Social Media and Empowerment Session

Session Form

• Chair of the Jury will initiate the session & will start the introduction round for the Panel.
• Session manager will hand over the Jury expert kits to the Panel including marking sheets.
• Chair of the Jury will be the sole decision maker in case of any conflict of interest.
• Chair of Jury can intervene anytime, if needed.
• Each finalist need to present their initiative for 5 minutes which is followed by a Q & A session.
• Each nomination will be marked and evaluated by all the Jurors on the Panel.
• Discussion and voting on the Presenter will happen by the Jury panel on spot.
• After Discussion & on the basis of Jury marks allocation as per predefined parameters; five winners will be selected and the names of the winners will be announced during the Award Gala only on December 6th.

Focus

• To recognize the best five Social Media initiatives & create a pool of huge innovation on Social Media platform
• Promote the spirit of Innovation & Creativity in Social Media domain
• Building an Ecosystem of Social Media to enable nominees to share their thoughts, exchange ideas on a single platform of Manthan Award for Social Media & Empowerment

Grand jury members

• PK Roy, Advisor, Cybermedia
• Aditya Gupta, Co-Founder, Social Samosa
• Abhishek Baxi, Digital Consultant, Technology Columnist
• Soumya Sarkar, National Editor, Mint
• Vishal Kumar, Director, Swaniti initiative
• Shubhranshu Chaudhary, Founder, Cnet Swara
• Nilesh Khare, Mumbai Bureau Chief, ABP Maza News Channel
• Kapil Gupta, Founder and CEO, OMLogic

Social Media Presenters:

• Shyam Tandon, Chief Operating Officer, Sevamob Ventures Ltd.
• Venkatesan N, CEO, Vidya Poshak
• Aashish Sawhney, CEO, Let Me Know
• One volunteer from CRY
• Mayank Malik, Founder & Chief Innovator, ComputerSeekho.com
• Snehal Lahoti, mangotechno.com
• Siddharth Hegde, Managing Director, Ethinos Digital Marketing
• Vijay Anand, President and Co-Founder, 5thpillar
• Ajay Mohan Reddy, Founder, GoUNESCO Travel Challenge
• Dr. Rajani Kant, Director , Human Welfare Association
• Elsa D.Silva, CoFounding Volunteer, Safecity
• Lakshmi Rebecca, Anchor & producer, Chai with Lakshmi
• Anshul Tiwari, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Youth ki Awaaz
• Santosh Borhade & Jaydeep Pathare, Peoples Movement for Drought Affected
• www.DehradunFootball.com
• Harsh Wardhan Dave, Head – Experience & Brand, worldoo.com
• S. K vidhan, Managing Director, MPWLC
• Ajith Kumar R, Head- Agri Informatics, IIITMK, GOK
• Shibayan Raha, Founding Director, Seven sisters Project
• Amir Rizvi, Founder, Flats Without Broker
• Meenakshi Vinay Rai, Founder, Chinh Early Education Webchannel

Anshul Tewari, Youth Ki Awaaz :“Youth Ki Awaaz” is based on the realization that there was a disconnect between what a young individual reads in the mainstream media and his/her own perception of news, and that young people want to have a say in the state of society and politics. In 2009, a portal in the name of “Youth ki Awaaz” was launched, enabling readers to write their views on diverse subjects.It’s an online journal that enables its readers to voice their opinions on politics, society, education and culture that are powered by shares on Facebook and Twitter. The website gets nearly 4 million hits every month and has 45,000 followers on Facebook. It has become the go-to site for India’s urban, opinionated and increasingly frustrated-with-the system young people.Youth Ki Awaaz also runs “work from home” training programs. YKA has trained 30 young people over the course of four weeks in 2010 on expressions, writing and content. YKA’s extensive outreach and social media has also impacted the real life scenarios many a times. In 2011, when living crisis was happening in Libya for Indians, one of the YKA follower’s relative was stuck in Libya. The person wrote an open letter on Youth Ki Awaaz to the ministry of external affairs. It took about 2hrs to get 6000 tweets on that issue, 30,000 shares on Facebook and every media organization contacted Youth Ki Awaaz to get to know about the issue. Because of the media pressure that followed, ships and planes were sent to Libya to get the Indian back to the country.YKA has also launched an IVR program system in February 2013, where anybody can record its message and post on the portal. The program ran for three months and got about 2000 calls. YKA, now, aspired to make “mobile for social media”, where it can reach out to young people through colleges and give them the accessibility to call YKA from any point and anytime.The portal has a strong editorial team that filters all the random issues. His editorial team selects the opinion and issues on something that has happened in the past, along with lots of case studies and proofs behind it. Youth ki Awaaz is a self-sustaining venture that has tied up with several non-profits that run its campaigns on the website.

Harsh Wardhan Dev, Worldoo.com : Worldoo is an online ecosystem for kids, where they can express and play. It is the first of its kind initiative, where kids can access all popular content in the world, designed dedicatedly for them. Kids in the urban areas are internet friendly, and thereby, Worldoo comes in to the picture in empowering children through the use social media and how can they help their needy fellow brother/sisters without actually spending a single rupee. To reach out to the community and make them a part of it and to grow with the growth of community, Worldoo have come out with a thought of creating a platform specifically for kids and to create the digital eco system and creating the safest place for kids online.
Worldoo is an advertising agency from Mumbai and it is a self-funded project. The company has now partnered with all the content pieces in the areas of gaming, entertainment, and knowledge such as Cartoon Network, ZQ, Shemaroo, National Geographic Channel, and Miniclip etc.Worldoo works on the strategy that whenever kids play on Worldoo, they earn Stars, and Worldoo’s currency that they can spend in decorating their homes in Worldoo land. The organization has launched Worldoo Tara Campaign especially for 6 to 12 yrs. kids for improving health and education of the needy kids. For this, Worldoo partnered with CRY and the campaign name was “Gift the Tara”.
Worldoo currently has 65,000 registered kids. Kids are encouraged to gift their stars for those needy kids who do not have clean drinking water and good education. Enormous impact was observed with 10 lakhs starts are donated by 32, 000 kids. For every ten stars, Worldoo donated Rs. 1 to CRY. The collected amount is now utilized in providing clean water and education for needy kids.

Sagarika Deb, Wild Blossoms Project :Wild Blossoms Project is world’s first girl internet Band, with all the members of the band across the globe connected through social media. They create and publish music through internet and social media. Wild Blossoms was founded in 2010 and within sometime, Lovelyn O from Philippines and Mandy B from UK joined the band as singers. Wild Blooms have three singers in the frontstage and 25 musicians at the back stage all across the globe. All the band members were recruited through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The band was created with no budgets and now, the professional company named HorizonVU Music Company from US is helping and promoting them.Wild Blossoms reaches out to people who cannot afford expensive studio or video recordings, taking advantage of digital platforms to reach higher audience. The organization fights for women empowerment, animal rights and human rights, creating awareness amongst the masses against all the cruel acts through the universal language of music. Wild Blossoms Project has also been listed in the Limca Book of Records for their Music Special in Community Development Programs.

Venkatesan N, Vidya Poshak :Vidya Poshak is a 12 yrs. old organization, working specifically on the empowerment of youth in the field of Education and Training. The organization’s project “Education Loan Awareness & Advocacy Program” makes use of the social media network to create awareness among the students.
Cost of professional education is too high that it’s not possible to reach to the lower middle class and economically challenged students. Vidya Poshak found that the government of India has model of education loan through all PSU (Public sector units) banks providing loan up to 4 lakhs to any student without any guarantee and interest free.
The organization has also developed an application of professional education and has created a help desk through Facebook pages, counseling more than 1650 students at the admission center. The initiative received 10000+ likes on Facebook page, reached almost 1500 students 3000 followers on blogs. The project also provides job alerts for all the rural graduates as a free service.
Vidya Poshak is an NGO and dependent on individual donors. However, they also have another sustainable product named Finishing School that earns revenues for the organization. However, the Education Loan Awareness & Advocacy Program is completely free of charge service that is provided to the students. The organization has tied up with 30+ organizations that help them in recruiting students in different work sectors.

Shibyana, Seven Sisters Project :“Seven Sisters Project” is mobile based citizen journalism, news service in northeast India, majorly, covering Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram.
Most communities in northeast India are residing in remote areas and not even the local media is unable to reach out to those people. “Seven Sisters Project” is a voice portal for grassroots communities and anyone from north east India, with a very simple mobile phone, can call the toll free number and can record in local language to report the issues. The project currently has 1500 members on Facebook.
The platform combines an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) phone system and a Facebook application to create a mobile reporting network for North-East India.The project aims to empower people of the local communities by sharing the positive and inspiring stories. Also, the project has CNN IBN as the social media partner. The Initiative is receiving 200 calls per day to listen and record their stories.

Shyam Tandon, Sevamob :Sevamob provides healthcare and insurance to low income consumers in India. Sevamob was started in 2011 in Lucknow, and currently, is providing services in four towns of Lucknow, Kakori, MohanlalGunj and Barabanki.
Low income people in India do not have the knowledge about healthcare system and have a limited awareness about life insurance policies. In such a scenario, Sevamob provides primary care,ECG, in mobile van with a doctor and the necessary equipment, along with medicines. They have 24×7 call centers and a network of 3rd party service providers like hospitals, clinics, pathologists and insurance companies. Sevamob also provides an accidental insurance of Rs. 1 Lakh and also the cashless scheme of Rs. 50, 000 as they tied up with new India insurance,
Sevamob also provides a mobile application where it captures all the data of customers and their medical histories. Sevamob also provides services in old age homes and orphanages. Sevamob also uses Facebook and Twitter for brand awareness and sharing details. Sevamob generates revenues via monthly subscriptions, referral fees from in-network, 3rd party service providers and technology licensing.

Elsa D Silva, Safecity :
Safecity is a social citizen initiative that runs by a group of volunteers. Safecity is crowd sourced GIS mapped occurrences of violence and harassment against women. The initiative started in December 2012 after the Delhi Gang rape case as the first step to address the cultural stigma of reporting assaults. The Safecity focused on this part of harassment, the need to report it. It started creating awareness through Facebook and Twitter and its website blogs.
Safecity encourages citizens to pin reports of the incident with a little description. Safecity is also running a campaign with Whypool organization to map 100 unsafe places in Delhi. As a result they have collected 1200 reports in Delhi. Till today, Safecity has got 1351 reports, 15100 page viewers, 41000 unique visitors, and visitors from 106 countries, reports from 52 cities in India, 19,000 Facebook likes, daily Facebook reach of 5000+, daily engagement on Facebook is 200.
The organization does not have any source of funding and is completely volunteers’ driven program. The have on ground volunteers all across the country.

Jaydeep, Peoples Movement for Drought Affected using Social Media :Maharashtra happened to undergo a very bad drought period last year with high scarcity and quality degradation in water. Few people also lost their lives due to the lack of water and suffered from skin erosion due to unavailability of water. A Facebook group “Drought Help Group” was launched, appealing people through Facebook.

The organization surveyed on the Drought situation and come up with the following things:

• Donating water storage tanks
• Channelizing the blockages in streams
• Removing mud from village common ponds
• Repairing existence water available water sources

As a result of this extensive social media outreach, 80 water tanks with 4,000 liters capacity each were sent to the affected place. Moreover, the students of drought affected villages were shifted to Pune for two months and were provided with food and lodging. Sanitary napkins were distributed to adolescent girls of 8 villages for three months due to the unavailability of water and hygiene facilities, and animals were fed by setting up animal camps in urban water available zones. With the Facebook managing team of more than 100 people, the Drought Help Group raised Rs. 8.2 million as donation.

S. K. Vidhan, Online application for the Registration of Private Warehouses :Online application for the Registration of Private Warehouses is a project launched to eliminate the problems of warehousing in Madhya Pradesh.The procurement rate growing high and the increasing storage problems in Madhya Pradesh have created a loss of food grains. Consequently, MPWLC created two major policies.

• e-Registration of private warehouse
• Warehousing logistic policy

The policy system facilitates the private warehouse owners to register online, deposit a nominal fee further leading to an online inspection of the warehouses and online execution of the agreement under JV Scheme. The policy has been implemented in all 50 Districts and 342 Tehsils of Madhya Pradesh with approximately 1,968 warehouses registered with MPWLC generating a revenue of Rs.32.15 Lacs.

Siddharth Hedge, Olympic Gold Quest :Olympic Gold Quest is a Not for Profit Company founded by Indian sporting legends Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone. The mission of Olympic Gold Quest is to support Indian athletes in winning Olympic gold medals.
OGQ aims to create a level playing field for all the athletes to enable them to be competitive at the highest level of sports. OGQ brings together eminent sportspersons, business leaders, sportswriters and talent scouts to identify emerging athletes, understand their training needs and requirements and raise funds to be used for supporting athletes with Olympic medal winning potential. OGQ assumes all responsibility for providing them with full-fledged support in their preparation towards winning at the Olympic Games.
Some activities by Olympic Gold Quest include logo competition for Saina Nehwal. The competition received 250 logo designs created by her fans with the best logo selected by Saina Nehwal herself to be used on her letterhead. OGQ also help athletes in maintain their social media presence including Facebook pages and run campaigns for building community involvement. The community strength of OGQ is 2.6 million. The organization is currently running the outsourced fund raising campaign for Shiva Keshavan. Shiva Keshavan is the youngest Luge player going for winter Olympic 2014 happening in Sochi. The organization has able to raise 9 lakhs rupees till now.

Sneha Lahoti, India Politics :
Project India Politics is the mobile application that gives the latest information about Indian Politics. There are only 3% of the mobile applications that are based on politics. Social media is the best way to get any kind of information and India Politics is an excellent example of using Social Media as tool for revolutionizing the decision making skills of the people
Information, Expressiveness andmCuriosity are the key ingredients to create the India Politics. India Politics Application is downloaded by 16,579 Android users and 5,000 Windows Phone users

The important highlights of the application include:

• India Politics application gives users the exact platform to evaluate the most important Political structure of Indian Constituency
• India Politics offers mobile users listen to the voice of their leaders and political parties across social channels like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and News
• Through India Politics application, citizens can check the results of political status of their state
• India Politics serves people who are looking for Elections dates and live feeds of results

Dr. Rajni Kant, Human Welfare Association – Mahila Shakti :
Mahila Shakti is working with deprived and marginalized women community in rural area of Varanasi in 53 villages. Human Welfare Association works with underserved, disadvantaged and minority communities of Varanasi through education, literacy and livelihood by mobilizing them through word of mouth, social networking, mobile SMS and by holding group meetings. Mahila Shakti is all about women Empowerment through education and literacy.1000 women participated in Mahila Shakti project through 40 education centers in 20 villages. Mahila Shakti formed more than 100 women Self-help groups and helped women members with personality development and decision making processes.

Aashish Sawhney, Let Me Know :Let Me Know is a “youth opportunities” portal that connects opportunity seekers with opportunity providers, where, opportunity seeker includes students and opportunity providers are startups, NGO, enterprises. Let Me Know was started with a mission of breaking information barrier. The awareness level is very low and the startup does not have proper mechanism to reach out to people for advertising, and thereby uses Social media as a tool for participation, campaigning, and sharing information. With the use of social Media, the Growth rate of Let Me Know has been 100% in 2013 with major involvement of cities such as Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore and Mumbai. The opportunities are posted on Facebook and Twitter pages.
Let Me Know features the News and information on internships, scholarships, competitions, jobs, conferences, seminars, workshops, and event information in the areas of technology, business, social sciences, art, design, culture, Mathematics, and Science etc. The portal has received over 550,000 unique visitors from more than 150 Indian cities and 36,330 followers on Facebook.

Lakshmi Rebecca, Chai with Lakshmi :Chai with Lakshmi is India’s first longest running talk show with a 120+ episodes and 2.6 million viewers. The talk show is a product of Red Bangle, a production house based in Bangalore. Chai with Lakshmi introduces refreshing conversations with people and share positive, hopeful, inspiring and encouraging stories about Indians with Indians.
The organization also runs a campaign on the website “Inclusive India”, attempting to write 100 stories on how Indian are being inclusive. Chai with Lakshmi has 1647 You Tube subscribers, 4866+ Facebook likes, 930+ Twitter Followers.
Chai with Lakshmi currently has four team members and to keep it growing and Self-sustaining, they are planning to launch the merchandise and events. It is possibly for the first time in India that any organization has started online TV quality content for the web. They are using canon 5D mark 3 DSLR for filming the videos of Chai with Lakshmi.Chai with Lakshmi has also won the Indian Blogger Awards, 2013, Manthan Award in December, 2012, and the Woman Innovator Award in January, 2013.

Ajith Kumar, Kissan Kerala :Kissan Kerala is an ICT enabled farmer government program by the Government of Kerala that uses YouTube as an empowerment tool for sharing agriculture information across the state. The objective is to provide right information knowledge at the right time. The initiative currently has 10+ million viewers, 11000 subscribers, 8000+ likes in Facebook and 400+ farmer profiles showcased so far.
Kissan Kerala has launched the inclusive high quality channel for agriculture with video contents developed in Malayalam, targeting it for the entire state of Kerala. YouTube has given free web space to host this content and the advertisement revenue from the Channel makes it sustainable.
The project provides telecast quality informative agricultural videos (in local language) to the farming community about technical and scientific cultivation, along with success stories of farmers. The topic includes agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, diary, goat farming and aqua culture.

Ajay Mohan Reddy, Go UNESCO :Go UNESCO travel challenge is an online travel challenge with the idea to visit UNESCO world heritage sites across the world. The contest is to upload the picture on gounesco.com and collect the points allotted to each world heritage site. The person with the highest points at the end of each year wins gifts. Go UNESCO makes travel to fun by an online challenge. By incentivizing travel with points and positions on a leader board, Go UNESCO appeals to a younger crowd and encourages heritage travel.
Go UNESCO travel challenge was started in January 2012 and presently has 600 people travelling around the word nearly 40 countries. Go UNESCO is entirely a self-funded project; however, has received a grant from Software.com, with infrastructural support from Amazon and endorsement support from UNESCO.

The types of travel challenges include

1. Country (India) challenge – Travel to world heritage sites in India in a year

2. Global challenge- Visit 981 world heritage sites in a lifetime
3. Custom Challenge- Theme based challenge

Go UNESCO is trying to monetize the initiative by speaking with foreign governments and tourism boards to get it sponsored by the tourism boards.

Vijay Anand, 5th Pillar :5th Pillar is a non-profit, nongovernmental organization aimed at fighting corruption. The Zero Rupee Note Campaign was initiated by the 5th Pillar to avoid corruption, wherein printing and distribution of Zero Rupee Note was undertaken so as to motivate citizens to stand up for themselves, when faced with a corrupt situation. Around 25 lakhs of the Zero Rupee note were distributed across the country and few thousand have got the result.
The website www.5thpillar.org has about 2,100 visits in a month, Facebook page has over 3,500+ likes and Twitter has 500 followers. The initiative related videos have up to 7000 views and the organization has 6000 members around the world. 5th Pillar receives 50-70 calls every day for counseling and case solving. 5th Pillar also provides Free Right to Information (RTI) Act training and Anti- corruption awareness campaigns are initiated in schools, colleges and governmental offices.

Devendra, www.dehradunfootball.com :www.dehradunfootball.com is India’s first website dedicated to city football. Dehradun football portal was launched in 2005, started by two football lovers Rohit Goyal and Raju Gusain to promote local football on the internet.
He explains that the website delivers news on local football, information about coming football championship, announcements about new courses in football and accessed by football lovers from different parts of the world, though majority of the users are based in Uttarakhand. The initiatives Facebook group have 999 members says Mr. Devendra.
Four team members manage the website on their own cost and give voluntary service for the web venture. They do not take any sponsorship or donation for operating the football website. Dehradun league became the first district league of the country to feature on All India Football Federation website.

Yogita, Cry Click Rights 2013 :Cry Click Rights 2013 is the annual online photo journalism campaign. It was started in 2010 as a volunteer initiative to focus on child issues. Photography has been realized as an interesting medium for people to talk about the serious children issues. It’s a 45 days campaign.
The mission of the campaign was to reach out to citizens and ask them to capture photographs on “why children of India are out of school”. These photographs are used in backing the efforts of CRY to uplift the awareness about The Right to Education for children.
CRY Works in 23 states across India. The primary social networks used are Facebook and Twitter that include participation from 86% people of the target age group. Pinterest is also used to build the initiative. Few celebrities such as Gul Panag and Rahul Khanna also supported Cry Click Rights 2013.8 million children do not go to school and Click Rights campaign actually encourages people to go out and capture photographs on “why children of India are out of school”. It enables people to take responsibility of the situation of the deprived Indian child and to motivate them to seek resolution through individual and collective action, thereby, enabling children to realize their full potential.
The campaign followed the standard social media promotions, posting about the campaign, followed by inviting people to join the campaign. The initiative focused mainly on pictorial promotions. Cry Click Rights 2013 campaign was also sponsored and supported by HCL

Mayank, Computer Seekho :“Computer Seekho” acts as a virtual school to learn about Computers (From Basic to Advanced Level) in Hindi. Computer based tutorials are created that can be accessed through mobile, tablet, laptop and computer. The reason behind this initiative is to provide computer knowledge to each Hindi speaking people as there was no quality content available to teach computers in the national language, thus making realization of potential of Hindi speaking community.
The application is available in Google play and it delivers customized videos online for students to watch anytime, anywhere, at their pace. The application provides basic education in computer, office, windows, c+ programming concept and online test evaluation.
The primary Social Media platforms are YouTube and Facebook. The Facebook page has garnered 2000 followers whereas 1,558 have subscribed to their You Tube channel along with 6500 registered users on our website. The number of visits by mobile was approximately 1370 and the application was mostly accessed in cities like New Delhi, Pune, Bombay and 142 nations. It is completely a self-funded single one man initiative which is now in collaboration with Bhaskar Foundation.

Meenakshi Vinay Rai, Chinh Early Education Web Channel :Chinh Early Education Web Channel is meant to empower children by using media literacy. Media literacy provides solutions, helps in accessing children needs and also works as communication tools for parents and educators to access the child’s mind says Meenakshi.
Chinh supports social initiatives promoting causes of children and marginalized nomadic communities through harnessing traditional wisdom, art and culture and rediscovering them in contemporary contexts. Chinh’s social media presence including associated blogs and video channels has recorded upward of 400,000 page views. The video content comes from kids by workshops and 70 percent of the children programming on the web channel is produced by the children themselves.
Chinh has a particular blog named CHINH where children are sharing, exchanging ideas and also networking across the country. The blog has 3600 registered users and pays Rs. 300 annually, to become the part of it.
They have also started “four birds and one million story project in collaboration with a US company. The project includes the use of Google hangouts, where kids will exchange ideas and children from any part of the country can participate and send audio files.
Chinh produces audio visual based curriculum as e-learning tool and the mission is to connect with children and to understand them. Chinh follows kid to kid trainer concept. Once the child participated in the workshop, they go to the rural India in summer and winter holidays and teach other kids and get the rural voices on the board. Regular programming of Chinh includes Rural Media Literacy and Children Voices on various children issues, among others.
Chinh regularly organizes Chinh India Festival as media literacy campaign in urban and rural India, mobilizing children to participate and make digital videos.

Aamir Rizvi, Flats without Brokers :Flats without Brokers aims to help people find affordable accommodation as finding a roof is a major problem for everyone who lands-up in a new city in India.
With his difficult experiences in finding a place, the platform was created for people who will help each other in getting flats on rent and Paying Guests accommodations without going through the brokers. FWB fills the need for accommodation regardless of biases and middlemen’s agendas. Flat without Brokers aims to approach the government to make necessary reforms in the housing society rules. It looks forward to make the system more transparent to register by means of leave and license agreement, police verification etc.Its Facebook group has 15,825 members and the initiative has achieved Pan-India participation with 17,000 members, and over 300 website visits. it is self-sufficient and 100% free platform and have five moderators to look after this initiative and who manage online posts.