If you think you’re doing an awareness project:
1. push yourself to think about what behavior you want to change, or put another way, what are you going to do with the awareness you gain and
2. you need to bring something new to the conversation.
I think “something new” generally falls into 3 categories:
Reporting – Revealing new information or making the information widely accessible in a way that it wasn’t before.
Research – Creating new knowledge by collecting and analyzing data that no one else has addressed
Storytelling – Crafting a compelling narrative about the people, and the emotion
If you’ve decided awareness is the best way to change behavior, then you need to attack the problem with a focus on these three strategies. A perfect example of this is Project Drawdown. To raise more awareness about the best ways to fight climate change, they did propriety research and aggregated data to make a useful tool that has now started a movement.
To bring more awareness to how Facebook is treating contractors and what content moderation looks like on the internet, Casey Newton from the Verge did strong reporting in his piece “The Trauma Floor.”
There are many ways to add to the conversation. Retweeting is one of them. Movements do need amplifiers, but if you’re truly passionate, we need you to lead. And to lead you must bring something new to the table.