Last year we had the great pleasure of helping launch what has to be one of the more ambitious new world-changing organizations today: The Elders. Brought together by Nelson Mandela and backed by the like
s of Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel, The Elders are "an independent group of eminent global leaders who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.
After 4 months of deep visioning and high speed digital campaign planning we led them through in early 2008 (including an unforgettable, story-to-tell-the-grandchildren trip to present to them on Branson's Necker Island), it's been great to see them launch their website this month. The site was planned and partially built by our team, but completed by a new internal team they hired up in London, UK. It has some cool features like:
- beautiful imagery and background on the vision, story, and the Elders themselves
- lots of rich media and video backgrounds on the org and the global issues they are addressing
- a world class media centre
- the standard-issue twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr groups
Perhaps the coolest thing they are doing is a new initaitive, "Follow our Mission to the Middle East". They are using the power of the web to bring people along on what are typically very behind-the-scenes diplomatic missions, and sharing daily stories of success and concerns through their new blog and video logs. Here is a video update from Desmond Tutu, or "the Arch", as of yesterday.
Here they are reacing out, for the first time, to hear regular people's voices with a "submit 
your message of peace" – the chance to possibly be heard and contribute to their amazing and deeply challenging work.
With this they are dipping a toe into public engagement, by asking regular people for input. When we were hired, there were quite literally dozens of very large scale, very ambitious models being batted around for how the power of the web might help engage the global public in the important work of the Elders. We whittled down the less grounded ideas into a suite of strong, quite probable, yet still very ambitious ways they could use Web 2 values and tools to tell their story, share wisdom and insights, and engage the world actively in their work especailly by listening and asking for help.
The staff that were brought on after our work was complete had a different vision for how to use the web: more as a storytelling medium, and in a much less public way than we had been driving for (which was driven largely by Gabriel and Branson's team). In the end I love what they've done – especially as a first step.
I'd be lying though if I didn't say I'm still disappointed more of the work we did wasn't a fit for their eventual strategy. I still hold out hope they will eventually take a more ambitious, innovative, 2-way approach that builds the web and massive public engagement in at the core of what they do. Web as strategic core organizing framework, vs. web as tactical comms channel. That's the battle raging at nearly ever organisation in 2009! As we know from orgs like Avaaz, Obama, 350.org, and hopefully with our latest big client, global climate change campaign TckTckTck.org, the latter model is what produces the most breakthrough results on the web.
But Mandela always envisioned an "organization that would last for 200 years" so I can be patient!
For now, our team is so proud to see their site, and some cool new tools like their Middle East blog, see the light of day. Goodness knows the world needs The Elders' leadership and vision even more today than ever before. Check it out!
