Movements are awesome and they are everywhere!
According to Seth Godin, a movement has 3 different main elements:
- Powerful Story - a story that is worth to spread it (like TED, I know :)
- Connect - a platform or space where members of the movement can meet and interact with each other and with the movement builder or organization.
- Clear call to action (s) - you should provide a clear to action(s) that can be easily executed in a short time to the movement members.
Example of a movement on happiness that I built with a friend
"What makes YOU happy?
Back in 2010, I started building a movement with a friend to spread happiness called: “Happy Post Project”. Here is a brief summary about how I built it:
- Powerful Story - Happiness is important for our lives.
- Connect - Initially, we created a FB page and a website where people could immediately learn about our project and to connect with each other by becoming Happy Post ambassadors.
- Call to Action - Spread happiness by asking people to write or draw anything that makes them happy on a post-it note. Our main goal was to collect 100K Happy Post messages around the globe for a massive installation in NYC. (HPP video)
Results
- In less than a year, the simple idea of asking people “what makes them happy” on a post-it note grew to 30 different countries.
- Over 100K Happy post-it notes were collected.
- Lots of media coverage. (i.e. ABC News)
- The Happy Post Project connected more than 5 thousand people that donated their time and energy to bring the Happiness message to their own communities. (TEDx video of a 7 years old girl delivering a speech about Happy Post in Saudi Arabia).
At the end, I ended up leaving my job in a health insurance company in Boston to keep building other projects around the idea of spreading happiness for a better world. It’s been already 5 years since we started Happy Post. Looking back, building my own movement about something that I deeply cared about was the best decision that I could take. (videoof HPP team asking 1000 New Yorkers: “what makes them happy”)
Why join/create a movement?
There are many reasons why we should join movements, below some of my suggested ones:
- To Connect with people that share your passion.
- To bring more Purpose to your day to day. Remember, movements are build around an idea that is greater than ourselves.
- To Learn more about the idea that makes you feel alive.
- To Act upon things you care about. Movements allows you to work towards specific projects or ideas .
And off course, don’t forget to ask yourself every day: “What Makes you Happy.” (: