Tag Archives: changeeverything

When social creations take flight

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Five years ago this summer, in a boardroom at Vancity, William Azaroff was unveiling a new online community to an audience of Vancouver-area bloggers — a community we had worked with Vancity to conceive, build and launch. Also in attendance (maybe explaining his later affection for computers and gadgets): our one-week-old second child.

Today, that child is his own amazing human being, and if you get me started on just how wonderful he is, I won’t shut up — which is parental pride at work.

And I feel a shadow of that parental pride toward that online community we were launching half a decade ago this month, called ChangeEverything.ca.

When you create an online social project, and then step back and let your client run with it, it’s not that different from watching a beloved child leave home as a young adult. You fret, you worry, you check in… but most of all, you can’t wait to see who (or, in the case of our online communities, what) they become.

Three of the online projects we’ve helped to build over the past few years passed some pretty important milestones recently — kind of the equivalent of hearing that a grandchild is on the way.

With one project, it’s a profound transformation; with another, a rebirth; and with a third, a huge step forward to a whole new level of impact.

We’ll be blogging about each one over the next few days. But for now, I’m struck by how apt the comparison is between building a community and raising a child.

You can provide infrastructure (whether it’s a server or a house). You can manage content (blog posts or books, videos or video games). You can monitor metrics (analytics or report cards) and respond accordingly. You can offer guidance, set and enforce rules, and give them all the love in the world.

But in the end, you can neither determine nor predict where they’ll go. It may be that they veer off in a much different direction than you’d planned, or surprise you with some completely unexpected ability. They will become their own amazing, astonishing, wonderful organism.

And you won’t be able to shut up about them.

Warm hearts vs. cold feet

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If you’ve ever accidentally soaked your shoes in a puddle on a freezing day, you’ll appreciate how miserable the experience can be… and how desperate you can be to get to your home, school or workplace to change into a spare pair.

When you’re living on the streets, though, it’s more than just discomfort. Cold, wet feet can quickly become agonizing to walk on – adding a big barrier to finding a job, food or shelter for the night.

And I’m going to let Kate Dugas from ChangeEverything.ca take it from here:

A few months after its launch, ChangeEverything and the people that make up the community here, made a difference in the lives of some people living on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with successful drive for warm clothing during a particularly bitter cold snap. Since 2006 we have used ChangeEverything.ca to collect thousands and thousands of items of warmth for folks living in the DTES of Vancouver..

Cold wet feet are a huge reason people living on the street get sick and even die in the winter. Getting clean dry socks to local shelters is a great way to help alleviate this problem. So this year we are focusing on socks!

So start looking through your closets and drawers. We’ll take mis-matched socks that are clean and in good condition. But even better, we’ll take ones that you went out and bought especially for this purpose. Reply with a comment on this post if you have leads on enormous quantities of socks, or if you just have a few pairs or even one pair to give. Each pair will totally make a difference. It’s true. Believe it.

I am also working on having a Vancity “Got Socks” account opened. Watch this space.

Kate

PS -oh and please spread the word. tweet this. add it to your facebook. emai your friends about it, heck post it to your fridge! see if your kids want to take up a collection at school for socks. whatever you can think of, the wackier the better.

Just leave a comment on her blog post to tell Kate you have socks to donate. And click here to pass the word along on Twitter!

ChangeEverything.ca launches "Got socks?" drive

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If you’ve ever accidentally soaked your shoes in a puddle on a freezing day, you’ll appreciate how miserable the experience can be… and how desperate you can be to get to your home, school or workplace to change into a spare pair.

When you’re living on the streets, though, it’s more than just discomfort. Cold, wet feet can quickly become agonizing to walk on – adding a big barrier to finding a job, food or shelter for the night.

And I’m going to let Kate Dugas from ChangeEverything.ca take it from here:

A few months after its launch, ChangeEverything and the people that make up the community here, made a difference in the lives of some people living on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with successful drive for warm clothing during a particularly bitter cold snap. Since 2006 we have used ChangeEverything.ca to collect thousands and thousands of items of warmth for folks living in the DTES of Vancouver.

Cold wet feet are a huge reason people living on the street get sick and even die in the winter. Getting clean dry socks to local shelters is a great way to help alleviate this problem. So this year we are focusing on socks!

So start looking through your closets and drawers. We’ll take mis-matched socks that are clean and in good condition. But even better, we’ll take ones that you went out and bought especially for this purpose. Reply with a comment on this post if you have leads on enormous quantities of socks, or if you just have a few pairs or even one pair to give. Each pair will totally make a difference. It’s true. Believe it.

I am also working on having a Vancity “Got Socks” account opened. Watch this space.

Kate

PS -oh and please spread the word. tweet this. add it to your facebook. emai your friends about it, heck post it to your fridge! see if your kids want to take up a collection at school for socks. whatever you can think of, the wackier the better.

Just leave a comment on her blog post to tell Kate you have socks to donate. And click here to pass the word along on Twitter!

How I’m voting in the 2008 Webbys

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At least in social networking, my choice is clear:

I\'m voting for changeeverything in the 2008 Webby Awards!

Updated: Guess who else is voting for Change Everything?

And thanks for the links to:

Get started blogging, keep your New Year’s resolutions… and win $500

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Our good friends (and clients) at Vancity are running a contest on ChangeEverything.ca. The $500 first prize is great, but the cool thing about it as far as I’m concerned is, it’s the ideal way for a beginner to dip their toes into the blogging waters.

Here’s how the Viva la resolution! contest works in five easy steps:

  1. You sign up on the site. (It’s free, and no salesperson will call.)
  2. You decide on a resolution – something you want to change in 2007 about yourself, your community or your world.
  3. You blog on the site about your progress in making that change and include the tag (i.e. keyword) “resolution”.
  4. A panel of judges checks out your resolution and blog posts, and picks out the top three resolutions.
  5. If yours is one of them, you walk away with a $50, $100 or $500 Visa gift card.

So why’s it ideal for a beginning blogger? Here are five handy reasons:

  • ChangeEverything.ca is a friendly community. Your chances of getting helpful, supportive comments are excellent.
  • It takes just seconds to set up a blog, and you have an instant built-in readership: the hundreds of other members of ChangeEverything.ca, and the thousands of visitors to the site.
  • Site moderator Kate Dugas is happy to help you if you run into a roadblock.
  • If you made New Year’s resolutions, you have built-in fodder for writing blog posts.
  • A $500 Visa gift card would be a pretty good reward for a first outing.

So if you know someone who’s been itching to start blogging, this could be the ticket. (And feel free to download the poster [PDF, 250kb] for the contest if you want to spread the word.)