Video as a tool to effect social change – An example from Giant Ant Media

I was just looking at a video that Jay Grandin, Leah Nelson and the rest of the Giant Ant Media folks created for the Ronald McDonald House, one of their clients. Quite impressive, and really sweet. It made me remember a recent post by Rebecca where she pondered on the reason why we blog and why we like to use social media to effect change.

I’ll admit that I’m the first one to brag about the power of my blog to effect social change. When I first started blogging, I did it just for kicks. Now, I feel confident that with the combined power of my blog, and those of my friends in the blogosphere I can help people. For example, recently I’ve been highlighting fundraisers that my friends Tanya and Kulpreet have been organizing. I also raised a few hundred dollars through Blogathon, in 2007 for A Loving Spoonful and in 2008 for the BC Cancer Foundation.

I will definitely have to look into ways to integrate more video into my portfolio, and maybe use it to galvanize people into contributing to several of the causes I’m passionate about. For example, Blog Action Day is coming up and the theme is poverty. Homeless Action Week 2008 is also coming up (Oct 12-19th) and I might be auctioning some stuff (hoping people will bid on it!)

To all of you who are in the new media realm who are working hard to help those less advantaged than us, I salute you.

EDIT – Duane has a link to the actual video embedded on his site so you can check it out here.

I just wanted to add one bit of my personal life to this post. A few years back, I spent 24 hours straight (yes, as in no sleep at all) creating three 3-min videos of chemical processes that we were highlighting for an Annual General Meeting. It was really hard work (I used Adobe Premiere for that one) and I sincerely can tell you that creating such compelling, well-designed and created video as the one you’re going to see is REALLY HARD WORK. I speak from experience.

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