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HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 9 28 15 Ben Keesey CEO of Invisible Children Q Having been through this successfully what would your advice be for celebrities Number one it s finding ways to make the story not about them but about the cause or the organization and supporters So we found some of the most powerful ways for our celebrities because we had celebrity supporters from year one Kristen Bellows Sophia Bush very committed Ben McKinsey Ryan Gosling It was a really cool young group Jason B really cool people and we had them our approach was always get involved as a human being If you weren t famous what would you be doing Come to events get involved in the community Kristen had a couple of events just at her house There wasn t press there it was just trying to enroll her community And we honestly didn t even use a lot from those events which was actually a lot of our belief But then it was when Kristen would speak she would speak alongside one of our high school supporters she would get to know them a little bit so when she was on stage she would mostly talk about a 17 year old rather than herself She and Rachel Bilson came to Uganda with us and on their first trip she didn t even publicize it She just went to experience it So when should would talk about Invisible Children it was first hand experience but it wasn t followed by People Magazine you know We did some of the Omaze campaigns which raised us some money At our Youth leadership conference the hundred top fundraisers we did a private reception They re at a table with Sophia and they weren t just part of the handshake line but it was trying to find meaningful human encounters between the average supporter and the celebrity and that s how it felt really empowering Q Where did this all come from And as you said it was all instinctive especially about ownership and agency The strength was it felt like we didn t have a choice We were all very young early twenties None of us had famous families or wealthy connections the only thing we had was one great film that was emotionally engaging people and we knew that that was enrolling average people to donate their money and time Pretty much a year in we had no other choice our only core support was from the average masses and young people And so from there we made the decision we can do nothing to jeopardize that we can do nothing to jeopardize our core audience And so we personalized our core audience for the first few years and Larian was in high school he wasn t a member of the humanitarian club he would have never gone to a charity event he cared about sports fashion his favorite brands were like Volcom Levis very cool stuff and he was also one of our lead art directors and he said we re not going to do anything that I wouldn t buy before I cared about the world 1

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 Because you need to keep your message how do you engage someone that doesn t give a shit about anything If it had been the celebrities at the top I would have tuned out So the focus We believed almost arrogantly that no one else is doing it no one else is doing anything about the LRA if we don t do it it s not going to happen Or if thousands of high schools kids don t do something it s not going to change And so we told kids if you don t do anything no one will Which of course ruffled the feathers of the NGO world A lot of the critics of the KONY campaign had been critics since the beginning because we were throwing this at them no one else know about this no one else cares And there were 25 people who had spend their whole lives on this had written books on the LRA and were very upset Q Why Because they felt like it was their issue Yeah and they had been at it for you know twelve years and it was theirs But the UN called it the most neglected humanitarian crisis in 2003 Q How did that leadership look How did you avoid this being a new power movement that ultimately just got one person at the front of it to be friends with a bunch of celebrities Because I m interested in that lesson not just for movements but for CEOs So two thoughts One we had three founders which is interesting so there was not a single person we could build around But we did build quite a story around that And they did become friends with celebrities We were all in San Diegos which is a little bit off the circuit of cocktail parties and celebrities The first film they submitted it to Sundance and got rejected The principle we had for this was At some point the system will fail you and you have a choice about what you are going to do And in this case the system for how to distribute a film is go to the film circuit because Netflix doesn t exist YouTube doesn t exist really and we got rejected And in some ways that was our impetus at giving the finger to the system and saying we re going to build our own distribution we re going to go right to the audience And that s when we built the roadie model of encouraging young people to give us six months of their life to do these campaigns and physical screenings It was our lifeblood it was what gave us all of our power Not only did we avoid the rich powerful circuit of the Sundance circuit you know meet Robert Redford who introduced us to George Clooney We just didn t get invited so we did our own thing What the roadie model did was it literally put our newest people as our spokespeople College people would come in we would train them for a month and then we would say off you go Good luck You are the face of this movement Kids at these schools then weren t hearing from me they re hearing from a person that is two to four years older than they are that is working without getting paid that s living out of a van and we portrayed these people to be cool to still have the sexiness of being on the stage But then that roadie team would sleep at someone s house that night get taken into their home It was very peer to peer organizations that build such an organic following 2

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 And we did this 2 000 times a year we did this 2 000 times a year for 8 years before we launched the KONY campaign Especially in the first five years there were dozens and dozens of roadies that were more well known than I was That were bigger in the Invisible Children community than I was as the CEO Because I was behind the scenes helping them spread the message Q How did you manage that data Salesforce From early on We had a great one of our most expensive early hires was our tech director We re also making money on those tours by selling merchandise on the road So we ve got 12 different sales centers at once And Salesforce is fun because the roadie teams could see their donations and sales statistics compared to other teams all this internal competition It was really fun Q Are they getting paid No No We d help them raise money They had to raise 2 000 from their friends and family so we knew they weren t going to go broke And we were getting 800 1 000 applicants for 60 spots Pre facebook No Interview interrupted Hey Henry when you listen to this thanks for the coffee The first event we organized on myspace Then we got on facebook right away but that was two years into the organization The core demand for people to be roadies was for people to have met roadies So much of our movements really was physical over digital it was the power of the face to face Q And did that continue Yeah Actually I just had a great conversation with Alison at the Gates foundation talking about this by in large our most powerful advocacy work was face to face It was encouraging at local lobby meetings it was getting kids to go to D C Even with the big online petitions we would physicalize them we would do in person delegations with myself two of our high school supports two people from Uganda that had survived the conflict and then we would actually walk into the office of someone and actually give it to them in person Other guy How did you build those advocates in the first place Our core model was our national tour followed up by our film tour We d do it every six months It was 10 teams 10 vans teams of 4 trained together and assigned to different segments of the country They would do unbelievable amounts of cold calls and do these screenings 200 would be in the room and of that 200 maybe 40 would take some kind of action that day buy something donate sign a petition write a letter to congress then we would get 5 that would form a club and of that 5 you would get 1 that you would call on and say hey you re member of Congress in your district in Kansas is really involved in this committee and if we help you will you go them And that person is scared because they ve never done that before Walking into a member of congress office is friggin scary 3

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 Most of our work was us having to bring a dynamic group of 50 interns into our own office and showing they could do this I was scared to but you can do it Here s what you do here s what you wear It s hand holding all the way till they get to the meeting and then they do it And then you congratulate them and then you call on them again the next year But it is so resource intensive It take a massive amount of human beings in our office to encourage other human beings Q What was the goal Were you always working towards that kind of blow or were you thinking you already had an A and then just happened to get so large There are three kinds of movements 1 Steady year after year growth 2 Spike 3 Can manage both What would an A capture or be for you We kind of naively believed that the issue was so terrible that we just had to get the word out and just get enough people to hear We thought it was a 1 or 2 or 3 year project if we had thought it would take 10 years I mean are you insane I remember when the LRA committed these multi day massacres Christmas 2009 over a thousand people over a weekend and internally it was so devastating I mean are we even doing anything So we got the Recovery Act passed in 2010 we thought that was the silver bullet even that wasn t the silver bullet we get the Green Berets deployed So the KONY campaign of 2012 in some ways was birthed out of frustration like what is it going to take We saw it as an all in year Which is why we flipped away from some of our principles Instead of shining away from our celebrities we shined a light towards them Instead of doing just these physical screenings because we believe that builds longevity we put the film online for free we put a mass communication strategy together And in many ways it was this like Again believing that this is about as bad as it gets if we just tell the story there is no denying But even our all in was 500 000 views online Q What if nothing had happened Would you have just done it again We were reaching a bit of a what felt like a breaking point This was the eighth year of trying to reinvent the same story And our team was exhausted we d been on full drive for 10 years So if the campaign had totally flopped it would have been a dramatic reinvisioning Off the record not quotable We were talking to private military groups A lot of conversations around is it better to just find some South African special forces and go get some rich donors that we already knew that would put their dollars into that as opposed to gigantic campaigns to mobilize governments to do it But it was a million views by day 2 And here s something we launched the physical tour for KONY campaign in February so we had 15 teams doing physical screenings for 4

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 about a week then we did a celebrity premier in Hollywood that was behind the scenes we did the CA premier then we premiered it online on March 5th to the world Many of the quickest adopting cities were the ones where we had always been on physical tour So kind of where the roadies were is where it started That s where it spread Then it was quickly accelerated by the celebrities and the celebrities we were asking our supporters to go reach Oprah was the first she was within five hours which was crazy Q And that was because the community was approaching Oprah and she was responding to the community Yeah she was like yes thank you everyone I know about this group I ve supported them in the past She s responding to our supporters We came up with these 20 cultural influencers cross section of celebrities the usual suspects Oprah Bono Angelina Jolie then it was like athletes Tim Tebeau Labron comedians like John Stewart and Colbert then musicians like Taylor Swift Gaga then Ryan Secrest and some others Bill O Reilly Rush Limbaugh If our whole strategy works If all these guys are talking about this at the same time then it will become news The story became how the heck did all this hodge podge of culture makers get behind this KONY thing Which also led to this controversy because people were looking for who s behind this is this the government itself is this the military industrial complex trying to do a PR campaign for the militarization of Africa These were serious questions that we were being asked on CNN This was major trying to find who s the Oz behind the curtain and we re like really it was us There was no Oz Our PR intern was one nineteen year old from Florida named Monica literally Q And this was all open and online right And that was the point The film would end it and it would say here are the things you can do You can donate but more than anything else share this film online and it would allow you to share the film to your community and then it landed on this page that was twenty culture makers twenty policy makers looks like a chessboard And it asked people to reach out to these people and ask them to join you in being a part of this All the language was to the average seventeen year old with no money Q And where does this come from It was so smart right that insight which I think is becoming more widespread now The Rescue Tour I just got chills this is what I should send you We made a film that shows in 2009 the year before we did an entire event that ended with us sort of holding hostage Oprah until she covered the story on her show It s called Together We Are Free We did a tour that ended in Chicago sleeping on the floor of a church and for a couple days in a row we went and stood around Oprah s studio with peace signs for hours and asking Oprah to cover the LRA story on her show On the third day she had the founders on the broadcast and covered everyone on the street standing around her studio she literally started her show by saying the last three days the group of Invisible 5

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 Children has been standing around this studio Don t ever do this again This is the first and only time I will do this But she gave us 10 minutes still on CBS so huge right That energy in 2009 was really what helped us to get the bill moving through Congress And that really was a lesson of how wow if you re committed enough and we approached her positively it wasn t angry just join us please be a hero with us We got one of the most powerful people in the world to engage with us So flash forward a few years from then I think we thought what if we play a similar game just on a bigger channel Q And what changed in the dyanmics You ve got Oprah and you ve got Congress but even those two doesn t get you what you got in 2012 The absence of a genuine participatory base in both those examples Oprah is downloading and Congress is downloading to world it s only when you get to genuine mass participation that things begin to shift is that fair Well no It was mass participation that got that moved The bill was a big step forward that was the first time Obama was on the record it got the special forces on the ground it got money flowing but that just still wasn t good enough For instance these troops that were deployed they were so restricted to engage the LRA because the White House was so concerned one of them would get hurt And we knew we had to help give the President a backup that even if this requires the sacrifice of American life it s worth it So the KONY campaign was let s just tell the country who this guy is and be proud of the fact that we have taken this giant step forward in stopping it We used this phrase surging positivity towards this start that we had gotten Because we believed it warranted everyone s support And it was it helped big time The KONY campaign it got the US much more forward leaning it got Congress reengaged it made giant strides politically because now there was a constituency that was big and loud It changed the game in terms of the political commitment Q What advice do you give What would you do differently Especially thinking about structure How do you make the structural changes that allow you to sustain this kind of thing The first thing is We were so We did not know the KONY film would do what it did We definitely did not know it would do it so fast If I could have a magic wand and go back in time we would have delayed its release because we had a lot more related deep and more sophisticated content that we wanted to launch with it so that the film was the entry point but for people that want to go deeper there is a funnel of engagement Where they can read about the history of the conflict they can put this issue in context The very simple message of the film that was appropriate for the mass audience was we need to give people a way the people that want to dig into the nitty gritty details of the policy restrictions give them a way to do so And all that was all there we just didn t launch it all at once because we thought we had time to roll it out in stages So I would have not gone so big so fast and I would have launched it with that funnel of engagement together So that people could go deeper right away if they wanted to 6

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 I would have protected ourselves and our staff so much more I mean what Jason just personally went through being the face of the campaign which you know anything this big it is like an anticipate blowback Ice Bucket everyone likes it until hello We left ourselves to vulnerable to that We had such thin skin we didn t have any PR team it was just us We ran ourselves into the ground and Jason literally had a breakdown It was very difficult and damaging to the cause So I would protect our team more I would have hopefully more quickly realized just how one off a phenomenon it was And invested I honestly don t know I was gonna say try to better separate there were a million people who engaged with us one time and that was all they were ever going to do and then there was a pocket that probably would have and could have sustained their engagement it s probably 2 of the people and I wish I had maybe been able to separate those even in my mind more quickly We had maybe 5 million people the KONY 2012 pledge We tried to keep all 5 million of them engaged and I wish I had put together a much smaller group to try to keep engaged and everyone else just say thank you all for donating one time and not attempt Q The United Way critique or the Robert Putnam critique explains the new power spin on that is these are not affiliative people and you need to wait till that moment of urgency comes and agents when they need to be agents and the rest of the time they can get back to Snapchat Is that fair It was something like 20 000 people signed up to be a recurring donor and I wish we had been like that s the group They told us that they are in for the long run We are going to not try to talk to the 5 million We weren t thinking along those lines We were trying to steward our human justice movement And it s so intoxicating the big numbers are so intoxicating but even to send an email to 5 million people is like 10K So you have to potentially lead a movement of that scale is such a big thing And we kind of tried to do that for a little while and we were slow to recognize that a real base was the base that had already been the people who had engaged in the sustainable way which was in many ways the ones we had met face to face by going to their schools all this stuff we had done for years that was our base And a lot of them are still our base to this day They pushed through all of that controversy And literally last month we got a couple thousands of students that are working together with their members of congress and they are working to get another resolution to the White House that s still trying to push we ve had 93 reduction in killings but the LRA still has about 100 fighters and Kony still exists So massive massive progress but it s not over and the troops are still out there And so we are still with our core supporters trying to push that all the way over the finish line Q The story of the arc that you ve ended up where you began post surge Yeah and check this out The five paid staff we have right now that are running the organization All five of them entered the organization as a volunteer roadie All five and they all grew up through the ranks 7

HT Ben Keesey Interview 9 28 15 Q The chapter we are working on right now is how to build your own personal community The same taxonomy from what you were just talking about also applies on a personal level Q One of the goals of this book is to push Silicon Valley pretty hard we don t just need more internet we need a better structural system of how this is built What tools that don t exist that you would want to exist What are the kinds of enabling tools that would make you ve been doing and going to be doing easier What would really help We found a lot of value in Facebook groups of different types of supporters That still is a very effective structural way to organize our different groups of supporters We have about 500 kids who know more about the ins and outs of the policy than even I do So we post something different to them than to our followers who just want a nice quote over a photo So much of social content is about delivering the custom content that people want and avoiding everything else so I ll think about that but that s a start 8