Voices of Our Future

Since our last report in September, we are proud to report that we have completed the World Pulse LIVE Tour and have deepened our work on the holistic integration of our programs to ensure stronger Voices of Our Future 2013 program and launch.

World Pulse LIVE

Our third annual World Pulse LIVE tour was our most successful yet! Hummingbird from Syria, Neema Namadamu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Stella Paul from India spoke in front of engaged audience in New York, Portland, OR, Washington DC, and Atlanta, and delivered their personal stories and passionate visions for empowering women by harnessing the power of technology. Some of the successes include:

• Nearly 20 events, including public forums, intimate salons, and media interviews: United Nations, Clinton Global Initiative, Nobel Women’s Initiative, Intel, City Club of Portland, U.S. Department of State, CNN, and a gender round table at John Hopkins University with partner organization Women Thrive Worldwide.
• Over 1,500 people attending events in person
• 700,000 viewers reached through CNN interview
• Interview on Voice of America, which has an audience of 141 million weekly

Program Integration 2012-2013

The key benefits of our 2012-2013 integration initiative are: 

• Increasing the impact of Correspondents voices on issues they care about through the Digital Action Campaigns
• Deepening program alumni (Correspondents, Listeners, Midwives, Mentors) engagement through the Community Leadership Program, Digital Action Campaign
• Increasing visibility of Correspondents’ stories through alignment with the Editorial Strategy 

Digital Action Campaigns

Successes to date include:

• Over 500 story submissions from 143 members, including 9 Correspondents—the most posts for any of our writing campaigns or competitions ever launched
• 124 VOF-style Listeners have been integrated into the campaign and are commenting on each of the story submissions, including 39 Voices of Our Future Alumni (mentors, listeners, midwives and correspondents).
• The Frontline Journal learning module from Voices of Our Future was simplified and posted to our Campaign page as learning materials for our greater community, and as a way to help guide members in writing their stories.
• Piloted a version of Editorial Midwives for campaign participants from the Congo. 

In 2013, our next campaign focusing on girls’ empowerment will launch just after the Voices of Our Future application process, giving our applicants as well as correspondents more opportunities to stay engaged. Additionally, we are considering gearing one of the application questions towards the girls’ empowerment theme so that we can generate additional content for the campaign and further our programs integration.

Deepening Alumni Engagement

Community Leadership Program

The Community Leadership Program is a tool to incentivize community participation and self-management, recognize leaders and empower them with the training and trusted roles to activate, manage, curate, and grow our online community of grassroots women leaders worldwide. In the first phase of this program, we identified and launched two key roles: Vocal Contributors, who are online community members who lead in maintaining high levels of engagement and activity; and Welcome Committee volunteers, who are community members who welcome each and every new member and make them feel at home when they join. 

Our goal has been to promote these current roles to our Correspondents, develop Phase II with an eye towards incorporating more alumni, and promote all roles to our class of 2013.  Currently:

• 33 out of 225 Vocal Contributors are Correspondent alumni
• 10 out of 23 Welcomers are Correspondent alumni

We are currently developing Phase II of the Community Leadership Model, and are imagining two potential new roles: Regional Ambassadors who will activate and welcome members from their region as well as convene in-person meet-ups; and Hub Page Curators, who take the lead on highlighting topic specific content, share resources and lead engagement.

Increasing Visibility of Correspondents Stories

We are pleased to announce that our Editorial Team has just finished designing a new strategy which we believe will take our content to new heights, engage our community, synch up with Voices of Our Future content, and increase the number of women’s voices being heard on key issues in media at and key forums. Moving forward into 2013, our Editorial team will employ some or all of the below activities:

• Introduce quarterly, thematic calls for story submissions
• Integrate these thematic content calls into Voices of Our Future learning materials
• Request content from key community members (particularly correspondents) when breaking news hits
• Produce a bi-monthly curated content e-magazine (News Roundups)

Our Editorial team is already seeing the results of our new strategy:

• 150% increase in views of magazine content
• 2 Curated content packages around Reproductive Health and Rio+20 Digital Action Campaign produced
• 21 stories picked up by outside media sources from June-October, including pick-ups from the WIP, Women’s eNews, Reuters Trust Law, Huffington Post, Women in the World Foundation, Gates Foundation Impatient Optimists Blog, Women Deliver, and Women Thrive WorldWide.

Launch of Voices of Our Future 2013

We are excited to launch our 2013 program in March and start recruiting our new class of women leaders, vision mentors and midwives, and listeners.

Thank you for your continued support in our work!