Cross-posted from the ROI Community.

This Pesach, when you are celebrating your freedom, with family and friends, take a minute and think of Gilad Shalit. This year he is in captivity, but next year, we hope Gilad too will be free to celebrate with his friends and family. Why don’t you take a minute to write him and tell him.

Last year, the Shalit family visited us at the 2010 ROI Summit. We spoke about how we could make a difference. Today with your help this Campaign (MeetGilad.com) can realize the vision so many of us had when we met with members of the Shalit family as they marched to Jerusalem last year. So please, join us. Write your message to Gilad, as part of the ROI Community, here. Sign up your own organization in English, French, Hebrew, Spanish, or Romanian (and please list ROI as your parent organization). Once you have signed up you will get a referral link you can share with others. Share the information available here about this campaign with others. See the other ways you can help. Get involved, get others involved, and between now and the anniversary of his capture in June, let’s make this campaign into a global success!

Let’s Take the Revolution to the International Community!

I wanted to write an open letter to Noam and Aviva, but I couldn’t. How could I say “we’ve given up, we’ve moved on,” “we no longer care?” It’s like the streams of people walking past a homeless person, seeing him, but not seeing him, eyes quickly sliding past. Don’t stop. Don’t think. Keep moving forward with your life. Is this what has become of our support for Gilad Shalit? That is certainly the feeling some expressed when I introduced our new Meet Gilad 2.0 campaign to them.

Over the last four months my team at the Community Internet Engagement Project has been working on a revolutionary new campaign to raise public awareness for Gilad. This new campaign was designed to build on the strengths of the Jewish community, including: our ability to organize locally and to build networks of affiliate organizations, our ability to share ideas and join together in collective campaigns, our ability to engage globally, and our ability to maintain the local connection between leaders and the members of their communities.

In building our Campaign we took a lesson from the revolutions in the Middle East, and the way social media has spurred social change. First there was the local spark, then a technology catalyst, and finally an explosion of action. We built a platform that can work locally, so that grassroots organizations could take part in it and use it to support their local activity. We made it multilingual. We designed it not just to share through Facebook and Twitter, but as a tool to facilitate conversations in real life. We created it so that it could be physically shown to a stranger using an iPad or laptop. Imagine sitting on a train and turning to someone and saying, “Do you know about Gilad Shalit?” This is a primary example of the aim of social innovation.

At the ROI Summit last year we spoke about outputs, outcomes, and the differences between them. We wanted this Campaign to make a measurable difference. We wanted each person who interacted with it to stop, think, and leave Gilad a personal message. This is more than adding “plus one” to a petition, which is an example of an outcome. We wanted the amount of messages, the amount of conversations, and the amount of strangers introduced to Gilad, to be displayed by state, country and on a global level. Those messages are the output. We wanted organizations to be able to see how they were contributing to the Campaign, to be able to show the return on their investment to their members, donors and supporters. We built this Campaign so federations could see how their affiliates were doing; and the efforts of those affiliates would reflect positively on their parents. That’s how federations show success.

The Campaign will run until September, but we’ve launched it now to catch the spirit of Pesach; the spirit of freedom. We launched it now so organizations could use it in their own Pesach greetings. This year, in captivity, next year, we hope Gilad too will be free. Why don’t you write and tell him that?

The idea for this Campaign evolved two days before an exam, at 11:15pm, when I had yet to start studying. Something more important came up. A young man in captivity. A young man the world is quietly ignoring. Sure, I thought about putting the Campaign off. Especially when others told me it would be too difficult. The enthusiasm, support, encouragement and ideas from the ROI community put that idea in place. It seems there is still a place in the community where innovation thrives, whether the first question is not “will it fly,” but “how can we make it even better?” It seems there is still a place in the Jewish world where people do first and question later. A place where people commit, share and support each other: that place is ROI.

With your help, this campaign can realize the vision so many of us had when we met with members of the Shalit family as they marched to Jerusalem last year. So please, join us. Have your organization join, and encourage the organizations and networks to which you belong to join us, and make a difference.

Write your message to Gilad, as part of the ROI Community, here. Get involved, get others involved, and between now and the anniversary of his capture in June, let’s make this campaign into a global success!

Cross-posted from the ROI Community.