A Website Redesign for a Passionate Global Community of Changemakers

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2009 - Members of the Changemakers community have no less ambitious a goal than to solve the world's most pressing social problems. Today Changemakers.com introduces a website to meet that challenge.

“Changemakers.com is among the world’s most robust laboratories for launching, refining, and scaling powerful new ideas,” said Changemakers’ Executive Director, Charlie Brown. “Our new website will give the members of the Changemakers community -- people who have big ideas and expect big things to happen -- more opportunities to make social change happen more quickly and more profoundly.”

The site features over 5,000 inspiring innovations from over 125 countries that address almost every issue under the sun, from popular cell phone games that subtly educate about HIV/AIDS in India to women-managed clean public latrines in rural Africa.

At every level of engagement – from enthusiastic newcomers to experienced social entrepreneurs to corporate executives looking for promising ventures to invest in --Changemakers engages individuals who want to make change happen and helps connect them to solutions that address the issues they care about.  

Changemakers’ “open source” competitions have been a key avenue for this. These competitions, which invite ideas from all over the world to address a specific social issue, are sponsored by corporate collaborators such as Nike, National Geographic, and Citibank. Visits spike, activity and energy soar, and great ideas surface (and are rewarded with cash prizes) whenever a competition is underway.

“Now Changemakers.com puts the community front and center with a new feature called Groups, which will allow for discussions, posting of resources, sharing of innovations and calls to action,” Delyse Sylvester, Director of Community said. It’s what everyone at Changemakers always wanted the site to be about: people collaborating to make the world better. “Technology is just a means to get us there.”

One challenge, though, was to decide just how high-tech to go.

“We decided not to use flash or Ajax, for example,” explained Robert Benedict, Changemakers’ lead project manager for design. “We link to parts of the world with lower bandwidth connections. So the new site is not as sexy and sleek as it could be, but that’s on purpose.”

The site reaches many countries and cultures with four language options: English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese and will eventually add more. Cultural challenges highlighted some serious problems, though, peppered with a little humor. One new feature was going to be a simple “thumbs up-thumbs down” rating system. “Well, it turns out that ‘thumbs up’ is a completely obscene gesture in several key markets that we want to be deeply connected with,” said Benedict with a chuckle. “That so typically depicts our Changemakers challenge.”

In the end, the new site needed to reflect not only the democratic nature of a community working together passionately to create change, but also its connection to its parent organization, Ashoka, which has been at the forefront of social innovation for 30 years. Ashoka’s spirit is inspirational and its fellows serve as models and mentors for members of the Changemakers community.

Brown won’t go so far as to say the new Changemakers.com will change the world but he will say this:  “I think the people who are going to be on the site are going to change the world,” he said with confidence. “We’re giving them the right box to stand on.”

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Ashoka Changemakers is a global community of action that connects people with a passion for a better world with those who are making a lasting difference in their communities. Our more than 20 successful open source competitions have attracted groundbreaking organizations, social entrepreneurs, media, corporate leaders, community organizers and supporters who want to be part of our exciting and collaborative process of finding solutions to solve the world’s most pressing social problems, one idea, one project at a time.