Social Teeth

Last updated
Social Teeth
Type of site
 Crowd funding
Available in English
Website www.socialteeth.org
LaunchedJune 2012
Current statusActive

Social Teeth is a crowd funding website that allows users to raise money for independently produced advertising campaigns.

Contents

History

Social Teeth was founded in June 2012 by Stanford graduate Elaine Chang. Chang developed the idea in late 2011, frustrated by the disproportionate influence of super PACs and other moneyed special interests on the airwaves. In an interview with The Guardian Chang stated: "In an election season dominated by big money from small numbers of people, I wanted to give all of us the chance to get involved and fight against the influence of big money in politics." [1] Steve Hilton, former director of strategy for British Prime Minister David Cameron, soon joined as an advisor to the organization. [2]

<i>The Guardian</i> British national daily newspaper

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders.

Steve Hilton British political consultant

Steve Hilton is a British political adviser and commentator. He is a former director of strategy for David Cameron, who was Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016. Hilton hosts The Next Revolution, a weekly show for the Fox News which debuted on 4 June 2017. He is a proponent of what he calls "positive populism".

The site was one of four winning entries in a competition held by Stanford's d.school Institute of Design, gaining a presentation slot in the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual gathering of global intellectual leaders put on by the Aspen Institute. [3]

The Joint Program in Design or "Stanford Design Program" was a graduate program jointly offered by the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Art Department at Stanford University, in Stanford, in the U.S. state of California. It was discontinued with the last cohort of students graduating in Spring 2017 and is succeeded by the Stanford Design Impact Engineering Master's Degree. It is generally considered a leading design program in the United States. The program offered degrees in Mechanical Engineering and in Fine Arts/Design and was closely connected with the Stanford d.school.

The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit think tank founded in 1949 as the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. The organization is a nonpartisan forum for values-based leadership and the exchange of ideas. The Institute and its international partners promote the pursuit of common ground and deeper understanding in a nonpartisan and nonideological setting through regular seminars, policy programs, conferences, and leadership development initiatives. The institute is headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, and has campuses in Aspen, Colorado, and near the shores of the Chesapeake Bay at the Wye River in Maryland. It has partner Aspen Institutes in Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Lyon, Tokyo, New Delhi, Prague, Bucharest, Mexico City, and Kiev, as well as leadership initiatives in the United States and on the African continent, India, and Central America.

Social Teeth's first round of ads consisted of six video campaigns chosen through a public voting contest. The ad campaigns ranged from support of marriage equality to Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson. [4]

Same-sex marriage in the United States expanded from one state in 2004 to all fifty states in 2015 through various state court rulings, state legislation, direct popular votes, and federal court rulings. Same-sex marriage is also referred to as gay marriage, while the political status in which the marriages of same-sex couples and the marriages of opposite-sex couples are recognized as equal by the law is referred to as marriage equality. The fifty states each have separate marriage laws, which must adhere to rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States that recognize marriage as a fundamental right that is guaranteed by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as first established in the 1967 landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia.

Gary Johnson American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Gary Earl Johnson is an American businessman, author, and politician who served as the 29th governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003 as a member of the Republican Party. He was the Libertarian Party nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 and 2016 elections. He was also the Libertarian nominee for U.S. Senate in the 2018 New Mexico senate election.

Funding Model

The Social Teeth platform works much like Kickstarter. Users submit independently produced broadcast-quality ads which have already gained popularity on social media networks like Facebook or Twitter to the Social Teeth website. Supporters then pledge money to particular campaigns. If the ad is funded on time, Social Teeth purchases spots on other media channels such as TV and online advertisements, with the assistance of partner organization Aegis Group, a global media buying firm. [5]

Kickstarter crowdfunding platform

Kickstarter is an American public-benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity and merchandising. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of May 2019, Kickstarter has received more than $4 billion in pledges from 16.3 million backers to fund 445,000 projects, such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, technology, publishing, and food-related projects.

Facebook Global online social networking service

Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Twitter Global micro-blogging Internet service

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280 for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software ("app"). Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.

See also

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Change.org is a petition website operated by for-profit Change.org, Inc., an American certified B corporation which claims to have over 240 million users and hosts sponsored campaigns for organizations. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The website serves to facilitate petitions by the general public.

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In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a 527 organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to campaigns for or against candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation. The legal term PAC has been created in pursuit of campaign finance reform in the United States. This term is quite specific to all activities of campaign finance in the United States. Democracies of other countries use different terms for the units of campaign spending or spending on political competition. At the U.S. federal level, an organization becomes a PAC when it receives or spends more than $1,000 for the purpose of influencing a federal election, and registers with the Federal Election Commission, according to the Federal Election Campaign Act as amended by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. At the state level, an organization becomes a PAC according to the state's election laws.

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References

  1. ↑ Pilkington, Ed (June 29, 2012). "Election tool gives Social Teeth to groups looking to foil Super Pac power". The Guardian. Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  2. ↑ Robehmed, Natalie (July 6, 2012). "A Startup Takes On The Super PACs". Forbes. Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  3. ↑ "Designs for the Future: Kids and Robots, Superior Medical Devices, Politics for Everyman". Aspen Ideas. Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  4. ↑ Schwartz, Ariel (August 20, 2012). "A Kickstarter for Political Ads Will Get You Airtime Like A SuperPAC". Fast Company. Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  5. ↑ Dwoskin, Elizabeth (September 4, 2012). "A Kickstarter for Political Ads". Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved December 10, 2012.
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