Week 1:
Global Zero

December 11, 2013

My first week at Global Zero has been very exciting! The office environment is wonderful. It’s a pretty small staff of about 12, they’re all young and very high performance people. The office culture is pretty relaxed (people sit on big yoga balls instead of chairs!) I work in a big room with 2 other people, Sean and Anita, who have been very helpful and friendly. The office building is located in the U street corridor (NW Washington), which is a very trendy area full of small offices, restaurants and bars.

I got started on day one working with social media. A big part of what Global Zero does is grassroots outreach and mobilization, so social media is a big deal. We also rely on Facebook as a way to stay in touch with and organize the 150+ student Global Zero chapters around the world. Over the course of my first week I put up about 10 pieces of content on the international Facebook pages. Facebook in the professional world is a very different creature than the one I know from personal use. The reach is huge (over 30,000 people see the posts) and there are high expectations for content quality because everything we put on our Facebook page could be construed as a PR statement. My part in this is finding stories in the news that fit our mission and speak in some way to different regions. The European Facebook page needs stories about Europe; the US page needs stories about the US, etc. Ideally each page gets at least one new post per day. Once I found appropriate stories to highlight I would write a sentence or two for a hook / intro that appears next to the link. There’s an art to the hook and it gets pretty fun once you’ve done a few. My favorite trick is to end them with a question because it gets more people to comment. Here’s an example of one I did for the Southeast Asia Facebook: “68% of Indians survive on less than $2 a day, but the government spends $5 billion a year on their nuclear program. Today, the Indian military test launched the Prithvi-II, part of their new generation of nuclear capable missiles. Something wrong with this picture?“ The best part of the Facebook work is when there aren’t any appropriate recent news stories. When that happens we pick some amusing / interesting historical story about nukes and we post that to educate people. We ended up using one of these historical posts this week; it was a ridiculous story about how for years during the Cold War the country was so close to the brink that the launch codes for all of our missile silos was “000000” – supposedly so that they could be launched faster! I’m a huge history nerd so I have a lot of fun finding and reading stories like that.
Another component of political social media is infographics. Infographics are pictures with words that convey information in a visually appealing way. They’re important for social media because they fit a lot of information in a small space and people are more likely to read it if it’s a pretty picture instead of just text. I began doing research for two new infographics, one on the recent Iran deal, and the other on the difference between tactical and strategic nukes. I’ve never made an infographic before so for these first two I am going to be working closely with the digital content guy, Alex Bonk, over the next week.

In week two I’m hoping to keep up the social media stuff and also begin a campaign research assignment (which I’ll tell you more about when I begin.) I also have a really cool idea for a blog post but I haven’t told them about it yet. I’m going to pitch it soon and I’ll let you know how it goes.
I am also including some pictures of the office. They’re from the first day and I was a little nervous taking pictures so I waited until the end of the day when most of the people were gone, that’s why the office looks dark and empty. Try to imagine it full of energy and smiling young people sitting on yoga balls. Catch you next week!