A hub for volunteers is being added to Keep America Beautiful’s Web site.
A nonprofit organization founded in 1953 is turning to social media to amplify its voice among consumers interested in causes like helping the environment.
The organization, Keep America Beautiful, is adding a Web site it calls a social volunteer hub, at kabcleanup.org, to its regular Web site, kab.org. The hub Web site is intended to assist people who volunteer for the organization’s annual initiative, the Great American Cleanup, in reaching out to each other as well as to friends and family.
The hub Web site includes links to and aggregates posts on social platforms like Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter.
Other steps intended to give Keep America Beautiful a more contemporary public face include a new logo and the organization’s participation in events at the coming South by Southwest Interactive Conference and Festival in Austin, Tex.
“There was a need to revisit our brand,” Matt McKenna, president and chief executive of Keep America Beautiful in Stamford, Conn., said in a phone interview on Thursday, because “our brand wasn’t keeping up with all the work we were doing.”
In addition to efforts focused on reducing littering, Mr. McKenna said, the organization and its almost 600 local affiliates around the country are involved in activities that include “recycling, community gardens, urban forestry, graffiti abatement, composting and disaster restoration.”
Social media are “a tremendous tool, a tremendous resource,” Mr. McKenna said, because they not only “allow us to collect all that our volunteers are doing and tell their stories” but also enable the volunteers to “talk to each other,” which “feeds on itself” and encourages additional volunteering.
Mr. McKenna plans to discuss the hub and other efforts the organization is taking at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which begins on Friday and continues through Tuesday. He is to take part in a luncheon on Saturday, during Tech Cocktail’s SXSW Startup Celebration.
Also on Saturday, the organization’s Austin affiliate, Keep Austin Beautiful, is sponsoring a volunteer cleanup at four local sites to which conference attendees are being invited.
Keep America Beautiful is also teaming with the Glad Products Company unit of Clorox to talk to conference attendees who visit SouthBites, where food trucks will be parked from Friday through Tuesday.
Keep America Beautiful is handling most of the change efforts internally, Mr. McKenna said, with “some help from our friends at Cone in Boston.” Cone, an agency that specializes in what is known as purpose marketing, pro-social marketing or cause marketing, is owned by the Omnicom Group.
The “high-water mark in public perception” for Keep America Beautiful, Mr. McKenna acknowledged, was probably the “crying Indian” public service campaign that was created on behalf of the organization in 1971 by the Marsteller agency and the Advertising Council.
“When people know what that is, I know how old they are,” he said, laughing.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/keep-america-beautiful-turns-to-social-media/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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