Of course those who are engaged in the pressing issues of environmental degradation and global warming want to reach out to audiences as wide as possible. The heavy hitters of social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…) can serve that purpose. But did you know that other social networks focus on particular issues and offer opportunities to talk with others focused on your organization’s concerns? If those concerns include those of the environment (from global industrial waste to local concerns of residue from asphalt runoff), sign up on the social network OneClimate.net. Why join yet another social-networking platform?
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Well, it’s free. And when you sign up, you can delimit your engagement right off the bat by telling OneClimate what especially interests you (Imagine such a feature on Facebook!).
More importantly, OneClimate.net is packed with resources to keep up with worldwide developments, including full video and textual reports from UN global summits on the environment since Copenhagen in December 2009. But the site, though still technically in ‘Beta’, also offers the latest news on events tailored to your region (where ever your region is on the globe). The platform even links to a page for kids kept up by Tiki the Penguin − though I’m not sure why they think kids want their websites to look like it’s still 1996.
The organization is hardly stuck in the mid-90s, though, as they are proud of their development alongside communication technologies:
Since the mid-1990s, the OneWorld team based in the UK have tried to communicate the urgency and scale of the climate crisis. But people know that now (whether or not they want to hide from the unpalatable truth).
So we are focusing our role more sharply now on pioneering media tools to support the climate movement. And that’s what OneClimate is. We are innovating new tools and platforms that make it easier for us all to share information, actions and experiences with one another, to help us hang in there and keep moving forward.
True, this is a platform for the informed and the committed, but your nonprofit’s staff needs some of that love too. Communication via Facebook is a valuable outreach to the millions (“whether or not they want to hide from the unpalatable truth”), but the staff of a nonprofit involved in environmental issues needs to have its roots fertilized as well. A social site like OneClimate.net will keep people informed and excited (and sometimes scared) about what’s happening in this particular field.
