New Power – A Must Read For Anyone Who Wants to Ignite Social Change

​In this new interconnected world where hashtags have the power to spark movements overnight, social entrepreneurs often ask me things like “how can I get my cause to go viral?” or “how can we use social media to advocate policy change?” I have good news: there is a new playbook that will walk you through the answers to all of these questions and more!
 
In their new book, New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our Hyperconnected World, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms help us all decipher new forms of power that democratize and equalize our capacity to create social change in the era of #blacklivesmatter and #metoo. Drawing on their deep experience developing online movements that have themselves caught fire (Heimans as the CEO of Purpose, a company that builds and supports social movements, and Timms as the co-founder of #GivingTuesday, an international day of philanthropy), the authors argue that new power can be both for good (crowd-sourced drug trials, fast-growing movements in the name of love and compassion) or for bad (ISIS or white-supremacists) and the choice is in our hands to ensure that we use these tools in a way that makes our world better.
 
New Power is a lively and engaging read that masterfully uses stories of social entrepreneurs, businesses and individual people to inspire readers to do more to spread ideas, lead movements, build careers or transform organizations. But Heimans and Timms don’t stop with the stories. They give readers a clear and easy-to-use 5-step framework that anyone can leverage for good: 1. Find your connected connectors, 2. Build a new power brand, 3. Lower the barriers, 4. Move people up the participation scale, 5. Harnessing the three storms.
 
As I have seen in my research for Social Startup Success, two-thirds of nonprofits in the United States are $500K and below in revenue, with so much grassroots potential to harness new power to support their causes. But as Heimans and Timms describe, they can’t do it without things like shifting their leadership approaches to allow for more open participation, and a deep understanding of how to leverage broader support. I’m so excited to share this amazing new playbook with all of my favorite social entrepreneur leaders so they too can maximize their potential for impact and turn hashtags into real social change!
 

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