Keep America Beautiful’s New Hub Visualizes Volunteer Work

Kira M. Newman Mar 8, 2013 Tweet

As over 4 million volunteers plant trees, clean up waste, and recycle across America, all their efforts will be visualized on Keep America Beautiful’s new social volunteer hub.

The Great American Cleanup is a community improvement program that takes place in over 21,000 communities each year. Starting in 2013, all volunteers who use the hashtag #KeepAmericaBeautiful will see their tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram photos, and Foursquare check-ins on KABcleanup.org.

“This social hub captures our volunteers’ actions in real time, bringing this national community service story to life,” says Matt McKenna, CEO and president of Keep America Beautiful. “Our mission is to engage individuals to take greater responsibility for their community’s environment and the social hub demonstrates how Americans are doing just that.”

Keep America Beautiful created this new website to “inspire the next generation of environmental advocates” who are already engaged across social media. Aggregating all their efforts helps create a unified national community of volunteers, rather than separate communities.

Keep America Beautiful’s partners include corporations like Lowe’s, PepsiCo, and LG, who support their community beautification efforts. This year, the nonprofit will also be getting their message out to startups at SXSW. Find them participating in Tech Cocktail’s Startup Celebration, educating attendees about waste diversion (along with Glad) at SouthBites, and hosting a cleanup event with Keep Austin Beautiful on March 9.

“There’s an absolute trend that businesses, communities, institutions, and startups are more aware of what needs to be done to be a responsible and good environmental steward,” says McKenna.

Thanks to Keep America Beautiful for being a big part of Tech Cocktail’s SXSW Startup Celebration, sponsoring many of the exciting events and activities throughout the day.