PassTheBaton: Ideas, Tasks, and Reflections

Today, our group centered around the hashtag #HydroFlaskGivesBack, a social object of our own creation. This object is calling on owners of a Hydro Flask water bottle to look at the bottom of their container and enter the five digit code into the Hydro Flask website, where the company gives five percent of every purchase back to charities, of which there are twelve to choose from. Ideally, this is something easy that owners of a Hydro Flask can do without taking too much of their own time from other charitable activities. In addition, encouraging the purchase of these water bottles as gifts during the holiday season will expand the range of our cause, and enable Hydro Flask to give back more once the season is over. Our tasks for the next few days are as follows:

1. Use the hashtag #HydroFlaskGivesBack on social media to raise awareness
2. If you own a Hydro Flask, register it on the website and choose one of the 12 charities to donate to.
3. Give a gift that keeps on giving and share a Hydro Flask with family and friends and encourage them to #GiveBack
4. Post a picture with your Hydro Flask and caption it #HydroFlaskGivesBack and write why you donated to that charity. also include the website https://www.hydroflask.com/donate so it can be easily reached.
5. Encourage a conversation outside of social media to help raise awareness for the cause and the charity you are passionate about.

In addition, you can check out our online Wiki space, hosted on cooperation.org, here.

As a group, I feel that all of us were generally aware of how to use social media in order to gain attention. Our tasks were not difficult, nor should they be in order to facilitate true technical coordination for an easy social call to action like this. These activities that we are encouraging consumers to do are not difficult, which aided in the cause we are supporting feeling actionable and engaging to many, not just ourselves.

In addition, one drawback was and will continue to be the size of our group. There is not much that three or four people can do with our interface, and there is not much to be said about three people using a hashtag. With how this project was laid out, the use of our hashtag is going to be limited to those in the other group, as we cannot complete our own tasks. What was truly needed is for all of our group to use these hashtags on social media as well, in order to have more of a noticeable presence as a whole. Along with this, having ten or more of us post on social media would allow our posts to reach a broader audience full of both weak and strong social ties facilitated through online social networking sites. I believe that in the case of a cause such as this, awareness to a public that owns these water bottles would come with numbers. Twenty kids on social media sites using the same hashtag is more noticeable and relevant to others than three or four.

It was also difficult to know that I was powerless to do anything in order to help our tasks come to fruition. Leaving my project in the hands of another was difficult, especially knowing they would be less invested and engaged in the cause. I was nervous about leaving these tasks up to a group that didn't know our intentions or share in our earlier conversations. If I am passionate about something, I am usually not afraid to say something about it on social media like was intended with this campaign. However, there are a number of members, and as a fellow member of this group it is important to not only follow the rules of the assignment but also to leave some of the campaign up to the public we are trying to reach. We do not own this task. We don't own the hashtag. These are common social goods, now, and we were tasked to treat our objectives like those of a real social movement would be treated by their creators: in a hands off fashion.

In having to work toward another cause, I was less than impressed with the efforts they thought we should put in. Online activism should be easy to accomplish, regardless of how many people are in a group. The difficult tasks that the Hope Phones group had us engage in were less than engaging, and were not at all public. The only public task we did as a group was to create a single post on social media. Emails, infographics, and text chains are hard to get around to a large group of people.

 However, suggesting a phone drive on campus was an interesting take on this exercise. Though the idea would have originated online, the bulk of the effort would have been attracting campus students in a face-to-face world. Then again, so much online promotion would have to be done before this drive could ever take place. Who carries around an old phone with them anyway, if they already have a perfectly good phone to use?

I think this activity was interesting as well as informative. It opened my eyes to how truly difficult it can be to get others to listen and understand why a social movement can be squashed within days of its inception. Activism online is a relatively new platform with both advantages and disadvantages, and will only bring a vision into fruition if the tasks required are agreeable and simple to accomplish,