Scott Redmond’s Speech at the Chicago Education Conference

 

 

 

 

 

I am Scott Redmond, I am the President of Clever Industries and I am also a policy reform advocate. I have helped provide resources for middle east regime change, national domestic reform movements and a number of social policy programs. I have numeric dyslexia so I appreciate the value of effective education programs. Today I am going to discuss the use of social media in grassroots campaigns.

To begin, let me first recall how The Association for Child Support Enforcement has changed child support laws. First in one state:  Ohio, and then across the country state by state. One Person - a single mother started and drove all that.

A few individuals  formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving and convinced dozens of states to toughen up their drunk driving laws. As a result, the numbers of drunk driving deaths are quantitatively lower.

Families of Alzheimer’s patients working together, through the Alzheimer’s Association, convinced the government to invest extensive resources into research for a cure. That was a few thousand people that got together.

Across America in the not so distant past, women were banned from voting. Millions of people rose up and changed that.

Voices together can move mountains. From a successful effort with one supporter to one with millions we are now able to launch grass-roots efforts with HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF SUPPORTERS.

Many of us think that ordinary individuals can’t make a difference in public policy because it is hard to change laws and policies. But it can be done. It has been done, over and over again in our history, in the face of great obstacles.

Today we are here to discuss refining the scaffolding for our children by bringing those hundreds of millions of people together in a way that each of you can do in your spare time in your home.

A social network is a group of individuals that are connected by a common interest. This room holds a social network.

A social network does not need to use any technology, but when you do use technology, you can expand the ability of the network to accomplish things by over a million times per person.

There are some existing websites that can give you a jumpstart on that outreach, these are some of those:

And here is the power they give you: (See Slide)

There are also tools that can do much of the work for you. One is TweetDeck. This is a desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn , Google Plus, Foursquare, and other sites. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter software to allow you to organize high volume sends and receive tweets and view profiles in bulk.

Another tool you can use is high volume contact management websites.

This is a very important super tool for managing your media, group and public contacts.

With one click you can deliver deep controlled details to hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

From traditional automated LISTSERV mailing lists, to sophisticated web-based power tools, the socially networked world is yours to lead the charge with.

So, kids started the social media phenomenon but they grew up and now they AND their kids are using it. I want to challenge you to leave here and take tangible steps to use social media to create Parent/child partnerships to bring our legislation reform message to every state in America. Not only are you going to turbo- charge your outreach with social media you are going to work with your kids and your neighbors and their kids to super-turbo-charge this campaign.

In this effort, let’s agree to use the same words in our writings so the message does not get confused. This means that we have to use the same “agreed phrases” in order to avoid concept diffusion. Try to use the phrases and language that you see on the campaign website at:  www.state-literacy-law.org

In conclusion, if you can’t remember all of this just go here:

So there you have it. What questions can I answer?