Progressive Source Communications was started in 2007 to serve the growing field of public interest digital marketing. Our background is in new media, journalism and public interest advocacy and journalism. This provides us with useful insight into how to use new media to most effectively, and directly, communicate progressive messages.

The case studies below provide examples of our recent work on digital marketing.

As part of Stonyfield Farm’s 10 percent “profits for the planet” effort, Progressive Source Communications created and managed the Shift ShoutOut! video contest.

The contest, a video soapbox empowering students to offer their solutions to the climate change crisis, was the Web’s most extensive environment-related interactive video contest. The students were asked to appear in videos providing an answer to the question: How would you solve the climate change crisis?

Some 400 one-minute videos were collected on 20 campuses across the country, alongside the Campus Consciousness “green tour” of the rock band Guster. Progressive Source marketed the contest through Facebook, and hired local students to assist our professional videographer, who collected the videos while traveling on the green tour’s biodiesel bus.

Progressive Source designed and scripted the Shift ShoutOut! contest and website, and also converted and uploaded hundreds of videos onto YouTube, collected from nearly 500 students. Thousands of people voted for the videos and thousands more viewed them on YouTube. At the contest’s end, two $5,000 prizes were awarded.

CEO Jonathan Greenberg represented the Open Washington Square Park Coalition, a community group located in New York City and dedicated to maintaining the open spirit of Greenwich Village’s historic park. To communicate the group’s opposition to the city’s planned renovation of the park, Greenberg and account coordinator Kaveri Marathe scripted and produced a short four-minute video describing the park’s unique popularity, and how the Parks Department deceived the public about its plan to radically redesign and transform it.

The launch of the video was announced with a full-page ad that Progressive Source created and placed in the Villager, the award-winning community newspaper for Lower Manhattan. A few days after the video was launched, Metro New York, New York’s largest free daily newspaper (circulation 300,000) featured the controversy as its main front page story entitled, Caught on YouTube. Within weeks, a strongly worded editorial in The Villager called The truth will out: Concerns on park renovation mount lauded the video for drawing attention to the deceptive campaign used by the Parks Department to win approvals of its plan.

Progressive Source also managed the Open Washington Square Park Coalition’s advocacy campaign at New York University, creating the first Facebook initiative to target N.Y.U. students. This resulted in a powerfully worded editorial against the Parks department plan in the award-winning school newspaper, the Washington Square News, as well as a front page article about the campaign. Within weeks, more than 300 NYU students joined a Progressive Source-created Facebook group supporting the Open Washington Square Park Coalition.

While Vice President at Fenton Communications, Jonathan Greenberg helped manage the media outreach for the Save Darfur Rally in New York’s Central Park, on behalf of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a founding Save Darfur Coalition member. He created a paid media campaign to turn out tens of thousands for the New York Save Darfur rally on September 17, 2006, two days before President Bush was scheduled to speak to the United Nations General Assembly.

Greenberg worked with AJWS to script and placed a provocative full-page ad in the Sept. 10 Sunday New York Times Week in Review. In the days leading up to the rally, Fenton helped produce and place three different radio ads that ran on stations with African American audiences and on the Air America New York affiliate. Greenberg also created a small “day of” the rally flyer and supervised a team of 15 workers who crossed the park publicizing the event. It drew more than 30,000 people and made the front page of the New York Times.

The following week, both President Bush and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan addressed the General Assembly, expressed their opposition to the genocide — and demanded that U.N. peacekeepers be brought in to end it.

Jonathan Greenberg, Cheryl Everette and Cliff Roth, three of the founding staffers of Progressive Source Communications, were at the vanguard of interactive media with Gist Communications, an international, Internet content and software applications company launched in 1996. Gist.com outpaced TV Guide Online to build the largest audience for interactive TV-related content in the world, reaching nearly 4 million registered users. Gist’s content was customized for and syndicated by more than two dozen clients, including Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, NBC, ABC, USA Today, CNN and Hewlett-Packard.

Gist created some of the internet’s earliest web video programs and interactive fan clubs. The Gist team developed and launched “Quickie with Nikki,” one of the Web’s first online streaming video shows. Gist staff members also produced TVMag, an original onscreen entertainment magazine, for the Echostar satellite television service, which reached 7 million U.S. households.

While at Fenton Communications, Jonathan Greenberg re-wrote and re-organized the outdated website for one of New York's most important community development non-profit organizations, the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation. With input from the client and a design firm, a new site plan and messaging strategy was implemented. The revised Greater Jamaica Development Corporation website was re-launched in January, 2007.