Meet Trish Tobin, the former vice president of marketing for one of the web’s top advertisers, the company that’s responsible for those ubiquitous “dancing cowboy” ads. (Yep. You know what I’m talking about.)
Trish started consulting on the side for Women for Women International earlier this year. Then she went with them to Rwanda and saw firsthand that their work was changing entire communities by matching women with sponsors, giving them job training, financial capital, a support network, and education about their rights. She met women in the program and got to know them. That changed everything.
“I thought, ‘How could I do anything else?’”
Now, Trish is Women for Women’s chief marketing officer. She uses her nearly superhuman communication skills not to convince people to buy something, but to do something that cascades into massive amounts of healing and change. Now that’s a great use of global media.
Still looking for a way to participate in our HumanKind Challenge #2? Women for Women has extended its matching fund-raising drive til November 15. Every dollar is matched by an anonymous donor!
HK: One of the things I like about Women for Women is that it doesn’t just ask for a check, it puts sponsors and women survivors of war in direct contact with each other, creating an active community. How do you plan to use global media to build on that?
TT: One of my objectives is to do so much more with the Internet than we do today in creating that community. We’re facilitating that connection definitely through the Internet today in terms of sharing particular stories.
There are women who have MySpace blogs or their own blogs on Blogspot, and they’ll actually talk about the letters they’ve received with their sisters, which we’re definitely encouraging people to do. Not to mention that tons of women are creating their own events, like Lisa.
HK: How else are members using the web and their own connections to grow this community?
TT: This fall, when our country directors were in town in New Jersey, one sponsor hosted an event and 111 women came, and 96 sponsored before they walked out the door. She did one in June, too, around her book club, which is what started her off thinking, how can we connect women?
When women come into the program, we actually put them in groups of 20. Some of them even name their groups. They go through that whole yearlong program with that group. We like sponsors to have groups of 20 also, and sponsor the same 20 women all the way through. They’re organizing this themselves, and we’re sitting here thinking, how can we leverage this more effectively online?
HK: What was it like to visit Rwanda with other sponsors and meet women who'd been in the program a while? What impressed you?
TT: The before and after. They were all in utter shock, the sponsors were, at how different the women appeared.
But the thing that was the most moving for me was feeling the ultimate connection, realizing that I don’t feel all that different from them, and that was very startling for me. For instance, they would talk about their children’s report card. They would talk about being able to send their children to school. A lot of them talked about pulling income from their sponsorships to create small businesses for themselves.
We went to visit one woman’s small house in her village, and there were bunches of kids running all over the place, and a woman that I was with stopped and took pictures of them. A woman walking by said something, and the translator told us, “Oh, she said if she knew her picture would be taken, she would have dressed up!”
And I just thought, my God, I would have felt the same way. I think in terms of connection, that’s what people grow from. In the letter exchange between the women and their sponsors, it’s “I’ve got kids, you’ve got kids."
HK: Right! But not everybody who might want to help Rwandan women can go there and meet them. So how do you use that massive, global reach of the Internet to help create a connection?
TT: A good example of this might be the story of Violette. We not only tell the story of Violette, but also we tell Liz’s story, her sponsor. [Ed. note: It’s another LIz!] So, we're sharing as many of those one-to-one stories as we can, and leveraging every tool that’s out there that’s free, like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and getting it out there so people can hear us. Getting the letters out there so people can see the stories of women.
One of the women in the program, Honorata, has actually been on “Oprah,” as part of the 2004 show that Oprah did around women in the Congo. She was literally just getting into the program then. She’s been working in the village where Women for Women is, and now she’s actually a staff member for Women for Women. She’s really empowering other women.
There really is that exponential impact too, which a lot of people don’t realize. It’s impacting their family, and as a result of that it’s impacting the community.
In the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) recently we actually did some research, so the staff members actually went out to interview the husbands. Not only have they gotten the benefit of the fact that their wife is bringing home income, but just understanding that there is value in the wife getting skills – it’s hard to estimate the impact of the value change there.
HK: It’s amazing the changes we can create when we reach out and do something. But unless we really get it and understand the impact we have on each other’s lives, it’s hard to inspire people to do that, right? That’s what makes good communication so powerful.
TT: In terms of that power, there are two things going on for me. There’s been all sorts of studies lately about how humans can’t really process genocide. It’s on such a mass level, you cannot really have the empathy that you should. It’s just not part of our programming.
With that one-to-one connection, it’s more than putting a name to the woman who is suffering, it’s putting you in her shoes. It’s not just World Bank statistics, all that mind-numbing stuff.
That Congo article in the New York Times – I would bet you that more people than average tuned out after the first three horrific statistics on the front page because it was just too much. I wish there was something more in that story about how you can impact it, because it just seemed like there’s no hope.
And that’s what I think causes people to do that tune-out: “I could help if I could, but what am I going to do, it won’t make a difference.”
My follow to that is the impact of video. At two meetings I had last week, I was so excited because I’ve been doing a lot with the video we’ve gotten back from the field, a lot of great footage from the Sudan. And in one, Zainab (Salbi, founder of WFW) goes to an enrollment event at our offices in the Sudan, and you see all these women who are lined up, who want to be sponsored. And she says to them, “I’ll find a sponsor for you, and you, and you.” It’s incredibly powerful to put a “you” on people.
So I show it to our country directors from Sudan who came to visit. Well, they both broke down crying. At first I was horrified at myself for just being so excited and forgetting that these are people they know, but I also realized, that’s the power of it. We can write brochures until the cows come home, but to see that video – you actually feel like you’ve gotten to know them.
HK: Thanks so much, Trish, for a great interview and for all the work you do.
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