The Tip Jar – 4/15/07

Live from Baltimore, here’s last week’s slightly late (or this week’s slightly early) edition of the Tip Jar…

• The Social Marketing Quarterly has undergone a complete makeover and looks simply stunning in red. The 4-color cover featuring artwork from campaigns described in each issue is a nice departure from the old black and white abstract photos. And the accompanying website provides an assortment of social marketing resources in addition to the journal abstracts and subscription information.

• I just discovered a great Wall Street Journal blog by Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy, who looks at numbers and statistics in the news to explain them more fully. Recently he’s written about pop culture issues like voting on American Idol and probabilities associated with a three-way tie on Jeopardy (1 in 25 million?), as well as more serious issues like how the wording of a political poll can affect survey results and an explanation of the statistics behind a study of hormones and heart attack risk. If you do research or have to interpret it, it’s a useful and entertaining read to help you distinguish between lies, damn lies and statistics.

• Public Health Grand Rounds is a series of satellite broadcasts and webcasts featuring various public health topics offered by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and the CDC. Their next free offering is an hourlong event called Healthy Places Leading to Healthy People: Community Engagement Improves Health for All on May 11, 2007, 2:00 to 3:00 pm Eastern Time. They will use an example from Wabasso, Florida to illustrate how to intervene at the “place level” instead of just at the “person level.”

• Deborah Rodriguez is a Michigan hair stylist who gave more than haircuts and highlights to Afghan women. By opening a beauty school in Kabul, she inadvertently brought about social change and independence to hundreds of women there:
  

  Rodriguez is quick to note that her school’s 182 graduates have seen their incomes grow significantly. Education for women was banned under the Taliban, so many Afghan women are illiterate. Many are war widows, or are otherwise isolated or shunned by society, and without a source of income.

  With beauty-school skills — which include waxing (all body hair must be removed before a wedding, by Afghan custom) — women who had earned $40 a month are now able to make $400 to $1,000 a month.

  “It is the one and only industry in the country that women can own and operate without male influence,” she said. “Women can do carpet weaving, chickens, eggs, tailoring — but a man can interrupt that at any point.”

  The beauty school is an anomaly. “Men cannot see uncovered women. They are not allowed in the building,” she said. “It’s a sanctuary.”

  Another case of unintended consequences, but this time with positive outcomes.

• Take a look at some of the Webby Award nominees for great examples of how social marketers can use websites effectively. Sites like Green My Apple, the International Rescue Committee (congrats, Marc!), I Spy with My Little Eye, Nothing But Nets, SOS, and Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, among many others, may give you ideas you can apply to your own program’s website. You can also vote for your favorites until April 27th.

I will be reporting about what happened at the Innovations in Social Marketing conference soon, but after taking the redeye last night and spending the day at the conference, I just don’t have the energy tonight. I will say, though, that some of my concerns have been allayed after learning that conference organizers made a big effort this year to include more people in the conference, with an initial mailing list of over 500 people. From a show of hands, it looked like about half of the people came for the first time. More soon…

Photo Credit: crispyteriyaki