Fun for A Change is a design competition that encourages youth to come up with fun ways to create positive change. It’s about getting people to “do the right thing” and change behavior by using fun and game-like motivations. It’s about learning and applying game mechanics without necessarily creating a game. It’s about thinking outside the box and rethinking how we can change the world.

As youth go through the challenge, they will learn about game mechanics, why they are powerful and why they are being adopted by entrepreneurs as well as social entrepreneurs. Participants may even win funding (up to US$500) to implement their ideas and share their results with the world.

To take part in the 2011 Online Challenge, youth simply join the 2011 Online group at funforachange.org and they will receive instructions on how to proceed to the next step.

On the first day of the 8th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York, there was one question on everyone’s mind: “What’s Al Gore going to say at a gaming conference?” Maybe he will announce a game on climate change?

Imagine saving “climate refugees” from the island of Maldives and ferrying them to a nearby Sri Lanka before anyone starts to drown. Or imagine nations competing with one another for precious carbon credits by deploying the military to retrofit entire cities.

Alas, the news wasn’t that earth shattering. When the former vice president took the stage to give the opening keynote, he simply wanted to say to game developers: “You have my attention.”

His exact words: “Games are the new normal.”

This is due in no small part to the popularity of smart mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads from Apple, a company on whose board he sits. Facebook deserves credit too for building a platform on which social games can be deployed and spread quickly.

But even “gamfication” — the use of game mechanics for non-game uses — is now ubiquitous. Businesses of all sizes see potential in making their products more addictive (or engaging) to their customers and have invested accordingly in integrating game mechanics.

The social sector, as usual, is lagging behind.

Al Gore admits that he and his team at the Alliance for Climate Protection have had numerous discussions on how to use games and are determined to do something. So what’s holding him back?

He hinted at one answer: good games are not so easy to pull off.

You can’t add points and badges and then stir and mix and expect to have a hit.

“Mechanics can matter,” says Gore, “but it’s about the WOW moments, the fist-pump moments, the lean-into-the-screen moments.”

I believe there’s a bigger, unstated, reason at play. It has to do with impact. Can a game on climate change really produce the real life results we need to see to turn things around?

Gore, I assume, is not yet convinced, despite gaming’s popularity.

His hesitation is understandable. The field of “serious games” is still new, not mature enough to provide rock solid proof that games can have profound and sustained social impact.

This open question is why the conference spent the entire first day on making “The Case for Social Impact Games” by presenting a series of case studies.

They included iCivics, an effort by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to use games to teach civics, and EVOKE, a game funded by the World Bank Institute to teach African youth the skills and abilities to change the world.

iCivics has seen two million plays and EVOKE was played by 20,000 users. But learning and social outcomes are much trickier to track, let alone quantify. The sessions’ content reflected that challenge.

Until game developers get more comfortable talking about outcomes and spend more time discussing outcomes rather than outputs, mass adoption by the social sector will remain unlikely. (Most funders are sitting on the sidelines, with the exception of the MacArthur Foundation and a few corporate foundations.)

The crowd favorite seemed to be Macon Money, an experiment by the Knight Foundation to use a real life social game, designed around a new currency, to build stronger social ties in Macon, Georgia.

This is how it worked: some lucky residents in Macon received half a bond each and were instructed to find others whose half bonds match theirs. Together they have to show up at game headquarters to redeem the bonds for real cash in a special currency. The Macon Money is then spent on local businesses, benefiting the local economy.

The fact that the game is played in real life probably helped make its impact more visible to the audience. Photos of smiling residents holding up their matching bonds also spoke volumes.

The Knight Foundation has hired two firms to evaluate the game to see if it produced changes in knowledge, attitude and behavior of the residents and whether the newly formed connections lasted. A full report will be released in August.

The case for social impact games — virtual and real — is one that many social innovators are desperate to make. They’ve seen the limits of knowledge and reason in changing human behavior — to exercise, eat healthy, recycle, and reduce one’s carbon footprint. They need other ways to motivate people to “do the right thing.”

This is the main reason I’m exploring gamification as well, with a new social innovation competition called Fun for A Change. I’m engaging youth in several countries in designing fun solutions to our common challenges to see if we can improve results… for people and for our planet.

I’ve already kicked off a pilot at Simon Fraser University in Canada and will spread it to other universities in the U.S. and India in the Fall.

I’m trying to see whether solutions powered by game mechanics can engage youth to change behavior and to become changemakers themselves.

If that can happen, then maybe saving the world can be fun too (for a change).

Today, social entrepreneurship is recognized by all sectors of society even if its definition remains vague. Changemaking has gained popularity too. Many organizations and even schools now urge everyone to be changemakers, or agents of change.

Helping people become changemakers became my sole mission as well.

I stopped producing documentaries and launched a new foundation, Global Youth Fund, to engage as many young people as possible in creating social and environmental change.

Why did I feel the need to leave the media when it has unrivaled potential to raise awareness and inspire?

I suppose it has to do with what I recognized as the limits of social issues media. In my experience, media leaves most people in the same place, with the same question: “I’m inspired. Now what?”

My work in the last 10 years — at the Creative Visions Foundation, Ashoka’s Youth Venture and my own organization — is basically a series of attempts to answer that simple question.

What have I learned?

The first thing I would say is that it remains a difficult question to answer and we shouldn’t trivialize it by saying, “Just do something, anything!”

It remains difficult because most would-be changemakers are smart enough to foresee some potential problems. (And if they don’t anticipate them, they run into these problems sooner rather than later.)

1. Wrong Action
   They fear they don’t know enough about an issue to know what solution to champion. Even worse, they might support the wrong action and make things worse, which is actually quite common.
2. Little Impact
   Assuming they’re doing something constructive to address a problem, they worry they won’t make much of a difference, that their efforts won’t amount to a hill of beans.
3. No Support
   Finally, they worry about sustainability. Even if they are doing the right thing and creating real impact, can they really sustain their efforts, given limited resources and all other demands on their time?

These are not trivial concerns.

Having mentored hundreds of youth in starting their own social change projects, I encounter and wrestle with these issues all the time.

That’s why I’ve come to believe we need to change how we engage new practitioners of social innovation so that they don’t fall prey (so easily) to the most common mistakes. We need to shape a new path for “amateur” activists so that mass engagement can truly mean massive change.

In partnership with the Creative Visions Foundation, I’ve put together a new road map to help individuals and teams launch new social change initiatives.

This new “Creative Activist Toolkit” brings together several key best practices that I consider to be essential to social innovation.

In short, they help changemakers avoid three of the most common mistakes in early stages of changemaking, namely:

1. Locking in on ideas too quickly
   Problem solving requires creativity and, to be creative, you need both divergent and convergent thinking. Innovators need to stay open-minded to different possibilities and different solutions before locking in on one. However, most people feel lucky to come up with just one idea. Afraid they can’t come up with more, they commit to it too quickly and defend it against any and all critique. Changemakers can do themselves a huge favor by staying open to different solutions and only commit to one when they have to.
2. Focusing on outputs rather than outcomes
   What you do (outputs) is different from the difference you make (outcomes). Most people don’t make this distinction. They assume the more they tutor, volunteer, fundraise, and lobby, etc., the more impact they’re making for other people and the environment. So, they set goals to maximize their outputs. But, social change is ultimately about outcomes — how people are better off or how the environment is better off. Often, maximizing outcomes is not about doing more but taking different actions. So, set goals based on outcomes, not outputs.
3. Setting unrealistic goals
   We tend to assume there’s one ultimate solution to a problem and our job as changemakers is to figure out and implement that one solution. However, that kind of thinking can easily spin out of control. It can lead us to develop solutions that we have no hope of realizing, given our abilities and resources. Instead of scaling down expectations, we scale up: we’ll raise more money, stretch out the timeline, create a killer app, etc. Without concrete results, momentum and good will are quickly exhausted and one’s project dies a quiet death. Instead of reaching for the moon, achieve some short-term impact using available resources and use your early success to fuel more ambitious dreams.

I don’t pretend this Creative Activist Toolkit can provide even a fraction of the guidance you’ll need as changemakers but I hope it makes the journey a bit less intimidating.

And if you’re still inspired, now what?

Today, social entrepreneurship is recognized by all sectors of society even if its definition remains vague. Changemaking has gained popularity too. Many organizations and even schools now urge everyone to be changemakers, or agents of change.

Helping people become changemakers became my sole mission as well.

I stopped producing documentaries and launched a new foundation, Global Youth Fund, to engage as many young people as possible in creating social and environmental change.

Why did I feel the need to leave the media when it has unrivaled potential to raise awareness and inspire?

I suppose it has to do with what I recognized as the limits of social issues media. In my experience, media leaves most people in the same place, with the same question: “I’m inspired. Now what?”

My work in the last 10 years — at the Creative Visions Foundation, Ashoka’s Youth Venture and my own organization — is basically a series of attempts to answer that simple question.

What have I learned?

The first thing I would say is that it remains a difficult question to answer and we shouldn’t trivialize it by saying, “Just do something, anything!”

It remains difficult because most would-be changemakers are smart enough to foresee some potential problems. (And if they don’t anticipate them, they run into these problems sooner rather than later.)

1. Wrong Action
   They fear they don’t know enough about an issue to know what solution to champion. Even worse, they might support the wrong action and make things worse, which is actually quite common.
2. Little Impact
   Assuming they’re doing something constructive to address a problem, they worry they won’t make much of a difference, that their efforts won’t amount to a hill of beans.
3. No Support
   Finally, they worry about sustainability. Even if they are doing the right thing and creating real impact, can they really sustain their efforts, given limited resources and all other demands on their time?

These are not trivial concerns.

Having mentored hundreds of youth in starting their own social change projects, I encounter and wrestle with these issues all the time.

That’s why I’ve come to believe we need to change how we engage new practitioners of social innovation so that they don’t fall prey (so easily) to the most common mistakes. We need to shape a new path for “amateur” activists so that mass engagement can truly mean massive change.

In partnership with the Creative Visions Foundation, I’ve put together a new road map to help individuals and teams launch new social change initiatives.

This new “Creative Activist Toolkit” brings together several key best practices that I consider to be essential to social innovation.

In short, they help changemakers avoid three of the most common mistakes in early stages of changemaking, namely:

1. Locking in on ideas too quickly
   Problem solving requires creativity and, to be creative, you need both divergent and convergent thinking. Innovators need to stay open-minded to different possibilities and different solutions before locking in on one. However, most people feel lucky to come up with just one idea. Afraid they can’t come up with more, they commit to it too quickly and defend it against any and all critique. Changemakers can do themselves a huge favor by staying open to different solutions and only commit to one when they have to.
2. Focusing on outputs rather than outcomes
   What you do (outputs) is different from the difference you make (outcomes). Most people don’t make this distinction. They assume the more they tutor, volunteer, fundraise, and lobby, etc., the more impact they’re making for other people and the environment. So, they set goals to maximize their outputs. But, social change is ultimately about outcomes — how people are better off or how the environment is better off. Often, maximizing outcomes is not about doing more but taking different actions. So, set goals based on outcomes, not outputs.
3. Setting unrealistic goals
   We tend to assume there’s one ultimate solution to a problem and our job as changemakers is to figure out and implement that one solution. However, that kind of thinking can easily spin out of control. It can lead us to develop solutions that we have no hope of realizing, given our abilities and resources. Instead of scaling down expectations, we scale up: we’ll raise more money, stretch out the timeline, create a killer app, etc. Without concrete results, momentum and good will are quickly exhausted and one’s project dies a quiet death. Instead of reaching for the moon, achieve some short-term impact using available resources and use your early success to fuel more ambitious dreams.

I don’t pretend this Creative Activist Toolkit can provide even a fraction of the guidance you’ll need as changemakers but I hope it makes the journey a bit less intimidating.

And if you’re still inspired, now what?

I was even asked this question by a freshman at UCLA during my recent lecture there on The Green Generation, which showcased countless examples of young people around the world developing their own solutions to sustainability. Perhaps even youth doubt their own abilities to contribute meaningful change?

In my response, I tend to mention the creativity, passion and idealism of young people I’ve worked with. But another reason became more clear in recent days in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I’m here with two students from Claremont McKenna College, Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci, founders of the project, Living on One Dollar. They were nominated by Ashoka to speak at TEDxBuenosAires, the largest TEDx event in the world.

In front of 1,300 people, Chris and Zach — the youngest speakers — told of how they spent two months in 2010 living in Guatemala on a dollar a day and researched the financial lives of the extreme poor. They brought along two other friends, Sean Leonard and Ryan Christoffersen to document the experience and create weekly videos to distribute through their website and YouTube channel.

They hoped that their own experience of living among the extreme poor and under similar conditions could bring the issue of global poverty closer to their peers — other American youth.

The gamble paid off. Their first video caught the attention of YouTube and was featured on its homepage, resulting in more than 400,000 views in one day.

Since coming back, they’ve been focused on putting together their documentary (and going to school). TEDxBuenosAires marks the first time they are presenting their full story as well as their two month research to a public audience.

As an advisor to their project, I came along to help them prepare their talk. Our hope was that it can be told well (and we’d get a good recording of it) and that their story doesn’t get eclipsed by the Argentinean speakers.

Little did we expect the media frenzy that was to follow.

Argentina’s main national newspaper, Clarin, published a lengthy feature on their project the morning of the event. After the talk, they were immediately surrounded by reporters wanting to interview them for radio, TV, and webcasts. Chris and Zach fielded each interview, sometimes live and sometimes in Spanish, until they became mentally exhausted. That night, we channel surfed in order to catch their various TV appearances.

Watching everything unfold, my one thought was, “Why them?” Why did no other speakers get the kind of coverage they did?

Were they more famous or accomplished? Was it because they were American? Perhaps it’s because their talk was inspiring but some reporters interviewed them without having even seen their talk.

I think, in the end, it had to do with the simplicity and unexpectedness of their project. One brief summary – “American students living on one dollar a day in Guatemala” – and you are promised a good story.

We know the term for this in Hollywood: high-concept.

As much as we want to focus on character, dialogue and storyline, high-concept sells. It gets you funding as well as coverage. Like it or not, the masses are engaged with “What if…” scenarios.

I think the social sector can benefit from more high-concept projects and campaigns, instead of simply relying on the worthiness of causes. If Living on One Dollar can engage the masses to think about global poverty, imagine what can be done with climate change or any of the other Millennium Development Goals, a term few outside the social sector can get excited about. Imagine rescuing “sustainability” from the meaningless abstraction it has become.

But pulling off high-concept projects is not so easy. I believe you need three essential ingredients:

1. Experiential learning.
   Someone has to go experience something interesting. You can’t just bring back knowledge and insights. You have to take part in some drama.
2. Risk of failure.
   The experience can’t be predictable. It has to go beyond what is normally considered to be safe or sensible. Failure should be possible, even likely. As Chris said, “The plan wasn’t perfect, but we didn’t want perfection to stand in the way of action.”
3. Great media.
   You have to take us there, especially through video. You have to help us live through the experience with you (as much as you can).

For all these reasons, I believe youth are more likely than other groups to bring high-concept stories to our most critical challenges. Today’s youth are naturally high-concept. Look at what Invisible Children did for the civil war in Uganda. Look at what Darius Goes West did for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a condition few had heard of before.

Of course, the real promise of good stories is that they can deliver meanginful impact and change lives.

Chris and Zach want to use their film to support other young social entrepreneurs, tell their stories and spread their solutions to poverty. Perhaps you can help them find that perfect ending.

I’ve since written about a new Creative Activist Toolkit I wrote as well as the Games for Change Festival in New York.

All articles will be posted here in the Articles section. Please go to Huffington Post and follow me there.

Development Marketplace provides funding for early stage social entrepreneurs and has given away millions of dollars to ore than 200 organizations through its global competitions.

The toolkits are part of the support the Development Marketplace provides its winners to help them achieve greater impact and sustainability.

You can see the toolkits on their site here.

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The question I’ve been struggling with for a long time is: “How can we spread best practices so that social entrepreneurs can achieve greater impact?”  After all, most social innovators do not have formal training in changemaking. You basically learn by doing.

What that means is the same mistakes are made over and over again. Even worse, few manage to achieve any significant impact.

At Princeton, I decided to put forward a new framework to learn, teach and practice social entrepreneurship.  The framework centers around six best practices that I think are essential to success.  To make them easy to remember, I made the six correspond to each of the letters in the word, SOCIAL.

From now on, whenever people speak of “social” entrepreneurship, I hope they first think of the six best practices.

To help spread this new framework, I’ve created a new website, socialcreatives.org, and I plan to create all future toolkits, books and other resources under this framework.

Check it out.

The theme is social entrepreneurship.  I might have a thing or two to say about that.

My plan is to answer once and for all that all important yet elusive question, “What is social entrepreneurship?”

Without giving away anything, I will simply say I will put forward a new framework to think about this hot topic.

Feel free to tune in to catch this historic speech. My talk will begin at 12 PM ET at TEDxPrincetonU.

It was truly inspirational from beginning to end and I met some amazing people, including Jourdan Urban, the young violin prodigy and philanthropist who now is a full-time student at Yale. I was able to work with Jourdan over the last two weeks to prepare his talk. Be sure to watch his talk and others.

Here’s a quick interview with Jourdan before the event.