Short Internships in Social Media

Basics: SpaceShare orchestrates ride-, room- and taxi- sharing for festivals and conferences. We help people replace cars and resource-use with their community. We aim well beyond the normal green events, spreading the green message not by talking about it but by helping people enact it and benefit from greening, making new friends and stronger communities in the process. For example, we've heard from many people who would never have thought of sharing a room , but now that they did in a safe environment (for example holistic nurses sharing with other holistic nurses), they feel more trusting and intend to do it again.

Who we are: SpaceShare is a small social enterprise. Founded by Stephen Cataldo six years ago, we work with about 50 events each year (you can see some recent and upcoming events), helping them be green and educate their attendees. We would welcome your help to grow, there are many thousands of events that would benefit from our approach to greening.

Our core message: We are believers in practice, and everyone who shares will get the core message without further explanation. We help make it easy for people to share and conserve, which tends to inspire them to do it again.

But we are also using that practice -- and our connections with event planners who often are just beginning to green their events -- to educate about other ideas: other ways to be green at festivals, why conference planners should push greening faster and further beyond just offsetting.

Social Media for Greener Events

Our two main audiences are partying festival goers and professional conference attendees. Obviously, we're considering separate social media campaigns for each:

Conferences: Better Campaign

Target audience: Conference Planners.

Background: Conferences are inching towards being greener with a heavy focus on costs, measurements and offsets. The efforts often bear little resemblance to the green movement of a few years ago, and are very heavy with greenwashing and commercialization. Greening is an expense, greening is outsourced.

Core Message: Greening is about doing what you're already doing better, more intelligently, and with less clutter and trash. It's often a fundamentally different way of looking at the world -- more connected, more joyful, more alive. Getting your core mission done without making a mess: for the meetings industry, that means helping people meet: connecting while traveling, making a higher proportion of local connections, enjoying local foods while traveling, etc.

Specific Goals: We want to invite all planners of professional events to think about how their early greening steps have made their events better (at the same time putting the idea into the heads of event planners who haven't taken any steps). We'd like to collect their answers and gather them into a video[?] that can then be shared, perhaps embedded in profiles on social networks among event planners as well as the usual facebook world. A very, very initial sketch is here: http://greeneventsguide.org/green-events-are-better

Internship: Transform the sketch into an outreach video requesting comments on "how greening made your event better." Get it into the hands of as many event planners as possible -- figuring out this step is a key part of the internship, what social media should we use? Record their feedback. Recreate the outreach video into one or more completed versions describing one way after another that greening made an event better (this step might fall to the next group or to SpaceShare/ the Green Events Guide).