How Corporations Should Do Activism

This is why corporations, intergovernmental organizations and powerful elites are now actively seeking to harness the power of social movements to further their agendas:

Within a month of the start of Occupy Wall Street, a social protest that I co-created, more than half of Americans had heard about the movement. In fact, a Gallup poll released on October 18, 2011, reported that 56 percent of Americans were closely following news about Occupy. That means that more than 174 million people were actively engaged in monitoring the progress of our movement: They knew our name, our slogans, our tactics.

To put things in perspective, the 2014 Super Bowl was “the most watched program in American television history,” according to NBC, with peak viewership of 120.8 million. In other words, Occupy Wall Street was watched by more people for a longer time with deeper engagement than the biggest television program in history. And the movement received far more donations — close to $1 million in cash and a warehouse full of supplies — than it cost to create. Five years later, many Americans still remember Occupy while, I’d wager, few Americans remember the ads played (at $4.5 million a pop) during the Super Bowl in 2014.

The potential is obvious. So here’s my advice to these corporations now looking to deploy activism: