For me 2007 will be remembered fondly as the year sustainability, social innovation, and Web 2.0 breached into the mainstream. The topics we’ve been quietly building a practice around for 14 years are finally top of mind for everyone from business leaders to politicians to the media to Jane Q. Public. As such, 2007 was such a phenomenal year for Communicopia that I wanted to reflect on and share our top 7 successes of an incredible year.
Climate Change hits the mainstream, and our clients lead the change.
The battle for awareness is over, the battle for implementation has just begun, and many of our clients are leading the way towards solutions with their innovative ideas and campaigns. From leading Canadian ENGO’s Environmental Defence Canada andEcojustice, to larger institutions like the UN Foundation and BC Hydro, to brand new local clients the BC Sustainable Energy Association and the BC Government’s newClimate Action Secretariat we’re honoured to help some of the best minds in this growing field succeed. They need to.
Social Innovation emerges as exciting field of practice.
My favourite book of 2007, Getting to Maybe, changed my outlook on our work as it put an academic and business framework around how real,
lasting social change happens. It turns out we were onto something all these years, as many of our company practices and choice of clients align nicely with the principles in the book. In 2007 we worked with many of Canada’s leading social innovators: from the funder collaborative Social Innovation Generation (of which Frances Westley, co-authour of Getting to Maybe, is a partner) to the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, from Tamarack Institute to Plan Institute, to locals Renewal Partners and BC Technology Social Venture Partners (as a partner and board member), it turns out we’re pretty well connected in this emerging and important field. It’s nice to see some leaders (from former PM Paul Martin to the current Gov’t of Ontario) recognize that social innovation is as important as business innovation and worthy of attention and support.
Working with Renewal Partners to tell their story and connect them to their community through Web 2.0 tools.
Renewal Partners has been an investor, mentor, and incredible backer of our work for almost a decade. In 2007 we had a chance to give back to them by leading a research and strategy process that culminated in a new articulation of their core values, theory of change, brand attributes, brand mantra, and service offering. Launching this spring will be a new logo and community oriented website for the Renewal group of organizations, with a fresh, integrated communications approach. Why now? After 10 years of being a quiet operator, it’s become critical they tell their story to promote the launch of their $40M "Renewal 2" fund and differentiate themselves from the dozens of new "green" or social funds that have launched recently. Renewal’s own big year was topped by founder Carol Newell receiving the Order of Canada, and Carol and Joel Solomon being listed as number 30 on Vancouver Magazine’s Power 50 list. Special shout out to the wonderful Pam Chalout, COO @ Renewal who has made our collaboration so successful and so fun.
Helping BC Hydro create a conservation culture in BC, and become more transparent and engaging in the process.
This year we managed to bring on not only one of the biggest companies in the province but also one of its emerging conservation powerhouses. BC Hydro reaches nearly every home in the province and, with BC’s innovative new Energy Plan coupled with binding GHG reduction targets approved into law this year, they are taking their social marketing work to a whole new level in 2008. We support their digital communications team and
PowerSmart with strategy, research, and writing services to turn their new online vision into reality. In 2008 look for their corporate website to become a "conservation gateway" of news, solutions, and connection to local action to help BC citizens become more conservation minded, and continued experiments with online community and engagement (building off the success of the Green Gifts Facebook app). To dig ourselves out of the environmental mess we’ve all created requires all hands on deck, so its great to see companies like Hydro taking the proposition of true social change seriously.
Weaving ever bigger Webs of Change — now on both coasts.
Communicopia created the Web of Changeconference 7 years ago to help grow a connected, collaborative, and effective community of professionals who use online tools to support social change. In 2007 our sold out 7th year attracted over 100 people from across North America and Europe to Hollyhock on Cortes Island, BC for 5 transformative days and our best event yet, and the positive spin-offs are still going strong. This social enterprise has been so successful that in late 2007 we were invited by the Social Innovation Generation hub at Toronto’s high-tech MaRS institution to bring the brand eastward, and we’re excited to announce that in May 2008 we’ll be doing a "Web of Change @ MaRS" social tech leadership training intensive in downtown Toronto (more details to come in mid-Jan).
Winning a Webby Award for world’s best charitable website.
No list would be complete without mentioning our Webby Award. Dubbed the
"Oscars of the Internet", our project for the United Nations Foundation won the people’s voice award forNothingButNets.net: a campaign to send $10 mosquito bednets to Africa to save families from Malaria. The innovative, "participative" or Web 2.0 campaign style website has raised over $16M in under 2 years and is used as a leading example in our community of great online storytelling, engagement, and empowerment. As for the Webby’s themselves, well it was pretty cool to have a New York reason to go to New York — the party was awesome (check out our Flickr photostream and look for my colleague Darrell partying it up with the co-founder of YouTube). And while winning the award was special, what I’m even prouder of is how we’re now helping theUN Foundation itself re-think its online strategy and create an engagement and fundraising model catalyzed by web thinking and the possibilities web tools provide. The UNF aims to build the world’s next great NGO and it’s exciting to be at the ground floor for the transition.
Our fantastic, talented, passionate and fun team + collaborators.
Life is pretty boring and ideas pretty stale without great people to jam with. Of all our "external" accomplishments this year, what I’m most proud of is the incredible team we’ve built. From usability master Darrell Houle, to designers extraordinaire Jordan Lewin, Jason Pfeifer, and Svea Dimmick, to uber-organizer Julia Watson, our people are among the best in the business and it shows in the quality of our collaborations. Equally important are the close relationships we’ve built with perceived "competitors" (such a 20th century term) like Social Signal, Agentic, Biro Creative, andOne/Northwest. This "web" of people help us be both nimble and specialized, and allows us to scale up for large projects with an offering as deep as anyone in the industry. I know my best work always comes through collaboration and consultation with others so here’s to more great challenges, joys, and successes in 2008.
