A tole-rant is a constructive rant. A 60 second video of a heartfelt rant about a social issue that points to a solution.
Tole-rants is the flag ship social good competition and UGC video movement created by Global Tolerance in partnership with UNESCO, The Council of Europe and The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. As Digital Media Manager for Global Tolerance I was responsible for the design and implementation of the digital/ social media strategy which was crafted around the new tagline we created: "Do you LIKE solutions instead of problems?"
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Tole-rants is the flag ship social good competition and UGC video movement created by Global Tolerance in partnership with UNESCO, The Council of Europe and The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. As Digital Media Manager for Global Tolerance I was responsible for the design and implementation of the digital/ social media strategy which was crafted around the new tagline we created: "Do you LIKE solutions instead of problems?"
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Tole-rants: 60 Seconds of Hope ( Facebook Page)
RESEARCH: IDENTIFYING STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS
Joining Global Tolerance when the Tole-rants was already a number of months into its life I began with extensive research and analysis of the user experience and user base 'as is', which quickly identified the central strength of Tole-rants: Tole-rants had the potential to be a highly shareable platform for social change organizations and socially conscious individuals to promote and bring attention to their causes.
However the momentum of Tole-rants had stalled significantly since it's launch and my research quickly identified that the weakness lay in its implementation. It was falling short by not properly answering the central user need: To use Tole-rants as a platform to promote their own social cause.
THE CHALLENGE
Tole-rants had a gorgeous stand alone website however its integration with social media channels was weak - it was not reaching its audience where they were. We needed to acquire more UGC video contributions and more attention for the movement and Facebook was identified as a key strategic platform for this goal. When I took charge the Facebook profile was quite weak. It had some 300 Likes, there were sparse and sporadic notices published on the profile and in 4 months only a few videos had been shared on the page. People were not sharing and speaking about the videos on Facebook because the videos were not being exposed and 'promoted' properly and there was no compelling context as to why people should share them 'now'. We needed to build exposure to the videos on Facebook (YouTube and Twitter also) and build contextual value around them.
THE SOLUTION
We concentrated primarily on Facebook as our community platform, designing a gorgeous, compelling and effective landing page that allowed us to feature selected videos each week, encouraged dialogue and discussion around the issues and kept people informed of the progress of the 'video competition' itself. The entire initiative was wrapped around the compelling, positive tagline and call to action: "Do You LIKE Solutions Instead of Problems?"
RESEARCH: IDENTIFYING STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS
Joining Global Tolerance when the Tole-rants was already a number of months into its life I began with extensive research and analysis of the user experience and user base 'as is', which quickly identified the central strength of Tole-rants: Tole-rants had the potential to be a highly shareable platform for social change organizations and socially conscious individuals to promote and bring attention to their causes.
However the momentum of Tole-rants had stalled significantly since it's launch and my research quickly identified that the weakness lay in its implementation. It was falling short by not properly answering the central user need: To use Tole-rants as a platform to promote their own social cause.
THE CHALLENGE
Tole-rants had a gorgeous stand alone website however its integration with social media channels was weak - it was not reaching its audience where they were. We needed to acquire more UGC video contributions and more attention for the movement and Facebook was identified as a key strategic platform for this goal. When I took charge the Facebook profile was quite weak. It had some 300 Likes, there were sparse and sporadic notices published on the profile and in 4 months only a few videos had been shared on the page. People were not sharing and speaking about the videos on Facebook because the videos were not being exposed and 'promoted' properly and there was no compelling context as to why people should share them 'now'. We needed to build exposure to the videos on Facebook (YouTube and Twitter also) and build contextual value around them.
THE SOLUTION
We concentrated primarily on Facebook as our community platform, designing a gorgeous, compelling and effective landing page that allowed us to feature selected videos each week, encouraged dialogue and discussion around the issues and kept people informed of the progress of the 'video competition' itself. The entire initiative was wrapped around the compelling, positive tagline and call to action: "Do You LIKE Solutions Instead of Problems?"
THREE KEY STRATEGY STEPS
We achieved our goals primarily by implementing these three key strategies:
1) A new "Featured Tole-rant of the Week" system was designed promoted and chosen by a public voting and commentary period and and internal selection.
2) An aesthetically pleasing Facebook Landing page was designed with two central focuses:
a) To showcase the selection of inspiring videos which encouraged the public and contributors to share their videos in their social graph.
b) Create a clear called to action to "Like" the page and share the cause through the creation of an original, socially tuned tagline: "Do You Like Solutions Instead of Problems"
3) A weekly blog series called "I'm Tole-ranting about...." was created to complement the "Featured Tole-rant of the Week" in which our staff web writer engaged blogging community and our Facebook, Twitter networks with entertaining, edgy and well researched articles that took a "conversational" approach to the social justice "problems and solutions" that the featured Tole-ranter raised.
SOME MEASURABLE RESULTS:
- Increased Facebook Likes by over 100% in 3 months from 450 to 980
- Increased Facebook Pageviews by 300%
- Increased UGC Video "Tole-rant" entries from 65 to 150 from 17 countries
- Increased number of comment activity 400%
- Increased number of Facebook Video clicks by 500%
Links:
Tole-rants Facebook
Tole-rants Website
INSIGHTS ON MY DESIGN PROCESS
As Digital Media Manager I led the design process which started with an extensive, in-depth analysis of our social media strategy and our Facebook Insight statistics. More data was then gathered via online questionnaires, interviews and polls with our Facebook Fan page base the results of which provided us with a solid understanding of our user base, their user experience and a hierarchy of our users needs. Working from this data I developed wireframe iterations at this point engaging a talented external graphic designer to bring the wireframe together with our aesthetic directives.
Throughout this process I began my own research on appropriate FBML and FBJS designs, while educating myself on this coding language. I managed an external back end programmer through the process of implementing our design but in point of fact it was I who discovered the proper FBJS method of implementing of video and photo centric design and functionality of the Tole-rants Facebook landing page(s).
The refined tag line and call to action - "Do you LIKE solutions instead of problems?" - evolved out of this process and the in-depth user experience analysis.
