More About Changents- What is a Change Agent?
- What are Action Requests?
- What is the Ripple?
- What information does the Ripple collect and display about me?
- Why should I sign-up as a Changents member?
- What tools are available for Change Agents?
- Who can advertise on Changents?
- I saw an ad in one of the YouTube videos on your site that was not from a good corporate citizen company. What's the deal?
- Does Changents allow political advertising?
- How can I advertise on Changents?
- When I nominate a Change Agent, what happens with them?
- What is the Life Story Option Agreement?
- How do I cancel my account?
- Is Changents for-profit or non-profit?
- I've forgotten my password. How can I get a new one?
Change Agents are cool people we’d all like to know who are working all over the globe to tackle the world’s biggest social and environmental problems. They’ve broken with convention and figured out how to chip away at a problem in surprising, fresh ways that are unique to them as individuals. Change Agents are everywhere – you, a friend, a colleague, someone you’ve heard about or a celebrity.
Most featured stories on Changents will have one or more contextually relevant Action Requests posted by the Change Agent. Action Requests are opportunities to work side-by-side with Change Agents to create social and environmental change. Action Requests are posted by the Change Agents themselves so you’re able to lend a hand in ways that have real impact. Take action; respond to a request!
The Ripple is a signature feature of Changents. It dynamically tracks and graphically represents the trail of Internet-based actions taken by registered Changents members as those actions spread virally from person to person, influencing the actions of others down the line.
It's easy to launch your Ripple and watch it grow. Just log-in to the Changents site. Invite a bunch of your friends to join Changents using our invitation email. When they sign-up for Changents, you'll see your Ripples in the 3-D and Ripple Map views that you can access from your Profile page. If your friends repeat the process with their friends, then your Ripple keeps expanding because you started the chain reaction!
To view your Ripple, simply click the View My Profile link in the upper right hand log-in box once you’re signed in to Changents. From your Profile page, click My Ripple to see how your Ripple is rollin’!
If you’re a registered Changents member, certain Ripple-related actions you take – such as inviting a friend to join Changents with our invitation email – are logged in our database. When people respond to your action, the database recognizes that response, you get the credit and your Ripple grows. When you go to “My Ripple,” Changents will deliver cool visuals such as Ripple 3-D and Ripple Map that show the actions you’ve taken as well as the Changents user name (e.g. Gloria85) and city location (e.g. Green Bay, Wisconsin) of each person who responded. It will also give the date those actions happened. If you respond to an action launched by someone else, then your Changents user name, city location and the date of your response will be displayed on the other person’s “My Ripple” view. Send us an email if you have questions: help(at)changents dot com
By joining Changents now, you can use all the features of this Beta site – either as a Change Agent or as a community member. You will also receive the Changents email newsletter which features new Change Agents, action opportunities, live events and other ways to jump in.
What can you do on Changents today? Thanks for asking! You can nominate Change Agents – yourself, a group for which you are a leader, or someone else. Change Agents can then use a rich suite of storytelling and team-building tools with which to broadcast their stories across the Internet and bring together a passionate group of Backers. At no cost to the Change Agent, we offer tools for blogging; creating video and photo albums; podcasting; and more. It’s all about igniting change that starts with an amazing story!
Members can team up with amazing Change Agents, follow their stories on an ongoing basis and get personally involved by responding to Action Requests. If members discover that they too are Change Agents, then they can nominate themselves and begin using all tools on Changents. That’s how change grows.
We’re building Changents together. Let’s start right now
The Changents Beta has lots of tools available to help Change Agents tell their ongoing stories and build teams of supporters who want to help. These tools are free to serious Change Agents who are committed and driven to move the needle. Is that you?
Here are few highlights:
Nomination: Nominate yourself as a Change Agent and launch your personal story and action area on Changents.
Blog: Tell your story and then keep it rolling with regular blog updates. If you already have a blog, you can easily pull it into Changents via RSS.
Photo and Video Albums: Upload your photos to Changents or pull in your Flickr photo stream. You can also create video albums by embedding your vids from YouTube and other sites.
Podcasts: Your story of creating change is ongoing and we want to hear all about it – frequently! You can phone in audio blogs that are as easy as leaving a voice mail. Just leave a message and it automatically posts to your story page as a podcast.
Twitter: We’re tapped into Twitter too so just punch a 140 character story update into your phone and it will show up on your story page.
Build your team: Backers are your fans. You can select the roles you want them to play on your team based on your needs. The more Backers you recruit, the more support you have around the world.
Personal Action Requests: Post action opportunities to your story that enable people to help you right away. These could include opportunities for your Backers to provide specific skills, financial resources or to get involved with your organization. Your Backers can respond to you directly about how they want to help.
Story sharing: Once your story is posted, use the Send to a Friend feature to spread the word to everyone who will get excited about your work. Get your friends and Backers to do the same.
We believe that business can help us save the world – that’s right, good ‘ole capitalism. On Changents, good corporate citizen companies are able to connect with the freshest group of conscious consumers on the Internet. We understand that Changents members increasingly make purchase decisions based on what they know about a company’s commitment to social responsibility. Our commitment to the Changents community is that they will only see messages on this site from companies that are committed to ethical behavior, giving back or whose groundbreaking initiatives are having a material impact on changing things for the better. (In case that was too subtle, green washers need not apply.) In particular, we welcome companies that have been vetted and favorably rated by reputable third parties like KLD, Calvert, CRO Magazine and so on. The point is that when you see an ad on Changents, you know you’re in the good company of good companies.
To provide Change Agents with the most choices possible in telling stories, you are invited to embed videos from other video sharing sites like YouTube. Those videos can be seen on Change Agent story pages and may include advertising from companies that are not good corporate citizens. We can’t control it...but we also think that more content about Change Agents is better than less so we decided to give video from other sites a try. When viewed, any attached ads will be restricted to the video player itself. Only good corporate citizen sponsors will be featured on Changents pages or on portable Changents widgets. Let us know how you think this approach is working.
Changents maintains no party affiliation and has no axe to grind. We celebrate agents of positive change, whatever their political orientation. Therefore, we will accept political advertising only to the extent that such messages are a clear expression of a candidate’s vision for a better future and an articulation of positions and/or record on specific social issues. If you’re a politician and you have a penchant for attack and negative advertising, go hang out with the greenwashers. And while we’re at it, didn’t you listen to your mother when she said “if you don’t have anything positive to say…?”
To inquire about advertising on Changents, please drop us a line: advertise at changents dot com. We have custom solutions for delivering unique, targeted messages to our community of well-educated, professional, tech-savvy, socially-conscious community members. They want to hear from you and so do we.
When you nominate someone you know as a Change Agent, you must include a valid email address for that person in the nomination form. Your nominee will automatically be sent an email inviting him or her to “activate” the story. Once activated, your Change Agent can begin to use all the storytelling and team building tools on Changents. Prior to being activated, the story of your nominee will be viewable in the Other Stories area and you may edit the story until it is activated by the Change Agent.
When you nominate yourself or a group in which you are a leader as a Change Agent, you are immediately given access to your story control panel where you can post blogs; create photo and video albums; phone in audio podcasts; start building your team of Backers and more. You must complete the General Info page and tell your story on the My Story page before your story area will be visible to the Changents community.
If your story takes the Changents community by storm, we’d like the exclusive right to help develop your story more fully for magazine articles, books, TV, movies and so on. So, when you nominate yourself as a Change Agent, you will be offered the opportunity to grant Changents an exclusive, six-month option to acquire the rights to your life story. If Changents exercises the option during the six-month term, we include a generous revenue sharing arrangement with you based on our success in developing your full story in partnership with publishers, filmmakers and TV producers.
“Why would I do that?” you might ask. It just so happens that we know a thing or two about how to spread great stories to other places beyond the Internet. In fact, through our development expertise, the story of one Change Agent has already been released as a book and is in development for a feature film and TV documentary.
Please thoroughly review the Life Story Option Agreement – and take a close look at the revenue sharing opportunity (we think you’ll be pleased) – to decide if you'd like to grant us this right.
Want to break-up? Say it isn’t so. You can cancel your Changents account by clicking the Edit My Account tab from your profile page and then clicking the "Cancel Account" link.
For profit. Definitely, for profit. We’re convinced that ethical business (you know, “doing well by doing good”) is a part of the solution…and we want to be part of that part of the solution. Not just a little, but in full! We expect to partner with a range of for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations – especially in the context of discovering Change Agents and sponsorships.
As a company, the Changents business model is focused on the integration of economic, social and environmental factors. As we grow, we will give back in meaningful and quantifiable ways in terms of quality jobs created, a family-friendly work environment, investment in our employees and our home communities, targeted contributions to non-profits including donated employee hours, fair trade and labor practices, utilization of clean energy sources and other measures. In fact, we have made our Web hosting for changents.com carbon neutral because of the carbon offsets we’ve purchased through Native Energy. To truly be a Change Agent company, we’ll walk our talk.
So you’ve forgotten your password, eh? That’s what tattoos are for! Please click here and enter your Changents user name or the email address you included when you registered for Changents. A temporary password will be sent to you shortly. You may use that password for a one-time log in. Once logged in, you must change your password by clicking the Edit My Profile link in the upper right corner of every page of the Changents site.
You will be taken to the “Update My Account” page where you can reset your password. Don’t forget to click the submit button for your update to go through.
