 Welcome, welcome everybody to the Berkman Center. I think we have a great group we have. So Ruha is a Berkman Center fellow this year. She's also the executive director of the internet bar organization, which works on a number of initiatives trying to improve working towards justice through technology. One particular initiative that she focuses on is peace tones. But that's not what she's talking about today. She's talking about Coney 2012, which is of interest to a lot of different groups, which is why so many different groups are represented here. So welcome, Ruha. Thanks, Amar. And thanks everyone for coming. I'm really excited about having all you guys in the room, especially invisible children people and ICC people, because I'm talking about both a little bit. So the reason I decided to do a presentation on Coney 2012 is not because I'm an expert in it by any means, but because the phenomenon really, really interests me as a practitioner in the field. As Amar mentioned, I run a nonprofit that does access to justice work through technology. One of our projects is a musicians advocacy project where we work with musicians around the world trying to use social media and teaching them about social media and how to use those tools to gain exposure for their own music. And the musicians we work with all have social justice messages to their music. So I think for me and for a lot of practitioners in the field, Coney 2012 is a really great example and a really great learning tool. So I'll be going through some of the positive aspects of the campaign, some of the negatives and the criticisms as well, but mostly to learn from them. And I think overall it's a really, really great campaign because of the impact it's had. So I would just like to see a show of hands. How many people have actually seen the Coney 2012 video? And how many have seen some of the follow-up videos? And I will go through it a little bit just for those who view who are listening in or those of you who haven't seen the video or videos yet. So Coney 2012 came out in early March of 2012. And it was a video campaign created by a nonprofit called Invisible Children who focus on the conflict in Uganda and the surrounding countries between the LRA, which the Lord's Resistance Army, and the governments of those countries. So this conflict has been going on for over two decades. It's winding down now, but it is still ongoing. The LRA still does exist. Coney is still out there. And this campaign was created to bring an end to the conflict and to have Joseph Coney arrested and tried at the ICC. He has already been indicted at the ICC. And so the campaign calls for basically countries to follow up on their obligations to capture him and bring him to the court so he can be tried. So there are some main elements that I'll go through of this particular video. And then after that, I'll go through some of the critiques of the video and the follow-up that Invisible Children did on those critiques. One thing that really interests me and I think interests a lot of nonprofits working in today's day and age is how do you captivate an audience and how do you capture their attention when they are so saturated by audio, visual, textual media, by the news, by entertainment media, how do you capture their attention and bring it to something that isn't really something people want to think about? People don't want to think about violence and murder and torture. And especially when it's in another country and on another continent, it's even further removed from you. So how do you bring that to the attention of an audience that is otherwise saturated with a whole bunch of other things? So Invisible Children's target audience is the millennials, which is people who were born after 1980. And I'm technically included in that category, but I feel like I'm aging out a little bit. So it's a generation after mine, I would say. And they are generally portrayed as very media savvy, very tech savvy, but also very apathetic when it comes to politics and especially world affairs. So it's an especially hard age group to target when you're trying to bring attention to international human rights issues. And one extremely impressive thing about the Kony 2012 video is it is currently the most viral video that was ever made. It reached 100 million views in less than a week. And it was about an issue that even people who are international relations savvy or international affairs savvy, an issue that sort of dropped off our radar. So the LRA, the Civil Conflict in Northern Uganda and the DRC in Sudan, Sudan was in the attention of the world last year and a couple of years ago, but that's dropped off as well. And so Kony 2012 sought to revive attention on that particular issue. And the main elements of the video are both the strength of the campaign and the weakness. When people critique the campaign, often it's these very same things that they critique. One that the campaign personalizes and emotionalizes an issue that is much more complex and involves many more actors, but personalizing involves bringing it down to one person or a group of people that may not really be on the ground in Northern Uganda. For example, this video starts off with it talks about social networks and the power of social networks and the power of us. Us being young Western middle income audiences based here in the US mostly, they start off with a whole series of YouTube clips that have caught on, have become viral memes here in the States. For example, this one is of a 29-year-old hearing herself speak for the first time, and it's a really emotional clip. The point of putting this in the Kony 2012 video is to elicit emotion. There's elicit emotion and have you connect with the video on a level that has nothing to do with Uganda, has nothing to do with Joseph Kony. And this has been a criticism of the campaign. They also did something very interesting and very, very personal, which is to bring into the video as a protagonist the head of the organization. So this is Jason Russell, and this is one of the most intimate moments of a person's life. His wife is giving birth to their son, and they put this scene in the video because it's one of those moments in your life that you have the most visceral, guttural reactions, and that's what they're trying to elicit. And you'll notice in the video that Jason has an invisible children bracelet on. So if you are familiar with the symbolism, it ties things in. The video then goes on to bring in, for the first time, Jacob, who is a Ugandan person who Jason met on his very first trip to Uganda. And his friendship with Jacob is part of what Jason Russell cites as one of his main ties to the cause. And one very clever thing that they did was to tie in the social media arc, the social media narrative, with the Ugandan narrative. Now, Jason actually met Jacob in Uganda before Facebook even existed. But the way they tie it in is they go through a Facebook timeline animation on the video, and they scroll down the timeline sidebar down to 2003, which is before Facebook existed, to show the narrative of how Jason and Jacob met, which is a really clever way of integrating the social media and the connectedness narrative with the Ugandan narrative. And then the video goes into the conflict itself. But again, it goes into it on a very simple personal level. And the audience is helped to connect with the conflict by being introduced to just one person, one child, and that child's grief. And this scene is extremely emotional, and I think is extremely well done, because it's very hard to give victims of conflict, to personalize the grief of victims of conflict, and to give it the same currency as your own grief. And in this film, I think they did a really, really good job of doing that, and you see Jacob talking about his brother here. And you can tell he doesn't do this often. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't think about it. But Jason brings it out of him, and he breaks down and weeps, and it's captured in the film. Again, this could be seen as sensationalizing grief, making Ugandans monolithic as victims. These are some of the criticisms that are brought in. But I think on a basic level, the intention was not that. The intention was to create a connection, create an emotional connection. And that's the arc that you see throughout the entire video. Another thing that you realize when you're watching this video is that Jason Russell and the organization started or came into this conflict on a very personal, basic, and naive level. At this point in the film, Jason says to Jacob, we're going to stop them. And it's just his immediate reaction to someone else's grief is to say, I'll help you. I'll figure it out. I'll get you out of this. And he says later, I had no idea how I was going to do it. I figured that out later. And that, again, is seen as problematic by many critics because you have a Westerner going into an extremely complex situation and jumping into the savior role before he even knows how he's going to do it. That's the criticism. But on a personal level, we all do this all the time. We jump in way beyond our depth and then figure it out later. And I think that, in a sense, is the theme of this entire thing. The video is called an experiment right in the beginning. They reference the experiment metaphor many times in several subsequent videos as well. And you can tell that it definitely, the approach is jumping in because of an emotional reaction and figuring it out later. So is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing to simplify foreign conflict? Is it a bad thing to jump in because of an emotional reaction? One critique from the blog, Wronging Rights, says, first, organizations like Invisible Children not only take up resources that could be used to fund more intelligent advocacy, they take up rhetorical space that could be used to develop more intelligent advocacy. I would argue that that isn't necessarily true. I think Invisible Children appears to be capturing resources and rhetorical space that used to be spent on more frivolous things, more frivolous issues. And I think that because the style of videography they use, the music they use, the merchandise they use are all, they target a population that is otherwise uninterested in foreign affairs. They target a population that is quite materialistic and domestic focused. A lot of the visuals they use, a lot of the merchandise and the music is very domestic. It's very hipster. I'll just say it. And it's effective. I think it captures an audience that is otherwise looking elsewhere and brings their attention to something. It does it in a simplistic way. But the question is, where do we go from there? Where do we go from that simplicity? So the calls to action in the first Coney video was for viewers to forward the link of the video. And this, in a sense, is their strategy was to capitalize on the disintermediated networks of social media. So instead of going via traditional media where there are gatekeepers, they were attempting to build a grassroots swell through social media and social media activism. They also called for people to buy the Coney 2012 kit and donate money, which those two are fundraising strategies. And their strategy was smart and simple, again, because buying the kit involved buying hipster t-shirts and posters and stickers that are all pretty cool. In fact, on the Coney 2012 action kit website, the first sentence of the description is, people will think you're an advocate of awesome with this official action kit. And it seems flippant, but I think it's actually a really good strategy, given their target audience. The fourth action item that the video puts out is to write to celebrities and policymakers. And this is a really interesting tactic that they used, because they understood that you cannot just gain momentum with disintermediated networks. You need to appeal to the official and offline gatekeepers and intermediaries in order to really establish that groundswell. So that's what they did. Invisible children reached out to many celebrities. I don't know if you can actually see them, but Oprah is on there. So is Mark Zuckerberg, Bono, of course, George Clooney. And then in terms of politicians, they reached out to politicians on both sides of the aisle. So there's a lot of Democrats and Republicans on that particular collage. And the fifth thing that they called people to do was to cover the night. So they integrated offline events into this online campaign. And that's, again, something that's very important, something we've seen many social media campaigns by other nonprofits fail on, because they haven't integrated this online activism with an offline engagement. So invisible children were very smart about that. They have a history of being very good at grassroots activism on the ground offline. As I mentioned before, invisible children predates Facebook. And a lot of their activism has been offline in schools, in colleges, showing the videos, talking to people in person, getting them engaged in person. So releasing the Coney 2012 video and then following that video up with two subsequent videos that, again, called people to attend these two in-person events was very smart of them. So going on to some of the critiques of the campaign, the main one was that it oversimplified the conflict in Uganda and the surrounding countries. Another critique was that the conflict is no longer what it used to be. The video portrays the conflict in a context that existed maybe six years ago, but does not exist anymore. Another critique is that most of the people in the video are Western, or at least the video is very clearly targeted at a Western audience. There's also a critique that conflict is commercialized because of the action kits and because of the appeal to people to buy posters and t-shirts and bracelets and that this is going to fix everything. Another critique is that there's an appeal to emotions and there isn't enough thought-provoking content or knowledge to back those emotions up. And so there is a danger of thoughtless action that could come out of this. Another main criticism is that the video calls for the arrest of Coney and his delivery to the ICC. And the arrest is called for in a militaristic and interventionalist way. So they want the US Army to go in and help the Ugandan government track Coney down, help the Ugandan Army track Coney down and arrest him. And so for people in international development who are more peace talk focused and more peace building through development focused, that particular action item was problematic. Another thing is that the video very clearly makes good guys and bad guys. And Coney is the only bad guy talked about really. Jacob is portrayed as the good guy, the hero of the peace in a sense, and he's the only hero of the peace. And Coney is the only villain. And this is extremely problematic because there are a lot of actors both on the side of working for peace and on the side of the conflict that are not talked about. But again, one aspect of simplification is that you have to leave facts out in order to get the message across. Again, the exclusion of local voices is justified by invisible children because they needed to get a simplistic message out. There are critiques about how they spend their money. They spend a lot of their money on creating these narratives, on doing video work, and not as much or not as much as people think is necessary on the ground development work or on the ground peacekeeping work. And then a final critique is the mental breakdown and public arrest of the film's director, who was also portrayed in the film, Jason Russell. So when that happened, a few days after the release of the video and after a lot of the public criticism started coming out, the traditional news media jumped on his mental breakdown and used that in addition to a lot of other criticisms to sort of discredit the organization as a whole. But as I said before, there are a lot of good things about this that we can learn from. The campaign did increase the visibility of an otherwise invisible conflict with an otherwise myopic audience. It also provides a model for other human rights and humanitarian campaigns looking to do similar things. And invisible children themselves, I think, learned a lot from this particular campaign and from the criticism, which is hugely to their credit, because a lot of organizations just crumble under such criticism. So in terms of visibility, I don't know if you can see these figures, but they're extremely impressive. Again, for a conflict, for an international conflict with a domestic audience, an American domestic audience, this is very, very difficult to do. Five million tweets on the video the week that it was released, over 100 million views of the video, over 13,000% increase in the views of the invisible children website. And then on the right side of this infographic, you see figures on the state of affairs prior to the video. So four out of five LRA attacks aren't reported by any Western news source. And this isn't surprising. There's a lot of news coming out of the entire world, a lot of conflict, and very, very little of it filters into Western media, and especially little filters into American media. American media is very domestic focused, compared to even European and other Western media sources. So there was a huge increase of visibility of this particular conflict. Here's more figures on that. I think he can read this. Yep? You get a lot of figures here showing the increase in visibility for that particular video and that particular organization. And one thing that would be really interesting to look at in order to see if those criticism are grounded or not would be the spillover effect on other secondary sources that provide accurate and thorough information about that conflict that could experience a surge in traffic due to that. And this is what we actually care about. Yeah. So do you have any sense? Has anybody looked at this? Are there? I don't know if anyone's looked at it, but that's a really interesting question. And I think one critique of the video that I think is very valid is there wasn't enough of a gateway to these other sources from invisible children. So it's understandable that they cannot be experts in everything. They cannot do the research on the ground, but there are people that are doing the research. So Human Rights Watch has written many, many reports on the conflict on the ground, detailed reports that can easily be linked to from the Invisible Children website. Amnesty International has worked on this campaign on the LRA issue for a while. They've even put out a few videos on the LRA issue. Interviewed people on the ground in these communities calling for the ICC to arrest and try Coney. So it's not just invisible children that are turning to this ICC solution. Many people on the ground in Uganda and in surrounding countries look to the ICC as one of the main legitimate ways of resolving the conflict and bringing a sense of justice to the community, but the campaign stood in isolation when it could have been integrated more, which is not to say that it cannot still do that. But that's a really good point. And these are all from the Invisible Children website, and these are recent. This didn't exist on the website when the campaign came out. These are updates to the website showing the progress of the campaign after the videos come out and after subsequent videos have come out. So a lot of political action has been taken. You can see there were a few political events moved DC, which happened in November. And lobby DC, where Invisible Children rallied people to go to Capitol Hill and lobby with their senators and Congress people to have the US fulfill its obligations or its promises with regard to Uganda. And they also have put Invisible Children is posted on their website information on their programs on the ground, which was lacking in the original Coney 2012 video information on how much work they actually do do on the ground in terms of high-frequency radio stations that they're building all over remote areas of the DRC, Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda, so that people who are at threat or at risk of having the LRA attack can communicate with each other and can warn each other early. Invisible Children also build schools and build fair trade work environments for people in these communities to give them alternative sources of income and help them establish themselves economically. So they do a lot of development work and a lot of conflict prevention work that wasn't addressed in the movie. And here are the four areas in which Invisible Children themselves work. Again, most of their money and most of their attention is spent on media and mobilization, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Because if you look at any other nonprofit, they have a specialization and they do what they're good at. And there's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. One, maybe one critique that I have is that Invisible Children doesn't just stand up and say, this is what we're good at and just allow us to do what we're good at. So those are the four areas in which they work. So one of the responses was, as I said before, Jason Russell's mental breakdown. And it's not surprising to me that he had an emotional breakdown because he was so emotionally tied not only to the cause, but also to the video. And not only was he emotionally tied, but he was in the video. Some of the most intimate moments of his life were in the video. So the criticism of the video and of the campaign came down hard not only on his organization, but on him as a human being, as a person. And surprisingly, a lot of people had a huge problem with him, with his son being in the video, with the fact that there was a cute little blonde boy in the video representing this good evil dichotomy dialogue. So that is understandably difficult for someone to have to deal with. And the organization as a whole suffered a lot after his breakdown in terms of losing supporters. So they had to recover from that. And one of the ways in which they did that was to release a series of follow-up videos. Move, I think, was the, no, Coney 2012 Part 2 was the first follow-up video and addressed more of the context of the conflict, addressed included more Ugandan voices speaking up and saying this is also what we want. It's not just what this outside American organization is coming and telling us we need. In this, in Coney 2012 Part 2, there's also a discussion of international legal obligations of states. And this is the first time that comes into play. There's a reference to the responsibility to protect commitment by a world nation that was signed in 2005, which basically references an obligation that a bunch of states signed on to recognizing the rights of a certain set of human rights, including the rights of children not to be recruited as child soldiers. So this video references that particular commitment. And also recognizes that states often don't act on their promises in the international arena. They make promises, and it's very hard to hold them to them. The only way you can do that is by huge domestic pressure or by foreign policy interests like economic, political, or other kinds of pressure from other states. So in terms of the United States, it's very difficult to exert foreign pressure on the US. And so that pressure has to come internally, which is sort of the point of this movie. Move, which was released in October 2012. And I would really encourage everyone to watch this because it goes through the motivations of invisible children in making the Coney 12 video. Jason Russell also addresses his breakdown. And there's a lot of addressing of that particular aspect of the entire situation in Move. And then Year in Review, which is the third movie I have up here, is the short one. The other two are 19 minutes and 30 minutes again. Year in Review is about five minutes long. It's pretty short. But goes through step by step all of the statistics that I showed you in previous slides. So I think in their follow-up videos, they did a really good job of bringing in more context, more nuance, more voices. All of most of the criticisms that were leveled against invisible children, they addressed in those videos pretty well. They've also added more context to their website. So on their website, you now have a list of 10 points that invisible children believes it will take to end the LRA conflict. They also have infographics that go into more detail on what they believe is needed. The action they call for is now multinational as well. And this builds in part on a conference that they held in November in Washington, DC, where they managed to bring together some very high-level politicians from around the world, from Uganda, the DRC, and Sudan, and have them meet together and commit to bringing Kony in and ending the conflict. So invisible children has taken a much more multinational approach as well because, in a sense, because they can now leverage their visibility, which they could not do before. So in terms of what we as other practitioners in the field can learn from this particular campaign, I do think it's important to personalize and emotionalize video campaigns. You have to be able to help your audience connect with your target community. And sometimes that does involve simplifying your message, simplifying the content. But as Jerome brought up, it's extremely important to create gateways so that you can take someone who's drawn in by an emotional connection and lead them through to a more nuanced and contextual understanding of the issue. Another really interesting thing that invisible children did that I didn't address before, and this is something that the marketing community has learned about viral videos, is a way to keep people's attention. And this is a long video for a viral video. It's 30 minutes long. A way to keep people's attention is to pulse positive messaging with tragic or emergency messaging. If you have too much of one thing, people lose interest. And so in Coney 2012, they did a really good job of that. In the beginning, you have this euphoric, we are the new generation of social media and we can change the world. And then you have the tragic issues in the middle of the video where you see Jacob and you see his grief. And then you see Coney and you see the brutality of his action. And then they quickly bring in a positive emotion again because they don't want to lose you in that despair. So it's actually something that works pretty well, something that worked very well in that video. And Invisible Children has continued to do that in their subsequent videos as well. Again, integrating old school mainstream media is still essential if you want to take your online campaigns and bring them offline. Integrating offline events and physical ties to the cause, that's merchandising and the cover of the night and the events on the ground is also extremely important. Time sensitivity, I didn't address this before, but one thing about the Coney 2012 video is that they bring a sense of urgency to the video. They say 2012 is the year we're going to get Coney. This video is 27 minutes long and there's a countdown in the video. There's a countdown to the end of the year. And it makes you feel a sense of urgency, but you don't really know why 2012 is the year. Why is it an emergency this year, well, last year? In the move video, they address that. And Invisible Children say it wasn't really an external emergency. It was an internal one within their organization. They felt a sense that they were running out of steam. And this was a last-ditch effort. All chips in. We're going to go all or nothing. So it's a very interesting case where they took an internal sense of emergency and externalized it. And it seemed to work. Not many people ask the question, why 2012? What is it about this year that Coney must be caught? So another thing that I think Invisible Children learned from and will integrate in the future is that they need to stay more relevant to needs on the ground. If the issue that you're dealing with is six years old, pivot and talk about the issue on the ground now. People are still being captured. It's not 30,000 child soldiers anymore, but 280 people captured in the past year is still a lot. So I think they've learned that as well. And the integration of easy calls to action is something very, very important. Clicktivism is a criticism that people have leveled against Coney 2012. But they integrated a lot of offline events and activities that I think take them beyond that criticism and beyond what a lot of other nonprofits trying to do online campaigns haven't been able to achieve. So I'd like to open it up to discussion now, because I think it is a very controversial campaign, a very controversial issue. And I'd like some of those controversies to be brought up so we can discuss. Jason Russell's mental breakdown was something that was seized upon by critics and something that I think was devastating to the Invisible Children, because you no longer have to engage with the substance of the issue. You can just say, oh, well, Jason Russell's breakdown. But I would level the same criticism inversely against Invisible Children with their video move. I mean, if I recall correctly, as you mentioned, a lot of move has to do with Jason Russell's breakdown. And something that I am concerned about is that they actually try to reframe the criticism as being not about substance, but about being about Jason Russell's breakdown, so that once they answered that question, they didn't have to answer the more substantive criticisms. And I mean, another example within the move is you had, I remember when they showed a bunch of YouTube critical responses, and one person said, well, this is the Illuminati. And it's meant to be somewhat joking, but it's also meant to reframe the criticism so that we have an understanding that it's more of a knee-jerk reaction to the organization than to their actual actions. Maybe this is a bit of a question with the period, but I was wondering if you think that's fair, or if move as a video did a better job of getting to the actual substantive criticisms, or was it just reframe? I don't think it did a better job of getting to the substance. I think it was a reactionary video. And it was in response to the fallout of the initial video. And so one of the things that they had to address, they felt they had to, they, Invisible Children released a video in April after Jason Russell had already had his breakdown, and they did not address his breakdown in that video. They were trying to bring people back to the actual substantive issues. And that didn't really work. The Cover the Night event was three days after Coney 2012, Part Two was released, and sort of they did not have the reaction they were hoping to have, did not have the kinds of on-the-street advocacy, even though all of their action kits had sold out. So hundreds of thousands of people had bought, had spent $30 on a kit to go out and canvas their neighborhoods, but for some reason did not go out and canvas. And one of the reasons that Invisible Children probably thought affected that was his mental breakdown and the fact that they did not address it. So I think Move was an attempt to deal with that. And it's very interesting to see them try and walk the line between addressing every single criticism, including financial criticisms, this very personal breakdown, which unfortunately had a very public aspect to it. And then the fact that attention was diverted totally away from the actual cause to the organization and its founder. So that's an answer with a question mark at the end. Considering that a good portion of Coney 2012's viewers were around in their teens, mid-20s, wouldn't you say that considering with Jason Russell's breakdown that a good number of them didn't know about it and really couldn't really, wouldn't go out canvassing because of that? You know, everybody saw it. Could you repeat that? Yeah. But just the last part. Yeah, so considering that a lot of young people don't necessarily know about Jason Russell's breakdown, could that, what would be some other reasons why they didn't go out canvassing and use those toolkits? Was it that why? I don't remember if it was that why it's spreading. I think they did know it was arguably more in the news than the original campaign because it was just so sensational. He was running around naked in the streets. You know, it's perfect news fodder. So I would argue that they did know. I might be one of the people who heard a lot about the campaign and then did not know until you mentioned it that what happened afterward. But okay, it's about 2013. Coney is presumably still at large. There hasn't been a U.S. military intervention. So how does, they didn't succeed in those two goals in 2012. How do they stay relevant in 2013 and keep people focused on it when there was so much energy put into this, this was supposed to happen last year? That's a really good question. And that's the risk you run when you put a deadline on your campaign. They went all out in 2012. They said, this is the end. And now it's 2013 and their Coney 2012 t-shirts are on sale for $10 because I don't know if I have the answer to that. I don't know how you recover from that. Have they gotten a, I recall they were trying to get a U.S. military intervention. I don't think they got anywhere close to that goal. No, but some of their other goals, one was fundraising and they were very successful at that in 2012 because of this campaign. And another was to use those funds to do more of the on the ground work that they're currently doing. So to build more radio stations, to build more schools, to help more small businesses and give out more scholarships. And so I think in those senses they have been successful in terms of capturing this one individual, no. And I don't know, I don't know how successful they're going to be on that particular action item. Yeah, maybe a reply to that. I think in the end the whole, I mean, what was said about the end of the campaign is a bit unfair on invisible children. I mean, I have my preserves on the whole thing, but it wasn't so unsuccessful. The thing I think one of the mistakes was identifying, you know, that by 2012 we have to get Coney captured which didn't happen. But if you ask Africans and Ugandans they say Coney is out of all those countries. He's out of Central Africa. He's hidden somewhere. He's got almost nobody. I mean, he wasn't, he wasn't captured because obviously he had a little, but he's out of the picture completely. So. But the problem still exists without him, right? Well, but the problem with Coney, the problem that address wasn't, you know, peace in Central Africa, it was just Coney. And to be fair, they didn't capture him, but some of that did change a lot. Like, maybe from the tactical perspective, part of the having such a well-delimited target is probably a tactical mistake because they could have, you know, maybe it's out of the purpose of getting people excited about a very specific thing, but much of the cause was driven forward. I have many reserves about the campaign, but on that, I think to be fair. Or you could argue that it was a tactical mistake in terms of the population here, not seeing this goal achieved, but in terms of populations, in terms of the target populations, having a single pinpointed target for this population to focus on and rally around and fund and then using that funding to fund other more nuanced activities that have actually helped those populations out fine. So the only population that's really duped and feeling unfulfilled is the one here, which is fine. As long as you don't have to appeal to them again. Yeah. Go ahead. In terms of strategy and tactics, two areas that I didn't hear you talk about in terms of improvement. One is the mobilizational logistics of material. They're the real problems in fulfillment and movement of materials, to especially the youth and young adult communities that were so brilliantly activated and made aware. Second, maybe missteps are learnings about sustaining mobilization and engagement of youth and young adult populations. I think there was a great deal of wishful thinking about the degree of momentum and how that would carry out into execution at the street level. So I'm very curious to know what's the organization learned or what have you evaluated as some of the insights into maintaining mobilization engagement? Because I think the reaction of the organization, and this is a statement, the reaction of the organization to the founder's breakdown, I thought was rather immature in terms of hiding out in chain, not being as aggressive, letting that be the story that carried as opposed to being more aggressive, encountering the story. I thought it was a real discernment supposedly such a media savvy organization not to be able to pivot itself more aggressively and appeal to the larger issues. And in some ways, sharing the press about making the kind of case it was making. So yeah. Okay, so three things that you brought up there. The first, the logistical aspects and the fact that they did break down in fulfillment, they addressed that in move. And this is one of the main things that I've noticed in looking into this campaign is that it blew up way too big for them, way bigger than they expected it to, way bigger than anyone else expected it to. And so the main critiques of this campaign really are that it got too big. If invisible children had managed to have 2,000 people buy action kits and go out into the streets and lobby Congress, everyone would have said, that's an amazing job that you've got 2,000 people to care about the LRA. But because they got 100 million people to care, suddenly it's like, well, the LRA isn't important enough for 100 million people to care about anymore. And a lot of the fulfillment issues the same thing, they weren't expecting that many people to order action kits. And so when they failed on fulfillment, when their website crashed and they had to send people to their Tumblr instead, and then everyone thought they were a fake organization because they're an internet organization that doesn't have a website, all of these things are failures of getting too big and being too successful. And the same thing with not being able to pivot the Jason Russell mental breakdown, I think they were just so overwhelmed as a young both as an organization and as a group of people organization, they didn't know how to react. So I don't really know what the solution is to that, except that they are probably now taking stock and learning and trying to strategize and plan their way forward. And I think they're generally quite a savvy and smart organization. They've learned now that they can scale that big and they probably will prepare for that kind of scale the next time they run a campaign. In terms of replicability for other organizations, I don't know if there's any way you can tell that you're gonna make it that big until you do and then until you buckle under the pressure of having gained that much exposure. Last night, coming to the video with an awareness of the massive viral hit that it became and you've seen all the links that my friends posted on Facebook on last spring. It seemed to almost be a self-fulfilling prophecy of so much that video devotes so much of its running time to like the power of the internet and the power of social networking. And I was curious that any other groups like invisible children have attempted to kind of sensationalize the power of mass media and the internet in the same way. I think part of the video's success was in that it made people excited about how like through the internet they could make a difference and not just sensationalize the issues. I'm not aware of that many other organizations that have done it very successfully. I know there's a really interesting YouTube fundraising project where two guys have gotten together and YouTube is somehow affiliated and they crowdfund to, they basically fundraise to give away money to one or two non-profits and they do that through having crowd sourcing video, fundraising videos. So it's crowd based in several aspects. It's YouTube affiliated, but it's kind of hard to understand. I mean, it's really hard for me to explain and so maybe that's where it falls. But I haven't really come across any that have been as successful as invisible children. Amnesty International has some very good campaign videos, but I think their most viewed video is under 10,000 views still. I wanted to touch upon two things. So transparency and credibility and how they link together. So you mentioned before that they had their four areas what they were good at and one of them was media and the other was mobilization and you said it would be better if they were upfront about saying this is what we're good at and along with creating those other gateways that the drill ability that Ethan's documented and other people's talking about. But I'm also wondering just how that, if that would have, if being more transparent would have eased a little the issue of what happened with Russell's breakdown and then another thing I'm not sure how much this affected the credibility of their organization but then like the leak cables about involvement with government agencies and collaboration with to get the military intervention in Uganda and these countries. I'm just wondering, it seems to be that there's a careful balance there where on the one hand transparency probably would have helped it but then on the other hand you did have a lot of these mainly the break, Russell's breakdown but then further down the line when there was more investigation of the organization things like the leak cables that really came down hard on the organization so I'm just wondering what's your assessment of how organizations can learn from that or? You can never be completely transparent as an organization one because people don't want to know all of that information until a scandal happens and then they want to dig it up and two it's not appropriate to reveal I don't think any organization is completely transparent about everything that goes on but one thing they did attempt to do which I think was the right thing to do is to once people started trying to dig into their their finances and their background is to be as transparent on those issues as they could and I think that's all any non-profit or anyone having someone delve into your closet is just be like, well here it is but no I don't think upfront complete transparency is appropriate for non-profits. I have a question mark at the end of it but I remember when I was in high school which was a little while ago invisible children came to my high school and did scrum of presently sort of resemble 2012 and a lot of the media use and a lot of the action items that were bracelets and I would like to push back based on that a little bit on your sort of like oh it doesn't matter that we activated this broader set of people who use money and don't see anything coming out of their work because I think that that's the tactic that they use sort of when I remember being in high school it was sort of an overly simplistic view of what was happening in Uganda they got the same push back then like wait I don't think this represents the whole story I remember people asking their teachers about like hey so can you learn more about this which is great but that invisible children sort of wasn't linking out wasn't creating that so I mean I guess that I'm a little skeptical about sort of like oh they're really good at Indian mobilization and they should just put this on that because I think that what it does is it turns people off sort of compassion fatigue style on getting involved in these kind of projects because what they see is I you know I tried I did these things and nothing even came out of it at all and like when I saw 2012 come out I was like oh god it's invisible children like these people who came to my high school and nothing ever came out so I guess it's really hard for me to like hear it's like oh it's great that we met reach all these people and oh nothing happened and that's totally fine it was a successful campaign I think it's better if you reach less people and actually activate them more fully and actually you know people gain more knowledge about what's going on and get a complete picture like you know quantity over quality over quantity I agree quality over quantity but wouldn't it be great if we could get that quantity to quality and we're halfway there with this campaign and that's where I see the potential how do you then link this ground surge with some actual follow through and I think invisible children gets us more there today in 2013 than they did 10 years ago when they were at your high school or even a year ago when they released Coney 2012 if you look on their website today there are a lot of link-throughs to other reports and other agencies a lot more than they used to have but there can be more and I think other agencies should also reach out to invisible children and organizations like them and use them so you know Human Rights Watch could use invisible children or work in conjunction with them to run a campaign together so that you've got experts on the context on the ground working with experts in media and communication which is what I see invisible children as more than anything in your own work you have all these lessons which one of them do you think could apply to musicians or other cases that are social justice oriented but maybe smaller in scale not exactly humanitarian crisis issues how do you or what lessons have you taken that you'll apply yourself? The lessons that I've taken you probably won't like because they're the commercial and fundraising ones and again this comes down to the scale right so every non-profit has merchandise every non-profit wants to sell them but as soon as you sell 500 million t-shirts people feel dirty about the fact that you're a non-profit and you've done so well at t-shirt sales but that's something I looked in invisible children as a model for merchandising and for small donation raising donations and raising memberships from small scale values but large scale quantity and that's something they have been really good at they haven't been good at sustaining interest and engagement on an intellectual level but they've been really good at fundraising on this really large scale. It seems to me that attention is a precursor to action and so just within an attention economy framework they've done a spectacular job getting people to notice and I wonder if there's a different way of evaluating the success of campaigns as it so that it's not about if it was about removing Coney that's not necessarily the mode to evaluate this campaign but it's a matter of opening up discourse and to that I think that it's really interesting to me that the video was 30 minutes and I don't know any ballroomist extreme I know very few people who actually watched it so there is this meta-text that was built around in the video and I think that's really important to think about the video and all the meanings of that video and how it manifests itself within social media and one sort or another outside of and the narrative becomes assumed and related as opposed to actually consuming. Yeah, that's a very interesting point and also the subsequent discussions that evolved out of it by and between people who may or may not have watched the video either but are relying on this sort of narrative that's been perpetrated by or propagated by by the news media and by blogs and now a little bit academic articles there still aren't that many academic articles on the issue or the campaign but the discourse that followed the video is almost can stand on its own almost as something to evaluate and to dig into because it generated a very rich discourse in its wake beginning days after most of the articles and blogs on Coney 2012 came out in the week after the video came out and there's not that much afterwards the academic articles came out a month or two after that but I think the conversation should continue and the analysis should continue there's a lot to unpack that hasn't yet been unpacked. To me the important point here is not that those people elicited emotional reactions through their video if per se the important question is how do you channel that energy afterwards to get people to act upon it in a useful way and so I wonder whether and who were the critics who attacked that video on the emotional elicitation angle as like there seems to be a sense in which everybody expects a commercial to be entertaining, fun and a sitting emotional reaction but as long as like you come to a serious subject the only way to enter it would be through information overload and boredom so which seems to me like a very bad strategy to like get people's interest if you look at any good lecture, academic lecture that's what people do right they attract, they catch you up they attract you with some kind of picture or something then they give you a frame that's totally like elusive about what they're gonna say and then they dig in once you're with them so it's a very bad understanding of what this whole is so where are the really people who were like upset with the fact that this elicited emotions per se and I was also interested in like who were those critics more generally and what was their stake in that particular issue for them to step in? Yeah, there was a lot of criticism on the emotional aspect more on the fact that it was emotions that weren't backed up by thought so emotions that would lead to action that was based on not enough context basically and those reactions were from academics of course Which would probably be bad at doing this kind of thing Yeah, sad for them and there was the anti-commercialization reaction was also mostly an academic one and I guess from when I say academic it's often practitioners who are also researching and writing on the issues so practitioners in the non-profit human rights field so we working in this field have we walk this line of needing funding and needing to reach out beyond grant funding to other sources but feeling dirty about purely commercial sources like merchandising and I think that critique came from that it wasn't so much about invisible children as it was about our own shame at this way of fundraising Online somewhere a campaign that was about getting pop stars, recording, coming home songs and I guess the idea is that there are now all these kids out there who are involved in this stuff and they're horribly embarrassed or have very psychological issues about what they've done and they're afraid to come home and there were local indigenous songs that got recorded and get broadcast to try and encourage the kids to go home and this has been effective and I'm curious if invisible children are involved with that to separate things and I wonder the extent to which this as a template might is what you might do moving forward so for instance you might say as was observed well look with the great efforts of lots of people and many forces Coney is now marginalized but now you have to deal with the reality of a place that has been scarred by these decades and this would enable one to say okay something has happened but now what are the set of things you have to do to deal with reality and also might allow the tying in of the personal narrative of you have a place that's psychologically scarred that had a breakdown and it has to recover and this is, you know might help to tie a bunch of things together. Yeah absolutely I think that would be a really good place for invisible children to move into so move away from targeting Coney per se and more towards rehabilitation and healing the coming home campaign I believe was a UN sponsored campaign and the UN subbed out a lot of the aspects of it to different organizations so I know invisible children did the flyers they made flyers for this campaign and would airdrop them across vast expanses of jungle where Coney and his army were believed to be and they've had some success with people coming back to their communities holding these flyers and saying this is the reason I came home they also from the radio stations that they've built broadcast coming home messaging so they've been very involved in that aspect of it Yeah They just started a rehabilitation program in the GRC that just opened up last month and they also do focus a lot of their on the ground initiatives on education like schools not only elementary schools but also high schools and then sending children in the region on to college and then also on like you kind of touched on this a little like sustainable fair trade like economic growth for the area so that they have something to go back to Thank you