Social Entrepreneurship

Awesome Design Watch: The Girl Effect

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Innovation And Ideas

Published October 23, 2008 @ 07:50AM PT

Ed. note: Sometimes social entrepreneurship is about viewing the world in a new way. I believe that good design can make people feel connected, and can make people feel powerful. "Awesome Design Watch" will be the irregular regular feature where we keep track of literally awesome design that makes us want to slam the computer shut and get out on the front lines.

When it feels like the world itself is at stake, how do you make the message connect without sounding preachy, dogmatic, or irrelevant?

The Girl Effect is a video produced for the Nike Foundation and Novo Foundation by Weiden+Kennedy and Grow Interactive to announce the launch of a large grant program investing in the capacity of girls in the developing world. For the last couple months the video has been getting an enormous amount of attention. Veritable social-media-for-social-good blogger Britt Bravo wrote about it a few months ago. Yesterday, Google.org wrote a post about the video, which was picked up by the Chronicle of Philanthropy's Give and Take blog.

My favorite thoughts about the video were posted by Dan Health on the Made to Stick blog. It's really worth reading his whole deconstruction of the video. One of the smartest points they make is identifying how the visual "zoom out" from one blinking dot to an eventually filled screen reinforces the shift from the micro to the macro.

One thing Dan doesn't talk about which I think is incredibly important is the music. The music is simple, instrumental, and builds perfectly along with the video. The first part of the video isn't sad, but is certainly contemplative. But then a single high note and thumping staccato beat build into an entire symphonic chorus, with element by element growing in lockstep with the viewer's excitement. More than any other single element, I think, the music is the glue that binds the design.

One final thought: How refreshing that the viral nonprofit video of the last few years doesn't have a single picture of war, poverty, disease and death, and its message fundamentally comes down to "the solution may not be simple, but the start of the solution is."