked away from the conference filled with “youthful enthusiasm for generosity, and the desire to do something,” but it was not clear that this was the best outlet for that sentiment. The Summer of Social Good ended up being its only initiative, but the “social good” concept was just getting started.
The United Nations Meets New Media
Some time in early to mid-2010, Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation, received a call from Henry Timms, Executive Director of 92nd Street Y. Calvin credits that call as the start of the Social Good Summit as we know it today.
“It all started with Henry. It’s funny how many ideas this man can generate,” Kathy Calvin said in a phone interview. “He and I were in a conversation about the mission of the UN Foundation, and he said, ‘You know, the biggest thing that people know the UN does is come together in New York every September and discuss everything, and yet the average person is not privy to the conversations that take place behind closed doors at the UN. What if we could bring that conversation out into the open and let other people really hear the important things being talked about?’”
It was a match meant to be. Mashable and 92nd Street Y were co-hosting the rebranded Social Good Summit, with the aim of creating one of the first—and only—public side events taking place during the UN General Assembly. (Neither Mashable or 92nd Street Y responded to requests for interviews for this article.) It was no coincidence this happened in 2010, as that year the United Nations dedicated a High-Level Plenary Meeting to the “significant opportunity to galvanize commitment, rally support and spur collective action in order to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.”
The 2010 Social Good Summit was meant to take a broader approach than the previous year, with the theme “How new media can change the world” and focusing on new media’s potential to accelerate the progress to the Millennium Development Goals. The UN Foundation, with its mission of connecting average citizens with the issues and work the United Nations is involved in globally, was the obvious partnership for this conversation.
The 2010 list of big name speakers grew even more: Ted Turner, founder of CNN and the philanthropist whose gift of $1 billion launched the UN Foundation, was highlighted as the Summit’s “Keynote Conversation”. Speakers representing Facebook, Kiva, (RED), PepsiCo—even a Sesame Street Muppet—took the stage on September 20th to bring awareness of the Millennium Development Goals to the public.
Although the Summit itself only lasted one day, the rest of UN Week was not left to waste. From September 21st to 24th, new media were given access to the UN Week Digital Media Lounge, where high-level UN officials and development experts alike were brought in to talk to bloggers who otherwise may not be able to get media accreditation to UN meetings in its iconic headquarters. For the first time, new technology’s potential to spark world-changing conversations from the ground up was being harnessed, and the words of global leaders were brought unfiltered to digital influencers and community creators.
The response was huge: the 971 seat auditorium at 92nd Street Y held 700 in-person attendees for the Summit; the UN Week Digital Media Lounge brought in 861 in-person attendees; and the livestream brought in a total of over 45,000 viewers over 4 days.
The world had a hunger for change, and that youthful enthusiasm Beth Kanter described in 2009 was just beginning to be recognized. But youthful enthusiasm can be capricious.
Download to Upload
In 2011, the world saw live what the Social Good Summit attendees already knew: social media can be a radical force for change in societies where challenges are deeply ingrained. The Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and more were fueled by the communities that passionate citizens were able to form on social media platforms, and while planning the 2011 Social Good Summit, Mashable, 92nd Street Y, and the UN Foundation saw it needed to respond somehow.
“That’s a bit of our challenge. We want to hold onto a big theme and look into the future, but you can’t ignore what’s going on,” Kathy Calvin said when asked about the planning for the 2011 Summit after the Egyptian Revolution. “That year, people were really intrigued with understanding what happened, but we weren’t trying to recreate the Arab Spring.”
She continued: “One thing we’ve tried to hold onto in the Social Good Summit is the focus on solution. People want to walk away thinking, ‘That’s interesting, I could go work on that,’ or ‘I could take that concept further,’ as opposed to just being freeform communication. [The Arab Spring] probably doubled the impact of the Social Good Summit because it crystallized for people who hadn’t appreciated as fully as we did that a revolution has taken place. People really wanted to listen to this conversation.”
The format of the Summit itself changed that year, growing from one day open to the public to four, and integrating the Digital Media Lounge into the full program. It also began to shift its focus in the speakers presented, shifting slightly away from high-level titles and long talks (as is seen at other globally-focused summits like the Clinton Global Initiative’s or World Economic Forum’s annual meetings) to shorter, more accessible conversations by everyday people working to make the world a better place (à la TED and SxSW). This was no longer the Summer of Social Good—it was a Digital Davos.
But despite the sessions having been livestreamed online since the very beginning, the live audience was still required to be in New York City during one of the city’s busiest times of year; even watching the livestream requires more internet speed than some developing areas can access. So in 2012, the Social Good Summit went global.
“UNDP believes that everyone should have a voice in the global conversation about the future of our planet, as well as about the role technology and innovation have in creating a better future for all of us,” Helen Clark, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and former Prime Minister of New Zealand, said in an email interview. “We see the Social Good Summit as an opportunity to connect more people in more places, including many currently living behind the digital divide. We realized that through our global network of country offices we could help bridge the gap and make sure that people were not left out of the conversation.”
After three days of discussions in New York City, participants looked to Asia and Africa as Beijing, Nairobi, and Mogadishu became central hubs to their own Social Good Summits. Even more impressively, beyond the formally organized Summit meetings, UNDP offices hosted meetups in more than 40 other countries, many of which face daily challenges of connectivity and security. Manila, The Philippines; Yerevan, Armenia; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Tokyo, Japan; Kampala, Uganda; Wellington, New Zealand; Myanmar, Egypt, Oman, Bhutan, Brazil—over 300 meetups from every continent came together during UN Week to discuss ways that technology and development could improve their own lives as well as their global neighbors’. The Global Conversation, as the worldwide reach was dubbed, resulted in 24 hours of discussions, translated into seven different languages.
“These meetups are tremendously important,” said Helen Clark. “This is part of the ‘democratization’ of social media and mobile technologies which is opening new communication channels for many hundreds of millions of people around the world. These channels allow for an unprecedented and truly global conversation which fundamentally changes the way in which we interact with each other and with public institutions.”
“September’s UN Week used to be about closed doors and closed streets. Up went the barriers as soon as the most important leaders arrived,” Henry Timms of 92nd Street Y wrote in a Global Conversation blog post. “We launched the Social Good Summit to try to open the conversation. We believed that the ‘connected generation’ had both a desire to be at the table, as well as something important to say. […] We can shift the conversation from download to upload. It’s been thrilling to see the conversation change direction. The Social Good Summit is now far more about people in New York listening to what’s happening around the world, than people around the world to listening to what’s happening in New York.”
G-Everyone
By 2013, the Social Good Summit was solidly established as a global force for development and change. But as with any major initiative, the conversations faced the potential of getting stuck in an echo chamber, not to mention the challenge of keeping the conversations’ momentum going after the Summit ended. And if there was one thing the success of the 2012 Social Good meetups showed, there was a huge thirst for a community in which people could come together to share ideas with others, both locally and internationally. People wanted to take charge of shaping the future of the world they live in.
“As soon as the [2012 Social Good Summit] was over, our phones started ringing,” said Aaron Sherinian, Vice President for Communications and Public Relations for the UN Foundation, to a room full of experts on women’s health and empowerment issues attending the 2013 Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “People were asking: How can we engage our community?”
And with that, the next step in the social good conversation was born: +SocialGood, an online platform that provides a space for ideas and best practices to be shared; that collaborates on a mix of online and live events connected with major gatherings such as SxSW and the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting; and that provides anyone with the tools and resources to host a local meetup dedicated to the Social Good conversation. (Diplomatic Courier has partnered with the UN Foundation on a series of +SocialGood events.)
+SocialGood launched with a bang, hosting a list of events including Women Deliver +SocialGood, discussing the potential of technology to empower women in areas where they are traditionally left without a voice; G-Everyone +SocialGood at the G8 Summit, a 24-hour digital gathering that brought voices from around the world together to discuss issues presented at the G8 Summit; and Diaspora +SocialGood, a series of gatherings hosted by the U.S. Department of State and the International diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA). The platform is flexible, allowing anyone from individual citizens to private sector organizations to host events targeting a specific social good topic, whether purely philanthropic or infused with elements of social entrepreneurship. In its first year, +SocialGood grew to a community of over 30,000 people, and hosted over 200 global meetups.
“The +SocialGood events have shown us how much people want to be connected,” said Kathy Calvin. “They want to exists in the microcosm that all of the Social Good Summit is, because they want to feel [what they do is] important and it was important that they did it in connection with others. That’s been a lesson for us; I think that’s what drove us towards the Keynote Listeners.”
Another new element of the 2013 Summit, the Keynote Listeners turned the inclusion of big names at the Summit on the concept of the keynote’s head. High-profile people such as Richard Branson, entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group; Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and HRH Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway attended the summit not to talk at the international audience, but rather to engage with emerging leaders, absorb the most important UN General Assembly conversations, and bring their key findings back to the Social Good conversations. This leaves space in the rest of the Summit for truly global and “authentic” voices to be heard.
“One of our problems is the authenticity of what we hear, and what we hear is often what international NGOs are telling us,” Kathy Calvin told Diplomatic Courier. “And one thing we’ve learned from some of the listening that we’re doing is that the really authentic voices don’t really see things the same way, so we’ve been looking for ways to bring those authentic voices in. We’re trying really hard to break out of the ‘New York knows everything’ mindset.”
Further building on its 2012 success, the 4th annual Social Good Summit expanded its global meetup reach—even streaming the concurrent meeting happening in Haiti to the New York City audience—and launched a new theme for the Summit: #2030Now. While technology as a force for good was still at the heart of the discussions, the new theme allowed for the world to come into the conversation on its own terms. What kind of world do we want to create between now and the year 2030?
#2030Now
In five years, the Social Good Summit has exploded, growing from its initial beginnings as a flash of conversation on how social media can bolster philanthropy and charity, to a worldwide, non-stop effort to create a better future for everyone. From the Summer of Social Good to #2030Now; from download to upload.
“Many solutions to global challenges will be found through technological innovation—from climate change mitigation to disaster preparedness. A data revolution is also taking place. Transparent access to updated, reliable and disaggregated information about development issues is needed,” said Helen Clark. “New online platforms allow citizens to speak directly to their governments and to their societies on what matters to them, and on how they can help shape creating a better world for themselves and their communities.”
In the process, the Social Good conversation has disrupted no less of an institution than the United Nations itself. In what would normally be a closed debate between world leaders and select NGO partners, the discussion over what the UN’s priorities show be following the 2015 due date of the Millennium Development Goals have been opened to all global citizens through the MY World campaign.
“So far, more than 3.2 million people from 194 countries and territories have participated in the global outreach on post-2015,” Helen Clark told Diplomatic Courier. “The UN has sought the voices of those who are usually not heard—particularly those of the poor, excluded, or marginalized. We used the technology available today to empower people, and to give voice to an unprecedented number who otherwise would have no opportunity to participate.”
“This has been a time of radical inclusion and radical consultation, and I feel that we helped create the acceptance of that at the UN,” said Kathy Calvin. “I think we’ve gotten enough experience to show that you can bring people together and they can have really creative and positive conversations; and that would be what kind of wonderful things can happen to ensure total buy-in to the goals.”
This ability to bring people together—to ensure that buy-in by giving everyone a place to make their voice heard, to listen to what people are passionate about—was credited by both Helen Clark and Kathy Calvin as a major element of the Social Good Summit’s success.
And the Summit organizers have taken to heart the entrepreneurial mantra to never stop learning. In five years of Summits, new features have been continually introduced—some later discarded, some phenomenally successful. This year, the Summit introduced a SxSW-style opportunity to pitch your own panel, expanding even further the radical inclusion concept. Helen Clark and UNDP hope to eventually expand the meetups and summits to every country in the world.
Kathy Calvin sees the future of the Summit in broader terms. “The work we’ve been doing over the past few years to get the conversation going is one thing,” she said. The next step she sees is “how we’re all working together to achieve it.” The next big shift for the Summit may be from an aspirational mindset to a practical one—once we know what we want out of #2030Now, how do we get there?
The answers to that challenge could come from anywhere. And with the power of technology to create communities like the Social Good Summit and +SocialGood, everyone can have a voice in shaping the world we want.
Chrisella Sagers Herzog is the managing editor of Diplomatic Courier and Editor-in-Chief of WhiteHat Magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @Chrisella.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's September/October 2014 print edition.
