Keep America Beautiful Inspires Volunteers with Social Media [VIDEO]

Kira M. Newman Mar 11, 2013 Tweet

On the Tech Cocktail stage at SXSW on Saturday, Keep America Beautiful president and CEO Matt McKenna announced the nonprofit’s impact goals for 2013.

Keep America Beautiful works with over 4 million volunteers across the United States to clean and green communities. Here are their 2013 Vibrant Communities Social Impact Goals:

“Clean and restore public places for safer, cleaner communities

• 200,000 public acres and sites
• 100,000 miles of roads and highways
• 10,000 miles of rivers, lakes and shorelines

Place 5,000 recycling bins in public spaces

Plant trees and gardens to enhance communities’s green infrastructure

• Plant and/or sustain 150,000 trees
• Plant and/or sustain 750 community edible gardens
• Plant and/or sustain 3,000 gardens and green spaces

Construct and restore 5,000 playgrounds to encourage physical activity

Educate 250,000 children to become the next generation of environmental stewards”

As volunteers work toward those goals, all their activity will be documented via tweets, Instagram photos, and Facebook posts aggregated on Keep America Beautiful’s new social volunteer hub.

McKenna also sat down for an interview after his announcement at our SXSW Startup Celebration sponsored by CEA and .CO. He highlighted how far Keep America Beautiful has come, what their new hub means, and how companies can use social media for social good. Here’s the video.

Tech Cocktail’s SXSW video series is part of the Tech Cocktail Conversations podcast - subscribe on iTunes.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to Yappem, the title sponsor of Tech Cocktail’s special SXSW video series. And thank you to Keep America Beautiful, the supporting video sponsor.