This week I lived out a lifelong dream of speaking before the United Nations! I was honored to deliver a statement on behalf of HelpMeSee to the 50th Commission on Population and Development.
In April 2017, I was honored to deliver a statement on behalf of HelpMeSee to the 50th Commission on Population and Development. Lean more at: http://www.matthewhurst.com/2017/04/speaking-at-the-united-nations/
As part of my role managing communications and content marketing at HelpMeSee, I often write speeches/statements and build presentations for our leadership. Late last year I took on responsibility for managing our global NGO’s membership with the Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC), participating in membership events and submitting HelpMeSee’s initiatives in support of the UN’s agenda to support public health and sustainable development. I was thrilled when our submissions were approved, so when our CEO was unavailable to speak I was nervous but excited to present our statement before the the committee at the UN’s headquarters in NYC.
To read the full transcript of the speech and statement, please visit HelpMeSee’s website.
Today is World Sight Day, a global holiday established by the UN’s World Health Organization to raise awareness about eye health and bring attention to blindness and eye health. To celebrate, today HelpMeSee submitted over 12,000 signatures to our petition calling on the United Nations to support an increase of training for cataract specialists needed to treat the millions of cataract blind around the world.
According to the WHO at least 20 million people are blinded by cataracts, despite the fact that sight can be restored by a low-cost surgical treatment, mostly due to poor access to health care in developing countries. Earlier this year I took on a new role as Content Marketing Manager with HelpMeSee to tackle this growing global health issue, including helping raise awareness and activism through this petition.
As part of my new role, I was asked to help represent HelpMeSee at the UN, using our NGO’s special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council. Then we decided to combine our UN advocacy with another common marketing goal: growing our list of supporters (and maybe leads as future donors) for email marketing outreach. So we partnered with Care2, a leading social network for philanthropy and activism, to share our UN petition with their growing audience.
Bringing it all together was our marketing funnel: we built a series of landing pages to share the petition, designed to convert interested advocates into active petition signers who would join our email database. At the top of that funnel we utilized our Google Ad Grant, available to any non-profit to looking use AdWords’ search engine marketing tools, to introduce thousands more to our cause through relevant search ads driving to the petition. This campaign worked in tandem with Care2’s support, adding 29% more signatures above our 10k goal! Along the way I learned more about tools like Unbounce and MailChimp then I ever thought possible, and HelpMeSee qualified to Google Ad Grants Pro (4x the total funding) by optimizing search ad spending to 99% efficiency for consecutive months.
I’m proud of the awareness we raised and support we’re building towards a critical public health challenge, and now I’m looking forward to delivering the thousands of signatures we gathered to the UN! But it’s not too late to add your name to the list- you can read the full petition and sign today here:
More than 20 million people are needlessly blind due to untreated cataracts. Tell the UN: I support training of cataract specialists in the developing world. (11947 signatures on petition)
What happens when the internet, the backbone of our high-tech economy, is down? That’s a question recently brought to the forefront of the public’s attention, between the debate over Net Neutrality, hacking attacks, and President Obama’s recent proposal to expand broadband options. Despite years of gains, millions of Americans lack broadband access, and even where it is available speeds often lag other markets. Yet we’re also more reliant on the web than ever before, constantly connected whether at home, at work, or anywhere on the go with smartphones. It’s easy to take for granted the benefits of fast, reliable broadband internet – at least until we lose our own connections.
During the recent hurricanes and winter storms which managed to shut down major parts of the U.S. East Coast, there were numerous reports of internet service outages and website downtime for major hubs like Huffington Post and Netflix. Some of these issues could have been caused by infrastructure damage from the storms, but at least some downtime was attributed to servers buckling under the load of millions more Americans simultaneously logging-on while stuck indoors during the inclement weather. In fact, even during normal nights Netflix can account for as much as one-third of internet traffic during the peak evening hours, straining web servers and ISP networks.
Knowing these trends I formed a hypothesis: local ISPs would crumble during last week’s storm (Winter Storm Juno) under the heavy load of snowed-in users. To test my hypothesis, I recruited a simple network sample, emailing my friends across the New York metro area to run speed tests at the same time: around 9 PM EST on Monday, January 26th 2015. For the methodology we used SpeedOf.me to gauge speeds, while I collected details about each participant’s ISP and connection type, attempting to rule out as many variables as possible. So here are some results from our little experiment: Continue reading Snowed down: Testing ISP Speeds on a Snow Day→
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: internet service providers want to create a “fast-lane” for certain websites (namely those who pay for the privilege) at the expense of effectively slowing down other websites. If it seems like we’ve been defending the principles of Net Neutrality for at least a decade you’re not far off (myself included during my early blogging days), but telecom companies continue to spend millions of dollars every year to lobby for policies designed to create an uneven playing field from which they profit but at the expense of consumers. Today I’ve joined thousands of bloggers and websites by participating an Internet Slowdown protest, simulating the same slowdown we might experience if ISPs are able to remove Net Neutrality rules set by the FCC.
First let’s make sure we understands what Net Neutrality is: a guiding principle of the internet that the web should be open and level-playing field for all websites. For the uninitiated, talk show John Oliver has an excellent primer on Net Neutrality and why it’s important: Continue reading Defend the web: Why I Support Net Neutrality→
I never thought it could happen to me, but last year I had an iPhone stolen out of my own hands while riding the subway late one summer night. Even though I had read news stories and blog posts before about how the theft of smartphones and iPads was becoming more common while riding public transportation, I thought I was safe until I became another victim.
My first instinct was to share my experience through social media, where I learned that a few more of my friends had also had their phones stolen riding the subway. A little further research led me to see the problem was growing across the US, and that many more shared my frustration being unable to recover my handset, even using the Find My iPhone feature. Most recently, in acknowledgment of the growing theft problem the FCC proposed changes to how the carriers manage reported thefts, hoping to help consumers avoid the hefty costs often associated when their stolen phones.
What is copyright and what constitutes fair use? Do I need to register a copyright for my creative work to be protected? How long is a work copyrighted, and when does it enter the public domain? Are there advantages to using creative commons licensing or copyright?
In a recent course I took at the Brooklyn Brainery, our class took these questions head on to discuss the need to protect creative work and limit the exploits of copyright trolls. Sometimes referred to as intellectual property, copyright is a kind of property right (and a Constitutional Right in the US) which protects the use of creative work. Of course creative work is unique compared to other kind of property, so copyright is created whenever it’s “fixed in a tangible form of expression” by its creators, whether it’s a written novel or a music recording. Copyright gives its owners the exclusive right to reproduce the work, derivative works, and public performances of it.
There’s a careful legal balance between protecting the intellectual property rights of their owners and promoting the free expression which is guaranteed as a constitutional right. For example, in the music recording industry many musicians don’t profit from sales of their recordings after they cede to their labels/distributors ownership to copyright for their work, sometimes waiting years to regain the copyright to their own songs. Likewise the creators of mash-ups and remixes such as Girl Talk make a legal balancing act necessary to avoid infringing on copyrights while using elements of old recordings to create something new.
While media law is a continuously evolving field and largely a matter of interpretation for the judges, over time some precedence has emerged that provides some legal framework. As we learned in our class for general purposes, here’s the four requirements you need to meet for Fair Use of copyrighted works: Continue reading Introduction to Copyright and Fair Use→
Content Marketing, Communications, and Social Media Strategy
been defending the principles of Net Neutrality for at least a decade you’re not far off (
