When Angela Fletcher discovered that the costs of her son Ethan’s medical treatment were becoming unbearable, she turned to a local radio station’s newly-created social network in an attempt to get support.
With just a couple of clicks, she was able to create the Ethan Fletcher Family Trust, a group that anyone can join who wants to support and help pay for Ethan’s expensive medical care.
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The social network, called FeelGood, was created by Pretoria-based radio station Jacaranda FM on Amazee.com, an internet platform that empowers people to initiate and promote their ideas, and to find like-minded people and raise funds.
By using the open source framework, Drupal, Amazee has created a user-friendly tool for activists to take action on a global or local scale. Jacaranda FM’s FeelGood is dedicated to achieving real-world social goals.
Members can create or join groups, raise funds, comment on each other’s initiatives and invite their friends to come and be part of a worthy cause. The site is simple to use and understand. It integrates seamlessly with a user’s Facebook profile, making registration a painless process, and it offers various ways in which you can help a particular group.
Each group has a wall you can write on, members’ area, calendars you can use and polling applications, although very few of these seem to have been used by the existing groups yet.
A central feature of Jacaranda FM’S FeelGood is the financial contributions a user can make, all of which are handled by established financial services providers. Successful groups can also be part of the Ad Sponsoring initiative, where ad revenue is evenly split between the group administrator and Jacaranda FM.
The network is barely six-weeks-old, but already there are initiatives in place to cope with Autism in SA, to help build a library for refugee kids in Musina, and most recently, Winter Warmer, Jacaranda’s annual drive to provide blankets to the homeless during the cold winter months.
The project is a neat example of cross-platform collaboration: Jacaranda FM is using its relationship with the listening audience to highlight issues that need attention, and then driving that audience to the social network, which turns the publicity generated on radio into actionable tasks for the audience.
The radio station’s CEO Alan Khan explains that the station’s ‘Feel Good’ strategy focuses on making a positive contribution to the community.
“Our strategy for Winter Warmer,” he says, “is focused on the fact that we all have the ability to make a positive impact in our country. This is why we want to rally more support to help those less fortunate this winter. ”
Jacaranda FM’s Feelgood is a fledging project, but the company reckons it’s a strategy to grow a relationship with the audience in “new and interesting ways and to deepen the collaborative nature of its audience relationship”.
