How you can help

Hi SparkFriends

I'm having so much fun sharing more about the SparkEarth/SparkAmerica plan I shared last week. It's fun that this is no longer a secret including the work we're doing with great partners including an alliance of partners in Pittsburgh (though some partners are still secret and I'll announce them soon). Here is the announcement for this plan if you missed it.

I'm already making additions and hearing many great thoughts from members -- exactly my hope that SparkPeople members would be excited about playing a leading role in this campaign!

Below are some enhancements to the original plan and specific ways you can help starting now:

Amplify

First, I forgot to include an important part about the strategy of bringing together great partners. Here is how I talk about this:

"So many passionate leaders and partners are coming on board that it's not really my plan any more -- it's now a collective plan that is moving forward every day. Our theory is that bringing together great partners with SparkEarth/SparkAmerica as the hub will let us AMPLIFY the good intentions and work from everyone involved. In other words, we see this as a 1+1=100 possible situation. And as you saw in the announcment, we consider SparkPeople members potentially the most important partner of all. I see this almost every day behind the scenes where progress by one partner then leads to some new connection with another possible partner or overall excitement. For example, when we could announce to our Pittsburgh partner group that we are starting to build a coalition of partners in Cleveland, that created real excitement around the possibility of a direct city challenge (the first of many)!"

Community Support

Second, I had a chat with my brother because he's so interested in the support aspect of this project as a personal passion. After talking with him, I realized that I should make it really clear that ALL types of support are included in the definition of Healthy Leaders being a Positive Force on their friends, family, co-workers, and community. So I added some new points to this blurb in the original announcement to clarify this important point:

"2) Spread the spark to be a Healthy Leader for your friends, family, co-workers, and community. This could be leading by example, or by shouting from the rooftops -- there are all types of leadership styles! Spreading the spark could be directly telling people about SparkPeople and/or it can be helping anyone else in any way. Remember that anyone can be a Healthy Leader by supporting others -- sometimes all it takes is a simple word of encouragement to get someone on the path to change their life. We see this all the time in our supportive community. When I sparked a co-worker by simply supporting her, this was a big point in the eventual creation of SparkPeople. The more you practice supporting others, the easier and more fun it gets."

This conversation with my brother sparked me to change the term "community service" to "community support" in the statement below. The reason is that "community support" can include supporting all types of groups mentioned: family, friends, co-workers, community. It can also include all types of support from encouraging and supporting anyone to full commmunity service.

"A big goal is to become the greatest and most impactful challenge ever in the areas of fitness & health, leadership development, and community support."

How you can help

I also got many great notes from people saying they love this project and want to do whatever they can to help. So I thought it would be helpful to be very specific about this and make a list of the most important ways you can help:

1. Keep working to reach your goals -- everything on SparkPeople is intentionally designed to help people become Healthy Leaders. Now you can use this a motivator: EVERY new goal reached and EVERY success story -- plugged into this SparkEarth/SparkAmerica plan -- then increases the odds that this really will work and change millions of lives and the world. I am spending so much of my time trying hard to share the good news from our members and other partners with potential new partners. I regularly share success stories and great community comments with very high-level people to show them the magic happening here. As a result, we are in talks with some amazing people and companies including some I will announce soon to come on board as partners. This way you will also be leading by example. I just talked this morning to a mother on SparkPeople who wants to lead by example for her son because he has Type 1 diabetes and she wants to motivate him.
   
   
2. Spread the spark -- wherever it makes sense, you can talk to people about SparkPeople and what we are doing. I will make a simple page you can use to share with other people about this project. Remember we don't need to have an active project in your specific area yet in order for you to make a difference in your community. Instead, SparkPeople will serve as the main hub and you can reach out to anyone anywhere. By doing this, we can have great coverage and then use that momentum to build more partnerships. For example, imagine if we partner with a major media company that has tens of millions of readers/viewers.
   
   
3. Future -- we will create a process that lets you enter any organization you represent as a SparkEarth/SparkAmerica supporter and will have downloadable guides to implement this in your organization and in your community.
   
   
4. Share Facebook posts -- I'd like to test a specific experiment for being a Positive Force as Healthy Leaders. If you like using Facebook, will you share my Facebook posts with your friends?

Think about this: I read the average number of friends per Facebook user is 338. That means if we had 10,000 people sharing a post with their friends, a post would reach 3.4 million people! Let's think even bigger if we could really build momentum:

100,000 people sharing would reach 34 million people
1,000,000 people sharing would reach 340 million people

The crazy thing is that this really could happen because:

• We are right with a great message and program that truly works to help anyone reach goals
• A small group of people passionate about something can achieve amazing results
• As we build momentum, then it really does get easier to convince people "because everyone else is doing it." For example, the ice bucket challenge turned into something that just about everyone knew about in a short time period
• Social media is the first communications platform in history that connects so many people in a community setting -- let's use this for something good!

How does this sound?

If you aren't following me on Facebook yet and you'd like to help with this, you can do that on this page.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about this on my blog.

SparkCheers!

Chris "SparkGuy" Downie



Chris (SparkGuy)

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