Eric Green of Grow Interactive has a good interview with Marktd about their work with The Girl Effect, a movement led by the Nike Foundation to help give hope to girls living in poverty around the world.

We spend the bulk of our time creating channels to promote brands and their goods, so when an opportunity comes up to create change for the benefit of others, we welcome the challenge.

Organizations with some of the most important messages are beginning to understand what it means to engage their audience. No more throwing up a 30-second spot and calling it a day. They need to be where the audiences are.

A nonprofit organization that produces some of the most familiar public service advertising is joining its profit-making counterparts in radically rethinking its media choices, reflecting substantial changes in how its intended audiences consume media.

The organization, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, is making a major commitment to reaching the public, particularly parents, through the Internet while reducing the amount of advertising it runs on traditional television outlets like broadcast networks.

In addition to using the Internet, the Partnership is experimenting with ads on cellphones and is even looking into opportunities in the new media, like ads in video games.

“The risk is not being useful to this generation of kids and parents,” said Steve Pasierb, president and chief executive at the Partnership in New York.

“Even if we’re on the 6 o’clock news with the greatest of spots,” he added, “we’ve missed the target.”

It’s great to see more organizations finally understanding and responding to what their customers are looking for. Last money quote from the article:

“We follow the consumers,” said Nick Moore, chief creative officer at Wunderman in New York, part of the Young & Rubicam Brands unit of the WPP Group. “If they want to be on a mobile phone, that’s fine with us.”

Enter Hotpress Web, a Denver-based web company, who is accepting applications to win a free website along with content entry assistance, email and one year of free hosting.

Thanks – you may now return to perusing the web for social media goodness.