"Mother of the Year Award" -- A movement building on-line video from MomsRising.org

MomsRising.org was described as “one of the most compelling new models for issue-organizing” by the Monitor Institute. One of their campaigns, the “Mother of the Year Award” video, was viewed by twelve million people and is an example of how non-profit organizations can use videos to power social change. MomsRising is a transpartisan, multicultural, grassroots organization of one million members. They advocate on issues that pertain to family health and economic security – such as healthcare reform, paid family leave and sick days policies, flexible work options, homelessness, quality early learning/childcare, environmental toxins, immigration issues, and ending wage and hiring discrimination against mothers. For Mother's Day 2009, MomsRising launched the two-minute long “Mother of the Year Award” video which lets viewers insert their favorite mom's name (or two or more names!) and email a customized video to her showing how she's won the mother of the year award. This hilarious video subtly weaves in information about economic discrimination against working mothers. After viewing the video, hundreds of thousands of women and men alike chose to sign up with MomsRising. They are now taking advocacy action on a range of family-related public health and economic security issues. MomsRising partnered with thirty aligned organizations to distribute the video. These organizations were given a dedicated video URL which enabled them to distribute it in a way that profoundly increased their own membership lists. Consequently the video served as an overall movement building initiative well beyond building MomsRising's own membership base. This presentation will address the strategic use of humor in MomsRising's video to advance social change and engage new constituencies previously not self-identified as activists. Strategies for cross-organizational collaboration to maximize overall movement building will also be discussed.