As at date,
a population at least 3 times that of Uganda’s 32.36 million has watched the
youtube video on Joseph Kony, a rebel and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA), a group notorious for recruiting and arming child soldiers.. Invisible Children’s controversial “Kony 2012″ video has reached
unprecedented heights for a social-cause video. The most amazing thing to many people is that the
video is nearly 30 minutes long, which surely breaks the “rule” that online
videos need to be short to be effective.
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| Armed child soldier on guard |
Here are the
three reasons:
• The organization told its own story first, a
story of how it developed passion for the issue, how its members came together,
and why it is critical for its supporters to act. The video follows a
storytelling pattern developed by Marshall Ganz, a lecturer at Harvard
University and is taught by the New Organizing Institute. Mr. Ganz says this
pattern uses three stories: the story of self, the story of us, and the story
of now.
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| Jason Russell |
• It made the story simple. The issues in
Northern Uganda are very complicated. But Invisible Children chose to simplify
those issues by focusing the video on the story of one bad guy: Joseph Kony,
head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, operating in Central Africa. The video
places a strong focus on emotion, which, in turn, inspired many viewers to
share it and take action.
• It made the viewer the hero. This video isn’t
about Mr. Kony. It’s about the viewer and how that viewer can be the hero by
taking action. In the video, Mr. Kony is portrayed as evil – as if he is a
villain in a Batman movie. And if he is the evil villain, then you, the person
fighting him, are the hero.
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