It took just three months for a tight-knit group of friends to get over 24,000 people into a bone marrow registry in an effort to save the life of friend and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sameer Bhatia. The key to their extraordinary results? They harnessed the power of social networks.
Despite a perfect match, Bhatia ultimately succumbed to leukemia, but his legacy lives on. In addition to the dramatically expanded pool of South Asians in the Marrow Donor Program, his story inspired the “
Dragonfly Effect,” an original framework developed at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. It uses design-thinking mindsets and psychological research to instruct how individuals may support their own causes and spur their own movements. It taps social media and insights in consumer behavior to create change. The mnemonic Focus + GET: (Focus Your Goal, Grab Attention, Engage Others, and Take Action) represents the four pillars of the framework.
Focus: Think Human. Focus on the person you are trying to help. Resist the urge to rush in with a preconceived solution to the problem. Test alternatives and be prepared to return to square one again and again. Also, focus on the person you need help from — your audience. What are their goals and dreams? How can you help them be realized? Who are you to them? Where are your leverage points in terms of causing them to act? Also, match your appeal to the medium. For example, use short bursts for Twitter, deeper discourse for blogs, and emotional envelopment on YouTube.
Grab Attention: Dream with Purpose. What matters to you draws others. Emotions are contagious. Meaningful purpose garners extraordinary support. The right idea — seated in emotion — grows exponentially.
Take Jessica Jackley. While earning her MBA she raised money online to bootstrap entrepreneurs in the developing world. Now Kiva.org has generated over $120M in micro-finance loans with the assistance of thousands of individual lenders.
Engage Others: Connect with People. Tell stories. Stories are sticky: they bring facts to life infusing them with passion. Our brains are hardwired for stories to organize and orient information, and we need patterns to understand things. Stories also increase the chance that your audience will remember you. Salient meaningful messages, however brief, mobilize communities.
Blogger Beth Kanter personally raised over a quarter-million dollars for orphans in Cambodia by simply asking for donations through her blog. She engages her community daily and focuses on stories about individuals to turn interest into action.
Take Action: Turn Ripples into Waves. Learn from trials. Think critically. Iterate. The right tests — and the subsequent tweaks — can amplify growth. Small details such as wording, images, and placement of links, can massively impact your campaign. Use social media tools to observe users and refine your approach.
As an example, Barack Obama’s social media strategy during the 2008 election transformed the history of American political campaigning — an initiative built on trial-and-error testing of images and messages and their results using online tools.
The Dragonfly Effect demonstrates that people are clamoring for ways to use social media for social good, and also suggests the existence of a replicable framework that allows people to execute their goals efficiently and thus achieve meaningful change.
Here's our own Dragonfly Effect to cheer you up:
It took just three months for a tight-knit group of friends to get over 24,000 people into a bone marrow registry in an effort to save the life of friend and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sameer Bhatia. The key to their extraordinary results? They harnessed the power of social networks.
Despite a perfect match, Bhatia ultimately succumbed to leukemia, but his legacy lives on. In addition to the dramatically expanded pool of South Asians in the Marrow Donor Program, his story inspired the “Dragonfly Effect,” an original framework developed at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. It uses design-thinking mindsets and psychological research to instruct how individuals may support their own causes and spur their own movements. It taps social media and insights in consumer behavior to create change. The mnemonic Focus + GET: (Focus Your Goal, Grab Attention, Engage Others, and Take Action) represents the four pillars of the framework.
Focus: Think Human. Focus on the person you are trying to help. Resist the urge to rush in with a preconceived solution to the problem. Test alternatives and be prepared to return to square one again and again. Also, focus on the person you need help from — your audience. What are their goals and dreams? How can you help them be realized? Who are you to them? Where are your leverage points in terms of causing them to act? Also, match your appeal to the medium. For example, use short bursts for Twitter, deeper discourse for blogs, and emotional envelopment on YouTube.
Grab Attention: Dream with Purpose. What matters to you draws others. Emotions are contagious. Meaningful purpose garners extraordinary support. The right idea — seated in emotion — grows exponentially.
Take Jessica Jackley. While earning her MBA she raised money online to bootstrap entrepreneurs in the developing world. Now Kiva.org has generated over $120M in micro-finance loans with the assistance of thousands of individual lenders.
Engage Others: Connect with People. Tell stories. Stories are sticky: they bring facts to life infusing them with passion. Our brains are hardwired for stories to organize and orient information, and we need patterns to understand things. Stories also increase the chance that your audience will remember you. Salient meaningful messages, however brief, mobilize communities.
Blogger Beth Kanter personally raised over a quarter-million dollars for orphans in Cambodia by simply asking for donations through her blog. She engages her community daily and focuses on stories about individuals to turn interest into action.
Take Action: Turn Ripples into Waves. Learn from trials. Think critically. Iterate. The right tests — and the subsequent tweaks — can amplify growth. Small details such as wording, images, and placement of links, can massively impact your campaign. Use social media tools to observe users and refine your approach.
As an example, Barack Obama’s social media strategy during the 2008 election transformed the history of American political campaigning — an initiative built on trial-and-error testing of images and messages and their results using online tools.
The Dragonfly Effect demonstrates that people are clamoring for ways to use social media for social good, and also suggests the existence of a replicable framework that allows people to execute their goals efficiently and thus achieve meaningful change.
Here's our own Dragonfly Effect to cheer you up:
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