Say what?
‘Mazeh9’ is a young adults center, situated in a beautiful historic preservation building in the very heart of Tel-Aviv. While their tagline is “Young.Making.City”, they work around the clock to improve the lives of young people, encourage social entrepreneurship, and promote policies for the benefit of the community. Sounds like a lot? Sure, that’s why they have to do it right.
“Once you go Green you never go Black”
As a perfect expression of their commitment, Mazeh9 utilized the infamous “Black Friday” to introduce the concept of conscious consumerism. That was the first step towards constructing a strong and resilient sustainability community.
Using the catchy title “Freaky Friday”, Mazeh9 invited Tel-Avivians (as well as everyone else, of course) to attend their ‘sustainable consumerism festival’ on a sunny Friday morning. Although the promotions for the event were mainly done on social networks, the venue itself was put on ‘with’s’ platform, providing people with information about the concept, the various stands available, and details about the different activities. These included second-hand shops, a sustainable styling workshop, and one extremely glamorous eco-fashion show.
From Awareness to Active Participation
With the vision of launching a hybrid sustainability community, the work plan was set from the start. Using social networks for promoting the festival, thus contacting people where they are and not changing user habits helped to easily reach current and potential community members. This phase is usually mandatory for the success of a single event but never sufficient to construct a resilient, long-lasting, and vibrant community.
The next step was to invite people to the Mazeh9 community page on ‘with’ platform. Providing people with superb user experience, a registration system, and multi-view support of map, calendar and grid made the process easy, convenient, and appealing.
Having members registered to the community portal is crucial in creating a basis for a relationship with your people. It helps understand and analyze their preferences through their community engagements.
Those that decided to register for one of the Freaky Friday events (which were completely free of charge) were able to receive various benefits. This way the admins were provided with additional information about the scope of communal interest in sustainable initiatives and a much more accurate group segmentation for future use.
It’s showtime!
During the day of the event, those registered in advance as well as more than a thousand ‘spontaneous’ attendees at the festival were introduced to this new movement emerging from within Mazeh9’s community center. They could physically feel the energy and were now officially invited to take part or take action in the newborn sustainability community.
With their community page already up and running and a solid base of members efficiently and automatically organized in the ‘People Relationship Management’, Mazeh9’s sustainability community was ready for kick-off.
Of course, that is just the beginning of a much bigger story. Making use of a platform that enables easy-to-use public participation solutions and promotes bottom-up initiatives of community members, is probably the most efficient way to drive significant climate action at scale.
Upon realizing this, the result is evident, there is a new community in town. Welcome to the family.
