Digital campaigns have come a long way! Promoting up and coming products, services, and/or campaigns is now more readily available through Kickstarter—“a funding platform for creative projects.” At Social Driver, we help clients Get with the Future by supporting both entertaining and revolutionary social projects. Check out 6 of the best Kickstarter video campaigns that caught our attention:
Campaign #1: Kickstarter Open Source Death Star
Pledge: £20,000,000
The force is definitely with the team behind the Kickstarter Open Source Death Star campaign! Based in London, the project has received worldwide recognition & support. While creation of an actual Death Star may be bleak, the Kickstarter Open Source Death Star campaign is momentous. Steadily growing towards it’s goal to gain “more detailed plans and enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.”
Campaign #2: Dog Days
Pledge: $30,000
Local directors Laura Waters Hinson and Kasey Kirby set out to document the successes and tribulations of two uncanny hotdog stand owners in the Washington, DC area. Coite, a former industrial engineer, and Siyone, a former East African refugee, join forces to keep street vending alive despite the new popularity of “food truck” vendors. The gain for pledging towards this campaign ranges from donating $5—which will allot you special thanks on the movie website, to $5,000 (or more)—which will grant you the credit of Contributing Associate Producer in the film and more perks. With under a month to go the campaign is almost halfway to their goal!
Campaign #3: LiveCode
Pledge: £350,000
“If you couldn’t code before, LiveCode is the answer.” The application—Live Code—is already available to a fourth of Secondary Schools in Scotland. Of those schools, students using the program for a year have shown a significant increase in computer science interest. LiveCode is produced by RunRev Ltd. (app developers) and is described as the “next generation hyper card” program. The Kickstarter campaign was created to help fund the program to run on every popular device and code in English. By mid-March the program will be available and free to schools and universities globally. The initiative of LiveCode is to encourage digital literacy by helping young minds write interactive software.
Campaign #4: /Crowdring
Pledge: $15,000
Through /Crowdring, Deepa Gupta, Adriana Valdez Young, Carina Molnar, and Leonardo Eloi planned to unite the world on social justice issues. In 2011, a movement in India gained 35 million petition phone calls from supporters to a local number. However, the supportive phone calls did not suffice because there was no system maintain and organize the data. /Crowdring is an application that is developed to allow those supporting any movement around the world to use their phone call as a petition signature. These “mobile signatures” will then be presented to politicians and lawmakers as encouragement for change. With developing partnerships in Rio, Nairobi, and Bangalore, /Crowdring is on it’s way to revolutionizing involvement in social movements.
Campaign #5: GPS Art Poster
Pledge: $500
This non-traditional art form has caught the attention of many. Although the campaign isn’t over the poster art exceeded its goal by over $7,000 dollars. Collected from thousands of impressions from GPS users around any city, each piece embodies layers of traveled routes. When finished the artistry shows a layout of a city with interconnected lines, some denser than others, which conveys areas highly traveled. The finished product, a frame-able poster, can be made from any area in the USA as well as the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark.
Campaign #6: Embrace+
Pledge: $220,000
Say goodbye to interrupting meetings or movies with phone alerts! Described as a “fashion accessory with true functionality,” Embrace+ (for androids and Iphones) is a bracelet which alerts it’s wearer with color coded alerts. From incoming calls and texts to email, Facebook, or Twitter notifications, Embrace+ keeps you in sync without having the phone directly in your hand. Each notification has the possibility of being to be color coded letting you know exactly which type of notification your receiving. Even down to your girlfriend/boyfriend or boss calling you. The campaign for the sleek notification design is still underway to release the final product of the Embrace+ with the 5ATM waterproof grade.
Share in the comments below your favorite Kickstarter campaign!
To find out more how Social Driver can aid your upcoming campaign contact us at Info@SocialDriver.com.
We visited our friends over at the Capital Area Food Bank during their open house the other week. We were both inspired and excited about the incredible work that CAFB is doing for our community. We had the honor of working with them on their new responsive website this year and we look forward to seeing what else they accomplish in the years to come.
Check out what’s been happening over at Social Driver’s YouTube Channel!
Once Social Driver’s Anthony Shop saw BidPal in action, he wanted to learn more. Area director for BidPal, Josh Meyer, presented his new innovation to replace those pesky silent auction bid sheets with handheld devices. BidPal is helping traditional galas “get with the future” using tech-savvy auction automation and that’s why we love BidPal.
All you need is your credit card, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android and you can monitor the auction in the palm of your hand. Extra motivation and competition are incorporated as guests have access to the highest bids and the donation totals. Watch the video to learn more!
We are so happy to welcome Julia Rocchi, the Managing Editor for the National Trust for Historic Preservation back to the Social Driver blog (see her previous post 5 Essential Tips for a Successful Nonprofit Website Redesign). At our most recent Social Driver’s Ed, Julia shared 5 tips for finding and engaging influencers through social media.
Julia talked at our event about a multimedia documentary project called “Buffalo Unscripted.” They initially wanted to do a documentary of Buffalonians talking candidly about their city, but what started out as a marketing piece just for Buffalo turned into a great marketing piece for the Trust because of the incredible engagement they found with the people of Buffalo. Here are the 5 tips that Julia talked about in her talk:
At Social Driver we like to talk about “getting with the future.” One of things that make me really excited about the future is the fact that people have great ideas, want to do really good things, and launch awesome products. With the digital web and the social web, these people are able to take those ideas and scale them up.
Sometimes people us the word disruptive to describe social media tools, websites, and mobile technology. What they really mean is that the people using these tools are messing up their plans, which they’ve spend a lot of money to build. Technology isn’t disruptive; it’s people’s habits with technology that is disruptive.
Instead of framing things in terms of technology, you should frame things in terms of people and focus on what people are doing. Here are a few emerging trends that we see:
We see this a lot in DC with Bikeshare, Zipcar, most recently Car2Go. Consumers don’t have to save vast amounts of money or take a lot of time to get what they want anymore. They can get it now, at a low cost by sharing it with other people. This is affecting a lot of different industries, not just the automotive industry. For example, people can rent time on 3D printers instead of spending $100,000 on a device. We are building the first generation of social consumers. They are consumers that are used to sharing things. It’s already affecting the car industry and it will continue to affect other industries, as the millennial generation continues to demand the ability to share products in order to have access to things they would usually have to save up to enjoy.
In the late 1990s, Alan Cooper wrote a book called The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, which talked about the idea of personas and scenarios. It said that if you are going to build a product, you should create story about your consumer and talk about how the product will fit into their everyday. In early 2000s, we saw The Cluetrain Manifesto, which posited that people are going to be leaving digital traces everywhere. As you are moving through your day, you are leaving digital cookie crumbs, which can be used to tell stories about what you do and why you do it.
Social information is creating a powerful context for decision-making. People trust their peers when it comes to decision-making. If you see Ashton Kutcher tweet something about his Nikon camera, you know that he’s getting paid by Nikon to tweet that. However, if you go to Amazon and see 5000 reviews that are 2 or 3-stars, you’ll know that Ashton is a big liar.
Digital is quickly becoming the same thing as not digital. What I mean is that if you can scale things up with digital technologies, then it’s going to be part of everything you do. There is no more e-commerce, there is just commerce. There is no more digital activism, there is just activism. There is no more electronic publishing, there is just publishing. This can go for any industry. The ones that innovate and build digital into their plans are the ones that will advance through history.
People have always had really great ideas, but the exciting thing about where we are today is that the social technology they are using and the habits that they are adopting is increasing the likelihood that you can scale your goals and outcomes, not just your reach.
This video was shown at the opening of the Typophile Conference in Seattle in July 2007. It is an inspiring example of how we can use design to not only create something beautiful, but to tell a story. There is no identity or personal characteristics revealed in the video, just a sped up story of life told through the typography that we see everyday. I challenge you to watch this without getting a little misty-eyed.
We’ve heard it time and time again: “it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.” Indeed, networking is more crucial than ever, but let’s be real – who has time for all those follow-up emails, phone calls, and lunch dates when we already struggle to balance our current professional and personal relationships? Contactually, we have a solution.
Yes – Contactually, created by dynamic entrepreneurs Zvi Band, Tony Cappaert, and Jeff Carbonella, is a relationship management tool developed to link with your email account to ensure your relationships and conversations remain consistent and meaningful. Personalized alerts are sent to your inbox reminding you to contact prospective clients, old college friends, and family members you haven’t connected with in awhile. Contactually remembers to keep in touch with your connections for you.
One of the most difficult things about moving to a new CRM or email contact management tool is retroactively assigning categories (or “buckets” as Contactually calls them) to your individual contacts. Contactually solved this with a clever feature called “The Bucket Game.” With keyboard shortcuts and visual cues, you’ll be able to sort hundreds of contacts in a matter of minutes.
The idea behind Contactually began while Zvi was consulting at his previous venture, skeevisArts. He realized success happened by connecting people, learning about what they do, and exchanging ideas. However, no platform was available to warn him if he was falling out of touch with his email contacts. Zvi followed his entrepreneurial drive and focused on building a strong product and team to solve his networking conundrum. Contactually has been featured in various media outlets including Mashable, The Washington Post, and TechCrunch.
Business aside, Zvi is passionate for the local DC tech community and is proud to headquarter his business in the District. He strives to foster growth for the DC tech scene and keep it thriving. Learn more about Contactually by watching Zvi’s presentation at our Social Driver’s Ed series.
With the passage of the JOBS Act, securities-backed crowdfunding for small companies has become a reality. A lot is not yet known about this new fundraising tool. Luckily, we have our good friends Sara Hanks and Brian Knight of CrowdCheck to help us through the thick of it.
Here’s five big take aways:
1. Valuation
Your venture is worth a billion dollars, right? When your just starting off, you can pretty much presume that your company is worth whatever you think it should be worth. When crowdfunding though, you will have to go through a valuation process to prove to the crowd why you think you’re worth what you are worth. Are you using future revenues? Are you basing it on current cash flow? How did you get to that number? You will have to disclose it.
2. Early Investors
You aunts and uncles are loaded and generous. That’s great! But, if you are someday planning to turn to VCs for big time funding, you’ll have to provide clear plans for how these early investors get to influence the business before bringing on the big guys.
3. Marketing
You can market your product, but you can not market your crowdfunding at all. If so, the SEC will be angry. That means no statements on your site asking for funds or directing people to a page. All marketing must go through a crowdfunding portal.
4. Portals
What is a portal? The new law provides the formation of online “portals” for crowdfunding, basically websites that will be online clearinghouses for investors and businesses to raise money. These portals don’t yet exist, but when they do, there will be a variety of options for investors and entrepreneurs alike.
5. Wait and See
When we say that a lot is still not yet known, we really mean it. Everyone is still waiting for the SEC to consider public comments and determine many of the open ended questions that crowdsourcing poses.
Crowdcheck gives business a tool to demonstrate that they are a bonafide business venture and a pathway for investers to avoid fraud. Watch Sara and Brian’s video below and be sure to check them out for any additional thoughts or questions.
Those Social Driver guys always seem so with the future, right? Curious how we manage to keep it on top of it all while the online landscape is always changing and evolving?
Curiosity cured! Here’s a peak behind the curtain featuring Social Driver’s CTO and Founder, Thomas Sanchez, presented at our Social Driver’s Ed on May 4th, 2012. We call it the Social Driver Canvas and it’s a big part of how we do things over here. What does your team use to organize and strategize communication?
The starting point for any good discussion, meeting, or plan about a web, mobile, or social strategy should be a shared understanding of what a communication strategy entails. We developed a framework to facilitate this planning process. Our goal is to present these concepts in a way that is simple, relevant, and intuitive, while not oversimplifying the complexities of how the strategy will function.
Sometimes it seems that Facebook changes up its look just often enough to drive users absolutely bonkers. If you look at the whole history of Facebook design changes, it’s pretty clear that Facebook is just experimenting with making it easier for people to connect and share with each other.
And, they’ve been pretty successful at it! Just look at the companies that have flocked to Facebook over the last few years. Companies invest in their Facebook presence because that’s where consumers spend their time, making it an easy way to connect with customers in a scalable way.
How should you be using Facebook? It depends on your goal. We’ve got tons of great examples of companies using Facebook to engage with their audience. Watch Adam Gerber from Social Driver’s short guide to the new Facebook Timeline and let us know your favorite corporate Facebook pages in the comments below.
