Pepsi-Cola has become adept at elevating its brand by issuing challenges. Now it's shifting its challenge focus to promote community self-improvement causes, and it's putting a lot of money -- $20 million spread over a year -- behind the strategy. CreateHere sees a good opportunity to win a $50,000 grant to spark innovation in our public schools through the Pepsi program. All it will take is a dedicated effort by thousands of Chattanooga-area computer users to vote online -- daily and often throughout February -- for CreateHere's "Stand & Deliver: Education" proposal.
Pepsi's Refresh Everything challenge will award $50,000 in February to each of the top 10 projects for improving communities that will be selected from applications across the country at the end of this month's online citizen voting period on Feb. 28. If thousands of Chattanooga-area citizens participate by voting often for Stand & Deliver: Education like they did a few months ago for CreateHere's "Stand" questionnaire on ways to improve the city, there's a good chance that Chattanooga could win one of Pepsi's February grants.
The opportunity won't come around often. CreateHere was invited to submit a proposal because of its success in getting over 26,000 local residents to participate in the Stand survey. Pepsi's process for opening the competitive spots in the company's year-long Refresh Everything initiative will move the competition around to distribute seed grants throughout the United States and to get the most for its money.
The Stand & Deliver proposal would use the grant money to fund a six-month program aimed at improving public education here through ideas culled from two 24-hour citizen summits in October.
CreateHere, a foundation-sponsored organization aimed at building grassroots participation in community-building projects, would use the money to organize and promote idea-generating meetings and online participation, and to hire expert facilitators to help coordinate activities at the citizen-summits. Its goal is to attract 1,000 people interested in improving schools to each of the two summits, and to finish with a family of innovative projects to enhance education that local citizens could rally around and support.
Because Pepsi's challenge focuses on the use of social media -- online voting, Twitter, Facebook and other social websites, it particularly encourages interactive participation through such media. Education advocates and school patrons here may go online (http://www.refresheverything.com/CreateHere) to vote for Stand & Deliver.
But voting once a day will not be enough to boost Stand & Deliver past a raft of other competitors across the country. Pepsi's rules allow each person who signs into the site to return and vote 10 times each day. Participants may also visit CreateHere's blog (http://createhere.org/blog) to access information, e-mail notes, twitter messages and Facebook connections to encourage their friends, neighbors and co-workers to participate in the voting.
It is for a good cause, and participants may want to begin thinking about the ideas they would propose to improve education if CreateHere wins one of the $50,000 grants (or even if it doesn't). Sponsors of Stand & Deliver believe, with good logic, that many area citizens have good ideas that would improve education, and that we need only to engage the community's collective power of ideas by connecting people to put these ideas into action.
That is, indeed, the most beneficial aspect of the Internet and other social media. Stand & Deliver could advance on the strength of that power.
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