In line with doing so, we had our second foray into the world of tweetups at the Unit Bar on Queen Street West just this Tuesday. The goal of the night, aside from kicking it with some of our super cool supporters, of course, was to generate some discussion on our latest project: Make Media Matter. I’m sure you’ve heard us talk about this project for quite some time now (ummm, like our shamelessly incessant requests for you to vote to help the idea win $100K in the Pepsi Refresh Project). But as a refresher, here’s a really brief run-down of what we hope to accomplish. Make Media Matter will be an online platform that brings together socially conscious media lovers: “thinkers will debate how the media affects the world; celebrities will tell the world about the media that made a difference in their lives; consumers will discover and gain exclusive access and discounts on media that matters to them, creators will have access to tools and resources to connect with like-minded individuals, inspiring each other to create more and more socially conscious media”.

Collaborating at Unit Bar

It is what we hope to be a truly revolutionary shift in the way we currently produce and consume media. But in all honesty, Make Media Matter is still in its infancy and we really wanted to gauge our supporters’ thoughts on our overall vision and the various elements of the project that would help achieve that vision (like the media alerts, academic debates, and celebrity playlists we mentioned above). With Ben leading the discussion, a vast array of topics, questions, and ideas emerged that have really given us much to think about.

Are other organization’s doing something similar? What role does social media and technology as a whole have to play in all this? What other innovative ways can we build this initiative up? How about creating incentives for media producers? Maybe hosting annual awards? But who would judge to give out these awards? Is there room for community thinking in determining what media matters? If so, where and how?

However, the most important question that was raised during the evening was, “what is your criteria for ‘media that matters’”? A burning question for many, no doubt. So here’s the long and short of it: jhr has no intention of defining what media matters. We’re in no position to dictate something so important. Who are we, anyway? No, this is solely up to each individual involved in Make Media Matter…it is the individual that chooses what information he or she would like to get out of this platform. For instance, if your passion is women’s rights in Afghanistan, the Make Media Matter platform will bring you the most up to date and relevant news articles, events, blog posts, photos, or videos from all around the world.

After speaking to many of the attendees, I could tell that this is what struck them the most. And quite frankly, it’s what makes us at jhr so excited! Make Media Matter is powerful because it is personal; because it is in focusing on the issues that each individual cares most deeply about, that real change will emerge.

As I said earlier, Make Media Matter is still very much a work in progress, but the collaboration that took place in that small but intimate bar was something really special…especially if you consider the fact that many of us had just met that night! It’s always humbling to see people come out to support the work that we do and we are only too happy to have you join us along our journey.

Our deepest thanks to all of those who made it out to our tweetup. May there be many more to come!

If you have any questions, suggestions, or ideas regards to Make Media Matter, please feel free to contact us. It’s almost all we can ever talk about these days!

Justine Yu is the Social Media Coordinator as Journalists for Human Rights. You can read her personal blog at justineabigail.com or follow her on Twitter - @justineabigail

But I need it now.

Please, please and please visit http://www.refresheverything.ca/makemediamatter and vote for jhr’s newest project, Make Media Matter, in the Pepsi Refresh Contest. You can vote every day between now and August!

If enough people vote for jhr’s Make Media Matter, Pepsi will give jhr $100,000 to implement it.

I haven’t been as excited as I am now about a new jhr project. Make Media Matter will redefine how the world thinks about, produces and consumes media. For the lowdown on it, visit our page on the Pepsi site (where you can vote too) - http://www.refresheverything.ca/makemediamatter, visit www.makemediamatter.com, or check out our awesome video below.

Instead of being angry at the companies that make overpriced software that doesn’t talk to other programs, I should be angry at the nonprofit executives who put up with it.

Most nonprofits buy separate solutions for:

• Accounting
• Contact management
• Emailing
• Document management
• Online fundraising processing
• Online pledge-based fundraising
• Volunteer management
• Etc., etc….

Clearly, this is absurd.

At jhr we currently use: Simply accounting, Exceed, iContact, Help for Charities, Theorem, Artez and we have a central server to house all of our internal documents. The best part is that very few of these solutions actually talk to each other–so if we get a new donor through Help for Charities, we have to manually enter it  into Exceed to snail-mail them, manually enter it into iContact to email them and then manually enter it into Simple Accounting to register the donation. AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Getting tangled in a web of theoretically smart technological solutions happens to many nonprofits for a bunch of different reasons, but they include: A) there aren’t any platforms that take care of more than one of these at a time and B) its hard for growing nonprofits to plan ahead for all of their needs  so they get tend to address individual needs as they arise, usually locking them into an inflexible solution in each category.

My friend Anil Patel at the Framework Foundation is trying to change this by working with a set of nonprofits to adopt a largely free solution that combines Google Docs and Salesforce to take care of most of these needs at once.

I salute Anil for doing this–but more needs to be done.

Before anything else…let me just say that I was blown away by the amount of information and insight each speaker had to give. So many tools, so many websites, so much of everything! Each workshop introduced all kinds of technologies and strategies (both familiar and unfamiliar) to help us with specific problems we would encounter…information overload? Set up filters on your email, use RSS feeds. Want to market your non-profit more effectively? Rework and repurpose your current content, create multiple versions for different media, develop a strategy that mobilizes your core digital volunteers, solve a need. Want to measure analytics? Google Analytics, radian6, netvibes, yahoo pipes.

Zing, boom, wham, and bam!

It’s incredible. Awesome. But mind-blowingly overwhelming. Some of you may have no idea what I just said. Hell, I question whether I know what I’m saying myself. I’ve been working at jhr as the Social Media Coordinator for almost a year now and every day there’s something new. Our social media strategy is constantly evolving in tandem with the emerging technologies and in response to our own failures. Sometimes (erm, many times) people just don’t respond to what we’re doing and we have to take time to rework and refine our strategy. It’s time consuming and sometimes frustrating. Every day I hear of stories of non-profits that are wildly successful in their social media efforts and I’m always asking, how the hell did they do that and why didn’t we think of it? Speaker Peter Flaschner said it himself…this is rocket science. Now if I may rephrase that to show the true scope of the situation…this is bloody f*&$-ing rocket science.

It’s overwhelming. Frustrating. On occassion, even burdensome…but you know what? At the end of the day and above everything else, all this is an opportunity. To move…to mobilize…and to create change.

We at jhr don’t have the special sauce. But we’re taste testing…adding on the ingredients as we go along…changing our style, our approach. And as we find what works and what doesn’t work…and as we continue to learn, to attend events like these…every taste only gets better and better. We’ll get that special sauce soon and don’t worry…we’ll share.

Justine Yu is the Social Media Coordinator as Journalists for Human Rights. You can read her personal blog at justineabigail.com or follow her on Twitter - @justineabigail

The competition posts blogs on host of worthy topics surrounding the MDG’s.

They kindly asked jhr to participate. We sent them one of our star trainers, Tamasin Ford, based in Liberia.

Check out her post here. It’s worth a read. It’s about the strength of women in situations where most would crumble. Inspiring stuff.

So, I spent an hour today on the phone with a few folks at Community Lab, a really cool new international development group based out of New York with close ties to Jeffrey Sachs and the good people at the Earth Institute. I’m proud to sit on their Board, so I try to help as much as I can.

They were trying to get my thoughts on their new (and still not live) website. Without getting into the details of our conversation, I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you my take on online content for nonprofits, for whatever it’s worth.

1) Be careful. There is a tonne of pressure on nonprofits to produce a slick and expensive web presence with lots of cool functionality and awesomeness everywhere. However, we don’t live in the field of dreams: if you build it, people might not come. And if they do, then what? Make sure you know why you’re building it, for whom you’re building it and what direct benefits your organization will see as a result.

2) Start by identifying your target audience: who do you want reading your website? And no, ‘everyone’ is not an answer. Who is your core audience? Get specific: age, interests, gender, education, etc. This should align with the core supporters of your organization as a whole. All materials and design should be geared to satisfy them.

3) What do you want your core audience to do when they come to the site? Usually it boils down to two things: donate money or volunteer. Having a website that looks good but doesn’t drive people to help your organization with specific asks can be a waste of time for you, and for people that might want to get involved but can’t figure out how.

4) Set targets: Know how many people you want to donate, how many to volunteer, how many to sign up for an event, etc… If your website isn’t drawing in those targets, explore why, make changes and move forward, always.

I got one posted before broadband problems got in the way.

So, I’ve thrown together some of the most interesting footage from my aborted v-blogs here.

It’s a hodgepodge, but hopefully it will give you a small taste of the trip’s flavour. Enjoy!

I know there are many doubters–like my friend Gerry Caplan–who have argued that this trip was a costly taxpayer funded junket meant to legitimize an otherwise mindless government approach to Africa.

I don’t deny there were likely hidden political agenda’s at play, including lobbying for a Security Council seat. Nor do I deny the Conservative government in Ottawa has largely ignored Africa thus far into its mandate, choosing instead to steer the weight of DFAIT and CIDA towards Latin America.

But none of this discounts the tremendous successes that came out of this trip…successes that add up to far more than its cost.

Call me ignorant, but from my perspective we must put aside grand political theater and look at the individual lives this trip touched upon. We could argue endlessly about the pro’s and con’s of our government’s African policy, and the role of the GG within it. But, at the end of the day, if this voyage positively affected people’s lives in the world’s most impoverished continent, it was a success. Let us not, even for a second, forget that humans should come before the politics at play.

What I saw first hand, as a delegate on this trip, was this sort of impact almost everywhere we went. For simplicities sake let me organize it into three main types of ‘human impact’:

1) Boosted Spirits: Over ten days we had over 50 meetings, each of which normally included between 20 and 30 members of local civil society. All in, therefore, at least 1000 key leaders in a range of fields including human rights, political activism, the media, women’s empowerment, theater and the arts were emboldened by the validation that comes with getting a direct audience with the Head of State of one of the world’s most important countries. Most of whom we met were not government stooges, but real people fighting, often against vested interests, to improve their country. Let us not discount the tremendous importance of Michaelle Jean’s “Diplomacy by Proximity” approach to boosting the spirits of democracy’s greatest defenders in some of the most difficult places on earth to defend it.

2) Positive Policy: Everywhere we went, the GG was not shy about callling on African governments to improve their policies, especially with respect to human rights. Nowhere was this more clear than when, during her address to the parliament of the DRC, she made an impassioned plea to improve the situation of women in the Eastern DRC, which is often called the ‘world’s rape capital’. This is perhaps Canada’s best hope at affecting DRC government policy there–a State Visit is the highest level of diplomacy Canada can offer. If that speech saves only one life of one girl in the DRC, this trip was well worth all the effort.

3) Strengthening Ties: Canada has long and historic relationship to each country we visited on this trip. Yes, not all of these relationships are equal in size and scope. But the variances of our track record with each country fails to discount the enormous importance of building upon past relationships and improve them moving forward. Examples of how these ties will be bound tighter include: potential partnerships between African and Canadian youth groups where established; business ties between Canadian and African companies and individuals were created; connections between a Vancouver theater company and African reconciliation groups were established; relationships between jhr and African media and human rights groups were created; the list goes on and on….

If the cost of other State Visits are any guide, this trip will likely cost tax payers about $750,000. As a person who has worked with CIDA and DFAIT for a number of years, I’m confident that the impact listed above, not to mention any high-level diplomatic successes, is far greater than the average project of that size creates.

Love or hate our current government, this trip has and will change peoples lives for the better. It’s price tag was a bargain.

But if it wasn’t for the dozens of genocide memorials that dot the landscape, you’d never know it occurred.

The streets are spotlessly clean. The roads are paved and smooth, the buildings tall and modern, the people warm and generous. It is considered among the least corrupt countries in Africa. And everywhere you look: beauty.

Rwanda countryside, from a car window.

They say God sleeps in Rwanda. If true, she couldn’t have picked a prettier bed.

Our two and a half days in Rwanda, were not, however, a safari. We attended an endless stream of meetings and roundtables to explore and deepen the ties between our two countries.

For me, the highlight was an opportunity to debate Rwandan media freedom on two occasions: one, in a small and closed meeting with President Kagame, and two, with top Rwandan media types in front of 1200 students.

The meeting with Kagame was a first among recent State Visits—he invited Her Excellency and our delegation into a small, one hour meeting with him. I asked about his complicated relationship with the media. I got an even more complicated and nuanced response.

The panel took place at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, a town about a 2 hour drive from Kigali. It was supposed to be a wide ranging discussion on the media’s role in democracy, but became more pointed when, a few days before the discussion, a panelist named Arthur Assimwe made the decision a head of their national med to close two newspapers. Predictably, the discussion turned around press freedom issues in Rwanda.

The topic is a complicated one for the people of Rwanda. The wounds inflicted by the media during its genocide are still fresh. As a result, any journalist or media organization that comes remotely close to crossing the lines of hatred are now stomped out with a hurried fury.

Media's Role in the Genocide featured in the Giozi Genocide Memorial Museum

So, the press is far from free. But it is repression that is more understandable than most. As Kagame said—the West has no right to lecture Rwanda about freedoms when they dropped the ball completely in protecting ours.

Still, the worry continues—will a rational response to the press’s involvement in past genocide lead to an irrational over-reaction today?

We need to respect the dead, but can’t let the ghosts of yesterday imprison us today.