Ever heard of the Green Guerillas Youth Media Tech Collective? The green youth media group proclaims their collective to be sustainable storytellers who challenge the status quo. “We are young media makers who define sustainability in terms that make sense to us. In April 2009, we embarked on a new project with our veggie diesel bus to create our fourth feature film—Green Guerrillas Blockumentary v.3 HD—which will showcase stories of sustainability from under-represented communities in the current environmental movement.” These and hundreds of other change agents are sharing their stories on Changents, a startup social community that serves as a catalyst for social entrepreneurs and great causes.
Changents is in the news for their GIVE marketing campaign with P&G that launches with the Blog Her Conference. The Give campaign integrates social purpose initiatives at P&G into a brand framework and engagement strategy. The rollout is centered around a global water initiative and counts on the involvement of the Changents community. Access to drinking water sounds basic right? But imagine a village that can redirect time spent trecking to water wells miles away (sometimes 8 hours away) and funnel that energy into education and committee organization to improve their community. Plus there are health benefits to clean fresh water.
We spoke to the founder of Changents, Deron Triff, and he shared these tips with fellow entrepreneurs.
- Focus on your core competencies. Understand what you’re organization is really good at and align against a core mission that utilizes your strengths. In the case of Changents, the team is excellent at identifying change agents around the world that have strong stories and storytelling capabilities to become real magnets for the public. Changents is efficient at bringing them together for initiatives such as the newly launched P&G campaign, and last year’s Timberland initiative.
- Simplify. There are so many functionalities, features, and capabilities that are possible. However, it’s impossible to do them all well. Changents has gone into agile development mode to make adjustments in real-time and avoid overbuilding.
- Engage Influencers. Much of Changents success depends on its ability to engage influencers. If you are successful at getting bloggers involved, they’ll help you reach a large base of consumers.
- Bootstrap. Like most entrepreneurs, the Changents team has decided to invest and re-invest in the business. Bootstrapping means taking low or no salaries for the startup team, being very disciplined about tech and outsourcing costs, leveraging partner resources, and avoiding major marketing expenses that don’t make a direct impact.
In 5 years, Changents hopes that its brand will be synonymous with change agents: individuals who are pursuing exciting movements to address social and environmental problems. Simply put, when people think of Change Agents, they’ll think of Changents. Currently, Changents is mostly an Internet brand, but that may change through content across platforms including television, books, and even a featured film. Changents hopes to grow its impact exponentially through its work with leading corporate citizens aligned with change agents in really scalable ways with multiple programs simultaneously across cause areas. If you seek to change the world, or support ambitious change agents, join the movement at Changents.com.
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