These Guys Rock!

STATE RADIO

[tweetmeme source=”ServeNext”]

For anyone who’s a supporter of the service movement, then you should know these guys. Plus, their music is awesome.

I’m talking about our great friends at STATE RADIO and its nonprofit arm, Calling All Crows.  The Pepsi Refresh Project — an unprecedented cause-marketing campaign where Pepsi will give away $20 million to ideas pushing the world forward — just featured a great Q&A with the band’s frontman, Chad Stokes and their enduring social efforts alongside their music.

STATE RADIO’s commitment to the world and the cities along their tours is no joke.  The band’s time, money, and fans are all leveraged relentlessly to engage people in service during music tours and help bring resources to humanitarian issues at home and abroad.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview on the Pepsi Refresh Project blog:

Could you make a bigger impact by focusing on one issue? Or is your approach to do what you can in any way you can and help out as many causes as possible?

I think it’s the latter because when we do our service in different cities, we would never want to say, “These are the one or two causes we’re interested in–what can you do for us?”  Every city has different groups that address specific needs based on specific problems, so we try to tailor our volunteerism towards what needs to be done. So in the end, we tackle a bunch of different subjects and causes but it’s all about human rights in the end. Everything is related.

I’ve seen this commitment first hand.  About six months ago I was fortunate to participate in a service day organized by Calling All Crows and City Year Washington, DC.  It was the day of a show when Chad, Matt Wilhelm  (Calling All Crows C0-Director and ServeNext Co-founder), myself and few others met early in the morning and headed to a great service project in DC (picture below).  It was great to see this commitment up-close because it became clear that community work is in the DNA of STATE RADIO.

Day of service with STATE RADIO, Calling All Crows, and City Year. Chad Stokes is bottom left in blue shirt.

ServeNext and the Refresh Service Coalition (a group of service organizations working together to win grants in the Pepsi Refresh Project during February) are excited to be invited by STATE RADIO and Calling All Crows to have a table at their upcoming concerts in DC on February 27 and 28th.

If you haven’t already, check out their music and their values in action by doing a day of service with them and then attending a great show!

———–

Worth checking out…

Calling All Crows website — become a fan on Facebook.

Music, Service and a Long Overdue Strategy — by Chad Stokes and Matt Wilhelm in Huffington Post.

STATE RADIO current tour dates

Celebrity Refresh

One of the problems with competing in a nonprofit free-for-all like Pepsi Refresh is that you can’t easily pay proper respects to some of the other contestants.

There are 729 individuals and organizations all currently vying for grant money in the Pepsi Refresh Project, and each of those participants represents a potentially positive impact on society.  I’m casting six votes a day in the contest to support the Refresh Service Coalition–no more, no less.  But there are hundreds of other ideas out there, and it’s frustrating to have to call them competition.  On any other given day, I’d gladly throw my support behind them.

And so it is with pent-up philanthropic energy and and one seriously  itchy trigger-finger that I’ve turned to “Celebrity Refresh”.

If you haven’t heard, Kevin Bacon and Demi Moore are competing head-to-head all month long in a Pepsi Refresh celebrity sidebet.  True to the spirit of the project, the two have come up with their own grant proposals, made videos, tweeted their supporters and opened the whole thing up to a public vote-off on Facebook.

Demi Moore is supporting GEMS–the Girls Educational & Mentoring Services–an organization that works with young women between the ages of 12 and 21, who are victims of sexual exploitation and human trafficking.  A grant would help GEMS empower 10 former victims by training them to be outreach workers.

Kevin Bacon is supporting the charity Six Degrees.org–a network that helps individuals connect with and support charities of their choice.

You can vote for your favorite celebrity–I mean, charity—all month long over at www.facebook.com/pepsirefresh.  Click on the Celeb Challenge tab on the Pepsi Refresh homepage and install the app for voting.

Meanwhile, back at Standard Pepsi Refresh, keep your eye out for some new trends.  Almost every grant category has seen some tumult this week, as some new teams have pushed their way into the leaderboard and other more established teams fight some complacency.  The whole coalition is still holding strong, but none of us are taking any chances.  ServeNext.org hasn’t moved from the Top 3, but we’re watching the leaderboard every day and keeping our supporters updated.  If you haven’t voted today, everyone in the coalition could certainly use your support:

wwww.refresheverything.com/servenext

www.refresheverything.com/mualpha

www.refresheverything.com/atlascorps

www.refresheverything.com/lift

www.refresheverything.com/myimpact

www.refresheverything.com/worldleadershipcorps

A Weekend of Celebrations

A note for our Pepsi Refreshers–after two great weeks of work and one particularly holiday-laden weekend!

Hey Team–

What a celebratory weekend! Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day, and there’s one more occasion to celebrate:

Today we begin the second half of the Pepsi Refresh Project!

We’ve been at this for two weeks, and your hard work is truly paying off: ServeNext.org remains in second place, and we continue to flirt–get it?–with first. Thank you!

The second half is going to be even more competitive. Other groups are working urgently to make up ground and crack the top 10. This puts pressure on those in places 6-10, and then the top 5 places are impacted. We must match that urgency!

Help start the second half on a strong note by voting today for ServeNext & the Refresh Service Coalition:

Vote here: ServeNext.org, LIFT, World Leadership Corps, Atlas Corps, APO, myImpact

Thanks for all you do!

-Evan, ServeNext.org

Day 12: Leader Board Movement and a Campaign Update

[tweetmeme source=”ServeNext”]

Campaign Update

We’re nearing the halfway point in the Pepsi Refresh Project, and ServeNext.org continues to make its mark as a serious contender for a $50,000 grant.

The last 12 hours have been a push-and-pull for the top spot, as our members and network came out with in full-force to vault us into #1, only to fall back a few hours later, retake #1 by late this morning, and then back to #2.  What a ride!

We were excited to be so close to the top, of course, but we are more encouraged by the display of our serious mobilizing power!

Our fellow coalition members are also in very good positions.  Thanks to all the teamwork, we are all strong contenders for our respective grants!

$250,000

LIFT: http://www.refresheverything.com/lift (currently 5th)

$50,000

ServeNext.org: http://www.refresheverything.com/servenext (currently 2nd)

Atlas Corps: http://www.refresheverything.com/atlascorps (currently 3rd)

World Leadership Corps: http://www.refresheverything.com/worldleadershipcorps (currently 8th)

$25,000

Mu Alphha: http://www.refresheverything.com/mualpha (currently 2nd)

MyImpact: http://www.refresheverything.com/myimpact (currently 3nd)

Moving Forward

These results are bringing a lot of excitement and encouragement our way.  But we are also preparing for a very intense finish against some very strong competition.

To win, we’ll need to implement a strategy that both motivates our most ardent supporters to continue to support us, while still reaching new folks that may not have heard about our campaign yet.  But as we begin to move into the final weeks, we’re also keeping a firm eye above and beyond Pepsi Refresh.  Here at ServeNext HQ, a constant question throughout this contest has been: How do we use this campaign to deepen our relationship with our network beyond February?

Online contests offer unique opportunities for organized nonprofits.  Sure, any organization that wins money in the Pepsi Refresh Project will find their coffers stronger–a serious victory in this economic climate.  But as Zach Maurin, the Executive Director of ServeNext.org wrote on this blog earlier in the week, online contests also present an excellent opportunity for organizations to engage their membership in new and substantial ways (particularly if we can show them the fruits of their efforts in a $50,000 grant)–and also build lasting relationships that hopefully extend far beyond the contest.

We’ve had tremendous success with finding ways to get our members involved in this competition, and with reaching new folks that might never have heard of ServeNext before and who are excited enough about our work to help us win this competition.  But it’s truly a wasted opportunity if we can’t capture some of that spirit for the long haul.

So over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a plan that focuses on amplifying and honing our message about this campaign and ways to increase engagement with our network.  We’ll continue support our members to spread the word about ServeNext and this campaign in the hopes of expanding our reach.

But we’re also beginning a phase of one-on-one outreach with many of our members and Campaign Captains to  see what it is about ServeNext that they like and what suggestions they have to help us grow.  The details are still coming together, but we hope to connect individually with 100 people over the next week or so– including 25 members that we’ve never spoken to before individually.  With individual engagement, we will begin to track how that changes involvement with ServeNext over the mid and long term.  $50,000 will do an amazing amount for our organization and the national service movement–but its impact will be hampered without the involvement of the folks that delivered it!

Thanks to all of you working hard to make this happen for ServeNext and the Refresh Service Coalition.  Keep voting, and we’ll see you next week!

Week 1 Reflections on Pepsi Refresh Project: More than the Money

There has been significant discussion among social media and social change folks about the worth of online contests that give money to a cause based on the amount of public support.

I’ve paid attention to the contests themselves, but less so to the surrounding discussion.  Now that ServeNext has entered our first and is eight days into the first month of the Pepsi Refresh Project (the largest of these contests to date, which has pledged about $20 million in grants during 2010), I thought it would be interesting to reflect on Week One within the context of various opinions of these contests.

Keep Your Eye on the…Social Capital

I knew about three weeks before the voting opened on February 1 that ServeNext would enter.  This gave us a chance to begin developing our strategy to deliver votes, while also thinking about other ways to advance ServeNext as a result of our participation.

A number of critiques about online contests have noted that this is not a sustainable way for nonprofits to raise money nor the best way to engage their members who can only be asked to do so much by an organization.

However, if raising money is the only goal and asking members to vote is the only way to get them involved in the contest, then it’s a big missed opportunity.  So while contests need to improve in certain areas, there are ways to grow outside of dollars raised that traditional fundraising does not enable.

These contests provide great opportunities to increase social capital between an organization and its networks (engaging them in strategy and opportunities to contribute to it; strengthening relationships with organizations we work with; giving members the opportunity to help decide how the money is spent if we win; etc., etc.).

Before this contest and during it, we’ve constantly asked: what can ServeNext accomplish so that even if we don’t win a grant, we will have made solid progress in other ways?  Every day has to include attention to those goals (which also helps to deliver votes).

“Forced” to Evolve

With the ubiquity of social technology, more organizations need to evolve to emphasize networked approaches and more bottom-up engagement.  It can be hard to prioritize this shift in structure and strategy, especially during tight times like these. (Yes, I know, limited resources can be the perfect time to evolve and innovate, especially if it means leveraging your organization’s network to help with the workload.  But that’s easier said than done.)

With that said, I’ve spoken to a couple of sizable organizations that have entered the Pepsi Refresh Project or are planning to, yet this will be their first time engaging their entire network in an extended online organizing pursuit.  At ServeNext, we have been involved in a number of efforts that emphasized an online component.  However, this contest forced us to get our online channels updated and more active (still working on some).  In a couple of weeks,  I can say that we’ve already learned a TON and made great progress.

The other organizations that are newer to this are incentivized to improve their ability to engage their networks online by testing ideas, learning strategy, etc.  In fact, one of these organizations told me that participation in this contest has pushed it to review and evaluate online engagement capacity and strategy across the board moving forward.

Deadlines and incentives help us all.

—-

With about 20 days left to vote for the February applicants, it will be interesting to see how Pepsi’s audacious experiment plays out and evolves over the next 10 monthly voting periods.  We’ll be blogging about our experiences on most days and reflecting more broadly once/week.

Voting from Facebook

Pepsi launched a new Refresh Project voting app for Facebook users yesterday.  The new app allows anyone with an account to vote for and promote their favorite ‘ideas’ directly from within the popular social networking platform.

Participants in the Pepsi Refresh Project  can already use their Facebook accounts to log-in and cast votes, but they have to do so remotely by visiting the Pepsi Refresh website and using Facebook Connect.  It’s a bit cumbersome, and some users might be hesitant to log-in to their Facebook page via Pepsi’s third-party set-up.

With this new app, Facebook users can vote for their favorite idea and share the results with their friends–all from the comfort of their own pages.  The app allows you to choose your favorite ‘idea’, and remembers your choice so you can find it with ease every day.  After you cast your vote, the app gives you the option to share the result on your wall.

Here’s 4 easy steps to get you started:

1. Log-on to Facebook

2.  Vist the app homepage and click ‘allow’. (Make sure you read the fine print below, to be sure you know what installing the app means for your privacy.)

3. Enter in the cause of your choice in the form of it’s contest url – e.g. www.refresheverything.com/servenext

4. Vote–and share it with your friends!

Day 3: The Refresh Service Coalition

Hi all, tonight I want to write to you about some of our Pepsi Refresh coalition partners. We’ve entered this contest with some good friends, and we want you to be familiar with their work and project entries.

First though, a quick note on some incredible progress.

It’s the end of Day 3 of the Pepsi Refresh Project, and ServeNext.org has some serious momentum.

How serious? It’s 7 pm where I’m writing from, and over at www.refresheverything.com/servenext, we’re seeing that ServeNext.org is ranked atop the leaderboard. We’re leading the vote in the $50k category!

That’s an amazing feat, and it’s clear that we’ve got some seriously mobilized forces.

The challenge now is to keep the momentum going through this week and beyond. Stay tuned at the bottom of this post for some new ways to keep in touch over the course of the month with this campaign.

Now for some introductions.

As you know ServeNext.org entered the Pepsi Refresh Project for the chance to win a $50k grant and put 10 community organizers in 10 cities in 2010–our ‘big idea.’   We’re asking our members, family and friends to vote for us in the hopes of winning the funding for our idea.

But we’re also asking our voters to think beyond our project.  ServeNext.org has also partnered up with several other  service-minded organizations in the Pepsi Refresh Project, to create a network of nonprofits that together could help win a greater share of the grant money for the greater good of volunteerism in the U.S.

We call it the Refresh Service Coalition, and we hope that by pooling our efforts—and our votes—we can cast a wider net over this contest and work together to haul in $450,000 for national service.

Pepsi gives everyone a chance to vote for up to 10 unique ‘ideas’ per day in the contest, and we hope that you’ll spread six of yours out among these organizations.  We’ll be promoting our coalition partners throughout the month.  Their efforts are all worth paying attention to, and their ‘big ideas’ are all worth voting for. Please take a minute to read over their mission statements and check out their entries.

The Refresh Service Coalition:

• ServeNext.org
  • www.refresheverything.com/servenext
  • ServeNext is building a grassroots movement to promote and advance AmeriCorps & citizen service as a strategy to tackle our most pressing social issues and strengthen our democracy.
• Atlas Corps
  • www.refresheverything.com/atlascorps
  • Atlas Corps works in the US and abroad to facilitate international fellowships for rising citizen sector leaders who volunteer overseas for at least one year. These Fellows then commit to work an additional year in the citizen sector of their home country, sharing new skills, best practices, and valuable experience.
• Alpha Phi Omega’s Mu Alpha Chapter
  • www.refresheverything.com/mualpha
  • Alpha Phi Omega brings together the best and brightest college students under the Cardinal Principles of Leadership, Friendship, and Service.
• LIFT
  • www.refresheverything.com/lift
  • LIFT is a growing movement to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the United States. LIFT clients and volunteers work one-on-one to find jobs, secure safe and stable housing, make ends meet through public benefits and tax credits, and obtain quality referrals for social services.
• myImpact
  • www.refresheverything.com/myimpact
  • myImpact.org is an emerging online platform for young Americans in national and community service. Our mission is to use social media to advance the cause of citizen service by developing new tools for volunteers and service organizations to measure and demonstrate their impact.
• World Leadership Corps
  • www.refresheverything.com/worldleadershipcorps
  • The World Leadership Corps is based on the idea that international volunteer service and cross-cultural living can make a difference in meeting critical global challenges and provide life-changing experiences for future leaders.

The most excellent news is we’re all leading our respective categories in this contest–each of us showing tremendous organizing power, and showing off the might of the service movement.  I hope you’ll take minute to vote for all six of us, every day this month.

In Solidarity,

Evan Mackinder

PS.  Feel you need a reminder to vote every day?  Sign up at http://www.servenext.org/vote.  We’ll send you a daily email that will remind you about the contest, ServeNext.org and the coalition, and offer links to everyone’s Pepsi Refresh pages.

PPS.  While you’re at it, why don’t you follow ServeNext.org on facebook and trend with us on twitter?  You’re bound to run across a reminder a day!

Off To the Races!

And we're off!

When we initially started planning for ServeNext.org’s Pespsi Refresh initiative, we knew there would be a lot of work.  There was strategizing, coalition meetings, emails, blog posts, tweeting, facebooking, and a ton of outreach to our individual networks–And that was before we even found out that ServeNext.org was accepted into the Pepsi Refresh contest!  But the good news came this morning, and all of our preparation seems to have paid off in a big way.  As of this post, I’m incredibly excited to report that ServeNext.org is truly off to the races with a #6 ranking!

729 individuals and organizations ideas are in the running  for the month of Februrary, all vying for their share of $1.3 million in grants.  I haven’t had much time to take a look at many of the entries, but the number alone is encouraging: Lots of great ideas for social change will at the very least have a highly-trafficked platform from which to make themselves known.

ServeNext submitted an plan to put 10 community organizers in 10 cities during 2010–something we think is worth a $50,000 grant for the positive effect it will have on communities across the country. By our count, ServeNext.org is up against 172 other ‘ideas’ in the $50k category.

But back to our network, and todays accomplishment.  When we started our outreach over the weekend, we knew our members, friends and families would all be excited about the initiative.  But the support we’ve had is even more wonderful than we expected.  Almost immediately we started getting emails with people pledging their support to vote for ServeNext.org, and not as a one-off.  Many also signed up to be Campaign Captains, a level of support that promises daily votes in addition to recruiting 5-10 close friends and family members to throw  some love behind ServeNext as we tackle the Pepsi Refresh Project. (Special shout out to all AmeriCorps members and alums! Thanks!)  We never had a moment’s doubt that people would turn out for the cause, and you guys proved us right in a huge way today.  Congrats and thank you!

We’re off to a great start, and we hope to really build on the momentum we secured today by increasing our get-out-the-vote effort and promoting ServeNext.org and our initiative.  We have a lot of great things planned that we hope will keep people excited, and maybe even draw in some people that hadn’t heard about us before.

Among those will be this blog.  As the lead on this campaign for ServeNext, I’ll be blogging as often as possible–every day?  hold me to it!–about all things ServeNext-in-Pepsi Refresh, including campaign updates, notes on our coalition partners, and, of course, all the support and news coming out of the service movement.

This blog has long been a forum in which service is paid high tribute.  And grant aside, much of the reason we have entered Pepsi Refresh is because the project really coheres with ServeNext’s larger goal: to help strengthen volunteerism in this country by promoting (and rewarding) hard work and good ideas.  Given that coherence, I would expect our involvement in the contest to really amplify those themes on BlogNext.

And to that end, we’ll need your comments, input, questions, etc.  Engagement is key, folks.  (If you have anything you’d like to address outside the forum, you can email me at evan@servenext.org)

So get excited, and I’ll see you in the morning!

Onward and Upward,

Evan Mackinder

Help ServeNext Win the Pepsi Refresh Project!

How can $50,000 transform the national service movement?

Here at ServeNext.org, we’ve spent much of the last few weeks huddled up in our offices trying to come up with big ideas for 2010.   We’ve come up with a series of new initiatives that we think will really add a spark to movement for national service, including an exciting expansion of our Social Media Service training program and a national service discussion plus actions series about the role of the grassroots, all of which we’ll be rolling out as the year progresses.

And today, we’re very excited to talk about our first big plan for 2010.

This February, ServeNext.org is participating in the Pepsi Refresh Project, an opportunity for our organization to earn $50,000 for the national service movement!

The Pepsi Refresh Project is an initiative that will award $1.3 million in grants to “people, businesses, and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact.”  ServeNext.org will be campaigning alongside several other service-oriented nonprofits throughout the month of February to win portions of the prize money, and work towards the greater goal of strengthening the national service movement.

In order to enter, ServeNext had to submit its own idea for how it will use the money.  With the $50,000 grant, ServeNext.org will put 10 community organizers in 10 cities across the country in 2010, an initiative that will spur the grassroots movement for national service.

We’ve submitted our entry, and on Monday, February 1^st, we find out if we were accepted.   Monday is also the day voting starts.  Call us premature, but we’re already ramping up!

The Refresh Contest is an online affair, and the winners will be decided entirely by the public—by online votes.  We need as many people as possible voting online for ServeNext every day!

Because our ability to win the $50,000 depends entirely on your votes, we have spent the last week really ramping up our efforts for the contest and coming up with ways for you to get involved.  First and foremost, we’ve set up an auxiliary page that explains the Refresh Contest initiative, which you can view here.  We’ll be updating that as the contest moves along (in particular, after we know we have been accepted).

In the meantime, here are  three quick and easy steps:

1.   Become a Campaign Captain. The voting doesn’t open for the contest until February 1^st—this coming Monday.  But you can pledge your support today: Visit www.servenext.org/captain and sign up to vote every day throughout February!

2.   Follow updates on the contest right here on the ServeNext blog. As Online Organizer for the contest, I’ll be posting daily from BlogNext about all things ServeNext /Pepsi Refresh.  We’ll talk about strategies for winning and keep you updated on our progress—and challenges—en route to hopefully winning the 50k.  We’ll also be asking for your input every step of the way.  So set those RSS feeds to Set your RSS feed to https://blognext.wordpress.com/feed/ and join the discussion!

3.   Follow us on Facebook and Twitter! If you aren’t a fan of ServeNext.org on Facebook, what are you waiting for?  Check us out! You can make a difference now by pledging your support and RSVPing to our event right now.  On Twitter? Follow us @ServeNext.  Speak Twitter? Pls RT! @ServeNext is going for 50k via #pepsirefresh! Vote http://bit.ly/d96Xos & transform the grassroots movement for nat’l #service!

ServeNext can accomplish a lot with $50,000, but we also see this contest as a fantastic way to connect with you, our members, and expand our network.  Just participating in this initiative will provide us with some great momentum moving into our 2010 initiatives.

So wish us luck as we move to Monday’s launch—or better yet, pledge to vote!