A social media project I’ve been working on this month went live today, and I’m proud to finally be able to share the final product. Second Chance is a non-profit organization based out of San Diego, CA. The organization focuses on breaking cycles of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse and incarceration through social entrepreneurship. Over the past 15 years they’ve developed an innovative support system for people in need that has an unprecedented track record for producing positive results – largely due to the unique approach they take to solving tough problems. The founder, Scott H Silverman was named a CNN hero of the week this year for his work in the space.
Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Scott, who gave me the opportunity to visit the facility and see for myself what the organization does and how it transforms people. A few months ago I spent a day sitting in on one of their classes and the experience was eye-opening and profoundly affecting. When you see the system working for yourself first hand, you get the message loud and clear. Not only is what they do great for local communities, it’s great for society overall. When they contacted me a few weeks ago about getting them into social media, I was happy to join on. Here’s a quick video that we launched the project with that gives you a snapshot of what Second Chance is all about:
Designing A Social Media Presence For Second Chance
Scott’s a forward thinking, energetic guy and he recognized early that getting in to social media makes a lot of sense for his organization. From a cost perspective, social media for a non-profit is a no brainer, but Second Chance was also generating a lot of buzz after Scott was awarded the CNN hero award and released his new book. For a non profit they had a huge amount of content distributed around the web. Before I came along, they were already into email marketing and facebook as well as posting YouTube videos and getting a ton of positive press – they just needed a way to pull it all together, brand it consistently and create a place that they owned where the community could interact and share content, resources and stories with one another. We knew when we first talked about the project that we wanted consistent branding that matched their 2010 annual report across Facebook, Twitter and a customized blog, and the project evolved from there. The final product, I think, looks pretty slick and ties each social media outlet to all the others in a clear and coherent way. Here are some screenshots of what we did. Each screenshot links to a Second Chance site, so please explore and feel free to give feedback. We’re all excited about the new direction and we hope the Second Chance community is too….
















