A Big Foundation Uses New Technology to Open Windows on Disasters — and Resilience

The Open Society Institute, in New York, has emerged as a leader among grant makers for its extensive use

of multimedia communications — including online audio and video — to educate the public about the issues at the top of its agenda.

While the foundation is not investing significantly more money in such efforts, its communications staff members are rethinking how best to use the dollars they have, says Laura Silber, director of public affairs.

“We’re being both reactive — in terms of the changing climate of the Internet and the blogosphere — but also proactive,” says Ms. Silber. “Most of our campaigns, or any issues we’re promoting, now have online, multifaceted aspects, and this has really grown exponentially over the past five years.”

For example, the foundation’s “Eyes on Zimbabwe” Web site started in June 2007, following a crackdown that spring in which scores of government opponents were brutally assaulted. The foundation’s multimedia advocacy campaign continues today, says Ms. Silber, when Zimbabwe is once again in the international spotlight due to new flare-ups of violence surrounding elections that have kept Robert Mugabe in power despite widespread accusations of voter fraud.

Visitors to the site can sign a petition asking the African Union to take “urgent action” regarding the situation, send an e-mail message to friends and tell them about the site, read a blog that describes recent developments in Zimbabwe, and copy the HTML coding they need to be able to promote the site on their own Web site or blog. It also provides a link to a companion Facebook page with more than 800 members.

But the site’s showpiece is an eight-minute film that intercuts footage of the faces of ordinary Zimbabweans with testimony from activists and lawyers who provide firsthand accounts of government repression and torture.

In one instance, Grace Kwinjeh, of the Movement for Democratic Change, is shown in a hospital bed, her back and shoulders a map of bruises following repeated beatings at the hands of the police.

While such a film may seem long for an American audience, Ms. Silber says, it appeals to international audiences in particular. “A two-minute multimedia piece may work best for viral distribution, but for people who want to get into the issues more, it’s a film that they can sink their teeth into.” (The foundation also produced two-minute and 30-second pieces for the site.)

“It’s really about looking at any initiative from all possible aspects,” says Ms. Silber, “and seeing how we can get the word out and get people engaged, both domestically within a given region or country, but also internationally.”

‘Unnatural Disaster’

In January, Open Society, which was founded by the financier George Soros, unveiled “Katrina: an Unnatural Disaster,” a Web site whose ultimate goal, says Ms. Silber, “is to have a wider conversation about race in America.”

The site is in large part the result of 31 grants totaling $950,000 that OSI awarded in 2006 to journalists, photographers, filmmakers, and youth media groups to investigate and document the lingering effects of the hurricane and the underlying social issues it brought to light.

Over the coming weeks and months, Ms. Silber and her associates — the foundation has a public-affairs staff of 14 — plan to add a blog to the site, and hope to have experts from different regions contribute regularly on such issues as criminal justice, inequity in education, and the status of African-Americans in the Gulf Coast region and elsewhere. She says that the foundation may hire a blog editor based in New Orleans.

“We want it to be as broad as possible,” says Ms. Silber, “to get many different people involved, so it’s not either a conversation of elites talking to elites or a question of people in a given field talking to each other.”

Amy P. Weil, OSI’s media officer, says that “the goal of the entire Katrina project is to keep this conversation going beyond the anniversaries, when the news media give it the best they’ve got for the day, but then have to move on.”

Ms. Weil adds that “very few news outlets have the resources to devote to all the facets of this issue, and part of the fellowships was giving seasoned journalists the space and time to write about the flood maps, the disaster response, education, the insurance industry, criminal justice, and other issues.”

As was the case with the Zimbabwe site, OSI worked with MediaStorm, a multimedia production studio in New York, to produce the Katrina Web site.

The partnership seems to have paid off, as both Web sites were recently nominated for Webby Awards — considered the Oscars of the Internet world — and the Katrina and general Open Society Institute sites received gold medals as part of the Council on Foundations’ Wilmer Shields Rich Awards for excellence in communications.

In addition to such industry praise, Ms. Silber says that Open Society is measuring the impact of its efforts in various ways, including the number of hits the Web sites receive, the number of unique visitors each month, and how long people stayed on the site: “Did they just click on for three seconds, or did they stay and watch the Zimbabwe film from beginning to end?”