Connecting 4 the Cool World

by Katherine Dodds

As we send out this e’Zine, I'm thinking about the projects we take on and how they interconnect. When I started Good Company Communications I had a vision for how the web could generate support and mobilize for social causes. Along with founding Good Company, I started the HelloCoolWorld.com website so that we could create a members mail list, distribute and promote content, as well as to create meaningful messages. We like to call ourselves "idea distributors."

Hello Cool World is the "brand" for Good Company, encapsulating our mission. A critical voice but still a gesture of hope wrapped up in just enough cheekiness to avoid the kiss of death PC position that gathers converts but keeps us caged in our own thinking.

What the study of "perception management" has to teach those of us with a message rather than a product to sell is that people are motivated by an emotional connection with the ideas being presented. Hello Cool World wants to function as a space to celebrate the process of creating social change. But we are not shallow. The “brand” that has our back is The Corporation, and this represents a rigorous exploration, solid sources and a range of opinions that are not just from the choir of the converted.

Most importantly to our partners and clients, Hello Cool World operates as a "scaffolding brand” — so that we can build new campaigns from the foundation up, or help our partners renovate their communications and build on to what they have. By co-branding and promoting with us, we all grow the network.

FROM SOUND BITE TO MEDIA BYTES

The impetus for what we wanted to DO with the web came out of my previous twenty years of offline activism. In this new web-world, “grassroots” and “word of mouth” sprouted into “2.O,” with the web able to circumvent the limits of time and space and exponentially increase the power to get the word out. And now with the addition of online networking tools the likes of Facebook and YouTube (and even Google), there are not only more free avenues to supplement out modest Hello Cool World network and micro-site family, but the very notion of mass media is being re-defined.

The web has breathed new life into the short form of any media. For better or for worse there is a use for this world of media "bytes."

HELP US GET FROM IDEA TO OUTCOME

We've made a start but we are not quite there yet. Why are we doing it? We want to sustain the desire — expressed by so many people — to get involved, to shape change and to prevent profit over people from prevailing. And to do this we need to sustain our own efforts to build alliances and launch campaigns, like our ongoing Campaign 4 Corporate Harm Reduction (C4CHR). (In this holiday season both the profits from our web store and donations to the C4CHR are going to Inter Pares, a long time supporter of curtailing corporate harms.)

We have reached the point where it is critical to get to know our network. Who are all of you who have been supporting our work all these years? What do you want to see happen? What can we do together to build a network that helps us all get from idea to outcome? We know we can't do it alone.

We’ve begun the process of turning HelloCoolWorld.com into the Hello Cool World Network Society. In the coming months we are going to be creating a survey for our members as a first step in shaping the mandate and vision for our future work. In the meantime, as 2008 comes to a close we are going to be getting in touch with the 844 folks who signed up this year to volunteer. We need your help to promote the cool projects we have going on right now: the C4CHR, Give Something Big, and Bevel Up: Drugs, Users, and Outreach Nursing.

So to all of you who have joined our network, offered to volunteer, donated to the C4CHR, or bought our stuff off our web store, we thank you very much and are dedicated to finding out how to make sure the work we do is work you want to support!